(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(low-key music) >> The cube's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting electronic music) (crowd chattering in background) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. My name's Dave Vellante. I'm here with Dave Nicholson. We are live at the Fira in Barcelona, covering MWC23 day four. We've been talking about, you know, 5G all week. We're going to talk about it some more. Jillian Kaplan is here. She's the head of Global Telecom Thought Leadership at Dell Technologies, and we're pleased to have Meg Knauth, who's the Vice President for Digital Platform Engineering at T-Mobile. Ladies, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, Meg, can you explain 5G and edge to folks that may not be familiar with it? Give us the 101 on 5G and edge. >> Sure, I'd be happy to. So, at T-Mobile, we want businesses to be able to focus on their business outcomes and not have to stress about network technology. So we're here to handle the networking behind the scenes for you to achieve your business goals. The main way to think about 5G is speed, reduced latency, and heightened security. And you can apply that to so many different business goals and objectives. You know, some of the use cases that get touted out the most are in the retail manufacturing sectors with sensors and with control of inventory and things of that nature. But it can be applied to pretty much any industry because who doesn't need more (chuckles) more speed and lower latency. >> Yeah. And reliability, right? >> Exactly. >> I mean, that's what you're going to have there. So it's not like it's necessarily going to- you know, you think about 5G and these private networks, right? I mean, it's not going to, oh, maybe it is going to eat into, there's a Venn there, I know, but it's not going to going to replace wireless, right? I mean, it's new use cases. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, they definitely coexist, right? And Meg touched a little bit on like all the use cases that are coming to be, but as we look at 5G, it's really the- we call it like the Enterprise G, right? It's where the enterprise is going to be able to see changes in their business and the way that they do things. And for them, it's going to be about reducing costs and heightening ROI, and safety too, right? Like being able to automate manufacturing facilities where you don't have workers, like, you know, getting hit by various pieces of equipment and you can take them out of harm's way and put robots in their place. And having them really work in an autonomous situation is going to be super, super key. And 5G is just the, it's the backbone of all future technologies if you look at it. We have to have a network like that in order to build things like AI and ML, and we talk about VR and the Metaverse. You have to have a super reliable network that can handle the amount of devices that we're putting out today, right? So, extremely important. >> From T-Mobile's perspective, I mean we hear a lot about, oh, we spent a lot on CapEx, we know that. You know, trillion and a half over the next seven years, going into 5G infrastructure. We heard in the early keynotes at MWC, we heard the call to you know, tax the over the top vendors. We heard the OTT, Netflix shot back, they said, "Why don't you help us pay for the content that we're creating?" But, okay, so I get that, but telcos have a great business. Where's T-Mobile stand on future revenue opportunities? Are you looking to get more data and monetize that data? Are you looking to do things like partner with Dell to do, you know, 5G networks? Where are the opportunities for T-Mobile? >> I think it's more, as Jillian said, it's the opportunities for each business and it's unique to those businesses. So we're not in it just for ourselves. We're in it to help others achieve their business goals and to do more with all of the new capabilities that this network provides. >> Yeah, man, I like that answer because again, listening to some of the CEOs of the large telcos, it's like, hmm, what's in it for me as the customer or the business? I didn't hear enough of that. And at least in the early keynotes, I'm hearing it more, you know, as the show goes on. But I don't know, Dave, what do you think about what you've heard at the event? >> Well, I'm curious from T-Mobile's perspective, you know when a consumer thinks about 5G, we think of voice, text, and data. And if we think about the 5G network that you already have in place, I'm curious, if you can share this kind of information, what percentage of that's being utilized now? How much is available for the, you know, for the Enterprise G that we're talking about, and maybe, you know, in five years in the future, do you have like a projected mix of consumer use versus all of these back office, call them processes that a consumer's not aware of, but you know the factory floor being connected via 5G, that frontiers that emerges, where are we now and what are you looking towards? Does that make sense? Kind of the mixed question? >> Hand over the business plan! (all laugh) >> Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, I- >> I want numbers Meg, numbers! >> Wow. (Dave and Dave laugh) I'm probably actually not the right person to speak to that. But as you know, T-Mobile has the largest 5G network in North America, and we just say, bring it, right? Let's talk- >> So you got room, you got room for Jillian's stuff? >> Yeah, let's solve >> Well, we can build so many >> business problems together. >> private 5G networks, right? Like I would say like the opportunities are... There's not a limit, right? Because as we build out these private networks, right? We're not on a public network when we're talking about like connecting these massive factories or connecting like a retail store to you and your house to be able to basically continue to try on the clothes remotely, something like that. It's limitless and what we can build- >> So they're related, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive in the sense that what you are doing in the factory example is going to interfere with my ability to get my data through T-mobile. >> No, no, I- >> These are separated. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. >> As we build out these private networks and these private facilities, and there are so many applications in the consumer space that haven't even been realized yet. Like, when we think about 4G, when 4G launched, there were no applications that needed 4G to run on our cell phones, right? But then the engineers got to work, right? And we ended up with Uber and Instagram stories and all these applications that require 4G to launch. And that's what's going to happen with 5G too, it's like, as the network continues to get built, in the consumer space as well as the enterprise space, there's going to be new applications realized on this is all the stuff that we can do with this amazing network and look how many more devices and look how much faster it is, and the lower latency and the higher bandwidth, and you know, what we can really build. And I think what we're seeing at this show compared to last year is this stuff actually in practice. There was a lot of talk last year, like about, oh, this is what we can build, but now we're building it. And I think that's really key to show that companies like T-Mobile can help the enterprise in this space with cooperation, right? Like, we're not just talking about it now, we're actually putting it into practice. >> So how does it work? If I put in a private network, what are you doing? You slice out a piece of the network and charge me for it and then I get that as part of my private network. How does it actually work for the customer? >> You want to take that one? >> So I was going to say, yeah, you can do a network slice. You can actually physically build a private network, right? It depends, there's so many different ways to engineer it. So I think you can do it either way, basically. >> We just, we don't want it to be scary, right? >> Yep. >> So it starts with having a conversation about the business challenges that you're facing and then backing it into the technology and letting the technology power those solutions. But we don't want it to be scary for people because there's so much buzz around 5G, around edge, and it can be overwhelming and you can feel like you need a PhD in engineering to have a conversation. And we just want to kind of simplify things and talk in your language, not in our language. We'll figure out the tech behind the scenes. Just tell us what problems we can solve together. >> And so many non-technical companies are having to transform, right? Like retail, like manufacturing, that haven't had to be tech companies before. But together with T-Mobile and Dell, we can help enable that and make it not scary like Meg said. >> Right, so you come into my factory, I say, okay, look around. I got all these people there, and they're making hoses and they're physically putting 'em together. And we go and we have to take a physical measurement as to, you know, is it right? And because if we don't do that, then we have to rework it. Okay, now that's a problem. Okay, can you help me digitize that business? I need a network to do that. I'm going to put in some robots to do that. This is, I mean, I'm making this up but this has got to be a common use case, right? >> Yeah. >> So how do you simplify that for the business owner? >> So we start with what we can provide, and then in some cases you need additional solution providers. You might need a robotics company, you might need a sensor company. But we have those contacts to bring that together for you so that you don't have to be the expert in all those things. >> And what do I do with all the data that I'm collecting? Because, you know, I'm not really a data expert. Maybe, you know, I'm good at putting hoses together, but what's the data layer look like here? (all laughing) >> It's a hose business! >> I know! >> Great business. >> Back to the hoses again. >> There's a lot of different things you can do with it, right? You can collect it in a database, you can send it up to a cloud, you can, you know, use an edge device. It depends how we build the network. >> Dave V.: Can you guys help me do that? Can you guys- >> Sure, yeah. >> Help me figure that out. Should I put it into cloud? Should I use this database or that data? What kind of skills do I need? >> And it depends on the size of the network, right? And the size of the business. Like, you know, there's very simple. You don't have to be a massive manufacturer in order to install this stuff. >> No, I'm asking small business questions. >> Yeah. >> Right, I might not have this giant IT team. I might not have somebody who knows how to do ETL and PBA. >> Exactly. And we can talk to you too about what data matters, right? And we can, together, talk about what data might be the most valuable to you. We can talk to you about how we use data. But again, simplifying it down and making it personal to your business. >> Your point about scary is interesting, because no one has mentioned that until you did in four days. Three? Four days. Somebody says, let's do a private 5G network. That sounds like you're offering, you know, it's like, "Hey, you know what we should do Dave? We'll build you a cruise ship." It's like, I don't need a cruise ship, I just want to go bass fishing. >> Right, right, right. >> But in fact, these things are scalable in the sense that it can be scaled down from the trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It needs to be focused on your outcome, right? And not on the tech. >> When I was at the Dell booth I saw this little private network, it was about this big. I'm like, how much is that? I want one of those. (all laugh) >> I'm not the right person to talk about that! >> The little black one? >> Yes. >> I wanted one of those, too! >> I saw it, it had a little case to carry it around. I'm like, that could fit in my business. >> Just take it with you. >> theCUBE could use that! (all laugh) >> Anything that could go in a pelican case, I want. >> It's true. Like, it's so incredibly important, like you said, to focus on outcomes, right? Not just tech for the sake of tech. What's the problem? Let's solve the problem together. And then you're getting the outcome you want. You'll know what data you need. If you know what the problem is, you're like, okay this is the data I need to know if this problem is solved or not. >> So it sounds like 2022 was the year of talking about it. 2023, I'm inferring is the year of seeing it. >> Yep. >> And 2024 is going to be the year of doing it? >> I think we're doing it now. >> We're doing it now. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah, yeah. We're definitely doing it now. >> All right. >> I see a lot of this stuff being put into place and a lot more innovation and a lot more working together. And Meg mentioned working with other partners. No one's going to do this alone. You've got to like, you know, Dell especially, we're focused on open and making sure that, you know, we have the right software partners. We're bringing in smaller players, right? Like ISVs too, as well as like the big software guys. Incredibly, incredibly important. The sensor companies, whatever we need you've got to be able to solve your customer's issue, which in this case, we're looking to help the enterprise together to transform their space. And Dell knows a little bit about the enterprise, so. >> So if we are there in 2023, then I assume 2024 will be the year that each of your companies sets up a dedicated vertical to address the hose manufacturing market. (Meg laughing) >> Oh, the hose manufacturing market. >> Further segmentation is usually a hallmark of the maturity of an industry. >> I got a lead for you. >> Yeah, there you go. >> And that's one thing we've done at Dell, too. We've built like this use case directory to help the service providers understand what, not just say like, oh, you can help manufacturers. Yeah, but how, what are the use cases to do that? And we worked with a research firm to figure out, like, you know these are the most mature, these are the best ROIs. Like to really help hone in on exactly what we can deploy for 5G and edge solutions that make the most sense, not only for service providers, right, but also for the enterprises. >> Where do you guys want to see this partnership go? Give us the vision. >> To infinity and beyond. To 5G! (Meg laughing) To 5G and beyond. >> I love it. >> It's continuation. I love that we're partnering together. It's incredibly important to the future of the business. >> Good deal. >> To bring the strengths of both together. And like Jillian said, other partners in the ecosystem, it has to be approached from a partnership perspective, but focused on outcomes. >> Jillian: Yep. >> To 5G and beyond. I love it. >> To 5G and beyond. >> Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE. Go to silliconANGLE.com. John Furrier is banging out all the news. theCUBE.net has all the videos. We're live at the Fira in Barcelona, MWC23. We'll be right back. (uplifting electronic music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 22 live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. I got a power panel here, Lisa Martin, with Dave Valante, John furrier, Holger Mueller also joins us. We are gonna wrap this, like you've never seen a rap before guys. Lot of momentum today, lot, lot of excitement, about 8,000 or so customers, partners, HPE leaders here. Holger. Let's go ahead and start with you. What are some of the things that you heard felt saw observed today on day one? >>Yeah, it's great to be back in person. Right? 8,000 people events are rare. Uh, I'm not sure. Have you been to more than 8,000? <laugh> yeah, yeah. Okay. This year, this year. I mean, historically, yes, but, um, >>Snowflake was 10. Yeah. >>So, oh, wow. Okay. So 8,000 was my, >>Cisco was, they said 15, >>But is my, my 8,000, my record, I let us down with 7,000 kind of like, but it's in the Florida swarm. It's not nicely. Like, and there's >>Usually what SFI, there's usually >>20, 20, 30, 40, 50. I remember 50 in the nineties. Right. That was a different time. But yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting what people do and it depends how much time there is to come. Right. And know that it happens. Right. But yeah, no, I think it's interesting. We, we had a good two analyst track today. Um, interesting. Like HPE is kind of like back not being your grandfather's HPE to a certain point. One of the key stats. I know Dave always for the stats, right. Is what I found really interesting that over two third of GreenLake revenue is software and services. Now a love to know how much of that services, how much of that software. But I mean, I, I, I, provocate some, one to ones, the HP executives saying, Hey, you're a hardware company. Right. And they didn't even come back. Right. But Antonio said, no, two thirds is, uh, software and services. Right. That's interesting. They passed the one exabyte, uh, being managed, uh, as a, as a hallmark. Right. I was surprised only 120,000 users if I had to remember the number. Right, right. So that doesn't seem a terrible high amount of number of users. Right. So, but that's, that's, that's promising. >>So what software is in there, cuz it's gotta be mostly services. >>Right? Well it's the 70 plus cloud services, right. That everybody's talking about where the added eight of them shockingly back up and recovery, I thought that was done at launch. Right. >>Still who >>Keep recycling storage and you back. But now it's real. Yeah. >>But the company who knows the enterprise, right. HPE, what I've been doing before with no backup and recovery GreenLake. So that was kind of like, okay, we really want to do this now and nearly, and then say like, oh, by the way, we've been doing this all the time. Yeah. >>Oh, what's your take on the installed base of HP. We had that conversation, the, uh, kickoff or on who's their target, what's the target audience environment look like. It certainly is changing. Right? If it's software and services, GreenLake is resonating. Yeah. Um, ecosystems responding. What's their customers cuz managed services are up too Kubernetes, all the managed services what's what's it like what's their it transformation base look like >>Much of it is of course install base, right? The trusted 20, 30 plus year old HP customer. Who's keeping doing stuff of HP. Right. And call it GreenLake. They've been for so many name changes. It doesn't really matter. And it's kind of like nice that you get the consume pain only what you consume. Right. I get the cloud broad to me then the general markets, of course, people who still need to run stuff on premises. Right. And there's three reasons of doing this performance, right. Because we know the speed of light is relative. If you're in the Southern hemisphere and even your email servers in Northern hemisphere, it takes a moment for your email to arrive. It's a very different user experience. Um, local legislation for data, residency privacy. And then, I mean Charles Phillips who we all know, right. Former president of uh, info nicely always said, Hey, if the CIOs over 50, I don't have to sell qu. Right. So there is not invented. I'm not gonna do cloud here. And now I've kind of like clouded with something like HP GreenLake. That's the customers. And then of course procurement is a big friend, right? Yeah. Because when you do hardware refresh, right. You have to have two or three competitors who are the two or three competitors left. Right. There's Dell. Yeah. And then maybe Lenovo. Right? So, so like a >>Little bit channels, the strength, the procurement physicians of strength, of course install base question. Do you think they have a Microsoft opportunity where, what 365 was Microsoft had office before 365, but they brought in the cloud and then everything changed. Does HP have that same opportunity with kind of the GreenLake, you know, model with their existing stuff. >>It has a GreenLake opportunity, but there's not much software left. It's a very different situation like Microsoft. Right? So, uh, which green, which HP could bring along to say, now run it with us better in the cloud because they've been selling much of it. Most of it, of their software portfolio, which they bought as an HP in the past. Right. So I don't see that happening so much, but GreenLake as a platform itself course interesting because enterprise need a modern container based platform. >>I want, I want to double click on this a little bit because the way I see it is HP is going to its installed base. I think you guys are right on say, this is how we're doing business now. Yeah. You know, come on along. But my sense is, some customers don't want to do the consumption model. There are actually some customers that say, Hey, of course I got, I don't have a cash port problem. I wanna pay for it up front and leave me alone. >>I've been doing this since 50 years. Nice. As I changed it, now <laugh> two know >>Money's wants to do it. And I don't wanna rent because rental's more expensive and blah, blah, blah. So do you see that in the customer base that, that some are pushing back? >>Of course, look, I have a German accent, right? So I go there regularly and uh, the Germans are like worried about doing anything in the cloud. And if you go to a board in Germany and say, Hey, we can pay our usual hardware, refresh, CapEx as usual, or should we bug consumption? And they might know what we are running. <laugh> so not whole, no offense against the Germans out. The German parts are there, but many of them will say, Hey, so this is change with COVID. Right. Which is super interesting. Right? So the, the traditional boards non-technical have been hearing about this cloud variable cost OPEX to CapEx and all of a sudden there's so much CapEx, right. Office buildings, which are not being used truck fleets. So there's a whole new sensitivity by traditional non-technical boards towards CapEx, which now the light bulb went on and say, oh, that's the cloud thing about also. So we have to find a way to get our cost structure, to ramp up and ramp down as our business might be ramping up through COVID through now inflation fears, recession, fears, and so on. >>So, okay. HP's, HP's made the statement that anything you can do in the cloud you can do in GreenLake. Yes. And I've said you can't run on snowflake. You can't run Mongo Atlas, you can't run data bricks, but that's okay. That's fine. Let's be, I think they're talking about, there's >>A short list of things. I think they're talking about the, their >>Stuff, their, >>The operating experience. So we've got single sign on through a URL, right. Uh, you've got, you know, some level of consistency in terms of policy. It's unclear exactly what that is. You've got storage backup. Dr. What, some other services, seven other services. If you had to sort of take your best guess as to where HP is now and peg it toward where Amazon was in which year? >>20 14, 20 14. >>Yeah. Where they had their first conference or the second we invent here with 3000 people and they were thinking, Hey, we're big. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think GreenLake is the building blocks. So they quite that's the >>Building. Right? I mean similar. >>Okay. Well, I mean they had E C, Q and S3 and SQS, right. That was the core. And then the rest of those services were, I mean, base stock was one of that first came in behind and >>In fairness, the industry has advanced since then, Kubernetes is further along. And so HPE can take advantage of that. But in terms of just the basic platform, I, I would agree. I think it's >>Well, I mean, I think, I mean the software, question's a big one. I wanna bring up because the question is, is that software is getting the world. Hardware is really software scales, everything, data, the edge story. I love their story. I think HP story is wonderful Aruba, you know, hybrid cloud, good story, edge edge. But if you look under the covers, it's weak, right? It's like, it's not software. They don't have enough software juice, but the ecosystem opportunity to me is where you plug and play. So HP knows that game. But if you look historically over the past 25 years, HP now HPE, they understand plug and play interoperability. So the question is, can they thread the needle >>Right. >>Between filling the gaps on the software? Yeah. With partners, >>Can they get the partners? Right. And which have been long, long time. Right. For a long time, HP has been the number one platform under ICP, right? Same thing. You get certified for running this. Right. I know from my own history, uh, I joined Oracle last century and the big thing was, let's get your eBusiness suite certified on HP. Right? Like as if somebody would buy H Oracle work for them, right. This 20 years ago, server >>The original exit data was HP. Oracle. >>Exactly. Exactly. So there's this thinking that's there. But I think the key thing is we know that all modern forget about the hardware form in the platforms, right? All modern software has to move to containers and snowflake runs in containers. You mentioned that, right? Yeah. If customers force snowflake and HPE to the table, right, there will be a way to make it work. Right. And which will help HPE to be the partner open part will bring the software. >>I, I think it's, I think that's an opportunity because that changes the game and agility and speed. If HP plays their differentiation, right. Which we asked on their opening segment, what's their differentiation. They got size scale channel, >>What to the enterprise. And then the big benefit is this workload portability thing. Right? You understand what is run in the public cloud? I need to run it local. For whatever reason, performance, local residency of data. I can move that. There that's the big benefit to the ISVs, the sales vendors as well. >>But they have to have a stronger data platform story in my that's right. Opinion. I mean, you can run Oracle and HPE, but there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do a deal with, with snowflake. I mean, we saw it with Dell. Yep. We saw it with, with, with pure and I, if our HPE I'd be saying, Hey, because the way the snowflake deal worked, you probably know this is your reading data into the cloud. The compute actually occurs in the cloud viral HB going snowflake saying we can separate compute and storage. Right. And we have GreenLake. We have on demand. Why don't we run the compute on-prem and make it a full class, first class citizen, right. For all of our customers data. And that would be really innovative. And I think Mongo would be another, they've got OnPrem. >>And the question is, how many, how many snowflake customers are telling snowflake? Can I run you on premise? And how much defo open years will they hear from that? Right? This is >>Why would they deal Dell? That >>Deal though, with that, they did a deal. >>I think they did that deal because the customer came to them and said, you don't exactly that deal. We're gonna spend the >>Snowflake >>Customers think crazy things happen, right? Even, even put an Oracle database in a Microsoft Azure data center, right. Would off who, what as >>Possible snowflake, >>Oracle. So on, Aw, the >>Snow, the snowflakes in the world have to make a decision. Dave on, is it all snowflake all the time? Because what the reality is, and I think, again, this comes back down to the, the track that HP could go up or down is gonna be about software. Open source is now the software industry. There's no such thing as proprietary software, in my opinion, relatively speaking, cloud scale and integrated, integrated integration software is proprietary. The workflows are proprietary. So if they can get that right with the partners, I would focus on that. I think they can tap open source, look at Amazon with open source. They sucked it up and they integrated it in. No, no. So integration is the deal, not >>Software first, but Snowflake's made the call. You were there, Lisa. They basically saying it's we have, you have to be in snowflake in order to get the governance and the scalability, all that other wonderful stuff. Oh, but we we'll do Apache iceberg. We'll we'll open it up. We'll do Python. Yeah. >>But you can't do it data clean room unless you are in snowflake. Exactly. Snowflake on snowflake. >>Exactly. >>But got it. Isn't that? What you heard from AWS all the time till they came out outposts, right? I mean, snowflake is a market leader for what they're doing. Right. So that they want to change their platform. I mean, kudos to them. They don't need to change the platform. They will be the last to change their platform to a ne to anything on premises. Right. But I think the trend already shows that it's going that way. >>Well, if you look at outpost is an signal, Dave, the success of outpost launched what four years ago, they announced it. >>What >>EKS is beating, what outpost is doing. Outpost is there. There's not a lot of buzz and talk to the insiders and the open source community, uh, EKS and containers. To your point mm-hmm <affirmative> is moving faster on, I won't say commodity hardware, but like could be white box or HP, Dell, whatever it's gonna be that scale differentiation and the edge story is, is a good one. And I think with what we're seeing in the market now it's the industrial edge. The back office was gen one cloud back office data center. Now it's hybrid. The focus will be industrial edge machine learning and AI, and they have it here. And there's some, some early conversations with, uh, I heard it from, uh, this morning, you guys interviewed, uh, uh, John Schultz, right? With the world economic 4k birth Butterfield. She was amazing. And then you had Justin bring up a Hoar, bring up quantum. Yes. That is a differentiator. >>HP. >>Yes. Yeah. You, they have the computing shops. They had the R and D can they bring it to the table >>As, as HPC, right. To what they Schultz for of uh, the frontier system. Right. So very impressed. >>So the ecosystem is the key for them is because that's how they're gonna fill the gaps. They can't, they can't only, >>They could, they could high HPC edge piece. I wouldn't count 'em out of that game yet. If you co-locate a box, I'll use the word box, particularly at a telco tower. That's a data center. Yep. Right. If done properly. Yep. So, you know, what outpost was supposed to do actually is a hybrid opportunity. Aruba >>Gives them a unique, >>But the key thing is right. It's a yin and yang, right? It's the ecosystem it's partners to bring those software workload. Absolutely. Right. But HPE has to keep the platform attractive enough. Right. And the key thing there is that you have this workload capability thing that you can bring things, which you've built yourself. I mean, look at the telcos right. Network function, visualization, thousands of man, years into these projects. Right. So if I can't bring it to your edge box, no, I'm not trying to get to your Xbox. Right. >>Hold I gotta ask you since in the Dave too, since you guys both here and Lisa, you know, I said on the opening, they have serious customers and those customers have serious problems, cyber security, ransomware. So yeah. I teach transformation now. Industrial transformation machine learning, check, check, check. Oh, sounds good. But at the end of the day, their customers have some serious problems. Right? Cyber, this is, this is high stakes poker. Yeah. What do you think HP's position for in the security? You mentioned containers, you got all this stuff, you got open source, supply chain, you have to left supply chain issues. What is their position with security? Cuz that's the big one. >>I, I think they have to have a mature attitude that customers expect from HPE. Right? I don't have to educate HP on security. So they have to have the partner offerings again. We're back at the ecosystem to have what probably you have. So bring your own security apart from what they have to have out of the box to do business with them. This is why the shocker this morning was back up in recovery coming. <laugh> it's kind like important for that. Right? Well >>That's, that's, that's more ransomware and the >>More skeleton skeletons in the closet there, which customers should check of course. But I think the expectations HP understands that and brings it along either from partner or natively. >>I, I think it's, I think it's services. I think point next is the point of integration for their security. That's why two thirds is software and services. A lot of that is services, right? You know, you need security, we'll help you get there. We people trust HP >>Here, but we have nothing against point next or any professional service. They're all hardworking. But if I will have to rely on humans for my cyber security strategy on a daily level, I'm getting gray hair and I little gray hair >>Red. Okay. I that's, >>But >>I think, but I do think that's the camera strategy. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of that stuff that's beginning to be designed in, but I, my guess is a lot of it is services. >>Well, you got the Aruba. Part of the booth was packed. Aruba's there. You mentioned that earlier. Is that good enough? Because the word zero trust is kicked around a lot. On one hand, on the other hand, other conversations, it's all about trust. So supply chain and software is trusting trust, trust and verified. So you got this whole mentality of perimeter gone mentality. It's zero trust. And if you've got software trust, interesting thoughts there, how do you reconcile zero trust? And then I need trust. What's what's you? What are you seeing older on that? Because I ask people all the time, they're like, uh, I'm zero trust or is it trust? >>Yeah. The middle ground. Right? Trusted. The meantime people are man manipulating what's happening in your runtime containers. Right? So, uh, drift control is a new password there that you check what's in your runtime containers, which supposedly impenetrable, but people finding ways to hack them. So we'll see this cat and mouse game going on all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's always gonna be the need for being in a secure, good environment from that perspective. Absolutely. But the key is edge has to be more than Aruba, right? If yeah. HV goes away and says, oh yeah, we can manage your edge with our Aruba devices. That's not enough. It's the virtual probability. And you said the important thing before it's about the data, right? Because the dirty secret of containers is yeah, I move the code, but what enterprise code works without data, right? You can't say as enterprise, okay, we're done for the day check tomorrow. We didn't persist your data, auditor customer. We don't have your data anymore. So filling a way to transport the data. And there just one last thought, right? They have a super interesting asset. They want break lands for the venerable map R right. Which wrote their own storage drivers and gives you the chance to potentially do something in that area, which I'm personally excited about. But we'll see what happens. >>I mean, I think the holy grail is can I, can I put my data into a cloud who's ever, you know, call it a super cloud and can I, is it secure? Is it governed? Can I share it and be confident that it's discoverable and that the, the person I give it to has the right to use it. Yeah. And, and it's the correct data. There's not like a zillion copies running. That's the holy grail. And I, I think the answer today is no, you can, you can do that maybe inside of AWS or maybe inside of Azure, look maybe certainly inside of snowflake, can you do that inside a GreenLake? Well, you probably can inside a GreenLake, but then when you put it into the cloud, is it cross cloud? Is it really out to the edge? And that's where it starts to break down, but that's where the work is to be done. That's >>The one Exide is in there already. Right. So men being men. Yeah. >>But okay. But it it's in there. Yeah. Okay. What do you do with it? Can you share that data? What can you actually automate governance? Right? Uh, is that data discoverable? Are there multiple copies of that data? What's the, you know, master copy. Here's >>A question. You guys, here's a question for you guys analyst, what do you think the psychology is of the CIO or CSO when HP comes into town with GreenLake, uh, and they say, what's your relationship with the hyperscalers? Cause I'm a CIO. I got my environment. I might be CapEx centric or Hey, I'm open model. Open-minded to an operating model. Every one of these enterprises has a cloud relationship. Yeah. Yeah. What's the dynamic. What do you think the psychology is of the CIO when they're rationalizing their, their trajectory, their architecture, cloud, native scale integration with HPE GreenLake or >>HP service. I think she or he hears defensiveness from HPE. I think she hears HPE or he hears HPE coming in and saying, you don't need to go to the cloud. You know, you could keep it right here. I, I don't think that's the right posture. I think it should be. We are your cloud. And we can manage whether it's OnPrem hybrid in AWS, Azure, Google, across those clouds. And we have an edge story that should be the vision that they put forth. That's the super cloud vision, but I don't hear it >>From these guys. What do you think psycho, do you agree with that? >>I'm totally to make, sorry to be boring, but I totally agree with, uh, Dave on that. Right? So the, the, the multi-cloud capability from a trusted large company has worked for anybody up and down the stack. Right? You can look historically for, uh, past layers with cloud Foundry, right? It's history vulnerable. You can look for DevOps of Hashi coop. You can look for database with MongoDB right now. So if HPE provides that data access, right, with all the problems of data gravity and egres cost and the workability, they will be doing really, really well, but we need to hear it more, right. We didn't hear much software today in the keynote. Right. >>Do they have a competitive offering vis-a-vis or Azure? >>The question is, will it be an HPE offering or will, or the software platform, one of the offerings and you as customer can plug and play, right. Will software be a differentiator for HP, right. And will be close, proprietary to the point to again, be open enough for it, or will they get that R and D format that, or will they just say, okay, ES MES here on the side, your choice, and you can use OpenShift or whatever, we don't matter. That's >>The, that's the key question. That's the key question. Is it because it is a competitive strategy? Is it highly differentiated? Oracle is a highly differentiated strategy, right? Is Dell highly differentiated? Eh, Dell differentiates based on its breadth. What? >>Right. Well, let's try for the control plane too. Dell wants to be an, >>Their, their vision is differentiated. Okay. But their execution today is not >>High. All right. Let me throw, let me throw this out at you then. I'm I'm, I'm sorry. I'm I'm HPE. I wanna be the glue layer. Is that, does that fly? >>What >>Do you mean? The group glue layer? I'll I wanna be, you can do Amazon, but I wanna be the glue layer between the clouds and our GreenLake will. >>What's the, what's the incremental value that, that glue provides, >>Provides comfort and reliability and control for the single pane of glass for AWS >>And comes back to the data. In my opinion. Yeah. >>There, there there's glue levels on the data level. Yeah. And there's glue levels on API level. Right. And there's different vendors in the different spaces. Right. Um, I think HPE will want to play on the data side. We heard lots of data stuff. We >>Hear that, >>But we have to see it. Exactly. >>Yeah. But it's, it's lacking today. And so, Hey, you know, you guys know better than I APIs can be fragile and they can be, there's a lot of diversity in terms of the quality of APIs and the documentation, how they work, how mature they are, what, how, what kind of performance they can provide and recoverability. And so just saying, oh wow. We are living the API economy. You know, the it's gonna take time to brew, chime in here. Hi. >><laugh> oh, so guys, you've all been covering HPE for a long time. You know, when Antonio stood up on stage three years ago and said by 2022, and here we are, we're gonna be delivering everything as a service. He's saying we've, we've done it, but, and we're a new company. Do you guys agree with that? >>Definitely. >>I, yes. Yes. With the caveat, I think, yes. The COVID pandemic slowed them down a lot because, um, that gave a tailwind to the hyperscalers, um, because of the, the force of massive O under forecasting working at home. I mean, everyone I talked to was like, no one forecasted a hundred percent work at home, the, um, the CapEx investments. So I think that was an opportunity that they'd be much farther along if there's no COVID people >>Thought it wasn't impossible. Yeah. But so we had the old work from home thing right. Where people trying to get people fired at IBM and Yahoo. Right. So I would've this question covering the HR side and my other hat on. Right. And I would ask CHS let's assume, because I didn't know about COVID shame on me. Right. I said, big California, earthquake breaks. Right. Nobody gets hurt, but all the buildings have to be retrofitted and checked for seism logic down. So everybody's working from home, ask CHS, what kind of productivity gap hit would you get by forcing everybody working from home with the office unsafe? So one, one gentleman, I won't know him, his name, he said 20% and the other one's going ha you're smoking. It's 40 50%. We need to be in the office. We need to meet it first night. And now we went for this exercise. Luckily not with the California. Right. Well, through the price of COVID and we've seen what it can do to, to productivity well, >>The productivity, but also the impact. So like with all the, um, stories we've done over two years, the people that want came out ahead were the ones that had good cloud action. They were already in the cloud. So I, I think they're definitely in different company in the sense of they, I give 'em a pass. I think they're definitely a new company and I'm not gonna judge 'em on. I think they're doing great. But I think pandemic definitely slowed 'em down that about >>It. So I have a different take on this. I think. So we've go back a little history. I mean, you' said this, I steal your line. Meg Whitman took one for the Silicon valley team. Right. She came in. I don't think she ever was excited that I, that you said, you said that, and I think you wrote >>Up, get tape on that one. She >>Had to figure out how do I deal with this mess? I have EDS. I got PC. >>She never should have spun off the PC, but >>Okay. But >>Me, >>Yeah, you can, you certainly could listen. Maybe, maybe Gerstner never should have gone all in on services and IBM would dominate something other than mainframes. They had think pads even for a while, but, but, but so she had that mess to deal with. She dealt with it and however, they dealt with it, Antonio came in, he, he, and he said, all right, we're gonna focus the company. And we're gonna focus the mission on not the machine. Remember those yeah. Presentations, but you just make your eyes glaze over. We're going all in on Azure service >>And edge. He was all on. >>We're gonna build our own cloud. We acquired Aruba. He made some acquisitions in HPC to help differentiate. Yep. And they are definitely a much more focused company now. And unfortunately I wish Antonio would CEO in 2015, cuz that's really when this should have started. >>Yeah. And then, and if you remember back then, Dave, we were interviewing Docker with DevOps teams. They had composability, they were on hybrid really early. I think they might have even coined the term hybrid before VMware tri-state credit for it. But they were first on hybrid. They had DevOps, they had infrastructure risk code. >>HPE had an HP had an awesome cloud team. Yeah. But, and then, and then they tried to go public cloud. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, just made them, I mean, it was just a mess. The focus >>Is there. I give them huge props. And I think, I think the GreenLake to me is exciting here because it's much better than it was two years ago. When, when we talked to, when we started, it's >>Starting to get real. >>It's, it's a real thing. And I think the, the tell will be partners. If they make that right, can pull their different >>Ecosystem, >>Their scale and their customers and fill the software gas with partners mm-hmm <affirmative> and then create that integration opportunity. It's gonna be a home run if they don't do that, they're gonna miss the operating, >>But they have to have their own to your point. They have to have their own software innovation. >>They have to good infrastructure ways to build applications. I don't wanna build with somebody else. I don't wanna take a Microsoft stack on open source stack. I'm not sure if it's gonna work with HP. So they have to have an app dev answer. I absolutely agree with that. And the, the big thing for the partners is, which is a good thing, right? Yep. HPE will not move into applications. Right? You don't have to have the fear of where Microsoft is with their vocal large. Right. If AWS kind of like comes up with APIs and manufacturing, right. Google the same thing with their vertical push. Right. So HPE will not have the CapEx, but >>Application, >>As I SV making them, the partner, the bonus of being able to on premise is an attractive >>Part. That's a great point. >>Hold. So that's an inflection point for next 12 months to watch what we see absolutely running on GreenLake. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of the, the last couple events this past year, and I'll bring this up, we'll table it and we'll watch it. And it's early in this, I think this is like even, not even the first inning, the machine learning AI impact to the industrial piece. I think we're gonna see a, a brand new era of accelerated digital transformation on the industrial physical world, back office, cloud data center, accounting, all the stuff. That's applications, the app, the real world from space to like robotics. I think that HP edge opportunity is gonna be visible and different. >>So guys, Antonio Neri is on tomorrow. This is only day one. If you can imagine this power panel on day one, can you imagine tomorrow? What is your last question for each of you? What is your, what, what question would you want to ask him tomorrow? Hold start with you. >>How is HPE winning in the long run? Because we know their on premise market will shrink, right? And they can out execute Dell. They can out execute Lenovo. They can out Cisco and get a bigger share of the shrinking market. But that's the long term strategy, right? So why should I buy HPE stock now and have a good return put in the, in the safe and forget about it and have a great return 20 years from now? What's the really long term strategy might be unfair because they, they ran in survival mode to a certain point out of the mass post equipment situation. But what is really the long term strategy? Is it more on the hardware side? Is it gonna go on the HPE, the frontier side? It's gonna be a DNA question, which I would ask Antonio. >>John, >>I would ask him what relative to the macro conditions relative to their customer base, I'd say, cuz the customers are the scoreboard. Can they create a value proposition with their, I use the Microsoft 365 example how they kind of went to the cloud. So my question would be Antonio, what is your core value proposition to CIOs out there who want to transform and take a step function, increase for value with HPE? Tell me that story. I wanna hear. And I don't want to hear, oh, we got a portfolio and no, what value are you enabling your customers to do? >>What and what should that value be? >>I think it's gonna be what we were kind of riffing on, which is you have to provide either what their product market fit needs are, which is, are you solving a problem? Is it a pain point is a growth driver. Uh, and what's the, what's that tailwind. And it's obviously we know at cloud we know edge. The story is great, but what's the value proposition. But by going with HPE, you get X, Y, and Z. If they can explain that clearly with real, so qualitative and quantitative data it's home >>Run. He had a great line of the analyst summit today where somebody asking questions, I'm just listening to the customer. So be ready for this Steve jobs photo, listening to the customer. You can't build something great listening to the customer. You'll be good for the next quarter. The next exponential >>Say, what are the customers saying? <laugh> >>So I would make an observation. And my question would, so my observation would be cloud is growing collectively at 35%. It's, you know, it's approaching 200 billion with a big, big four. If you include Alibaba, IBM has actually said, Hey, we're gonna gr they've promised 6% growth. Uh, Cisco I think is at eight or 9% growth. Dow's growing in double digits. Antonio and HPE have promised three to 4% growth. So what do you have to do to actually accelerate growth? Because three to 4%, my view, not enough to answer Holger's question is why should I buy HPE stock? Well, >>If they have product, if they have customer and there's demand and traction to me, that's going to drive the growth numbers. And I think the weak side of the forecast means that they don't have that fit yet. >>Yeah. So what has to happen for them to get above five, 6% growth? >>That's what we're gonna analyze. I mean, I, I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I wish I had a better answer. I'd tell them <laugh> but I feel, it feels, it feels like, you know, HP has an opportunity to say here's the new HPE. Yeah. Okay. And this is what we stand for. And here's the one thing that we're going to do that consistently drives value for you, the customer. And that's gonna have to come into some, either architectural cloud shift or a data thing, or we are your store for blank. >>All of the above. >>I guess the other question is, would, would you know, he won't answer a rude question, would suspending things like dividends and stock buybacks and putting it into R and D. I would definitely, if you have confidence in the market and you know what to do, why wouldn't you just accelerate R and D and put the money there? IBM, since 2007, IBM spent is the last stat. And I'm looking go in 2007, IBM way, outspent, Google, and Amazon and R and D and, and CapEx two, by the way. Yep. Subsequent to that, they've spent, I believe it's the numbers close to 200 billion on stock buyback and dividends. They could have owned cloud. And so look at this business, the technology business by and large is driven by innovation. Yeah. And so how do you innovate if >>You have I'm buying, I'm buying HP because they're reliable high quality and they have the outcomes that I want. Oh, >>Buy their products and services. I'm not sure I'd buy the stock. Yeah. >>Yeah. But she has to answer ultimately, because a public company. Right. So >>Right. It's this job. Yeah. >>Never a dull moment with the three of you around <laugh> guys. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your, an analysis from day one. I can't imagine what day two is gonna bring tomorrow. Debut and I are gonna be anchoring here. We've got a jam packed day, lots going on, hearing from the ecosystem from leadership. As we mentioned, Antonio is gonna be Tony >>Alma Russo. I'm dying. Dr. >>EDMA as well as on the CTO gonna be another action pack day. I'm excited for it, guys. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and for letting me join this power panel. >>Great. Great to be here. >>Power panel plus me. All right. For Holger, John and Dave, I'm Lisa, you're watching the cube our day one coverage of HPE discover wraps right now. Don't go anywhere, cuz we'll see you tomorrow for day two, live from Vegas, have a good night.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to The Great Cloud Debate. I'm your moderator Rachel Dines. I'm joined by two debaters today Corey Quinn, Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group and Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst and Host of theCube. Welcome Corey and Stu, this when you can say hello. >> Hey Rachel, great to talk to you. >> And it's better to talk to me. It's always a pleasure to talk to the fine folks over at CloudHealth at by VMware and less of the pleasure to talk to Stu. >> Smack talk is scheduled for later in the agenda gentlemen, so please keep it to a minimum now to keep us on schedule. So here's how today is going to work. I'm going to introduce a debate topic and assign Corey and Stu each to a side. Remember, their assignments are what I decide and they might not actually match their true feelings about a topic, and it definitely does not represent the feelings of their employer or my employer, importantly. Each debater is going to have two minutes to state their opening arguments, then we'll have rebuttals. And each round you the audience gets to vote of who you think is winning. And at the end of the debate, I'll announce the winner. The prize is bragging rights of course, but then also we're having each debater play to win lunch for their local hospital, which is really exciting. So Stu, which hospital are you playing for? >> Yeah, so Rachel, I'm choosing Brigham Women's Hospital. I get a little bit of a home vote for the Boston audience here and was actually my wife's first job out of school. >> Great hospital. Very, very good. All right, Corey, what about you? >> My neighbor winds up being as specialist in infectious diseases as a doctor, and that was always one of those weird things you learn over a cocktail party until this year became incredibly relevant. So I will absolutely be sending the lunch to his department. >> Wonderful! All right. Well, is everyone ready? Any last words? This is your moment for smack talk. >> I think I'll say that for once we can apply it to a specific technology area. Otherwise, it was insulting his appearance and that's too easy. >> All right, let's get going. The first topic is multicloud. Corey, you'll be arguing that companies are better off standardizing on a single cloud. While Stu, you're going to argue the companies are better off with a multicloud strategy. Corey, you're up first, two minutes on the clock and go. >> All right. As a general rule, picking a single provider and going all in leads to the better outcome. Otherwise, you're trying to build every workload to run seamlessly on other providers on a moment's notice. You don't ever actually do it and all you're giving up in return is the ability to leverage whatever your primary cloud provider is letting you build. Now you're suddenly trying to make two differently behaving load balancers work together in the same way, you're using terraform or as I like to call it multicloud formation in the worst of all possible ways. Because now you're having to only really build on one provider, but all the work you're putting in to make that scale to other providers, you might theoretically want to go to at some point, it slows you down, you're never going to be able to move as quickly trying to build for everyone as you are for one particular provider. And I don't care which provider you pick, you probably care which one you pick, I don't care which one. The point is, you've got to pick what's right for your business. And in almost every case, that means start on a single platform. And if you need to migrate down the road years from now, great, that means A you've survived that long, and B you now have the longevity as a business to understand what migrating looks like. Otherwise you're not able to take care of any of the higher level offerings these providers offer that are even slightly differentiated from each other. And even managed database services behave differently. You've got to become a master of all the different ways these things can fail and unfortunate and displeasing ways. It just leaves you in a position where you're not able to specialize, and of course, makes hiring that much harder. Stu, fight me! >> Tough words there. All right, Stu, your turn. Why are companies better off if they go with a multicloud strategy? Got two minutes? >> Yeah, well first of all Corey, I'm really glad that I didn't have to whip out the AWS guidelines, you were not sticking strictly to it and saying that you could not use the words multicloud, cross-cloud, any cloud or every cloud so thank you for saving me that argument. But I want you to kind of come into the real world a little bit. We want access to innovation, we want flexibility, and well, we used to say I would have loved to have a single provider, in the real world we understand that people end up using multiple solutions. If you look at the AI world today, there's not a provider that is a clear leader in every environment that I have. So there's a reason why I might want to use a lot of clouds. Most companies I talked to, Corey, they still have some of their own servers. They're working in a data center, we've seen huge explosion in the service provider world connecting to multiple clouds. So well, a couple of years ago, multicloud was a complete mess. Now, it's only a little bit of a mess, Corey. So absolutely, there's work that we need to do as an industry to make these solutions better. I've been pining for a couple years to say that multicloud needs to be stronger than the sum of its pieces. And we might not yet be there but limiting yourself to a single cloud is reducing your access to innovation, it's reducing your flexibility. And when you start looking at things like edge computing and AI, I'm going to need to access services from multiple providers. So single cloud is a lovely ideal, but in the real world, we understand that teams come with certain skill sets. We end up in many industries, we have mergers and acquisitions. And it's not as easy to just rip out all of your cloud, like you would have 20 years ago, if you said, "Oh, well, they have a phone system or a router "that didn't match what our corporate guidelines is." Cloud is what we're doing. There's lots of solutions out there. And therefore, multicloud is the reality today, and will be the reality going forward for many years to come. >> Strong words from you, Stu. Corey, you've got 60 seconds for rebuttal. I mostly agree with what you just said. I think that having different workloads in different clouds makes an awful lot of sense. Data gravity becomes a bit of a bear. But if you acquire a company that's running on a different cloud than the one that you've picked, you'd be ridiculous to view migrating as anything approaching a strategic priority. Now, this also gets into the question of what is cloud? Our G Suite stuff counts as cloud, but no one really views it in that way. Similarly, when you have an AI specific workload, that's great. As long as it isn't you seriously expensive to move data between providers. That workload doesn't need to live in the same place as your marketing website does. I think that the idea of having a specific cloud provider that you go all in on for every use case, well, at some point that leads to ridiculous things like pretending that Amazon WorkDocs has customers, it does not. But for things that matter to your business and looking at specific workloads, I think that you're going to find a primary provider with secondary workloads here and they're scattered elsewhere to be the strategy that people are getting at when they use the word multicloud badly. >> Time's up for you Corey, Stu we've got time for rebuttal and remember, for those of you in the audience, you can vote at any time and who you think is winning this round. Stu, 60 seconds for a rebuttal. >> Yeah, absolutely Corey. Look, you just gave the Andy Jassy of what multicloud should be 70 to 80% goes to a single provider. And it does make sense we know nobody ever said multicloud equals the same amount in multiple environments but you made a clear case as to why multicloud leveraging multi providers is likely what most companies are going to do. So thank you so much for making a clear case as to why multicloud not equal cloud, across multiple providers is the way to go. So thank you for conceding the victory. >> Last Words, Corey. >> If that's what you took from it Stu, I can't get any closer to it than you have. >> All right, let's move on to the next topic then. The next topic is serverless versus containers which technology is going to be used in, let's say, five to 10 years time? And as a reminder, I'm going to assign each of the debaters these topics, their assignments may or may not match their true feelings about this topic, and they definitely don't represent the topics of my employer, CloudHealth by VMware. Stu, you're going to argue for containers. Corey you're going to argue for start serverless. Stu, you're up first. Two minutes on the clock and go. >> All right, so with all respect to my friends in the serverless community, We need to have a reality check as to how things work. We all know that serverless is a ridiculous name because underneath we do need to worry about all of the infrastructure underneath. So containers today are the de facto building block for cloud native architectures, just as the VM defined the ecosystem for an entire generation of solutions. Containers are the way we build things today. It is the way Google has architected their entire solution and underneath it is often something that's used with serverless. So yes, if you're, building an Alexa service, serverless make what's good for you. But for the vast majority of solutions, I need to have flexibility, I need to understand how things work underneath it. We know in IT that it's great when things work, but we need to understand how to fix them when they break. So containerization gets us to that atomic level, really close to having the same thing as the application. And therefore, we saw the millions of users that deploy Docker, we saw the huge wave of container orchestration led by Kubernetes. And the entire ecosystem and millions of customers are now on board with this way of designing and architecting and breaking down the silos between the infrastructure world and the application developer world. So containers, here to stay growing fast. >> All right, Corey, what do you think? Why is serverless the future? >> I think that you're right in that containers are the way you get from where you were to something that runs effectively in a cloud environment. That is why Google is so strongly behind Kubernetes it helps get the entire industry to write code the way that Google might write code. And that's great. But if you're looking at effectively rewriting something from scratch, or building something that new, the idea of not having to think about infrastructure in the traditional sense of being able to just here, take this code and run it in a given provider that takes whatever it is that you need to do and could loose all these other services together, saves an awful lot of time. As that continues to move up the stack towards the idea of no code or low code. And suddenly, you're now able to build these applications in ways that require just a little bit of code that tie together everything else. We're closer than ever to that old trope of the only code you write is business logic. Serverless gives a much clearer shot of getting there, if you can divorce yourself from the past of legacy workloads. Legacy, of course meaning older than 18 months and makes money. >> Stu, do you have a rebuttal, 60 seconds? >> Yeah. So Corey, we've been talking about this Nirvana in many ways. It's the discussion that we had for paths for over a decade now. I want to be able to write my code once not worry about where it lives, and do all this. But sometimes, there's a reason why we keep trying the same thing over and over again, but never reaching it. So serverless is great for some application If you talked about, okay, if you're some brand new webby thing there and I don't want to have to do this team, that's awesome. I've talked to some wonderful people that don't know anything about coding that have built some cool stuff with serverless. But cool stuff isn't what most business runs on, and therefore containerization is, as you said, it's a bridge to where I need to go, it lives in these cloud environments, and it is the present and it is the future. >> Corey, your response. >> I agree that it's the present, I doubt that it's the future in quite the same way. Right now Kubernetes is really scratching a major itch, which is how all of these companies who are moving to public cloud still I can have their infrastructure teams be able to cosplay as cloud providers themselves. And over time, that becomes simpler and I think on some level, you might even see a convergence of things that are container workloads begin to look a lot more like serverless workloads. Remember, we're aiming at something that is five years away in the context of this question. I think that the serverless and container landscape will look very different. The serverless landscape will be bright and exciting and new, whereas unfortunately the container landscape is going to be represented by people like you Stu. >> Hoarse words from Corey. Stu, any last words or rebuttals? >> Yeah, and look Corey absolutely just like we don't really think about the underlying server or VM, we won't think about the containers you won't think about Kubernetes in the future, but, the question is, which technology will be used in five to 10 years, it'll still be there. It will be the fabric of our lives underneath there for containerization. So, that is what we were talking about. Serverless I think will be useful in pockets of places but will not be the predominant technology, five years from now. >> All right, tough to say who won that one? I'm glad I don't have to decide. I hope everyone out there is voting, last chance to vote on this question before we move on to the next. Next topic is cloud wars. I'm going to give a statement and then I'm going to assign each of you a pro or a con, Google will never be an actual contender in the cloud wars always a far third, we're going to have Corey arguing that Google is never going to be an actual contender. And Stu, you're going to argue that Google is eventually going to overtake the top two AWS and Azure. As a constant reminder, I'm assigning these topics, it's my decision and also they don't match the opinions of me, my employer, or likely Stu or Corey. This is all just for fun and games. But I really want to hear what everyone has to say. So Corey, you're up first two minutes. Why is Google never going to be an actual contender and go. >> The biggest problem Google has in the time of cloud is their ability to forecast longer term on anything that isn't their advertising business, and their ability to talk to human beings long enough to meet people where they are. We're replacing their entire culture is what it's going to take to succeed in the time of cloud and with respect, Thomas Kurian is a spectacular leader internally but look at where he's come from. He spent 22 years at Oracle and now has been transplanted into Google. If we take a look at Satya Nadella's cloud transformation at Microsoft, he was able to pull that off as an insider, after having known intimately every aspect of that company, and he grew organically with it and was perfectly positioned to make that change. You can't instill that kind of culture change by dropping someone externally, on top of an organization and expecting anything to go with this magic one day wake up and everything's going to work out super well. Google has a tremendous amount of strengths, and I don't see that providing common denominator cloud computing services to a number of workloads that from a Google perspective are horrifying, is necessarily in their wheelhouse. It feels like their entire focus on this is well, there's money over there. We should go get some of that too. It comes down to the traditional Google lack of focus. >> Stu, rebuttal? Why do you think Google has a shaft? >> Yeah, so first of all, Corey, I think we'd agree Google is a powerhouse in the world today. My background is networking, when they first came out with with Google Cloud, I said, Google has the best network, second to none in the world. They are ubiquitous today. If you talk about the impact they have on the world, Android phones, you mentioned Kubernetes, everybody uses G Suite maps, YouTube, and the like. That does not mean that they are necessarily going to become the clear leader in cloud but, Corey, they've got really, really smart people. If you're not familiar with that talk to them. They'll tell you how smart they are. And they have built phenomenal solutions, who's going to be able to solve, the challenge every day of, true distributed systems, that a global database that can handle the clock down to the atomic level, Google's the one that does that we've all read the white papers on that. They've set the tone for Hadoop, and various solutions that are all over the place, and their secret weapon is not the advertising, of course, that is a big concern for them, but is that if you talk about, the consumer adoption, everyone uses Google. My kids have all had Chromebooks growing up. It isn't their favorite thing, but they get, indoctrinated with Google technology. And as they go out and leverage technologies in the world, Google is one that is known. Google has the strength of technology and a lot of positioning and partnerships to move them forward. Everybody wants a strong ecosystem in cloud, we don't want a single provider. We already discussed this before, but just from a competitive nature standpoint, if there is a clear counterbalance to AWS, I would say that it is Google, not Microsoft, that is positioned to be that clear and opportune. >> Interesting, very interesting Stu. So your argument is the Gen Zers will of ultimately when they come of age become the big Google proponents. Some strong words that as well but they're the better foil to AWS, Corey rebuttal? >> I think that Stu is one t-shirt change away from a pitch perfect reenactment of Charlie Brown. In this case with Google playing the part of Lucy yanking the football away every time. We've seen it with inbox, Google Reader, Google Maps, API pricing, GKE's pricing for control plane. And when your argument comes down to a suddenly Google is going to change their entire nature and become something that it is as proven as constitutionally incapable of being, namely supporting something that its customers want that it doesn't itself enjoy working on. And to the exclusion of being able to get distracted and focused on other things. Even their own conferences called Next because Google is more interested in what they're shipping than what they're building, than what they're currently shipping. I think that it is a fantasy to pretend that that is somehow going to change without a complete cultural transformation, which again, I don't see the seeds being planted for. >> Some sick burns in there Stu, rebuttal? >> Yeah. So the final word that I'll give you on this is, one of the most important pieces of what we need today. And we need to tomorrow is our data. Now, there are some concerns when we talk about Google and data, but Google also has strong strength in data, understanding data, helping customers leverage data. So while I agree to your points about the cultural shift, they have the opportunity to take the services that they have, and enable customers to be able to take their data to move forward to the wonderful world of AI, cloud, edge computing, and all of those pieces and solve the solution with data. >> Strong words there. All right, that's a tough one. Again, I hope you're all out there voting for who you think won that round. Let's move on to the last round before we start hitting the lightning questions. I put a call out on several channels and social media for people to have questions that they want you to debate. And this one comes from Og-AWS Slack member, Angelo. Angelo asks, "What about IBM Cloud?" Stu you're pro, Corey you're con. Let's have Stu you're up first. The question is, what about IBM Cloud? >> All right, so great question, Angelo. I think when you look at the cloud providers, first of all, you have to understand that they're not all playing the same game. We talked about AWS and they are the elephant in the room that moves nimbly as a cheetah. Every other provider plays a little bit of a different game. Google has strength in data. Microsoft, of course, has their, business productivity applications. IBM has a strong legacy. Now, Corey is going to say that they are just legacy and you need to think about them but IBM has strong innovation. They are a player in really what we call chapter two of the cloud. So when we start talking about multicloud, when we start talking about living in many environments, IBM was the first one to partner with VMware for VMware cloud before the mega VMware AWS announcement, there was IBM up on stage and if I remember right, they actually have more VMware customers on IBM Cloud than they do in the AWS cloud. So over my shoulder here, there's of course, the Red Hat $34 billion to bet on that multicloud solution. So as we talk about containerization, and Kubernetes, Red Hat is strongly positioned in open-source, and flexibility. So you really need a company that understands both the infrastructure side and the application side. IBM has database, IBM has infrastructure, IBM has long been the leader in middleware, and therefore IBM has a real chance to be a strong player in this next generation of platforms. Doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to go attack Amazon, they're partnering across the board. So I think you will see a kinder, gentler IBM and they are leveraging open source and Red Hat and I think we've let the dogs out on the IBM solution. >> Indeed. >> So before Corey goes, I feel the need to remind everyone that the views expressed here are not the views of my employer nor myself, nor necessarily of Corey or Stu. I have Corey. >> I haven't even said anything yet. And you're disclaiming what I'm about to say. >> I'm just warning the audience, 'cause I can't wait to hear what you're going to say next. >> Sounds like I have to go for the high score. All right. IBM's best days are behind it. And that is pretty clear. They like to get angry when people talk about how making the jokes about a homogenous looking group of guys in blue suits as being all IBM has to offer. They say that hasn't been true since the '80s. But that was the last time people cared about IBM in any meaningful sense and no one has bothered to update the relevance since then. Now, credit where due, I am seeing an awful lot of promoted tweets from IBM into my timeline, all talking about how amazing their IBM blockchain technology is. And yes, that is absolutely the phrasing of someone who's about to turn it all around and win the game. I don't see it happening. >> Stu, rebuttal? >> Look, Corey, IBM was the company that brought us the UPC code. They understand Mac manufacturing and blockchain actually shows strong presence in supply chain management. So maybe you're not quite aware of some of the industries that IBM is an expert in. So that is one of the big strengths of IBM, they really understand verticals quite well. And, at the IBM things show, I saw a lot in the healthcare world, had very large customers that were leveraging those solutions. So while you might dismiss things when they say, Oh, well, one of the largest telecom providers in India are leveraging OpenStack and you kind of go with them, well, they've got 300 million customers, and they're thrilled with the solution that they're doing with IBM, so it is easy to scoff at them, but IBM is a reliable, trusted provider out there and still very strong financially and by the way, really excited with the new leadership in place there, Arvind Krishna knows product, Jim Whitehurst came from the Red Hat side. So don't be sleeping on IBM. >> Corey, any last words? >> I think that they're subject to massive disruption as soon as they release the AWS 400 mainframe in the cloud. And I think that before we, it's easy to forget this, but before Google was turning off Reader, IBM stopped making the model M buckling spring keyboards. Those things were masterpieces and that was one of the original disappointments that we learned that we can't fall in love with companies, because companies in turn will not love us back. IBM has demonstrated that. Lastly, I think I'm thrilled to be working with IBM is exactly the kind of statement one makes only at gunpoint. >> Hey, Corey, by the way, I think you're spending too much time looking at all titles of AWS services, 'cause you don't know the difference between your mainframe Z series and the AS/400 which of course is heavily pending. >> Also the i series. Oh yes. >> The i series. So you're conflating your system, which still do billions of dollars a year, by the way. >> Oh, absolutely. But that's not we're not seeing new banks launching and then building on top of IBM mainframe technology. I'm not disputing that mainframes were phenomenal. They were, I just don't see them as the future and I don't see a cloud story. >> Only a cloud live your mainframe related smack talk. That's the important thing that we're getting to here. All right, we move-- >> I'm hoping there's an announcement from CloudHealth by VMware that they also will now support mainframe analytics as well as traditional cloud. >> I'll look into that. >> Excellent. >> We're moving on to the lightning rounds. Each debater in this round is only going to get 60 seconds for their opening argument and then 30 seconds for a rebuttal. We're going to hit some really, really big important questions here like this first one, which is who deserves to sit on the Iron Throne at the end of "Game of Thrones?" I've been told that Corey has never seen this TV show so I'm very interested to hear him argue for Sansa. But let's Sansa Stark, let's hear Stu go first with his argument for Jon Snow. Stu one minute on the clock, go. >> All right audience let's hear it from the king of the north first of all. Nothing better than Jon Snow. He made the ultimate sacrifice. He killed his love to save Westeros from clear destruction because Khaleesi had gone mad. So Corey is going to say something like it's time for the women to do this but it was a woman she went mad. She started burning the place down and Jon Snow saved it so it only makes sense that he should have done it. Everyone knows it was a travesty that he was sent back to the Wall, and to just wander the wild. So absolutely Jon Snow vote for King of the North. >> Compelling arguments. Corey, why should Sansa Stark sit on the throne? Never having seen the show I've just heard bits and pieces about it and all involves things like bloody slaughters, for example, the AWS partner Expo right before the keynote is best known as AWS red wedding. We take a look at that across the board and not having seen it, I don't know the answer to this question, but how many of the folks who are in positions of power we're in fact mediocre white dudes and here we have Stu advocating for yet another one. Sure, this is a lightning round of a fun event but yes, we should continue to wind up selecting this mediocre white person has many parallels in terms of power, et cetera, politics, current tech industry as a whole. I think she's right we absolutely should give someone with a look like this a potential opportunity to see what they can do instead. >> Ouch, Stu 30 seconds rebuttal. >> Look, I would just give a call out to the women in the audience and say, don't you want Jon Snow to be king? >> I also think it's quite bold of Corey to say that he looks like Kit Harington. Corey, any last words? >> I think that it sad you think Stu was running for office at this point because he's become everyone's least favorite animal, a panda bear. >> Fire. All right, so on to the next question. This one also very important near and dear to my heart personally, is a hot dog a sandwich. Corey you'll be arguing no, Stu will be arguing yes. I must also add this important disclaimer that these assignments are made by me and might not reflect the actual views of the debaters here so Corey, you're up first. Why is a hot dog not a sandwich? >> Because you'll get punched in the face if you go to a deli of any renown and order a hot dog. That is not what they serve there. They wind up having these famous delicatessen in New York they have different sandwiches named after different celebrities. I shudder to think of the deadly insult that naming a hot dog after a celebrity would be to that not only celebrity in some cases also the hot dog too. If you take a look and you want to get sandwiches for lunch? Sure. What are we having catered for this event? Sandwiches. You show up and you see a hot dog, you're looking around the hot dog to find the rest of the sandwich. Now while it may check all of the boxes for a technical definition of what a sandwich is, as I'm sure Stu will boringly get into, it's not what people expect, there's a matter of checking the actual boxes, and then delivering what customers actually want. It's why you can let your product roadmap be guided by cart by customers or by Gartner but rarely both. >> Wow, that one hurts. Stu, why is the hot dog a sandwich? >> Yeah so like Corey, I'm sorry that you must not have done some decent traveling 'cause I'm glad you brought up the definition because I'm not going to bore you with yes, there's bread and there's meat and there's toppings and everything else like that but there are some phenomenal hot dogs out there. I traveled to Iceland a few years ago, and there's a little hot dog stand out there that's been there for over 40 or 50 years. And it's one of the top 10 culinary experience I put in. And I've been to Michelin star restaurants. You go to Chicago and any local will be absolutely have to try our creation. There are regional hot dogs. There are lots of solutions there and so yeah, of course you don't go to a deli. Of course if you're going to the deli for takeout and you're buying meats, they do sell hot dogs, Corey, it's just not the first thing that you're going to order on the menu. So I think you're underselling the hot dog. Whether you are a child and grew up and like eating nothing more than the mustard or ketchup, wherever you ate on it, or if you're a world traveler, and have tried some of the worst options out there. There are a lot of options for hot dogs so hot dog, sandwich, culinary delight. >> Stu, don't think we didn't hear that pun. I'm not sure if that counts for or against you, but Corey 30 seconds rebuttal. >> In the last question, you were agitating for putting a white guy back in power. Now you're sitting here arguing that, "Oh some of my best friend slash meals or hot dogs." Yeah, I think we see what you're putting down Stu and it's not pretty, it's really not pretty and I think people are just going to start having to ask some very pointed, delicate questions. >> Tough words to hear Stu. Close this out or rebuttal. >> I'm going to take the high road, Rachel and leave that where it stands. >> I think that is smart. All right, next question. Tabs versus spaces. Stu, you're going to argue for tabs, Corey, you're going to argue for spaces just to make this fun. Stu, 60 seconds on the clock, you're up first. Why are tabs the correct approach? >> First of all, my competitor here really isn't into pop culture. So he's probably not familiar with the epic Silicon Valley argument over this discussion. So, Corey, if you could explain the middle of algorithm, we will be quite impressed but since you don't, we'll just have to go with some of the technology first. Looks, developers, we want to make things simple on you. Tabs, they're faster to do they take up less memory. Yes, they aren't quite as particular as using spaces but absolutely, they get the job done and it is important to just, focus on productivity, I believe that the conversation as always, the less code you can write, the better and therefore, if you don't have to focus on exactly how many spaces and you can just simplify with the tabs, you're gona get close enough for most of the job. And it is easier to move forward and focus on the real work rather than some pedantic discussion as to whether one thing is slightly more efficient than the other. >> Great points Stu. Corey, why is your pedantic approach better? >> No one is suggesting you sit there and whack the spacebar four times or eight times you hit the Tab key, but your editor should be reasonably intelligent enough to expand that. At that point, you have now set up a precedent where in other cases, other parts of your codebase you're using spaces because everyone always does. And that winds up in turn, causing a weird dissonance you'll see a bunch of linters throwing issues if you use tabs as a direct result. Now the wrong answer is, of course, and I think Steve will agree with me both in the same line. No one is ever in favor of that. But I also want to argue with Stu over his argument about "Oh, it saves a little bit of space "is the reason one should go with tabs instead." Sorry, that argument said bye bye a long time ago, and that time was the introduction of JavaScript, where it takes many hundreds of Meg's of data to wind up building hello world. Yeah, at that point optimization around small character changes are completely irrelevant. >> Stu, rebuttal? >> Yeah, I didn't know that Corey did not try to defend that he had any idea what Silicon Valley was, or any of the references in there. So Rachel, we might have to avoid any other pop culture references. We know Corey just looks at very specific cloud services and can't have fun with some of the broader themes there. >> You're right my mistake Stu. Corey, any last words? >> It's been suggested that whole middle out seen on the whiteboard was came from a number of conversations I used to have with my co-workers as in people who were sitting in the room with me watching that episode said, Oh my God, I've been in the room while you had this debate with your friend and I will not name here because they at least still strive to remain employable. Yeah, it's, I understand the value in the picking these fights, we could have gone just as easily with vi versus Emacs, AWS versus Azure, or anything else that you really care to pick a fight with. But yeah, this is exactly the kind of pedantic fight that everyone loves to get involved with, which is why I walked a different path and pick other ridiculous arguments. >> Speaking of those ridiculous arguments that brings us to our last debate topic of the day, Corey you are probably best known for your strong feelings about the pronunciation of the acronym for Amazon Machine Image. I will not be saying how I think it is pronounced. We're going to have you argue each. Stu, you're going to argue that the acronym Amazon Machine Image should be pronounced to rhyme with butterfly. Corey, you'll be arguing that it rhymes with mommy. Stu, rhymes with butterfly. Let's hear it, 60 seconds on the clock. >> All right, well, Rachel, first of all, I wish I could go to the videotape because I have clear video evidence from a certain Corey Quinn many times arguing why AMI is the proper way to pronounce this, but it is one of these pedantic arguments, is it GIF or GIF? Sometimes you go back and you say, Okay, well, there's the way that the community did it. And the way that oh wait, the founder said it was a certain way. So the only argument against AMI, Jeff Barr, when he wrote about the history of all of the blogging that he's done from AWS said, I wish when I had launched the service that I pointed out the correct pronunciation, which I won't even deem to talk it because the community has agreed by and large that AMI is the proper way to pronounce it. And boy, the tech industry is rific on this kind of thing. Is it SQL and no SQL and you there's various ways that we butcher these constantly. So AMI, almost everyone agrees and the lead champion for this argument, of course is none other than Corey Quinn. >> Well, unfortunately today Corey needs to argue the opposite. So Corey, why does Amazon Machine Image when pronounce as an acronym rhyme with mommy? >> Because the people who built it at Amazon say that it is and an appeal to authorities generally correct when the folks built this. AWS has said repeatedly that they're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. And this is one of those areas in which they have been misunderstood by virtually the entire industry, but they are sticking to their guns and continuing to wind up advocating for AMI as the correct pronunciation. But I'll take it a step further. Let's take a look at the ecosystem companies. Whenever Erica Brescia, who is now the COO and GitHub, but before she wound up there, she was the founder of Bitnami. And whenever I call it Bitn AMI she looks like she is barely successfully restraining herself from punching me right in the mouth for that pronunciation of the company. Clearly, it's Bitnami named after the original source AMI, which is what the proper term pronunciation of the three letter acronym becomes. Fight me Stu. >> Interesting. Interesting argument, Stu 30 seconds, rebuttal. >> Oh, the only thing he can come up with is that, you take the word Bitnami and because it has that we know that things sound very different if you put a prefix or a suffix, if you talk to the Kubernetes founders, Kubernetes should be coop con but the people that run the conference, say it cube con so there are lots of debates between the people that create it and the community. I in general, I'm going to vote with the community most of the time. Corey, last words on this topic 'cause I know you have very strong feelings about it. >> I'm sorry, did Stu just say Kubernetes and its community as bastions of truth when it comes to pronouncing anything correctly? Half of that entire conference is correcting people's pronunciation of Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes and 15 other mispronunciations that they will of course yell at you for but somehow they're right on this one. All right. >> All right, everyone, I hope you've been voting all along for who you think is winning each round, 'cause this has been a tough call. But I would like to say that's a wrap for today. big thank you to our debaters. You've been very good sports, even when I've made you argue for against things that clearly are hurting you deep down inside, we're going to take a quick break and tally all the votes. And we're going to announce a winner up on the Zoom Q and A. So go to the top of your screen, Click on Zoom Q and A to join us and hear the winner announced and also get a couple minutes to chat live with Corey and Stu. Thanks again for attending this session. And thank you again, Corey and Stu. It's been The Great Cloud Debate. All right, so each round I will announce the winner and then we're going to announce the overall winner. Remember that Corey and Stu are playing not just for bragging rights and ownership of all of the internet for the next 24 hours, but also for lunch to be donated to their local hospital. Corey is having lunch donated to the California Pacific Medical Centre. And Stu is having lunch donated to Boston Medical Centre. All right, first up round one multicloud versus monocloud. Stu, you were arguing for multicloud, Corey, you were arguing for one cloud. Stu won that one by 64% of the vote. >> The vendor fix was in. >> Yeah, well, look, CloudHealth started all in AWS by supporting customers across those environments. So and Corey you basically conceded it because we said multicloud does not mean we evenly split things up. So you got to work on those two skills, buddy, 'cause, absolutely you just handed the victory my way. So thank you so much and thank you to the audience for understanding multicloud is where we are today, and unfortunately, it's where we're gonnao be in the future. So as a whole, we're going to try to make it better 'cause it is, as Corey and I both agree, a bit of a mess right now. >> Don't get too cocky. >> One of those days the world is going to catch up with me and realize that ad hominem is not a logical fallacy so much as it is an excellent debating skill. >> Well, yeah, I was going to say, Stu, don't get too cocky because round two serverless versus containers. Stu you argued for containers, Corey you argued for serverless. Corey you won that one with 65, 66 or most percent of the vote. >> You can't fight the future. >> Yeah, and as you know Rachel I'm a big fan of serverless. I've been to the serverless comp, I actually just published an excellent interview with Liberty Mutual and what they're doing with serverless. So love the future, it's got a lot of maturity to deliver on the promise that it has today but containers isn't going anyway or either so. >> So, you're not sad that you lost that one. Got it, good concession speech. Next one up was cloud wars specifically Google. is Google a real contender in the clouds? Stu, you were arguing yes they are. Corey, you were arguing no they aren't. Corey also won this round was 72% of the votes. >> Yeah, it's one of those things where at some point, it's sort of embarrassing if you miss a six inch pot. So it's nice that that didn't happen in this case. >> Yeah, so Corey, is this the last week that we have any competitors to AWS? Is that what we're saying? And we all accept our new overlords. Thank you so much, Corey. >> Well I hope not, my God, I don't know what to be an Amazonian monoculture anymore than I do anyone else. Competition makes all of us better. But again, we're seeing a lot of anti competitive behaviour. For example, took until this year for Microsoft to finally make calculator uninstallable and I trust concerned took a long time to work its way of course. >> Yeah, and Corey, I think everyone is listening to what you've been saying about what Google's doing with Google Meet and forcing that us when we make our pieces there. So definitely there's some things that Google culture, we'd love them to clean up. And that's one of the things that's really held back Google's enterprise budget is that advertised advertising driven culture. So we will see. We are working hand-- >> That was already opted out of Hangouts, how do we fix it? We call it something else that they haven't opted out of yet. >> Hey, but Corey, I know you're looking forward to at least two months of weekly Google live stuff starting this summer. So we'll have a lot of time to talk about google. >> Let's not kid ourselves they're going to cancel it halfway through. (Stu laughs) >> Boys, I thought we didn't have any more smack talk left in you but clearly you do. So, all right, moving on. Next slide. This is the last question that we did in the main part of the debate. IBM Cloud. What about IBM Cloud was the question, Stu, you were pro, Corey you were con. Corey, you won this one again with 62% of the vote and for the main. >> It wasn't just me, IBM Cloud also won. The problem is that competition was oxymoron of the day. >> I don't know Rachel, I thought this one had a real shot as to putting where IBM fits. I thought we had a good discussion there. It seemed like some of the early voting was going my way but it just went otherwise. >> It did. We had some last minute swings in these polls. They were going one direction they rapidly swung another it's a fickle crowd today. So right now we've got Corey with three points Stu with one but really the lightning round anyone's game. They got very close here. The next question, lightning round question one, was "Game of Thrones" who deserves to sit on the Iron Throne? Stu was arguing for Jon Snow, Corey was arguing for Sansa Stark also Corey has never seen Game of Thrones. This was shockingly close with Stu at 51.5% of the vote took the crown on this King of the North Stu. >> Well, I'm thrilled and excited that King of the North pulled things out because it would have been just a complete embarrassment if I lost to Corey on this question. >> It would. >> It was the right answer, and as you said, he had no idea what he's talking about, which, unfortunately is how he is on most of the rest of it. You just don't realize that he doesn't know what he's talking about. 'Cause he uses all those fast words and discussion points. >> Well, thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. Now, I am completely crestfallen as to the results of this question about a thing I've never seen and could not possibly care less about not going in my favor. I will someday managed to get over this. >> I'm glad you can really pull yourself together and keep on going with life, Corey it's inspiring. All right, next question. Was the lightning round question two is a hot dog a sandwich? Stu, you were arguing yes. Corey, you were arguing no. Corey landslide, you won this 75% of the vote. >> It all comes down to customer expectations. >> Yeah. >> Just disappointment. Disappointment. >> All right, next question tabs versus spaces. Another very close one. Stu, what were you arguing for Stu? >> I was voting tabs. >> Tabs, yeah. And Corey, you were arguing spaces. This did not turn out the way I expected. So Stu you lost this by slim margin Corey 53% of the vote. You won with spaces. >> Yep. And I use spaces in my day to day life. So that's a position I can actually believe in. >> See, I thought I was giving you the opposite point of view there. I mistook you for the correct answer, in my opinion, which is tabs. >> Well, it is funnier to stalk me on Twitter and look what I have to there than on GitHub where I just completely commit different kinds of atrocities. So I don't blame you. >> Caught that pun there. All right, the last rounds. Speaking of atrocities, AMI, Amazon Machine Image is it pronounced AMI or AMI? >> I better not have won this one. >> So Stu you were arguing that this is pronounced AMI rhymes with butterfly. Corey, you were arguing that it's pronounced AMI like mommy. Any guesses under who won this? >> It better be Stu. >> It was a 50, 50 split complete tie. So no points to anyone. >> For your complete and utterly failed on this because I should have won in a landslide. My entire argument was based on every discussion you've had on this. So, Corey I think they're just voting for you. So I'm really surprised-- >> I think at this point it shows I'm such a skilled debater that I could have also probably brought you to a standstill taking the position that gravity doesn't exist. >> You're a master of few things, Corey. Usually it's when you were dressed up nicely and I think they like the t-shirt. It's a nice t-shirt but not how we're usually hiding behind the attire. >> Truly >> Well. >> Clothes don't always make a demand. >> Gentlemen, I would like to say overall our winner today with five points is Corey. Congratulations, Corey. >> Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to mop the floor with you Stu. >> Actually I was going to ask Stu to give the acceptance speech for you, Corey and, Corey, if you could give a few words of concession, >> Oh, that's a different direction. Stu, we'll start with you, I suppose. >> Yeah, well, thank you to the audience. Obviously, you voted for me without really understanding that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm a loudmouth on Twitter. I just create a bunch of arguments out there. I'm influential for reasons I don't really understand. But once again, thank you for your votes so much. >> Yeah, it's always unfortunate to wind up losing a discussion with someone and you wouldn't consider it losing 'cause most of the time, my entire shtick is that I sit around and talk to people who know what they're talking about. And I look smart just by osmosis sitting next to them. Video has been rough on me. So I was sort of hoping that I'd be able to parlay that into something approaching a victory. But sadly, that hasn't worked out quite so well. This is just yet another production brought to you by theCube which shut down my original idea of calling it a bunch of squares. (Rachael laughs) >> All right, well, on that note, I would like to say thank you both Stu and Corey. I think we can close out officially the debate, but we can all stick around for a couple more minutes in case any fans have questions for either of them or want to get them-- >> Find us a real life? Yeah. >> Yeah, have a quick Zoom fight. So thanks, everyone, for attending. And thank you Stu, thank you Corey. This has been The Great Cloud Debate.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Really excited we get to talk to the SUSE executives, their partners and their customers. In this segment, we have one of the customers, he's in the keynote and really excited to talk to him, Günther Tschabushnig and he is the CIO of ZAMG. If you're not familiar with them, they are the Central Institute for meteorology and geodynamics, the oldest weather service in the world, based out of Austria. Günther, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you. >> Thank you for being here, thank you. >> All right, so obviously weather something we are very interested on theCUBE. We talk how important data is. And data, is it for central to what your service is doing, providing data, the organizations, they can do lots with it. Give us a little bit, we probably don't have time to go through the 150 plus, years history of the organization, but tell us a little bit about what your organization does, and especially your role as CIO. What's involved with that? >> Oh, let me hook you in. One thing you said, we have the oldest, weather service in the world. I always tell people, we are doing big data analytics between until 1851. And actually that's true. We have actually two big data centers based in Austria. We are operating about 20 petabytes of data, 100,000 data sets per minute. What is very, very interesting for tech guys. We have one small data center additional on over 3000 meters above sea level on the observatory. It's in the middle of the glacier. Can't imagine how cool that is. When you go up, into the glacier and yeah, you have a lot of sensors, a lot of measurements and a lot of data collecting, configurations. Actually, we are also using a lot of super-computers. We do simulating, we do a lot of AI. We did big data analytics and the most important thing, we do a lot of cooperation with the people that are out there. >> Yeah, in 1851, wasn't exactly super-computers. You're gathering data from a lot of sources. Help us understand a little bit. What are some of the, asks that the business have for you? What are the kind of challenges? In 2020, that might be a little bit different than they were years ago. >> Weather comes from, but different source, actually in 1851, it was more for the King, for their wars. Nowadays it's much more peaceful, thank, God. It's more for sporting, it's more for producing things. It's a lot for logistics, but it's actually for all the human people are out there, and therefore we have to use a lot of data, a lot of processes and a lot of different customer journeys. Our most important thing is customer first. So we try to produce, our full costs, our, integrated processes, especially for the customers. Justin, quick example is, the Olympic winter games. The ZMAG is doing the forecast for the last two, winter games, because we are doing now casting and we're very good at now casting that means the forecast between the next five minutes to 15 minutes, with, what's it call a breath of 100, 150 meters, which is very, very important for, some kind of events. But we do other forecast as well. The only thing we cannot forecast but we also to, earthquakes, that means naturally earthquakes on the one side, on the other side, artificial earthquakes, which are produced through, normally bombs or nuclear bombs. And, we are working with the CTBTO, the UN organization together to analyze and to measure is illegally, nuclear tests. To make the world a little bit a better place. >> Yeah, so Günther it's interesting you mentioned in the early days it was, weather for the king. One of the things we look about in data, especially in the public sector is what data, where do you collected from? How much hearing is there? Can you talk a little bit about, how it goes kind of beyond your borders and is there, I guess, how do you work with other organizations there any of data that shared any of the models? How does that work together in your organization? >> The most important thing is the link data to link our data to other organizations and to collect other data from other organizations. It's not forecast anymore. It's forecast, integrating into processes, especially in the business processes. Weather doesn't stop at the borders. That's a good thing. So we had a lot of collaboration with our neighbors. We found a weather services from our neighbors. That's one thing. I have them, the big picture. For, our models for our simulations. But what we also do is a lot of crowd data. Because the more data we get, the more data we can assimilate into our model. The better, the higher is the resolution of our forecast, so we do a lot of integration of this crowd source weather, that could be on the one hand, a simple app that could be a weather station, in our, in your home. But that could also be a photograph. What did you do with your smartphone? Well, we do artificial intelligence algorithms. To get out the information about clouds, about damages, what we integrate again in our models, in our simulations. And give you the better forecast as a response. We have a big, cooperation, for example, with, the Austrian fire department. They get the best forecasts we can ever do. A specialist forecast for the emergencies. When does, a fire in the woods, for example, they need a special soil moisture for example, then wind directions. Do we need wind strengths? They can use this on their smartphone. They can, use the smart watch. They do pictures after emergency, send it back to us. We analyze it and do a live modeling through our super-computers. To have a better forecast on this place. >> Excellent, now you talked about a bit about communities, leveraging, a lot of different technologies, I guess that's a good way for us to help connect the dots to us talking here to at SUSECON. Obviously, open-source, the communities, the piece of what we or hearing at the show. Talk to us a little bit about SUSE , what technologies are using them, what's the role of open-source, is that, the piece of how you look at technology. >> Nothing is more boring than they get weather from yesterday. So what we need is a really fast development of our forecasts, to our customers. And SUSE helps us, there. We have special services, especially on our ship of computers. Well, we use the special SUSE ranking system. We use SUSE, on our storage systems on our software defined storage system. To have a, we can develop man, to our customers, to our cooperation partners. And, the last big thing is we use SUSE containering, that forms, and on AI platforms. So the new SUSE AI platform, we tried to do forecasts for avalanches, for snow avalanches and that's a really, really big effort at the moment, because there are people dying every year in Austria and in the Alps, because of avalanches. And maybe we can save some of them, because we do have good forecast together with SUSE. >> Excellent, you talk about moving to containerization, gives a little insight. You are a government agency. How easy it is for you to take advantage of new technologies? Any guidance you can give as to things that you've through that might be able to help? >> Innovation and new technologies, but kind of moving on the edge, because on the one hand we have 24/7, the whole year long, we have to be high availability. We have a very stable, on the other hand, we want to have new technologies, new innovations. So it's really, really working on the edge. We use two groups, two separate data centers. On one hand, we do the all the stable thing. The high availability things on the other things. On the other data center, on other group, they are doing the true new things. They do containerization, they do blockchain and they do artificial intelligent moves. And the thing is they are working together. They are connected, that means tell it this way. We have a very, very experienced, head of our one group, our stable 24/7 group, and very, very young high potential or not innovation group. To be honest, first two weeks they hated each other, because one guy wanted to have the innovation and going forward and forward and forward, and the other one said, "No stop, we have to be stable. "That's the most important thing." After four weeks with a lot of maintenance for sure, and with a lot of guidance, they started to love each other because they can learn from each other. And that's the main point. We learned about all of these things. Now we can combine, stable with technology, with new technology, with cool, new things, which can be proved in the one side and integrate that in the stable side, a little later. >> That's an excellent story to learn from, learning so important, great to hear that the more traditional, reliable group and the new innovation group work together. Of course we can't let you go talking about weather without touching on climate. So, anybody that's watched the space with his global pandemic has some interesting, I guess you'd say, positive side effects, there are parts of the world where pollution's cleaned up, major impacts, on climate that, I'd expect you have some interesting data on. What can you share, when it comes to climate change? Any advice, you'd give for business leaders, that are looking to help contribute in a positive way. >> Okay, sure actually, a data center, we are also data hub for the ESA, the European Space Agency for their sentinel data. This data is very interesting, because it hasn't direct shows and direct impact how the climate is changing. The most important thing I can tell you as a CIO, it is changing. That's the most important thing. What we are looking for is how can we combine data, to stop this climate change. How can we show other leaders, politicians, etc. How to stop it, how can we work against it, and how they can be cooperate, work against. The thing is if we only show us the weather service, our climate data, that's nice to have. You see what a curve that's going to be warmer and warmer and the parameters are changing, but that's not the goal. The goal is, how can we work together? How can we link data together? To stop pollution, to stop several kind of attributes. To stop climate change. We started to do some collaborations with big companies. One of these is SUSE. One of these is Hewlett Packard, to work together. To combine resources, to combine a compute power, to combine storage, to combine knowledge, especially data to stop climate change. >> Excellent, so Günther final question is, anything you've been seeing strange, being a CIO, a question we always have, something we heard in the keynote is the changing role of the CIO. You talked a bit about AI, talked about, you live with actual cloud, and super-computers. So what in 2020 is kind of different about the role of CIO? >> What I really learned is IT, it's the supporting accompany or the supporting department anymore. IT is, the strategic partner of each domain we have, we had all our scientists and they always told us, "We had a scientist and we need IT." From several years now, they started to work together with the IT, with Artificial Intelligence, with big data analytics, with several platforms, both integrations, how to, solve problems. So the CIO especially, is not the IT leader anymore, it's more the management part of the management board. So that means, the integration of the CIO in the whole company is much, much more then it was several years ago. Meg Whitman, I met years ago and we had a good talk, told me there is no company anymore without IT. That's not correct. There's no company anymore that is IT. Even every culture is IT, everything is IT. It's no support anymore, it's linking anymore. >> Excellent, yeah Günther, such an important point to talk about if a company, is going to thrive in the modern era. Data is such a critical piece of that gives you as a CIO, a seat at the table to work closely with them, because if the business needs to be driven by data, the CIO's role of connecting IT in the business, so important. Thank you so much for sharing your stories. Pleasure to talk with you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: It's theCUBE, covering the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by Vertica. >> Dave Vellante: Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital event tech coverage. And we're broadcasting remotely from our studios in Palo Alto and Boston. And, we're pleased to be covering wall-to-wall this digital event. Now, as you know, originally BDC was scheduled this week at the new Encore Hotel and Casino in Boston. Their theme was "Win big with big data". Oh sorry, "Win big with data". That's right, got it. And, I know the community was really looking forward to that, you know, meet up. But look, we're making the best of it, given these uncertain times. We wish you and your families good health and safety. And this is the way that we're going to broadcast for the next several months. Now, we want to unpack Colin Mahony's keynote, but, before we do that, I want to give a little context on the market. First, theCUBE has covered every BDC since its inception, since the BDC's inception that is. It's a very intimate event, with a heavy emphasis on user content. Now, historically, the data engineers and DBAs in the Vertica community, they comprised the majority of the content at this event. And, that's going to be the same for this virtual, or digital, production. Now, theCUBE is going to be broadcasting for two days. What we're doing, is we're going to be concurrent with the Virtual BDC. We got practitioners that are coming on the show, DBAs, data engineers, database gurus, we got a security experts coming on, and really a great line up. And, of course, we'll also be hearing from Vertica Execs, Colin Mahony himself right of the keynote, folks from product marketing, partners, and a number of experts, including some from Micro Focus, which is the, of course, owner of Vertica. But I want to take a moment to share a little bit about the history of Vertica. The company, as you know, was founded by Michael Stonebraker. And, Verica started, really they started out as a SQL platform for analytics. It was the first, or at least one of the first, to really nail the MPP column store trend. Not only did Vertica have an early mover advantage in MPP, but the efficiency and scale of its software, relative to traditional DBMS, and also other MPP players, is underscored by the fact that Vertica, and the Vertica brand, really thrives to this day. But, I have to tell you, it wasn't without some pain. And, I'll talk a little bit about that, and really talk about how we got here today. So first, you know, you think about traditional transaction databases, like Oracle or IMBDB tour, or even enterprise data warehouse platforms like Teradata. They were simply not purpose-built for big data. Vertica was. Along with a whole bunch of other players, like Netezza, which was bought by IBM, Aster Data, which is now Teradata, Actian, ParAccel, which was the basis for Redshift, Amazon's Redshift, Greenplum was bought, in the early days, by EMC. And, these companies were really designed to run as massively parallel systems that smoked traditional RDBMS and EDW for particular analytic applications. You know, back in the big data days, I often joked that, like an NFL draft, there was run on MPP players, like when you see a run on polling guards. You know, once one goes, they all start to fall. And that's what you saw with the MPP columnar stores, IBM, EMC, and then HP getting into the game. So, it was like 2011, and Leo Apotheker, he was the new CEO of HP. Frankly, he has no clue, in my opinion, with what to do with Vertica, and totally missed one the biggest trends of the last decade, the data trend, the big data trend. HP picked up Vertica for a song, it wasn't disclosed, but my guess is that it was around 200 million. So, rather than build a bunch of smart tokens around Vertica, which I always call the diamond in the rough, Apotheker basically permanently altered HP for years. He kind of ruined HP, in my view, with a 12 billion dollar purchase of Autonomy, which turned out to be one of the biggest disasters in recent M&A history. HP was forced to spin merge, and ended up selling most of its software to Microsoft, Micro Focus. (laughs) Luckily, during its time at HP, CEO Meg Whitman, largely was distracted with what to do with the mess that she inherited form Apotheker. So, Vertica was left alone. Now, the upshot is Colin Mahony, who was then the GM of Vertica, and still is. By the way, he's really the CEO, and he just doesn't have the title, I actually think they should give that to him. But anyway, he's been at the helm the whole time. And Colin, as you'll see in our interview, is a rockstar, he's got technical and business jobs, people love him in the community. Vertica's culture is really engineering driven and they're all about data. Despite the fact that Vertica is a 15-year-old company, they've really kept pace, and not been polluted by legacy baggage. Vertica, early on, embraced Hadoop and the whole open-source movement. And that helped give it tailwinds. It leaned heavily into cloud, as we're going to talk about further this week. And they got a good story around machine intelligence and AI. So, whereas many traditional database players are really getting hurt, and some are getting killed, by cloud database providers, Vertica's actually doing a pretty good job of servicing its install base, and is in a reasonable position to compete for new workloads. On its last earnings call, the Micro Focus CFO, Stephen Murdoch, he said they're investing 70 to 80 million dollars in two key growth areas, security and Vertica. Now, Micro Focus is running its Suse play on these two parts of its business. What I mean by that, is they're investing and allowing them to be semi-autonomous, spending on R&D and go to market. And, they have no hardware agenda, unlike when Vertica was part of HP, or HPE, I guess HP, before the spin out. Now, let me come back to the big trend in the market today. And there's something going on around analytic databases in the cloud. You've got companies like Snowflake and AWS with Redshift, as we've reported numerous times, and they're doing quite well, they're gaining share, especially of new workloads that are merging, particularly in the cloud native space. They combine scalable compute, storage, and machine learning, and, importantly, they're allowing customers to scale, compute, and storage independent of each other. Why is that important? Because you don't have to buy storage every time you buy compute, or vice versa, in chunks. So, if you can scale them independently, you've got granularity. Vertica is keeping pace. In talking to customers, Vertica is leaning heavily into the cloud, supporting all the major cloud platforms, as we heard from Colin earlier today, adding Google. And, why my research shows that Vertica has some work to do in cloud and cloud native, to simplify the experience, it's more robust in motor stack, which supports many different environments, you know deep SQL, acid properties, and DNA that allows Vertica to compete with these cloud-native database suppliers. Now, Vertica might lose out in some of those native workloads. But, I have to say, my experience in talking with customers, if you're looking for a great MMP column store that scales and runs in the cloud, or on-prem, Vertica is in a very strong position. Vertica claims to be the only MPP columnar store to allow customers to scale, compute, and storage independently, both in the cloud and in hybrid environments on-prem, et cetera, cross clouds, as well. So, while Vertica may be at a disadvantage in a pure cloud native bake-off, it's more robust in motor stack, combined with its multi-cloud strategy, gives Vertica a compelling set of advantages. So, we heard a lot of this from Colin Mahony, who announced Vertica 10.0 in his keynote. He really emphasized Vertica's multi-cloud affinity, it's Eon Mode, which really allows that separation, or scaling of compute, independent of storage, both in the cloud and on-prem. Vertica 10, according to Mahony, is making big bets on in-database machine learning, he talked about that, AI, and along with some advanced regression techniques. He talked about PMML models, Python integration, which was actually something that they talked about doing with Uber and some other customers. Now, Mahony also stressed the trend toward object stores. And, Vertica now supports, let's see S3, with Eon, S3 Eon in Google Cloud, in addition to AWS, and then Pure and HDFS, as well, they all support Eon Mode. Mahony also stressed, as I mentioned earlier, a big commitment to on-prem and the whole cloud optionality thing. So 10.0, according to Colin Mahony, is all about really doubling down on these industry waves. As they say, enabling native PMML models, running them in Vertica, and really doing all the work that's required around ML and AI, they also announced support for TensorFlow. So, object store optionality is important, is what he talked about in Eon Mode, with the news of support for Google Cloud and, as well as HTFS. And finally, a big focus on deployment flexibility. Migration tools, which are a critical focus really on improving ease of use, and you hear this from a lot of customers. So, these are the critical aspects of Vertica 10.0, and an announcement that we're going to be unpacking all week, with some of the experts that I talked about. So, I'm going to close with this. My long-time co-host, John Furrier, and I have talked some time about this new cocktail of innovation. No longer is Moore's law the, really, mainspring of innovation. It's now about taking all these data troves, bringing machine learning and AI into that data to extract insights, and then operationalizing those insights at scale, leveraging cloud. And, one of the things I always look for from cloud is, if you've got a cloud play, you can attract innovation in the form of startups. It's part of the success equation, certainly for AWS, and I think it's one of the challenges for a lot of the legacy on-prem players. Vertica, I think, has done a pretty good job in this regard. And, you know, we're going to look this week for evidence of that innovation. One of the interviews that I'm personally excited about this week, is a new-ish company, I would consider them a startup, called Zebrium. What they're doing, is they're applying AI to do autonomous log monitoring for IT ops. And, I'm interviewing Larry Lancaster, who's their CEO, this week, and I'm going to press him on why he chose to run on Vertica and not a cloud database. This guy is a hardcore tech guru and I want to hear his opinion. Okay, so keep it right there, stay with us. We're all over the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference, covering in-depth interviews and following all the news. So, theCUBE is going to be interviewing these folks, two days, wall-to-wall coverage, so keep it right there. We're going to be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Fly from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the QS live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John. My coasts do many minutes. We are in the dev net. Similar all the action is the accused third year covering where dev net has been evolving into the centerpiece of Cisco strategy. And all the sessions are here. We've got a great guest. Make D as product marketing for Cisco with umbrella is a takeover going on here. The Devin, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So tell us about umbrella, cause that's a new brand open DNS kind of confer. What's the story with umbrella? Give us the update. >>Sure. So umbrella was first really developed an introduced in the market in 2012 under the open DNS company. We were acquired by Cisco in 2015 and rebranded it to Cisco umbrella. So we've taken the same great product that we've had for years and just continued to develop and add to it. >>And what's the main features now as that same product? Has it been integrated in, cause everything's becoming API base here. We're seeing that. What's the tweak? Is it security? What's the main linkage with the Cisco? >>Yeah, so um, umbrella really started off, uh, providing DNS layer security. So it was often an added layer or foundational layer that customers would use to reduce the amount of malware, make sure that their users were protected anywhere that they were connecting to the internet. And so we've taken that. It's, it's always been developed as an open platform and we've continued to add additional API APIs to it and a lot of additional security features too. So beyond just DNS, we now have a full secure web gateway cloud delivered firewall, uh, Cosby capabilities. So there's been a lot of new capabilities that we've built into the product. >>Can you bring us inside a little bit? We've been in the dev net zone for three years, as John said, got to dev net, create that API economy is something that is so important and that's what so many people, I mean we've seen just huge crowds all week. Help us understand how those APIs fit into Cisco and Cisco umbrella. >>Sure. So when you look at, there's a number of API APIs that we've built into umbrella. So to give you some examples, we have a, uh, a device network device API to make it easy to actually integrate different network devices that you have to umbrella. So how do you get that traffic very easily from any device to our cloud platform? So that's one example. Uh, we've rebuilt a lot of integrations but that allows you to, to help build any additional integrations that you want. Um, we have a reporting API that helps you to, you know, automate some of the, the reporting, send it and integrate it with systems that you have. Um, and then another example, even with, uh, all of the intelligence behind umbrella, we make it available through our investigate API. So we see a lot of organizations use that to enrich their Sam or threat intelligence platform. >>So being able to take all of the data that you have within umbrella and make sure that it can be integrated in the right ways. >> Any new features you guys announcing an umbrella that we should know about here this week? >> Yes. One of the big ones that we've I've been talking about at our booth and in some of the sessions is with any connect, so any connect has always been really big for a lot of Cisco customers to protect roaming users and we've had the ability to, I enable a DNS module as part of that, so that enables them to, even when users are off the VPN, their VPN isn't even turned on. They're still getting protection from umbrella and we've taken that and we've also enabled them to leverage our security gateway functionality when users are roaming as well. So that's for the use cases. >>They're on a VPN, they're doing their thing, they go to a coffee shop or go somewhere else or they're, they're moving around. Exactly. And they might not be actually connected to the VPN, so their traffic isn't actually being protected, so they might be connecting directly to the internet. That's where when they have umbrella enabled there, they can still get the right protection for those users. May talk about the dynamics going on with, with injecting hacks in DNS, because this has always been kind of a, you're always been people but always been chasing this because you are rails, they run the internet, we know some URLs could look like PayPal or this or the other bank. And so it becomes kind of a, your URL, DNS management challenge. This is something that's been fundamental for security. What's, what are some of the things that are going on that people should pay attention to? >>Sure. So I think that there's, there's a few different aspects of that that we're really delivering on today. So first of all, when it comes to just, uh, people, uh, trying to get you to click on a link that looks like PayPal, but it's actually not. Um, so there's a number of different methods that we're using in the product to detect that. So one of the things is, is we'll look at, uh, the way that the domain is actually written. A lot of times you can see some, uh, we, we look at, you know, the, the structure of the wording. And sometimes you can see little, uh, little characters or letters or numbers that are off and we can detect that that's happening. But then we also look at the infrastructure beyond behind the domain. So we look at where is that IP, uh, where is that domain actually hosted? Right? So what's the IP address? What other activity do we see happening on that IP address? Cause you can really learn a lot, right? We saw a, a, a, a PayPal, uh, domain that was supposedly a UK PayPal domain, but it was actually hosted on a Bulletproof hosting site, which no legitimate PayPal account would be or domain would be hosted on. So things like that that we're able to detect. >>Yeah. So make us this way. I saw something talked about online puny code. Is this, what we're talking about here is that there's a different topic, >>a little bit different cause that, but yeah, there, there's also, yeah, they could be embedded within puny code, things like that. But this is just some of our fundamental, what we look at when we're determining if a domain is malicious or not. >>Okay. Could you walk us through a little bit, the demos going on? We've got the takeover going on right now. What, what's the umbrella presence here in the dev net zone and throughout Cisco live? >>Yeah, so there's, there's a lot of different areas that we are. So we have a latch of Verna. Uh, the cafe. Uh, we have all of our demo stations. We have theater presentations pretty much running every 15 minutes. So you can learn more on a number of different topics. Uh, we have the dev net takeover, we have a number of breakout sessions that are happening. Um, so there's a lot of activity happening around Cisco live. >>Well the, Cisco's got a huge technical crowd here. Obviously they're their network geeks. They all know DNS. What are some of the conversations you guys are having? What are some of the cool things that are cause that's not know about programming and they getting into different formats? How is the DNS fitting into that? I've saw some cool demos. What are some of the cool tech conversations? >>Yeah, I think, I think a lot of times it's still, um, we're seeing more of a, a an uptake in people understanding that DNS can be used to actually deliver security as well. So I think, you know, those are some of the, the conversations still educating people about how they can add additional layers of security to their environment and DNS being really one of them. Um, I think what we're also seeing is just because with umbrella we're going beyond just DNS and really taking multiple security services, bringing them into a single cloud platform. And that's a lot of the conversation that we're having and that's where you're seeing the market going. So organizations starting to look at how does that fit into their environment, how can they start to architect their network differently for the future and, and how to wrap security in there. So a lot of the conversations we're having are around that. >>It's interesting the whole dynamic internet conversation kids interesting. Because DNS is, you got to resolve, you got named servers, get your resolution to the, to the destination URL and you load the page or app. As you start getting into more of the dynamic situations, the software is programming it. So it's interesting to see how DNS is evolves. You guys are leading the forefront on that. What's your view on that? What do you, how do you guys see that evolving as you got ACI intent based networking app dynamics over the top kind of programming down as DNS fit into all that? How does that, how does that all work? >>Definitely I think, I think DNS continues to be a, you know, a foundational part of how the internet works. And I, I don't see that really changing. I think, you know, some of the things that we've been, or even the different ways that you see attackers leveraging DNS, uh, you're seeing DNS tunneling for example, being one of the kind of, uh, I wouldn't say newer, but it's one of the types of techniques that nation States are using at times when they're actually embedding, you know, data to, into DNS to exfiltrate it. So, you know, things like that we're seeing, uh, come into place of trying to use DNS in, in different ways from the attack side. Yeah. But I think, you know, when you look at the overall, you know, network and, and all of that, it is a really important and kind of core part of this, >>it's interesting is that the international thing too is you submitted your hosting. A lot of these hosting sites are outside of North America, outside of Europe. They're in these countries where it's suspect, you know, and some of the foreign characters sets get interesting cause that's not ASCII, it's Unicode or you've got all kinds of things going on. So it's a complex not that easy is it? >>No, we have a lot of very, very smart people, doctors working on the, uh, the backend on the, on the engineering side to really look at that. And you know, one of the things that we tried to do, even from the beginning was take a different approach to security where we're not just looking strictly at the file hash or just the basic information, but seeing how can you take data science principles and apply them to use security in new ways to uncover attacks even before they launch. >>I gotta say one of the sessions I was walking around the hall, the couple of the main kind of clusters of people was obviously the big panoramic WebEx room was pretty popular. It looks pretty cool, but the IOT security section was packed. As you hit more devices out there, they're just internet addresses too. And there you've got destination, you got URLs over DNS there too. So you have now that edge piece that's a big security perimeter. I mean, and security surface area, I should say. That's popular. People are interested in this. >>Yes. And that's, I mean, and that's one of the big use cases that we've even seen with umbrella is you have hospitals who have all of these IOT devices and you know that are in their patients and, and it's really scary to think about where they could be connecting on the internet. And that's one of the things that we've seen with umbrella is because we're providing some of that security at the DNS layer, you don't need to have an agent or something on those devices when they're on the network. It's protected by umbrella. So that is one of the use cases that we see. >>I got to ask you, because you came from the acquisition open DNS, I know David, the founder of donut when he started. Great company, great success, congratulations to the whole team there. As you guys come into Cisco, what's it like, because startups are, you know, you're hungry, you grow in and then you get in here, it's almost an a waste of tech. He got new divisions. What's it been like at Cisco with the open DNS now? Umbrella brand, same product with some tweaks. What's it like? >>No, I mean it's been amazing. >>I mean I'm still here, uh, you know, almost five years later. Um, and I think one of the things that's been really exciting is, is the fact that we have been able to leverage a lot of the Cisco technology, right? We've embedded, you know, amp technology, threat grid technology, things that, that ultimately, because we're, you know, sharing those resources and, and embedding them, it's going to make the products more secure. It's going to allow us to share more information between products. And I think just the, you know, the investment, I think Cisco sees where the future is going and you know, how important the cloud is, you know, not only from just a, the way that businesses work, but from the security perspective. So there's been a lot of investment in it. Awesome. Well thanks for coming on sharing your insight. I got to ask you kind of an industry question because you've been on, again the startup now Cisco, most normal people like DNS, I know what a URL is, but they know security. So when they asked you a lot, they hae all this fake news, all this malware, spear fishing. I mean the average consumer, they get the security thing. When they asked you what's going on, what, what do you say to them? How do you explain what you do and your vision of how you see the world evolving? >>Sure. I think, I think for a lot of people, I mean I've, I've been in security now for for a while when I started it was really, it was still all the compliance conversation and you were still educating a lot of people on security. But now my grandma knows about it and you know, she'll ask me questions. So I think, you know, it has become so much more mainstream and you know when I, in in simplest terms, I just talked to people about the fact that we are making sure that wherever users are connecting to the internet, they're doing it securely. You know, no matter what application they're trying to access, we can help secure that. And so that's kind of the, >>and be careful what you click on. It would be, you know, the emails you get. Well you don't know what's in there exactly. Well thanks for come on. Great. Great to have you on. Thanks for the insight. Cisco umbrella. It's taking over dev net dev net zone is packed. It just gets bigger every year and this is where people are learning is very community driven. A lot of, a lot of education, a lot of great content. You're starting out or you're more experienced software certifications all here inside the cube coverage of Barcelona. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> From New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Welcome to the New Edge. Brought to you by Pensando Systems. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're on top of Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan. It was a really beautiful day a couple of hours ago, but the rain is moving in, but it's appropriate 'cause we're talking about cloud. And we're here for a very special event. It's the Pensando launch, I'll get the pronunciation right, Pensando launch, and it's really about Welcome to the New Edge. And to start off, I mean, I couldn't come up with two better tech executives who've been around the block, seen it all, and they're both here for this launch event which is pretty special. On my left, Antonio Neri, CEO and president of HP. Antonio, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> And John Chambers, of course we know him from his many years at Cisco, but now he's the chairman of Pensando, and of course J2 Ventures, and an author, and John, you're keeping yourself busy. >> I am, tryin' to change the world one more time. >> All right, so let's talk about that changing the world, 'cause you are two very high, powerful people. You run big companies, and you talked about, in your opening remarks, the next wave. You talked about these kind of 10-year waves. And we're starting a new one, which is why you got involved. Why did you see that coming, what do you see in Pensando, and how are we going to address this opportunity? >> Well, when you think about it, every 10 years there's a new leader in the marketplace, and nobody has stayed on top longer than 10 years and has led in the next market transition. We think about mainframes, IBM clearly the leader there, the mini computers, I'm biased toward Wang, but DEC was there. Then the client server and obviously Microsoft and Intel playing a very key role, followed by the internet where Cisco was very, very successful. And then followed, literally by that, by social media and then the cloud and then what I think will be bigger than any of the prior ones, it's about what happens as the cloud moves to the edge. And we may end up having a different term every time, but that really is what we saw today. And how we came together with a common vision as the cloud moves to the edge, what could an ecosystem of partners do, with a foundation, with Pensando at the core of that, to really take advantage from how do you deliver services to our joint customers in a way that no one else can. And have the courage, really, to go challenge Amazon in terms of their market dominance, but provide choice and say it's a multi cloud world. How do you provide that choice and then how do you differentiate it together with each partner? >> Antonio, you guys have been talking about edge for a long, long time. You've been on this for a while. HP's such a great company. Used to be, I think, one of the great validators if anyone could do a deal with HP. It was really a technology validation and a business validation, and I think that still holds true. So you must have, knocking on your door all day long. What did you see in this opportunity with Pensando? >> Well, first of all, John and I see the world from the same lens. We see a world where the enterprise of the future will be essentially cloud enabled and data-driven. And therefore we have to remove these barriers, call it the cloud in one place or the other one. We are going to live what are calling a edge-to-cloud world where, is a cloudless. Where the cloud experience is distributed everywhere. And where action happens is where we live and work right now, right here. We're having a conversation, we're producing data, and we are transmitting this real time. So, the point is, we believe the edge is a new frontier and that's where the vast majority is being created, 75%. of it created the edge. And this is where it starts by having a common vision and ultimately a same DNA, same culture. John and I share the same values for passion for customers, passion for driving a customer-driven innovation, and ultimately change the world like we have done for decades. And I think Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is uniquely positioned to be the edge-to-cloud platform delivered as a service. And together with Pensando and the great technology I bring about from the silicon side and on the softer side, together with our own knowhow and engineering capabilities, we can change the world again. >> And the fun part is, we can almost finish each other's sentences. (all laughing) We have a little bit different accent. The stability to have a common vision, having never really talked about it, and then a view of the common culture. Because strategic partnerships are really hard. And you said it on stage, but I cannot agree with it more. If you're cultures aren't similar, if you don't think how does your partner win first and how do you win second, this is very hard to do. And we can finish each other's sentences. >> And I think there is another point here that John and I truly believe, because it's part of our values. It's to use technology for good. So, one thing is accelerating the business innovation and what our enterprise customers are going through, but then how apply that technology to deliver some good. And we as a company have a clear purpose in life, which is to advance the way people live and work. So, I think as we go through this massive inflection point, both from the business side and the technology side, not only we can create a better world, but also give back somewhat to the communities as well. >> There are massive changes, and it's a sea-change in infrastructure in the way things are done, but you hit on three really key, simple words in your remarks earlier. Trust, engineering-driven, which is HP's culture from the earliest garage days, and customer-centric. So, we hear about data-driven but in engineering, you don't necessarily want to lead with that. Customer-centric you do have to lead and it's pretty interesting at Pensando, you talk to all these customers, and you're just launching the company today, you've been in stealth for over two years. But all these customers have been engaged with you since the very, very beginning. Pretty interesting approach. >> It is, and we do share a common passion on that. Every company says they're customer-driven, but just ask how the CEO spends his or her time. I just asked their customers, do they replace them first on every issue? We share that common value completely. >> Yeah, I spend 50% of my time on the road talking to customers. That's my goal, because I believe the truth is in the cold face. When you talk to customers, you get the truth, what the challenges and opportunities are. And we need to bring that succinct feedback back into our problem management engineering team to try to solve there's a problem. So take advantage of those opportunities by delivering a better experience. It starts with experience first and technology comes second. >> The other piece you talked about is your team, and diversity and really the power of diversity. And, I think it was, the Lincoln cabinet, band of people that didn't get along with each other and had a bunch of different points of view. But because of that, it surfaces issues and it lets you see multi sides. You said you handpicked that team. What are some of the things you thought about when you handpicked your team when you took the reins a couple years ago from the-- >> Well, it starts by, thought leadership and what, how they see the world, ultimately what the strengths are and how we bring those strengths for the power of one. I agree with John, I believe a team comes first, individual comes second. And if you can bring the best of each individual in a concerted way where you create an environment for debate and ultimately for getting alignment and moving forward with execution. That's what that is all about, leadership. So, I handpicked those people because each of them had that unique quality. Whether it's, you know, being very self-centric in the way you deliver the value proposition or very technology-centric, or very services oriented. So, we have picked those people for a reason and it's not easy to manage a very opinionated team. (all laughing) But once you can get them aligned, is actually incredible fun to watch. >> You know, I would make one tweak to what you just asked the question on. I had a chance to watch his team for the first time in our garage startup at my house. And they are very diverse with different opinions, they are very comfortable with disagreeing with each other. But they have a common set of values and a common end goal. I'm not sure the Lincoln cabinet had that. And that's so important to realize, because what we're about to do together and what each of us are trying to do in our own endeavors, it's so important to have a team that has that type of culture and the ability to move for that. >> The other team that mentioned, that kept coming up throughout the day, was the team that you're working with on Pensando. And how this team has been together for, I think you said the new 20, right? 25 plus years, and have built multiple projects, multiple products over many, many years. And now have this cohesion as you keep saying, they can finish their own sentences. You know, a really specific approach to get this group together that you know is not going to be strategy, it's going to be delivery. >> It is going to be the combination, if I may. And it is very unique that a team works together for over 25 years. It's a team that is a family and we are about as diverse as it gets in our backgrounds, our accents, our countries that our families came from. But it's a team that competes purely on getting market transitions right, that is always driven by our customers and what we need to do and build and put 'em always first in everything we do. And then it's fearless. We outline audacious goals at being number one in everything we do, and out of the eight products that we built together, we are number one in all eight. All of 'em with over 50% market share, and there was no number two. And so the ability to execute with that type of precision, customer-driven and the courage to do it and understand what we know and what we don't know. Coming together one more time, I mean it's really exciting, it will be a new definition of 20 somethings in a startup. >> So, getting you the last word Antonio, as you looked at John's chart with those 10-year blocks and the garage has been around Palo Alto for a long time. >> 82 years. >> You guys have seen a lot, 82 years, you've been through a few of these and you're still here and still doing a great job and still winning. So, as you look at that from your current position as CEO, what goes through your head? How are you making sure you're keeping ahead? How are you avoiding the Clayton Christensen Innovator's Dilemma, to make sure you're killing your own business before somebody else kills kind of the old stuff and making sure you're out in front. >> When I became a CEO, in the transition from Meg to me, I established three key priorities for myself. One is our customers and partners. Keep them at the center of everything we do. That's one of our core values. Second is innovation, innovation, innovation. Innovation from a customer-driven approach. And third is the culture of the company. And what a great example here with John, you know, leading an iconic company for decades. And so to me, I have been working very aggressive on the three of those aspects. And I'm very pleased with the progress we have made. But, now is about writing the next chapter of this company. And in order to write that next chapter company, you need to have a strong alignment at the top, all the way down, what I call ropes to the ground. So, fun enough, John is going to be in my event here in a couple of weeks. We'll bring the leadership team, the top 400 leaders, talking about how to disrupt yourself and how you pay for the company into the future. And the future, as I said, is we see an enterprise that's edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven, delivered as a service. So we are going to be the, as a service company with an edge-to-cloud platform that accelerates business from the data. And the combination of Pensando technologies and engineering capabilities, with our vision and our own intellectual property, we think we can deliver those unique experience for the customers in a more agile, cost-effective way and democratize the cloud, as John say, for the world. So, I'm incredibly excited about doing this. And who thought that John Chambers and Antonio Neri would be here, you know. And the reality is it takes leadership, so I value leadership, I value trust, and this partnership is built on trust. And we both have the same values. >> I appreciate you taking the time. I mean, we're going to talk about the products a little bit later. We've got some of the deeper product people. But, you know, I think the leadership thing is so important and I think it's harder. I think it's hard to be a great leader, it's hard to lead through transitions, and the pace of change is only accelerating, so the challenge is only going to increase. But I think communication and trust is such a big piece. I saw Dave Pottruck speak many, many times and he's very, very good. And I asked him, 'cuz we had a thing at school. I said, "Dave, why are you so good?" And he said, "Very simple. "As a CEO, my job is to communicate. "I have three constituents. "I have my customers, I have the street, "and I have my employees. "And so I treat it as a skill, I practice, I got a coach, "and I treat it like any other skill." And it's so hard and so important to provide that leadership, provide that direction, so everybody can pull the rope in the same direction. Nothing but the best to both of you and thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Thank you. >> It was a lot of fun. >> All right. >> It's a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> He's Antonio, he's John, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, from the top of Goldman Sachs in Manhattan. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Now, here's your host, Dave Velante. >> We're back with Patrick Osborne. All right Patrick, we've been talking about how customers want to be data-driven, they're doing digital transformation, they want to put data at the core of the enterprise. All sounds good. What's your strategy as HPE in terms of helping them get there? >> Yeah so, for our customers, this is a common theme, right. Some feel that they're going to be disrupted, they've been disrupted, right, and one of the key threads that runs through that is that they want to get more AI driven, right, so they want to use analytics as a way to provide new services around their products, get these services out faster, be able to use all that data they have in their enterprise. So for us, it's being able to have that conversation of whether the data sits out in the edge, right, you guys are very familiar with our Edge strategy, using Edgeline and Aruba, our core infrastructure in the data center, which we've had-- for a long history of helping customers with that, and then more recently around Hybrid Cloud, right, so most of the products, services, experiences we have there have Hybrid Cloud built in from the ground up. So for us, all those conversations have to do with data. >> So you recently made an acquisition of BlueData. >> Correct. >> What was that all about? Was that your AI play? Was it a software-as-a-service play? Explain that. >> Yeah, certainly a little bit of both. BlueData's a fantastic platform and it allows you to virtualize, containerize the application, so we know that in the market, you've got mode one applications, you've got mode two applications, a lot of mode one apps, you know, business applications, mission critical applications, have been virtualized. But what we also see is that a lot of the new product development is around these mode two applications that are using things like big data, whether it's a dupe in H-D-F-S, fast data - some of the streaming services - and now you're doing things around A-I inferencing, modeling, all using essentially containers as a way to do that, fuel that application development. So when we saw BlueData, it's essentially a platform to be able to virtualize all of these container-based applications. And as customers, big data and analytics and A-I platforms and their pipeline gets bigger and more complicated, it allows us to, A) manage that, increase their time to value, unlock a lot of the resources on the data scientists side, right, who have the responsibility of managing all of those applications, and it's a really great platform, great people, right, so they have a team of data scientists to be able to help customers implement this, not only within the product but within their own enterprise. And then we've got some really, really big logos that we're going to build off of for the BlueData ecosystem. >> So things are moving very fast. You've got all this data, you're applying machine intelligence and quickly moving from a world that was all batch to one that's real time, and we blinked and real time flew by. Now you've got this machine intelligence world where systems are acting, they're sensing, they're hearing, they're smelling... >> Yup. >> And so, is that what you're seeing with customers? Are they trying to build these sort of new systems that will act on their behalf? >> Absolutely. We see it on our own. If you take a look at some of our strategy, as HPE, especially within our storage and big data division, one of the big things that we're doing is introducing all of our products with the capability of A-I ops, right. And so all of our products that go out the door, using platforms like Infosite, will have this A-I ops capability to, not only just start with support automation, predictive analytics, and now you've got predictive A-I driving the actual management experience of these products. And it lets our customers ultimately unlock those resources that were doing mundane, repeatable tasks to focus on where they're going to add value. >> So I got to ask you, you guys do-- obviously a lot of your revenue comes from indirect channels. So you've seen the cloud, the cloud is not about selling boxes anymore, now you're seeing all this machine intelligence and automation. What does all this mean for partners? Where's the opportunity for those guys? >> Yeah so, I would say that when we go and make an acquisition like Blue Data, it's a great, like we said before, it's a great product, it's a good platform, right, they've got great engineers and great people within the organization and certainly some big logos. The reason why they got those logos was partly based on the product, but it's also a very services led methodology. So for-- I'd say for our partner community, being able to do discovery services, to understand what they're requirements are, a lot of folks that use BlueData and these type of platforms are builders. They're building a platform that has services on it for their end user customers. So being able to gather those requirements, do implementation, certainly be able to take a lot of this dynamic application ecosystem that is either very new, it's nascent, when you take a look at A-I or it's even in the open source arena, being able to de-risk that for the customers, from a services perspective, is a huge opportunity. >> Okay, great, so that's exciting because it's new frontier for those folks. So think about HPE, the tech that you guys have, the partner opportunity that you just described, how are you going to change the life of a data scientist? And maybe we could add in some other personas as well. >> Yeah, so, as a lot of our customers and partners certainly know, data scientists don't grow on trees, right, and they're very important folks within these large organizations, right, so you want to unlock their capabilities. So for us at the end of the day, we're trying to have a platform and as a service experience around A-I that unlocks the value of these data scientists. So for example, if I have a production environment or a U-A-T or a test dev environment, I can very quickly spin up your entire toolchain as a data scientist, right, so your toolchain, your models, your H-D-F-S data lakes, you can tap into existing data lakes, all of my streaming data, Kafka, Spark, all this stuff, very dynamic ecosystem, complex application dependencies. What I can do is I can sandbox that, I can test it, I can iterate, and I can very, very quickly provide that type of environment for your developers and your data scientists (snaps) just like that. >> So, in addition to the data scientist, is the chief data officer somebody that you guys are interacting with? There's also the application developer. Are you trying to sort of effect this collaboration amongst those different roles and personas? >> Yeah I think one of the greatest things for the partners and we've seen this at HPE too, is that you're going to be calling on new buyer personas. Right, so in the case of infrastructure, working a lot with enterprise architects, data center manager, infrastructure manager, C-I-O. In the case of BlueData and some of these A-I and analytics projects, right, you're at the front of the budget cycle, right, so you're talking to line of business, application developers, data scientists, analytics team, and now the rise of the C-D-O, the chief data officer. So you not only get to establish value with the infrastructure team, who are going to have to support this, right, you're going to go make some new friends and be able to get on the front of the budget cycle with a whole new set of buyer personas, and I think that's very exciting for partners. >> So, we talk a lot about A-I and, sort of this machine learning environment, machine intelligence. Software-defined is a hot topic. It's kind of a buzzword but it has meaning. What does it mean to you? Where does it fit in this whole equation? >> It's very adjacent to the big data and A-I analytics conversation. I think that what we see in software-defined, it's heavy on scale, right, so now that you're into petabytes, tens of petabytes, hundreds of petabytes, scaling, scaling, scaling, you need some new architectures to be able to do that cost-effectively. And you think about automated cars for example. They're-- each car is spinning off terabytes of data a day, so think about how am I going to store that, it's a monumental task. You got scale on your mind, you also have automation, right, so not only the scale of being able to store that effectively from a price-point, to be able to automate that. So you want to keep your-- the folks who are managing that infrastructure, they're going to have to increase the amount of systems, capacity under management, and the only way you can achieve that is through automation. And so, we see some themes around that and software-defined is really, kind of stepping in in that angle where you've got N-V-M-E, S-S-Ds, can saturate-- two N-V-M-E can saturate a C-P-U at this point, right, and now you're moving to hundred gig fabrics, so this rack-scale architecture that you can provide and paint on different software-defined personalities onto it is something that customers are definitely leaning in towards right now. >> And what you've been describing-- you mentioned autonomous vehicles-- data's at the edge, it's at the core, it's everywhere, and so, easier to bring, maybe, let's call it, ten meg of code to a petabyte of data than the reverse. >> Yeah, and what we see too is customers want to-- they want to dip their toe in this water, right, starting with very large enterprises, and we're able to, as HPE, bring a vetted ecosystem, whether from a workload perspective, 'cause we always talk about follow the workload, in software-defined, if you need something like scale-out file for A-I workloads, or you need scale-out file for more of a high performance, capacity-driven architecture, you're looking for object storage, you're looking for hyper-converged secondary, right, we bring an ecosystem of partners running on our infrastructure that's scalable, automated, and customers can feel confident in. >> Awesome. Well thank you Patrick, love the story. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> You're welcome. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. Everyone's cubes. Live coverage. Day three wrap up of Del Technologies World twenty nineteen Java is Dave a lot. There's too many men on set one. We get set to over there blue set, White said. We got a lot of content. It's been a cube can, in guise of a canon of content firing into the digital sphere. Great gas. We had all the senior executive players Tech athletes. Adele Technology World. Michael Dell, Tom Sweet, Marius Haas, Howard Ally As we've had Pat Kelsey, rco v M were on the key partner in the family. They're of del technology world and we had the clients guys on who do alien where, as well as the laptops and the power machines. Um, we've had the power edge guys on. We talked about Hollywood. It's been a great run, but Dave, it's been ten years Stew. Remember, the first cube event we ever went to was DMC World in Boston. The chowder there he had and that was it wasn't slogan of of the show turning to the private cloud. Yeah, I think that was this Logan cheering to the private cloud that was twenty ten. >> Well, in twenty ten, it was Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud twenty nineteen. It's all cloud now. That difference is back then it was like fake cloud and made up cloud and really was no substance to it. We really started to see stew, especially something that we've been talking about for years, which is substantially mimicking the public cloud on Prem. Now I know there are those who would say No, no, no, no, no. And Jessie. Probably in one of those that's not cloud. So there's still that dichotomy is a cloud. >> Well, Dave, if I could jump in on that one of the things that's really interesting is when Veum, where made that partnership with a ws It was the ripple through this ecosystem. Oh, what's that mean for Del you know Veum, wherein Del not working together Well, they set the model and they started rolling out bm where, and they took the learnings that they had. And they're bringing that data center as a service down to the Dell environment. So it's funny I always we always here, you know, eight of us, They're learning from their partners in there listening and everything like that. Well, you know, Dylan Veum where they've been listening, they've been learning to in this, and it brings into a little bit of equilibrium for me, that partnership and right, David, you said, you know that you could be that cloud washing discussion. And today it's, you know, we're talking about stacks that live in eight of us and Google and Microsoft. And now, in, you know, my hosted or service lighter or, you know, my own data center. If that makes sense, >> I mean, if you want to just simplify the high order bit, Dave Cloud. It's simply this Amazon's trying to be enterprised everyone, the enterprise, trying to claw Amazon, right? And so what? The what that basically means is it's all cloud. It's all a distributed computer system. OK, Scott McNealy had it right. The network is the computer. If you look at what's going on here, the traditional enterprise of vendors over decades of business model and technology, you know, had full stack solutions from mainframe many computers to PC the local area networking all cobble together wires it up creates applications, services. All that is completely being decimated by a new way to roll out storage, computing and networking is the same stuff. It's just being configured differently. Throw on massive computer power with Cloud and Moore's Law and Data and A. I U have a changing of the the architecture. But the end of the day the cloud is operating model of distributed computing. If you look at all the theories and pieces of computer science do and networking, all those paradigms are actually playing out in in the clouds. Everything from a IIE. In the eighties and nineties you got distributed networking and computing, but it's all one big computer. And Michael Dell, who was the master of the computer industry building PCs, looks at this. Probably leg. It's one big computer. You got a processor and subsystems. So you know this is what's interesting. Amazon has done that, and if they try to be like the enterprise, like the old way, they could fall into that trap. So if the enterprise stays in the enterprise, they know they're not going out. So I think it's interesting that I see the enterprise trying to like Amazon Amazon trying to get a price. So at the end of the day, whoever could build that system that's scalable the way I think Dell's doing, it's great. I was only scaleable using data for special. So it's a distributed computer. That's all that's going on in the world right now, and it's changing everything. Open source software is there. All that makes it completely different, and it's a huge opportunity. Whoever can crack the code on this, it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. Total adjustable market >> well, in twenty ten we said that way, noted the gap. There's still a gap between what Amazon could do and what the on Prem guys Khun Dio, we'd argue, is a five years is seven years, maybe ten years, whatever it is. But at the time we said, if you recall, lookit, they got to close the gap. It's got to be good enough for I t to buy into it like we're starting to see that. But my view, it's still not cloud. It doesn't have to scale a cloud, doesn't have the economics cloud. When you peel the onion, it doesn't certainly doesn't have the SAS model and the consumption model of cloud nowhere close yet. Well, and you know, >> here's the drumbeat of innovation that we see from the public cloud. You know where we hit the shot to show this week, the public have allowed providers how many announcements that they probably had. Sure, there was a mega launch of announcements here, but the public lives just that regular cadence of their, you know, Public Cloud. See a CD. We're not quite there yet in this kind of environment, it's still what Amazon would say is. You put this in an environment and it's kind of frozen. Well, it's thought some, and it's now we can get data set. A service consumption model is something we can go. We're shifting in that model. It's easier to update things, but you know, how do I get access to the new features? But we're seeing that blurring of the line. I could start moving services that hybrid nature of the environment. We've talked a few times. We've been digging into that hybrid cloud taxonomy and some of the services to span because it's not public or private. It's now truly that hybrid and multi environment and customers are going to live in. And all of >> the questions Jonah's is good enough to hold serve >> well. I think the reality is is that you go back to twenty ten, the jury in the private cloud and it's enterprises almost ten years to figure out that it's real. And I think in that time frame Amazon is absolutely leveled. Everybody, we call that the tsunami. Microsoft quickly figures out that they got to get Cloud. They come in there, got a fast followers. Second, Google's trying to retool Oracle. I think Mr Bo completely get Ali Baba and IBM in there, so you got the whole cloud game happening. The problem of the enterprises is that there's no growth in terms of old school enterprise other than re consolidate in position for Cloud. My question to you guys is, Is there going to be true? True growth in the classic enterprise business or, well, all this SAS run on clouds. So, yes, if it's multi cloud or even hybrid for the reasons they talk about, that's not a lot of growth compared to what the cloud can offer. So again, I still haven't seen Dave the visibility in my mind that on premises growth is going to be massive compared to cloud. I mean, I think cloud is where Sassen lives. I think that's where the scale lives we have. How much scale can you do with consolidation? We >> are in a prolonged bull market that that started in twenty ten, and it's kind of hunger. In the tenth year of a of a decade of bull market, the enterprise market is cyclical, and it's, you know, at some point you're going to start to see a slowdown cloud. I mean, it's just a tiny little portion of the market is going to continue to gain share cloud can grow in a downturn. The no >> tell Motel pointed out on this, Michael Dell pointed out on the Cubans, as as those lieutenants, the is the consolidation of it is just that is a retooling to be cloud ready operationally. That's where hybrid comes in. So I think that realization has kicked in. But as enterprises aren't like, they're not like Google and Facebook. They're not really that fast, so So they've got to kind of get their act together on premises. That's why I think In the short term, this consolidation and new revitalisation is happening because they're retooling to be cloud ready. That is absolutely happen. But to say that's the massive growth studio >> now looked. It is. Dave pointed out that the way that there is more than the market growth is by gaining market share Share share are areas where Dell and Emcee didn't have large environment. You know, I spent ten years of DMC. I was a networking. I was mostly storage networking, some land connectivity for replication like srd Evan, like today at this show, I talked a lot of the telco people talk to the service of idle talk where the sd whan deny sirrah some of these pieces, they're really starting to do networking. That's the area where that software defined not s the end, but the only in partnership with cos like Big Switch. They're getting into that market, and they have such small market share their that there's huge up uplift to be able to dig into the giant. >> Okay, couple questions. What percent of Dell's ninety one billion today is multi cloud revenue. Great question. Okay, one percent. I mean, very small. Okay. Very small hero. Okay? And is that multi cloud revenue all incremental growth isat going to cannibalize the existing base? These? Well, these are the fundamentals weighs six local market that I'm talking to >> get into this. You led the defense of conversations. We had Tom Speed on the CFO and he nailed us. He said There's multiple levers to shareholder growth. Pay down the debt check. He's got to do that. You love that conversation. Margin expansion. Get the margins up. Use the client business to cover costs. As you said, increased go to market efficiency and leverage. The supply chain that's like their core >> fetrow of cash. And that all >> these. The one thing he said that was mind blowing to me is that no one gets the valuation of how valuable Del Technologies is. They're throwing off close to seven billion dollars in free cash flow free cash flow. Okay, so you can talk margin expansion all you want. That's great, but there got this huge cash flow coming in. You can't go out of business worth winning if you don't run out of cash >> in the market. When the market is good, these guys are it is good a position is anybody, and I would argue better position than anybody. The question on the table that I'm asking is, how long can it last? And if and when the market turns down and markets always cyclical we like again. We're in the tenth year of a bull market. I mean, it's someone >> unprecedented gel can use the war chest of the free cash flow check on these levers that they're talking about here, they're gonna have the leverage to go in during the downturn and then be the cost optimizer for great for customers. So right now, they're gonna be taking their medicine, creating this one common operating environment, which they have an advantage because they have all the puzzle pieces. You A Packer Enterprises doesn't have the gaping holes in the end to end. They can't address us, >> So that is a really good point that you're making now. So then the next question is okay. If and when the downturn turn comes, who's going to take advantage of it, who's going to come out stronger? >> I think Amazon is going to be continued to dominate, and as long as they don't fall into the enterprise trap of trying to be too enterprising, continue to operate their way for enterprises. I think jazz. He's got that covered. I think DEL Technologies is perfectly positioned toe leverage, the cash flow and the thing to do that. I think Cisco's got a great opportunity, and I think that's something that you know. You don't hear a lot of talk about the M where Cisco war happening. But Cisco has a network. They have a developer ecosystem just starting to get revitalized. That's an opportunity. So >> I got thoughts on Cisco, too. But one of things I want to say about Del being able to come out of that stronger. I keep saying I've said this a number of times and asked a lot of questions this week is the PC business is vital for Del. It's almost half the company's revenue. Maybe not quite, but it it's where the company started it. It sucks up a lot of corporate overhead. >> If Hewlett Packard did not spin out HP HP, they would be in the game. I think spinning that out was a huge mistake. I wrote about a publicly took a lot of heat for it, but you know I try to go along with the HPD focus. Del has proven bigger is better. HP has proven that smaller is not as leverage. And if it had the PC that bee have the mojo in gaming had the mojo in the edge, and Dale's got all the leverage to cross pollinate the front end and edge into the back and common cloud operate environment that is going to be an advantage. And that's going to something that will see Well, let me let me >> let me counter what you just said. I agree. You know this this minute. But the autonomy was the big mistake. Once hp autonomy, you know what Meg did was almost a fatal complete. They never should've bought autonomy >> makers. Levi Protector he was. So he was there. >> But she inherited that bag of rocks. And then what you gonna do with it? Okay, so that's why they had to spend out and did create shareholder value. If they had not purchased autonomy, then he would return much better shape, not to split it up. And they would be a much stronger competitor. >> And I share holder Pop. They had a pop on value. People made some cash with long game. I think that >> going toe peon base actually done pretty well for a first year holding a standalone PC company. So, but again, I think Del. With that leverage, assuming pieces, it's going to be really interesting. I don't know much about that market. You were loving that PC conversation, but the whole, you know, the new game or markets and and the new wayto work throwing an edge in there, I don't know is ej PC and edges that >> so the peanut butter. And so the big thing that Michael get the big thing, Michael Dell said on the Cube was We're not a conglomerate were an integrated company. And when you have an integrated company like this, with the tech the tech landscape shifting to their advantage, you have the ability to cross subsidize. So strategy game. Matt Baker was here we'd be talking about OK, I can cross subsidize margin. You've brought it up on the client side. Smaller margins, but it pays a lot of the corporate overhead. Absolutely. Then you got higher margin GMC business was, you know, those margins that's contributing. And so when you have this new configuration. You can cross, subsidize and move and shift, so I think that's a great advantage. I think that's undervalued in the market place. And I think, you know, I think Del stock price is, well, undervalue. Point out the numbers they got VM wear and their question is, What what point is? VM where blink and go All in on del technology stew. Orcas Remember that Gus was gonna partner. You don't think the phone was ringing off the hook in Palo Alto from their parties? What? What's this as your deal? So Vienna. There's gotta be the neutral party. Big problem. The opportunity. >> Well, look, if I'm a traditional historical partner of'Em are, it's not the Azure announcement that has me a little bit concerned because all of them partner with Microsoft to it is how tightly combined. Del and Veum, where are the emcee, always kept them in arms like now they're in the same. It's like Dave. They're blending it. It's like, you know Del, from a market cap standpoint, gets fifty cents on the dollar. VM wears a software company, and they get their multiples. Del is not a software company, but VM where well, people are. Well, if we can win that a little bit, maybe we could get that. >> Marty still Isn't it splendid? No, no, I think the strategy is absolutely right on. You have to go hard with VM wear and use it as a competitive weapon. But, Stuart, your point fifty cents and all, it's actually much worse than that. I mean the numbers. If you take out of'Em, wears the VM wear ownership, you take out the core debt and you look at the market value you're left with, like a billion dollars. Cordell is undervalued. Cordell is worth more than a billion or two billion dollars. Okay, so it's a really cheap way to buy Veum. Where Right that the Tom Sweet nailed this, he said. You know, basically, these company those the streets not used to tech companies having such big debt. But to your point, John, they're throwing off cash. So this company is undervalued, in my view. Now there's some risks associated with that, and that's why the investors of penalizing them for that debt there, penalizing him from Michael's ownership structure. You know, that's what this is, but >> a lack of understanding in my opinion. I think I think you're right. I just think they don't understand. Look at Dale and they think G You don't look a day Ellen Think distributed computing system with software, fill in those gaps and all that extra ten expansion. It's legit. I think they could go after new market opportunities as as a twos to us as the client business. I mean mere trade ins and just that's massive trillions of dollars. It's, I think I think that is huge. But I'm >> a bull. I'm a bull on the value of the company. I know >> guys most important developments. Del technology world. What's the big story that you think is coming out of the show here? >> Well, it's definitely, you know, the VM wear on del I mean, that is the big story, and it's to your point. It's Del basically saying we're going to integrate this. We're going to hard, we're going to go hard and you know Veum wear on Dell is a preferred solution. No doubt that is top for Dell and PacBell Singer said it. Veum wearing eight of us is the first and preferred solution. Those are the two primary vectors. They're going to drive hard and then Oh, yeah, we'Ll listen to customers Whatever else you want Google as you're fine, we're there. But those two vectors, they're going to Dr David >> build on that because we saw the, um we're building out of multi cloud strategy and what we have today is Del is now putting themselves in there as a first class citizen. Before it was like, Oh, we're doing VX rail and Anna sex and, you know, we'LL integrate all these pieces there, but infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure now it is. It is multi cloud. We want to see that the big table, >> right, Jeff, Jeff Clarke said, Why are you doing both? Let's just one strategy, one company. It's all one Cash registers that >> saying those heard that before. I think the biggest story to me is something that we've been seeing in the Cuban laud, you know, been Mom. This rant horizontally scaleable operating environment is the land grab and then vertically integrate with data into applications that allow each vertical industry leverage data for the kind of intimate, personalized experiences for user experiences in each industry. With oil and gas public sector, each one has got their own experiences that are unique. Data drives that, but the horizontal and tow an operating model when it's on premises hybrid or multi cloud is a huge land grab. And I think that is a major strategic win for Dell, and I think, as if no one challenges them on this. Dave, if HP doesn't go on, emanate change. If H h p e does not do it em in a complete changeover from strategy and pulling, filling their end to end, I think that going to be really hurting I think there's gonna be a tell sign and we'LL see, See who reacts and challenges Del on this in ten. And I think if they can pull it off without being contested, >> the only thing I would say that the only thing I would say that Jonah's you know, HP, you know very well I mean, they got a lot of loyal customers and is a huge market out there. So it's >> Steve. Look at economic. The economics are shifting in the new world. New use cases, new step function of user experiences. This is this is going to be new user experiences at new economic price points that's a business model. Innovation, loyal customers that's hard to sustain. They'Ll keep some clutching and grabbing, but everyone will move to the better mousetrap in the scenario. So the combination of that stability with software it's just this as a big market. >> So John twenty ten Little Table Back Corner, you know of'em See Dylan Blogger World double set. Beautiful says theatre of present lot of exchange and industry. But the partnership in support of this ecosystem. It's something that helped us along the way. >> You know, when we started doing this, Jeff came on board. The team has been amazing. We have been growing up and getting better every show. Small, incremental improvements here and there has been an amazing production, Amazing team all around us. But the support of the communities do this is has been a co creation project from day one. We love having this conversation's with smart people. Tech athletes make it unique. Make it organic, let the page stuff on on the other literature pieces go well. But here it's about conversations for four and with the community, and I think the community sponsorship has been part of funding mohr of it. You're seeing more cubes soon will be four sets of eight of US four sets of V M World four sets here. Global Partners sets I'm used to What have we missed? >> Yeah, it's phenomenal. You know, we're at a unique time in the industry and honored to be able to help documented with the two of you in the whole team. >> Dave, How it Elias sitting there giving him some kind of a victory lap because we've been doing this for ten years. He's been the one of the co captains of the integration. He says. There's a lot of credit. >> Yeah, Howard has had an amazing career. I I met him like literally decades ago, and he has always taken on the really hard jobs. I mean, that's I think, part of his secret success, because it's like he took on the integration he took on the services business at at AMC U members to when Joe did you say we're a product company? No services company. I was like, Give me services. Take it. >> It's been on the Cube ten years. Dave. He was. He was John away. He was on fire this week. I thought bad. Kelsey was phenomenal. >> Yeah, he's an amazing guest. Tom Tom Suite, You know, very strong moments. >> What's your favorite Cuban? I'LL never forget. Joe Tucci had my little camera out film and Joe Tucci, Anna. One of the sessions is some commentary in the hallway. >> Well, that was twenty ten, one of twenty eleven, I think one of my favorite twenty ten moments I go back to the first time we did. The cue was when you asked Joe Tucci, you know why a storage sexy. Remember that? >> A He never came on >> again. Ah, but that was a mean. If you're right, that was a cube mean all for the next couple of years. Remember, Tom Georges, we have because I'm not touching. That was >> so remember when we were critical of hybrid clouds like twenty, twelve, twenty, thirteen I go, Pat is a hybrid cloud, a halfway house to the final destination of public loud. He goes to a halfway house, three interviews. This was like the whole crowd was like, what just happened? Still favorite moment. >> Oh, gosh is a mean so money here, John. As you said, just such a community, love. You know, the people that we've had on for ten years and then, you know, took us, you know, three or four years to before we had Michael Dell on. Now he's a regular on our program with luminaries we've had on, you know, but yeah, I mean, twenty ten, you know, it's actually my last week working for him. See? So, Dave, thanks for popping me out. It's been a fun ride, and yeah, I mean, it's amazing to be able to talk to this whole community. >> Favorite moment was when we were at eighty bucks our first show. We're like, We still like hell on this. James Hamilton, Andy Jazzy Come on up, Very small show. Now it's a monster, David The Cube has had some good luck. Well, we've been on the right waves, and a lot of a lot of companies have sold their companies. Been part of Q comes when public Unicorns New Channel came on early on. No one understood that company. >> What I'm thrilled about to Jonah's were now a decade, and we're documenting a lot of the big waves. One of one of the most memorable moments for me was when you called me up. That said, Hey, we're doing a dupe world in New York. I got on a plane and went out. I landed in, like, two. Thirty in the morning. You met me. We did to dupe World. Nobody knew what to do was back then it became, like, the hottest thing going. Now nobody talks about her dupe. So we're seeing these waves and the Cube was able to document them. It's really >> a pleasure. The Cube can and we got the Cube studios sooner with cubes Stories with Cube Network too. Cue all the time, guys. Thanks. It's been a pleasure doing business with you here. Del Technologies shot out the letter. Chuck on the team. Sonia. Gabe. Everyone else, Guys. Great job. Excellent set. Good show. Closing down. Del Technologies rose two cubes coverage. Thanks for watching

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

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Micron Insight 2018. It's just wrapping up behind us. It's a day long of thought-leading content around AI, AI for good, how it's affecting the human condition and healthcare and the future of AI. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Peter Burris and that's the Golden Gate Bridge over there. You used to live right up that hill over there. >> I did. >> Dee Mooney is here. >> Until they kicked me out. >> Dee Mooney is here. She's the Executive Director of the Micron Foundation. Dee, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule and coming on theCUBE. >> You bet, I'm very pleased to be here with you today. >> So, you guys had some hard news today. We heard about the 100 million dollar fund that you're launching, but you also had some news around the Foundation. >> That's right. >> The grant, you announced two winners of the grant. Tell us about that. >> That's right. So, it was a great opportunity for Micron to showcase its goodness and what a great platform for us to be able to launch the Advancing Curiosity grant. It is all around really focusing on that, on advancing curiosity, in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that's in business and health or life, and it's really a great platform for us to be able to be a part of today. >> So, what are the specifics? It was a million dollar grant? >> So, it was a million dollar fund and today we announced our first recipients. It was to the Berkeley College of Engineering, specifically their BAIR, which is Berkeley A, Artificial Intelligence Research lab, then also Stanford PHIND lab, which is the Precision, Health and Integrated Diagnostics lab. And then also a non-profit called AI For All, and really their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help the underrepresented groups be exposed to the field. >> So with AI For All, so underrepresented groups as in the diversity culture-- >> Females, underrepresented groups that might not actually get the exposure to this type of math and science in schools and so they do summer camps and we are helping to send students there next summer. >> How do you decide, what are the criteria around which you decide who gets the grants, and take us through that process. >> Today, because we are all about goodness and trying to enhance and improve our communities, this was all around how can AI do some good. So, we are taking a look at what problems can be solved utilizing AI. The second thing we're taking a look at is the type of technology. We want students and our researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work. Then also, what groups are being represented. We want a very diverse group that bring different perspectives and we really think that's our true ability to innovate. >> Well, there's some real research that suggests a more diverse organization solves problems differently, gets to more creativity and actually has business outcomes. That may not be the objective here, but certainly it's a message for organizations worldwide. >> We certainly think so. The more people that are being involved in a conversation, we think the richer the ideas that come out of it. One more thing that we are taking a look at in this grant is we'd like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data, so that's also something that we want people to consider when they're applying. >> One of the challenges in any ethical framework is that the individuals that get to write the ethical framework or test the ethical framework, the ethics always works for them. One of the big issues that you just raised is that there is research that shows that if you put a certain class of people and make them responsible for training the AI system, that their biases will absolutely dominate the AI system. So these issues of diversity are really important, not just from a how does it work for them, but also from a very starting point of what should go into the definition of the problem, the approach and solution, how you train it. Are you going the full scope or are you looking at just segments of that problem? >> We'll take a look at, we hope to solve the problems eventually, but right now, just to start with, it's the first announcement of the fund. It's a million dollars, like we mentioned. The first three recipients were announced today. The other recipients that come along, we're really excited to see what comes out of that because maybe there will be some very unique approaches to solving problems utilizing AI. >> What other areas might you look at? How do you determine, curiosity and AI, how'd you come up with that and how do you determine the topics in the areas that you go after? >> The Micron Foundation's mission is to enhance our lives through our people and our philanthropy and we focus on stem and also basic human needs. So, when Micron is engaged in large business endeavors like today, talking about AI, it was the perfect opportunity for us to bring our goodness and focus on AI and the problems that can be solved utilizing it. >> Pretty good day today, I thought. >> Oh, yeah. >> I have to say, I've followed Micron for awhile and you guys can get pretty down and dirty on the technical side, but it was an up-level conversation today. The last speaker in particular really made us think a little bit, talking about are we going to get people to refer-- >> Max Tegmark, right? >> Was that Max Tegmark? Yeah. >> I think that's the name. I didn't catch his name, I popped in late. But he was talking about artificial general intelligence >> I know. >> Reaching, I guess a singularity and then, what struck me is he had a panel of AI researchers, all male, by the way, I think >> Yes. >> I noticed that. >> Yes, we did too. >> The last one, which was Elon Musk, who of course we all know, thinks that there's going to be artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and he asked every single panel member, will we achieve that, and they all unanimously said yes. So, either they're all dead wrong or the world is going to be a scary place in 20, 30, 50 years. >> Right, right. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, it was certainly thought-provoking to think about all the good things that AI can do, but also maybe the other side and I'm actually glad that we concluded with that, because that is an element of our fund. We want the people that apply to it or that we'll work with to think about those other sides. If these certain problems are solved, is there a down side as well, so that is definitely where we want that diverse thinking to come in, so we can approach the problems in a good way that helps us all. >> Limited time left, let's talk a little bit about women in tech. In California, Jerry Brown just signed a law into effect that, I believe it's any public company, has to have a woman >> On the Board? >> on the Board. What do you think about that? >> Well, personally, I think that's fantastic. >> Well, you're biased. (laughs) >> I might be a little biased. I guess it's a little unfortunate we now have to have laws for this because maybe there's not enough, I'm not exactly sure, 6but I think it's a step in the right direction. That really aligns well with what we try to do, bring diversity into the workplace, diversity into the conversation, so I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> You know, let's face it, this industry had a lack, really, of women leaders. We lost Meg Whitman in a huge Fortune 50 company, in terms of a woman leader, replaced by Antonio Neri, great guy, know him well, but that was one, if you're counting, one down. Ginni Rometty, obviously, huge presence in the industry. I want to ask you, what do you think about, I don't want to use the word quotas, I hate to use it, but if you don't have quotas, what's the answer? >> I don't know about quotas either. We do know that we help, our Foundation grants span the pipeline from young students all the way up through college and we see this pipeline. It starts leaking along the way. Fifth grade, we start seeing girls fall out. Eighth grade is another big-- >> In the U.S. >> In the U.S. >> Not so much in other countries, which is pretty fascinating. >> We are a global foundation and when we talk with our other partners, they're also interested in having stem outreach into their schools because they want to bring in the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so, I used to think it was quite just a U.S. problem, but now being exposed to other cultures and countries, definitely they have a different approach, but I think it's a problem that we all strive to overcome. >> Well, it's pretty good research that shows that governance that includes women is generally more successful. It reaches better decisions, it reaches decisions that lead to, in the case of Boards, greater profitability, more success, so if you can't convince people with data, you have to convince them with law. At the end of the day, it would be nice if people recognized that a diverse approach to governance usually ends up with a better result but if you can't, you got to hit 'em over the head. >> I guess so, I guess so. >> Well, obviously, with the Kavanaugh confirmation, there's been a lot of talk about this lately. There's been some pretty interesting stuff. I've got two daughters, you have a daughter. Some pretty interesting stuff in our family chat that's been floating around. I saw, I think it was yesterday, my wife sent me a little ditty by a young woman who was singing a song about how tough it is for men, sort of tongue-in-cheek and singing things like, I can't open the door in my pajamas, I can't walk down the street on my phone at night, I can't leave my drink unattended, so tough for men, so tough for men, so on the one hand, you have the Me Too movement, you have a lot more, since Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth at the Grace Opera event, I don't know if you saw that, he said-- >> I didn't. >> He said, a couple years ago >> He's the CEO of Microsoft. >> Said a couple years ago, a woman in the audience, Grace Opera, big conference for women, asked, "If we're underpaid, should we say anything?" and he said, no, that's bad kharma, you should wait and be patient, and then of course, he got a lot of you know what for that. >> That probably didn't work for them. And then, he apologized for it, he did the right thing. He said, you know what, I'm way off base and then he took proactive action. But, since then, you feel like there's been certainly much more attention paid to it, the Google debacle of last summer with the employee that wrote that Jerry Maguire tome. >> Right, right. >> Now the Me Too movement, then you see the reaction of women from the Kavanaugh appointment. Do you feel like we've made a lot of progress, but then you go, well, hmm, maybe we haven't. >> It sometimes feels like that. It sometimes feels like that. In my career, over 20 years, I have had a very positive experience working with men, women alike and have been very supported and I hope that we can continue to have the conversations and raise awareness, that everyone can feel good in their workplace, walking down the street and, like you mentioned, I think that it's very important that we all have a voice and all of us bring a different, unique perspective to the table. >> So do you feel that it's two steps forward, Dee, and maybe one step back every now and then, or are we making constant progress? >> It kind of feels like that right now. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like we're talking a lot about it more now and maybe just with a lot more attention on it, that's why it's seeming like we're taking a step back, but I think progress has been made and we have to continue to improve that. >> Yeah, I think if you strip out the politics of the Kavanaugh situation and then focus on the impact on women, I think you take a different perspective. I think that's a discussion that's worth having. On theCUBE last week, I interviewed somebody, she called herself, "I'm a Fixer," and I said, "You know, here's some adjectives I think of in a fixer, is a good listener, somebody who's a leader, somebody who's assertive, somebody who takes action quickly. Were those the adjectives that were described about you throughout your career, and the answer was, not always. Sometimes it was aggressive or right? >> True, true. >> That whole thing, when a woman takes swift action and is a leader, sometimes she's called derogatory names. When a man does it, he's seen as a great leader. So there's still that bias that you see out there, so two steps forward, one step back maybe. Well Dee, last thoughts on today and your mission. >> Well, we really hope to encourage the next generation to pursue math and science degrees, whether they are female or male or however they identify, and we want them to do great and hopefully have a great career in technology. >> I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause it's not just about women, it's about people of color and however you identify. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. >> You bet, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Micron Insight 2018 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(tech music) >> Live, from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our live coverage here in Bahrain for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Summit here in the Middle East in the region. Our first time here, lots of observations, lots of learnings, and also great people we're meeting. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Our next guest is Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, who is the Chief Executive of the Information E-Government Authority, also known as IGA. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, thank you for hosting me. >> Saw you last night at dinner. We were talking about all the opportunities. So the first question I have to ask you is, as you guys are bringing in the digital transformation, which is happening, you now have Amazon here with the region, how is that changing things? >> Of course, always we try to innovate, and the technology, if you don't innovate, if you don't make sure that you are ready for the changes coming, it is very difficult. When we announced our first strategy in 2007, we delivered it in 2010 becoming the leader in the region, delivering 200 services over four channels. But as you mentioned, usually in the technology, the longest cycle is the infrastructure and servers and configurations, buying things and configuring. And with the leadership vision of transforming the country the vision 2030, transformations happening in the judicial system and to the commercial legislations and to the customs and to health and education, the pace of change required and the ambition is very much, much higher. And particularly, when you develop something and you were successful. So our leaders say, we are a bit slow. We need to fast things up. So then we looked into the Amazon and the cloud. How it can help us. And usually, in Bahrain, we don't have the luxury of trial and error. Trying things and if it works, you know, try multiple things. So we have to study it well. This is why we looked into the cloud, what it can bring to the country, the agility, the time to market. And when we put the strategy forward, it was a comprehensive one. The leaders decided to go cloud-first policy. Everybody should move. Because that's the way forward, that's the way that the Kingdom can deliver its vision-- >> And the cloud-first decision, when was that made? >> That was last year. And, when it was made, it's not a piece of strategy. You have to look at it in a comprehensive way. >> Yeah. >> You have to look into your laws, legislations, compliance, >> Yeah. >> audits, architectures, unit policies, skills sets available, the procurement process, the tendering process, and you have to review all of that-- >> Yeah. >> and make sure that there is no show blockers or barriers for the implementation. Otherwise, it will take a long time. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> This is why, in a year's time, we managed to migrate huge workloads to the cloud. >> We were talking last night about how hard it is just to figure out the future, never mind provisioning all the gear you got to do, and the training, and so this cloud-first is very interesting. But I also want to just tell you that we talked about, also, how hard it is. So when I say, oh, go cloud-first, it's so easy! Right? No, it isn't. There's a lot of work involved. >> Yes. >> Take us through some of the things that you guys have done, your learnings prior to cloud-first. And the key learnings now that cloud-first has been under your belt for over a year. >> Of course, always with the governments, the biggest challenge will happen about the security. How I am going to move losing the control, putting my processing and storage outside the government. How I'm going to protect it, somebody else is there. That's the biggest challenge. That's number one. Number two, people doesn't understand, they think it's processing. So okay, I have my processing power, I will save some money, that's not much. >> Yeah. >> But they don't think about the ultimate goal. About the time to market. >> Yeah. >> When you have a new vision, when you have a new service to be delivered, you cannot wait for 18, 24 months for the infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> Getting there, idle for a couple of years until you know the full utilization of them. So this is why the ultimate goal is much, much bigger. >> Yeah. >> And the thing about the issue, of somebody else, looking into-- >> So speed is critical. >> Yeah. >> And you guys have speed under your belt. You did a Formula One racetrack in what, 14 months I heard, very fast construction. The Amazon region is going up in record time. Is this a cultural thing? Just go fast? People like speed? The need for speed? >> We like that, you know the Formula One, of course that's just part of our DNA. Our leaders always push the citizens. And that's the Bahraini culture. >> Yeah, the other thing, too, about the application, now to get back to our serious conversation, to have innovation, you need to have software development go on in a way that's not the 24-month, oh we built it, and you don't know if you tested it or not. But you got to built the dev-ops model infrastructure as code. How far along are you on the infrastructure as code? Because the developer side is going to be very great. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Yeah. >> Amazon's proven that developers love it, easy to get going, lower cost to test, agility, time to market, time to value. The setup for you guys is a little bit different. You've got infrastructure as code-- >> Yeah. >> You're not a startup. But you want to act like one, but what are you going to do for the infrastructure? >> Of course, the infrastructure in terms of processing, that's easy because it's been migrated, most of it's been migrated, our ports, our channels, our mobile channels. >> The networks, you have 5G, do you have 5G here yet? >> We are already experimenting, ready for it. The frequency's already freed up for the telco's to utilize them. It's already there for the 5G. Of course, fiber is everywhere, all the government entities are connected to the fiber. High speed, we have 100-meg, we have a gig, we have 10 gig, we have all kinds of speed available. >> No problem for bandwidth in the country. >> I don't think so. We don't have an issue about the bandwidth. And the processing power, once moved, then the optimization, which already happened. But as you mentioned, coming to the development, we started already, developing into the serverless, using the lamdas, using born-in-the-cloud concepts, that was not there once we started. But now we are already educating and training our employees. >> What's the reaction to it? >> The reaction is excellent. I give an example today about the fingerprint authentication. That's a basic service, but it requires a huge demand return from all the telco's, all transactions happen in telco's, private hospitals, the banking are coming. >> Yeah. >> Any authentication happens, it has to happen in a second. >> Yeah. >> So that requires a huge, massive infrastructure. Once we built it, at the beginning, for only a few customers-- >> Yeah. >> we invested about 250,000 dinar at that time. Now, I think, it's being moved completely to serverless-- >> Yeah. >> Concept, a new development. >> Yeah. >> So... >> A simple idea, hard to implement in the old way, but the new way, you got to wire API's around, sling API's, and connect devices, telco's, environments quickly. So this brings up the integration, this is the benefit of the cloud. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Exactly. >> The glue layer is, what, microservices? Is it API's? How are you making that lambda function...? >> You know, that API's, and, just, you call the service and it gets you online and you go back to the storage. I mean, a basic thing. >> Yeah. >> Initially, you know, you need a testing environment, a development environment, a lot of infrastructure, and then you have to secure all of that, secure your data. >> Yeah. >> Now, it's a fraction of that cost and much faster to go to market. >> I'm a huge believer in the services model, and this is why microservices is a big deal right now in clouds, if you look at all the cloud-native conversations, it's containers, we're using it, no problem, very good to use containers. They're great. Kubernetes, now, orchestration. But deal with state and stateless applications is now the new challenge because there are so many new services that are spinning up. Soon, you're going to be like, ordering McDonald's, you know, I'll have a microservice over here, so this is the world we're moving to. This is the services. >> Exactly. And we would like to build a center of excellence, you know? Because we get into this journey, we looked into all our legislations and the ecosystem, trained our employees, their skillset is very important, with the program, with Tamkeen. We looked into the training strategy, all the portfolio training, making sure that our Bahrainees have the ability to develop, to operate, databases and all aspects, even the planning of it. Then institutes, partners, to be ready to train the private sector and everybody. >> You know, Mohammed, I'm really impressed with the entrepreneurial people that I've met. They've got a good mojo to them, because they're kind of cocky, which I love about them, but they're not arrogant. They're like, they're smart, and I so I got a... I see a good community there. The question for you is, as you move to cloud-native, how is that transition? The young kids get it. I mean, it's no problem. >> Yeah. >> Where's the progress on the skillset gap? I've heard that conversation. I just don't see it being a problem if the young kids are eating up the cloud stuff like it's nobody's business. >> Yeah. >> Then I don't see a problem. What's your take on this skills gap thing? I mean, the guys I met, and the entrepreneurs, they're like, they want more action. >> Exactly. The point is the current employees that we have already. Hundreds of government employees that have been trained in a different environment with different technologies. I get a couple of questions from some of the professionals in the market, private sector and government sector: how we can benefit out of that? How we can help? We are experts in the field, but cloud for us is a new thing. So as you mentioned, for them it might be a bit more difficult. So what we did, and the IGA, we created a taskforce of the most brilliant team, and told them okay, you have to migrate the workloads, train, we'll give you the training, and you have to migrate. >> Go. >> Next, you have now to optimize. Give the task of migration to somebody else, a new team, and the old team, they have to optimize. Third, now you have to work on, bore on the cloud, develop on the cloud, create the environment of the cloud, a new concept. So that's how we take-- >> So you're spreading the work around through hands-on training? >> Of course. You train, and then you get them into the action, hands, on, and so on, one by one. But, eventually, the university's already working on training their students. So we want to make sure that part of the curriculum, the cloud is there for the new generations to take it from day one. >> You know, you guys are a learning culture, my observation, first time here, very impressed. Very friendly, which is always cool. But, it's a multilingual culture. So, if you add source code to the new lingua, coding is going to be critical. Are you guys getting at the younger generation really when they're young? How young are you going in terms of the new language, software... Thoughts on that? Where do you see that going? >> Starting from school-- >> Elementary school? >> From elementary school, trying to get them in to coding. Universities as well. >> So you are teaching kids to code? >> Of course. And you know, any citizen they can get any certifications free of charge, according to the agreement with Tamkeen Labor Fund. They are willing to train any Bahrainian on any certifications, professional certifications, free of charge. >> That's great. >> To be ready for the next, and making Bahrainians-- >> So there's no excuses. >> Of course. >> There it is. >> We want to give Bahrainians a choice for employment. >> Yeah. >> You know? If that's the future, we have to make them ready for the future. >> That's great. And the cloud's going to give you all that energy. Talk about the relationship with Amazon a bit, Amazon Web Services. Obviously, Teresa Carlson, really behind this, the whole team. I talk about the whole company, I see them getting behind this and partnering with you guys. They're not just coming in here and being Amazon. There's a real co-development ethos. Talk about the relationship you have with... >> Amazon is impressive. I mean, the way that we work, in a partnership way, everybody should think about the long-term, not the short-term part of the partnership. That they should help the economy, the Bahrainis for employment, making sure that the economy will benefit out of this move to Bahrain. And as well, we have to help with the registrations, with the regulations, with any infrastructure connectivity to the international links. Whatever they need, we try to help them because we believe that eventually it will create the ecosystem for the market. >> I know they open up a lot of doors for you guys, and then for us as well. They attracted us to come and cover the territory here, so we're super excited. And I'm so glad we came because I learned a lot. >> Thank you. >> It's been fantastic. Okay, your big idea... Final question. What's your big idea that's going to come out of the cloud? It doesn't have to be the complete... Your idea, in your personal opinion, what is going to happen five years down the road? What is it going to look like? What will this new magic look like? What's the outcome? >> I think it will be a major restructure and reform in the government. So most of the people working into the routine work of buying and configuring, buying and configuring, they can be more focused into the real problem about the innovation, trying to bring solutions to the problems and issues in the country. Trying to develop software that will help the economy to foster, and to look at what is required, what is the vision of the leaders, try to implement those. So most of the people think business. Before, it was isolation. The technical people only, they had their territory, their environment looking at the wires and hardware and configurations, and somebody else looking into the development and a third group of people who are looking strategically, analytics, and how to utilize it. So, I think what we'll have, we'll merge those people, thinking only about the solutions, and how to analyze and how to come with new solutions out of those analytics. >> And that model has been consolidated, those silos have been broken down. With the cloud, it brings it all together. Developers are now on the front lines. >> Of course. And those-- >> And they're driving the business. >> They're driving the business. >> Mohammed, great to have you on, great to see you. Thanks for sharing your insight. And congratulations. Looking forward to tracking all the great coverage. Amazing opportunity here for everyone in the country, and also for Amazon and for us. Great to meet new people. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @Furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R, or just search, I'm open. All my channels are open, Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, you name it. Say hello, reach out. Stay with us, more all-day coverage after this short break. (tech music)

(dramatic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio for a CUBE conversation. It's really a great thing that we like to take advantage of. A little less hectic than the show world and we're right in the middle of all the shows, if you're paying attention. So we're happy to have a CUBE alumni on. He's been on many, many times. Saar Gillai , he's now the CEO of Teridion. And Saar, welcome. I don't think we've talked to you since you've been in this new role. >> Yeah, it's been about a year I think. >> Been 'about a year. So give us kind of the update on Teridion. What it's all about and really more importantly, what attracted you to the opportunity? >> Sure. First of all, great to be here. I don't know where John is. I'm looking for him. He ran away. Maybe he knew I was coming. >> Somewhere over the Atlantic I think. 35,000 feet. >> I'll follow up on that later but hey, you're here. So, you know Teridion, let's talk about maybe the challenge that Teridion is addressing first so people will understand that, right. So if you look about what's going on these days with the advent of Cloud. and how people are really accessing stuff, things have really moved in the past. Most of the important services that people access were in a data center and were accessed through the LAN so the enterprise had control over them and if you wanted to access an app, if it didn't work, somebody when into the LAN, played around with some CISCO router and things maybe got better. >> But at least you had control. >> You had control and if you look at what's happened over the last decade, but certainly in the last five years, with SAS and the Cloud. Stating the obvious, more and more of your services now are actually being accessed through your WAN and in many cases, that actually means the internet itself. If you're accessing Salesforce or Box or Ignite or any of these services. The challenge with that is that now means that a critical part of your user experience, you don't control. The vendor doesn't control because you can make the best SAS up in the world but, and those apps are increasingly very dynamic. Caching doesn't solve this problem and the problem is now, okay, but I'm experiencing it over the internet. And while the internet is a great tool obviously, it's not really built for reliabilty, consistency, and consistent speed. Reality, if you look at the internet, it was designed to sent one packet to NORAD and tell them that some nuclear missile died somewhere. That's what it was designed for right? So the packet will get there but the jitter and all these things may work and so what happens is that, now you have a consistency problem. Historically, people will say well, that's all been addressed through traditional caching and that's true. Caching still has it's place. The reality is though that caching is more for stuff that doesn't change a lot and now, it's all very dynamic. If you're uploading a file, that's not a caching activity. If you're doing something in Salesforce, it's very dynamic. It's not cached. At Teridion, we looked at this problem. Teridion's been around about four years. I've been there for about a year. We felt that the best way to solve this problem was actually to leverage some of the Cloud technology that already exists to solve it. So what we do, actually, is we build an overlay network on top of the public Cloud surface area. So instead of traditionally, the way people did things is they would build a network themselves but today the public Cloud guys honestly are spending gazillions of dollars building infrastructure. Why not leverage it the same way that you don't buy CPUs, why buy routers? What we do is we create a massive overlay network on demand on the public Cloud surface area. And public Cloud means not just Amazon or Google but also people like AliCloud, DigitalOcean, Vulture, any Cloud provider really, some Russian Cloud providers. And then we monitor the internet conditions and then we build a fast path. If you think about it almost like a ways, a fast path for your packet from wherever the customer is to your service thereby dramatically increasing the speed but also providing much higher reliabilty. >> So, lot of thoughts. If I'm hearing right, you're leveraging the public Cloud infrastructure so they're pipes, if you will. >> And they're CPUs. >> And they're CPUs but then you're putting basically waypoints on that packet's journey to reroute to a different public Cloud infrastructure for that next leg if that's more appropriate. >> Yeah, and basically what I'm doing is I'm basically just saying if there's a, if your server's here whether they're on a public Cloud or somewhere else, it doesn't matter, and a customer is here, through some redirection, I will create a router on a public Cloud so a soft router, somewhere close from a network perspective to a user and somewhere close to the server and then between them, I'll create an overlay fast path. And then, what is goes over will be based on whatever the algorithm figures out. The way we know where to go over is we also have a sensor network distributed throughout the public Cloud surface areas and it's constantly creating a heat map of where there's capacity, where there's problems, where there's jitter and we'll create a fast path. Typically that fast path will give you, one of the challenges, I'll give you an example. So let's say you're on Comcast and let's say you've got 40 meg let's say, your connection at home. And then you connect to some server and theoretically that server has much more, right? But reality is, when you do that connection, it's not going to be 40 meg. Sometimes it's 5 meg, okay? So we'll typically give you almost your full capacity that you have from your first provider all the way there by creating this fast path. >> So how does it compare, we hear things about like Direct Connect between Equinix and Amazon or a lot of peer relationships that get set up. How does what you're doing kind o' compare, contrast, play, compare to those solutions? >> Direct Connect is sort of a static connection. If you have an office and you want to have a Direct Connection, it's got advantages and it's useful in certain areas. Part of the challenge there is that first of all, it has a static capacity. It's static and it has a certain capacity. What we do, because it's completely software oriented, is we'll create a connection and if you want more capacity, we'll just create more routers. So you can have as much capacity as you want from wherever you want where with Direct Connect, you say I want this connection, this connection, this much capacity and it's static. So if you have something very static, then that may be a good solution for you but if you're trying to reach people at other places and it's dynamic, and also you want variable capacities. For example, let's say you say I want to pay for what I use. I don't want to pay for a line. Historically, when you're using these things, you say okay, if the maximum I may want is 40 meg, you say okay, give me a 40 meg line. That's expensive. >> Right, right. >> But what if you say I want 40 meg only for a few hours a day right? So in my case, you just say look, I want to do this many terabytes. And if you want to do it at 40 meg, do it at 40 meg. It doesn't matter. So it's much more dynamic and this lends itself more to the modern way of people thinking of things. Like the same way you used to own a server and you had to buy the strongest server you needed for the end of the month because maybe the finance guy needed to run something. Today you don't do that right? You just go to public Cloud and when it's the end of the month, you get more CPUs. We're the same thing. You just set a connection. If you need more capacity, then you'll get more capacity that you need. We had a customer that we were working with that was doing some mobile stuff in China and all of a sudden, they needed to do 600,000 connections a minute from China. And so we just scaled up. You don't have to preconfigure any of this stuff. >> Right, right. So that's really where you make the comparison of public Cloud for networking because you guys are leveraging public Cloud infrastructure, you're software based so that you can flex so you don't have the old model. >> It's completely elastic, like I said. It's very similar. Our view is the compute in the last decade, obviously, compute has moved from a very static I own everything mode to let's use dynamic resources as much as possible. Of course, there's been a lot of advantage to that. Why wouldn't your connectivity, especially your connectivity outside which is increasing your connectivity also use that paradigm. Why do you need to own all this stuff? >> Right, right. As you said before we turned the cameras on the value proposition to your customers who are the people that basically run these big apps, is the fact that they don't have to worry about that but net is just flat out faster to execute the simple operations like uploading or downloading something to BOX. >> And again, you mentioned BOX, they're one of our big customers and we have a massive network if you thing about how much BOX uploads in a given day, right? 'Cause there's a lot of there traffic that goes through us. But if you think about these SAS providers, they really need to focus on making their app as good as possible and advancing it and making it as sophisticated as possible and so, the problem is then there's this last edge which is from their server all the way to the customer, they don't really control. But that is really important to the customer experience, right? If you're trying to upload something to BOX or trying to use some website and it's really slow, your user experience is bad. It doesn't matter if it's the internet's fault. You're still as a customer, So this gives them control. They give us that ability and then we have control that we can give it much faster speed. Typically in the US, it may be two to five times faster. If you're going outside the US, it could be much faster sometimes. In China, we go 15 times faster. But also, it's consistent and if you have issues, we have a knock, we monitor, we can go look at it. If some customer says I have a problem, right? We'll immediately be able to say okay, here's the problem. Maybe there's a server issue and so forth as opposed to them saying I have a problem and the SAS vendor saying well, it's fine on our side. >> Right, right. So, I'm curious on your go to market. Obviously, you said BOX is a example of a customer. You've got some other ones on the website. Who are these big application service providers, that term came up the other day, like flashback to 1990. 1998 >> I call them SAS >> It's funny, we were talking about the old days. >> To me, it's all the same, as a service guy. >> But then, as you go to market then going to include going out directly through the public Clouds in some of their exchanges so that basically, I could just buy a faster throughput with the existing service. Where do you go from here? I imagine, who doesn't want faster internet service period? >> Yeah, we started off going to the people who have the biggest challenge and easier to work with a small company right? You want to work with a few big guys. They also help you design your solution, make sure it's good. If you can run BOX and Traffic and Ignite. Traffic can probably handle other things, last year for example. We are looking at potentially providing some of the service, for example, if you're accessing S3 for example, we can access S3 at least three times faster. So we are looking potentially at putting something on the web where you could just go to Amazon and sign up for that. The other thing that we're looking at, which is later in the year, probably is that we haven't gotten a lot of requests from people that said hey, since the WAN is the new LAN, right, and they want to also try to use this technology for their enterprise WAN between branch offices where SD-WAN is sort of playing today, we've gotten a lot of requests to leverage this technology also in SD-WAN and so we're also looking at how that could potentially play out because again, people just say look, why can't I use this for all my WAN connectivity? Why is it only for SAS connectivity? >> Right, right. I mean it makes sense. Again, who doesn't want, the network never goes fast enough, right? Never, never, never. >> It's not only speed. I agree with you but it's not only speed. What you find, what people take for granted in the LAN but they only notice it when now they're running over the LAN is that it's a business critical service. So you want it to be consistent. If it's up, it needs to have latency, jitter, control. It needs to be consistent. It can't be one second it's great, the next second it's bad and you don't know why and visibility. No one's ever had that problem. >> I'm just laughing. I'm thinking of our favorite Comcast here. If they're not a customer, you need to get them on your list. Help make some introductions hopefully. >> So, people take that for granted when they're LAN and then when they move to the Cloud, they just assume that it's going to continue but it doesn't actually work that way. Then they get people from branch offices complaining that they couldn't upload a doc or the sales person was slow and all these problems happen and the bigger issue is, not only is this a problem, you don't have control. As a person providing a service, you want to have control all the way so you can say "yeah, I can see it. "I'm fixing it for you here. "I fixed it for you." And so it's about creating that connection and making it business critical. >> It's just a funny thing that we see over and over and over where cutting edge and brand new quickly becomes expected behavior very, very quickly. The best delivery by the best service, suddenly you have an expectation that that's going to be consistent across all your experiences with all your apps. So you got to deliver that QS. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing that we notice, of course, is because of the explosion of data right? It's true that the internet's capacity is growing but data is growing faster because people want to do more because CPUs are stronger, your handset is stronger and so, so much of it is dynamic. Like I said before, historically, some of this was solved by just let's cache everything. But today, everything is dynamic. It's bidirectional and the caching technology doesn't do that. It's not built for that. It's a different type of network. It's not built for this kind of capacity so as more and more stuff is dynamic, it becomes difficult to do these things and that's really where we play. And again, I think the key is that historically, you had to build everything. But the same way that you have all these SAS providers not building everything themselves but just building the app and then running on top of the public Cloud. The same thing is why would I go build a network when the public Cloud is investing a hundred billion dollars a year in building massive infrastructure. >> Yeah, and they are, big infrastructure. Well Saar, thanks for giving us the update and stopping by and we will watch the story unfold. >> Great to be here. >> Alright. And we'll send John a message. >> I'll have to track him down. >> Alright, he's Saar, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. It's a CUBE conversation at our Palo Alto Studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (dramatic music)