>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies: "Creating technologies that drive human progress." >> Good late afternoon from Barcelona, Spain at the Theater of Barcelona. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson of "theCUBE" covering MWC23. This is our third day of continuous wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. And you know we're going to be here tomorrow as well. We've been having some amazing conversations about the ecosystem. And we're going to continue those conversations next. Honore Labourdette is here, the VP global partner, Ecosystem Success Team, Telco Media and Entertainment at Red Hat. And Tony Jeffries joins us as well, a Senior Director of Product Management, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to have both of you here. So we're going to be talking about the evolution of the telecom stack. We've been talking a lot about disaggregation the last couple of days. Honore, starting with you, talk about the evolution of the telecom stock. You were saying before we went live this is your 15th at least MWC. So you've seen a lot of evolution, but what are some of the things you're seeing right now? >> Well, I think the interesting thing about disaggregation, which is a key topic, right? 'Cause it's so relative to 5G and the 5G core and the benefits and the features of 5G core around disaggregation. But one thing we have to remember, when you disaggregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way. And that's predominantly what we're doing in our partnership with Dell, is we're bringing those disaggregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of the new technology, at the same time taking out the complexity and making it easier for our Telco customers to deploy and to scale and to get much more, accelerate the time to revenue. So the trend now is, what we're seeing is two things I would say. One is how do we solve for the complexity with the disaggregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges? >> Tony, jump on in, talk about what you guys announced last week, Dell and Red Hat, and how it's addressing the complexities that Honore was saying, "Hey, they're there." >> Yeah. You know, our customers, our operators are saying, "Hey, I want disaggregation." "I want competition in the market." But at the same time who's going to support all this disaggregation, right? And so at the end of the day, there's going to be an operator that's going to have to figure this out. They're going to have an SLA that they're going to have to meet. And so they're going to want to go with a best-in-class partner with Red Hat and Dell, in terms of our infrastructure and their software together as one combined engineered system. And that's what we call a Dell Telecom infrastructure block for Red Hat. And so at the end of the day, things may go wrong, and if they do, who are they going to call for that support? And that's also really a key element of an engineered system, is this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one. Which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation, yeah. >> So what is the market, the go to market motion look like? People have loyalties in the IT space to technologies that they've embraced and been successful with for years and years. So you have folks in the marketplace who are diehard, you know, dyed red, Red Hat folks. Is it primarily a pull from them? How does that work? How do you approach that to your, what are your end user joint customers? What does that look like from your perspective? >> Sure, well, interestingly enough both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time, right? So we do have the brand with those Telco customers for these solutions. What we're seeing with this solution is, it's an emerging market. It's an emerging market for a new technology. So there's an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together. So our field sales teams will be motivated to, you know, take advantage of the solution for their customers, as will the Dell team. And I'll let Tony speak to the Dell, go to market. >> Yeah. You know, so we really co-sell together, right? We're the key partners. Dell will end up fulfilling that order, right? We send these engineered systems through our factories and we send that out either directly to a customer or to a OTEL lab, like an intermediate lab where we can further refine and customize that offer for that particular customer. And so we got a lot of options there, but we're essentially co-selling. And Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. So it's a really good mix. >> And I think, if I may, one of the key differentiators is the actual capabilities that we're bringing together inside of this pre-integrated solution. So it includes the Red Hat OpenShift which is the container software, but we also add our advanced cluster management as well as our Ansible automation. And then Dell adds their orchestration capability along with the features and functionalities of the platform. And we put that together and we offer capability, remote automation orchestration and management capabilities that again reduces the operating expense, reduces the complexity, allows for easy scale. So it's, you know, certainly it's all about the partnership but it's also the capabilities of the combined technology. >> I was just going to ask about some of the numbers, and you mentioned some of them. Reduction of TCO I imagine is also a big capability that this solution enables besides reducing OpEx. Talk about the TCO reduction. 'Cause I know there's some numbers there that Dell and Red Hat have already delivered to the market. >> Yeah. You know, so these infrastructure blocks are designed specifically for Core, or for RAN, or for the Edge. We're starting out initially in the Core, but we've done some market research with a company called ACG. And ACG has looked at day zero, day one and day two TCO, FTE hours saved. And we're looking at over 40 to 50% TCO savings over you know, five year period, which is quite significant in terms of cost savings at a TCO level. But also we have a lot of numbers around power consumption and savings around power consumption. But also just that experience for our operator that says, hey, I'm going to go to one company to get the best in class from Red Hat and Dell together. That saves a lot of time in procurement and that entire ordering process as well. So you get a lot of savings that aren't exactly seen in the FTE hours around TCO, but just in that overall experience by talking to one company to get the best of both from both Red Hat and Dell together. >> I think the comic book character Charlie Brown once said, "The most discouraging thing in the world is having a lot of potential." (laughing) >> Right. >> And so when we talk about disaggregating and then reaggregating or reintegrating, that means choice. >> Tony: Yeah. >> How does an operator approach making that choice? Because, yeah, it sounds great. We have this integration lab and you have all these choices. Well, how do I decide, how does a person decide? This is a question for Honore from a Red Hat perspective, what's the secret sauce that you believe differentiates the Red Hat-infused stack versus some other assemblage of gear? >> Well, there's a couple of key characteristics, and the one that I think is most prevalent is that we're open, right? So "open" is in Red Hat's DNA because we're an open source technology company, and with that open source technology and that open platform, our customers can now add workloads. They have options to choose the workloads that they want to run on that open source platform. As they choose those workloads, they can be confident that those workloads have been certified and validated on our platform because we have a very robust ecosystem of ISVs that have already completed that process with open source, with Red Hat OpenShift. So then we take the Red Hat OpenShift and we put it on the Dell platform, which is market leader platform, right? Combine those two things, the customers can be confident that they can put those workloads on the combined platform that we're offering and that those workloads would run. So again, it goes back to making it simpler, making it easy to procure, easy to run workloads, easy to deploy, easy to operate. And all of that of course equates to saving time always equates to saving money. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Oh, I thought you wanted to continue. >> No, I think Honore sort of, she nailed it. You know, Red Hat is so dominant in 5G, and what they're doing in the market, especially in the Core and where we're going into the RAN, you know, next steps are to validate those workloads, those workload vendors on top of a stack. And the Red Hat leader in the Core is key, right? It's instant credibility in the core market. And so that's one of the reasons why we, Dell, want to partner with with Red Hat for the core market and beyond. We're going to be looking at not only Core but moving into RAN very soon. But then we do, we take that validated workload on top of that to optimize that workload and then be able to instantiate that in the core and the RAN. It's just a really streamlined, good experience for our operators. At the end of the day, we want happy customers in between our mutual customer base. And that's what you get whenever you do that combined stack together. >> Were operators, any operators, and you don't have to mention them by name, involved in the evolution of the infra blocks? I'm just curious how involved they were in helping to co-develop this. I imagine they were to some degree. >> Yeah, I could take that one. So, in doing so, yeah, we can't be myopic and just assume that we nailed it the first time, right? So yeah, we do work with partners all the way up and down the stack. A lot of our engineering work with Red Hat also brings in customer experience that is key to ensure that you're building and designing the right architecture for the Core. I would like to use the names, I don't know if I should, but a lot of those names are big names that are leaders in our industry. But yeah, their footprints, their fingerprints are all over those design best practices, those architectural designs that we build together. And then we further that by doing those validated workloads on top of that. So just to really prove the point that it's optimized for the Core, RAN, Edge kind of workload. >> And it's a huge added value for Red Hat to have a partner like Dell who can take all of those components, take the workload, take the Red Hat software, put it on the platform, and deliver that out to the customers. That's really, you know, a key part of the partnership and the value of the partnership because nobody really does that better than Dell. That center of excellence around delivery and support. >> Can you share any feedback from any of those nameless operators in terms of... I'm even kind of wondering what the catalyst was for the infra block. Was it operators saying, "Ah, we have these challenges here"? Was it the evolution of the Telco stack and Dell said, "We can come in with Red Hat and solve this problem"? And what's been some of their feedback? >> Yeah, it really comes down to what Honore said about, okay, you know, when we are looking at day zero, which is primarily your design, how much time savings can we do by creating that stack for them, right? We have industry experts designing that Core stack that's optimized for different levels of spectrum. When we do that we save a lot of time in terms of FTE hours for our architects, our operators, and then it goes into day one, right? Which is the deployment aspect for saving tons of hours for our operators by being able to deploy this. Speed to market is key. That ultimately ends up in, you know, faster time to revenue for our customers, right? So it's, when they see that we've already done the pre-work that they don't have to, that's what really resonates for them in terms of that, yeah. >> Honore, Lisa and I happen to be veterans of the Cloud native space, and what we heard from a lot of the folks in that ecosystem is that there is a massive hunger for developers to be able to deploy and manage and orchestrate environments that consist of Cloud native application infrastructure, microservices. >> Right. >> What we've heard here is that 5G equals Cloud native application stacks. Is that a fair assessment of the environment? And what are you seeing from a supply and demand for that kind of labor perspective? Is there still a hunger for those folks who develop in that space? >> Well, there is, because the very nature of an open source, Kubernetes-based container platform, which is what OpenShift is, the very nature of it is to open up that code so that developers can have access to the code to develop the workloads to the platform, right? And so, again, the combination of bringing together the Dell infrastructure with the Red Hat software, it doesn't change anything. The developer, the development community still has access to that same container platform to develop to, you know, Cloud native types of application. And you know, OpenShift is Red Hat's hybrid Cloud platform. So it runs on-prem, it runs in the public Cloud, it runs at the edge, it runs at the far edge. So any of the development community that's trying to develop Cloud native applications can develop it on this platform as they would if they were developing on an OpenShift platform in the public Cloud. >> So in "The Graduate", the advice to the graduate was, "Plastics." Plastics. As someone who has more children than I can remember, I forget how many kids I have. >> Four. >> That's right, I have four. That's right. (laughing) Three in college and grad school already at this point. Cloud native, I don't know. Kubernetes definitely a field that's going to, it's got some legs? >> Yes. >> Okay. So I can get 'em off my payroll quickly. >> Honore: Yes, yes. (laughing) >> Okay, good to know. Good to know. Any thoughts on that open Cloud native world? >> You know, there's so many changes that's going to happen in Kubernetes and services that you got to be able to update quickly. CICD, obviously the topic is huge. How quickly can we keep these systems up to date with new releases, changes? That's a great thing about an engineered system is that we do provide that lifecycle management for three to five years through this engagement with our customers. So we're constantly keeping them up with the latest and the greatest. >> David: Well do those customers have that expertise in-house, though? Do they have that now? Or is this a seismic cultural shift in those environments? >> Well, you know, they do have a lot of that experience, but it takes a lot of that time, and we're taking that off of their plate and putting that within us on our system, within our engineered system, and doing that automatically for them. And so they don't have to check in and try to understand what the release certification matrix is. Every quarter we're providing that to them. We're communicating out to the operator, telling them what's coming up latest and greatest, not only in terms of the software but the hardware and how to optimize it all together. That's the beauty of these systems. These are five year relationships with our operators that we're providing that lifecycle management end to end, for years to come. >> Lisa: So last question. You talked about joint GTM availability. When can operators get their hands on this? >> Yes. Yes. It's currently slated for early September release. >> Lisa: Awesome. So sometime this year? >> Yes. >> Well guys, thank you so much for talking with us today about Dell, Red Hat, what you're doing to really help evolve the telecom stack. We appreciate it. Next time come back with a customer, we can dig into it. That'd be fun. >> We sure will, absolutely. That may happen today actually, a little bit later. Not to let the cat out the bag, but good news. >> All right, well, geez, you're going to want to stick around. Thank you so much for your time. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. This is Lisa Martin of theCUBE at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. We'll be back after a short break. (calm music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music intro) (logo background tingles) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to day three of MWC23, my name is Dave Vellante and we're here live at the Theater of Barcelona, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson, John Furrier's in our studio in Palo Alto. Lot of buzz at the show, the Mobile World Daily Today, front page, Netflix chief hits back in fair share row, Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, talking about how, "Hey, you guys want to tax us, the telcos want to tax us, well, maybe you should help us pay for some of the content. Your margins are higher, you have a monopoly, you know, we're delivering all this value, you're bundling Netflix in, from a lot of ISPs so hold on, you know, pump the brakes on that tax," so that's the big news. Lockheed Martin, FOSS issues, AI guidelines, says, "AI's not going to take over your job anytime soon." Although I would say, your job's going to be AI-powered for the next five years. We're going to talk about data, we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco stack, part of that stack is a data layer. John Kreisa is here, the CMO of Couchbase, John, you know, we've talked about all week, the disaggregation of the telco stacks, they got, you know, Silicon and operating systems that are, you know, real time OS, highly reliable, you know, compute infrastructure all the way up through a telemetry stack, et cetera. And that's a proprietary block that's really exploding, it's like the big bang, like we saw in the enterprise 20 years ago and we haven't had much discussion about that data layer, sort of that horizontal data layer, that's the market you play in. You know, Couchbase obviously has a lot of telco customers- >> John: That's right. >> We've seen, you know, Snowflake and others launch telco businesses. What are you seeing when you talk to customers at the show? What are they doing with that data layer? >> Yeah, so they're building applications to drive and power unique experiences for their users, but of course, it all starts with where the data is. So they're building mobile applications where they're stretching it out to the edge and you have to move the data to the edge, you have to have that capability to deliver that highly interactive experience to their customers or for their own internal use cases out to that edge, so seeing a lot of that with Couchbase and with our customers in telco. >> So what do the telcos want to do with data? I mean, they've got the telemetry data- >> John: Yeah. >> Now they frequently complain about the over-the-top providers that have used that data, again like Netflix, to identify customer demand for content and they're mopping that up in a big way, you know, certainly Amazon and shopping Google and ads, you know, they're all using that network. But what do the telcos do today and what do they want to do in the future? They're all talking about monetization, how do they monetize that data? >> Yeah, well, by taking that data, there's insight to be had, right? So by usage patterns and what's happening, just as you said, so they can deliver a better experience. It's all about getting that edge, if you will, on their competition and so taking that data, using it in a smart way, gives them that edge to deliver a better service and then grow their business. >> We're seeing a lot of action at the edge and, you know, the edge can be a Home Depot or a Lowe's store, but it also could be the far edge, could be a, you know, an oil drilling, an oil rig, it could be a racetrack, you know, certainly hospitals and certain, you know, situations. So let's think about that edge, where there's maybe not a lot of connectivity, there might be private networks going in, in the future- >> John: That's right. >> Private 5G networks. What's the data flow look like there? Do you guys have any customers doing those types of use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what are they doing with the data? >> Yeah, absolutely, we've got customers all across, so telco and transportation, all kinds of service delivery and healthcare, for example, we've got customers who are delivering healthcare out at the edge where they have a remote location, they're able to deliver healthcare, but as you said, there's not always connectivity, so they need to have the applications, need to continue to run and then sync back once they have that connectivity. So it's really having the ability to deliver a service, reliably and then know that that will be synced back to some central server when they have connectivity- >> So the processing might occur where the data- >> Compute at the edge. >> How do you sync back? What is that technology? >> Yeah, so there's, so within, so Couchbase and Couchbase's case, we have an autonomous sync capability that brings it back to the cloud once they get back to whether it's a private network that they want to run over, or if they're doing it over a public, you know, wifi network, once it determines that there's connectivity and, it can be peer-to-peer sync, so different edge apps communicating with each other and then ultimately communicating back to a central server. >> I mean, the other theme here, of course, I call it the software-defined telco, right? But you got to have, you got to run on something, got to have hardware. So you see companies like AWS putting Outposts, out to the edge, Outposts, you know, doesn't really run a lot of database to mind, I mean, it runs RDS, you know, maybe they're going to eventually work with companies like... I mean, you're a partner of AWS- >> John: We are. >> Right? So do you see that kind of cloud infrastructure that's moving to the edge? Do you see that as an opportunity for companies like Couchbase? >> Yeah, we do. We see customers wanting to push more and more of that compute out to the edge and so partnering with AWS gives us that opportunity and we are certified on Outpost and- >> Oh, you are? >> We are, yeah. >> Okay. >> Absolutely. >> When did that, go down? >> That was last year, but probably early last year- >> So I can run Couchbase at the edge, on Outpost? >> Yeah, that's right. >> I mean, you know, Outpost adoption has been slow, we've reported on that, but are you seeing any traction there? Are you seeing any nibbles? >> Starting to see some interest, yeah, absolutely. And again, it has to be for the right use case, but again, for service delivery, things like healthcare and in transportation, you know, they're starting to see where they want to have that compute, be very close to where the actions happen. >> And you can run on, in the data center, right? >> That's right. >> You can run in the cloud, you know, you see HPE with GreenLake, you see Dell with Apex, that's essentially their Outposts. >> Yeah. >> They're saying, "Hey, we're going to take our whole infrastructure and make it as a service." >> Yeah, yeah. >> Right? And so you can participate in those environments- >> We do. >> And then so you've got now, you know, we call it supercloud, you've got the on-prem, you've got the, you can run in the public cloud, you can run at the edge and you want that consistent experience- >> That's right. >> You know, from a data layer- >> That's right. >> So is that really the strategy for a data company is taking or should be taking, that horizontal layer across all those use cases? >> You do need to think holistically about it, because you need to be able to deliver as a, you know, as a provider, wherever the customer wants to be able to consume that application. So you do have to think about any of the public clouds or private networks and all the way to the edge. >> What's different John, about the telco business versus the traditional enterprise? >> Well, I mean, there's scale, I mean, one thing they're dealing with, particularly for end user-facing apps, you're dealing at a very very high scale and the expectation that you're going to deliver a very interactive experience. So I'd say one thing in particular that we are focusing on, is making sure we deliver that highly interactive experience but it's the scale of the number of users and customers that they have, and the expectation that your application's always going to work. >> Speaking of applications, I mean, it seems like that's where the innovation is going to come from. We saw yesterday, GSMA announced, I think eight APIs telco APIs, you know, we were talking on theCUBE, one of the analysts was like, "Eight, that's nothing," you know, "What do these guys know about developers?" But you know, as Daniel Royston said, "Eight's better than zero." >> Right? >> So okay, so we're starting there, but the point being, it's all about the apps, that's where the innovation's going to come from- >> That's right. >> So what are you seeing there, in terms of building on top of the data app? >> Right, well you have to provide, I mean, have to provide the APIs and the access because it is really, the rubber meets the road, with the developers and giving them the ability to create those really rich applications where they want and create the experiences and innovate and change the way that they're giving those experiences. >> Yeah, so what's your relationship with developers at Couchbase? >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, talk about that a little bit- >> Yeah, yeah, so we have a great relationship with developers, something we've been investing more and more in, in terms of things like developer relations teams and community, Couchbase started in open source, continue to be based on open source projects and of course, those are very developer centric. So we provide all the consistent APIs for developers to create those applications, whether it's something on Couchbase Lite, which is our kind of edge-based database, or how they can sync that data back and we actually automate a lot of that syncing which is a very difficult developer task which lends them to one of the developer- >> What I'm trying to figure out is, what's the telco developer look like? Is that a developer that comes from the enterprise and somebody comes from the blockchain world, or AI or, you know, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of developer talk here, but there's a huge opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, you know, I feel like, the telcos kind of remind me of, you know, a traditional legacy company trying to get into the developer world, you know, even Oracle, okay, they bought Sun, they got Java, so I guess they have developers, but you know, IBM for years tried with Bluemix, they had to end up buying Red Hat, really, and that gave them the developer community. >> Yep. >> EMC used to have a thing called EMC Code, which was a, you know, good effort, but eh. And then, you know, VMware always trying to do that, but, so as you move up the stack obviously, you have greater developer affinity. Where do you think the telco developer's going to come from? How's that going to evolve? >> Yeah, it's interesting, and I think they're... To kind of get to your first question, I think they're fairly traditional enterprise developers and when we break that down, we look at it in terms of what the developer persona is, are they a front-end developer? Like they're writing that front-end app, they don't care so much about the infrastructure behind or are they a full stack developer and they're really involved in the entire application development lifecycle? Or are they living at the backend and they're really wanting to just focus in on that data layer? So we lend towards all of those different personas and we think about them in terms of the APIs that we create, so that's really what the developers are for telcos is, there's a combination of those front-end and full stack developers and so for them to continue to innovate they need to appeal to those developers and that's technology, like Couchbase, is what helps them do that. >> Yeah and you think about the Apples, you know, the app store model or Apple sort of says, "Okay, here's a developer kit, go create." >> John: Yeah. >> "And then if it's successful, you're going to be successful and we're going to take a vig," okay, good model. >> John: Yeah. >> I think I'm hearing, and maybe I misunderstood this, but I think it was the CEO or chairman of Ericsson on the day one keynotes, was saying, "We are going to monetize the, essentially the telemetry data, you know, through APIs, we're going to charge for that," you know, maybe that's not the best approach, I don't know, I think there's got to be some innovation on top. >> John: Yeah. >> Now maybe some of these greenfield telcos are going to do like, you take like a dish networks, what they're doing, they're really trying to drive development layers. So I think it's like this wild west open, you know, community that's got to be formed and right now it's very unclear to me, do you have any insights there? >> I think it is more, like you said, Wild West, I think there's no emerging standard per se for across those different company types and sort of different pieces of the industry. So consequently, it does need to form some more standards in order to really help it grow and I think you're right, you have to have the right APIs and the right access in order to properly monetize, you have to attract those developers or you're not going to be able to monetize properly. >> Do you think that if, in thinking about your business and you know, you've always sold to telcos, but now it's like there's this transformation going on in telcos, will that become an increasingly larger piece of your business or maybe even a more important piece of your business? Or it's kind of be steady state because it's such a slow moving industry? >> No, it is a big and increasing piece of our business, I think telcos like other enterprises, want to continue to innovate and so they look to, you know, technologies like, Couchbase document database that allows them to have more flexibility and deliver the speed that they need to deliver those kinds of applications. So we see a lot of migration off of traditional legacy infrastructure in order to build that new age interface and new age experience that they want to deliver. >> A lot of buzz in Silicon Valley about open AI and Chat GPT- >> Yeah. >> You know, what's your take on all that? >> Yeah, we're looking at it, I think it's exciting technology, I think there's a lot of applications that are kind of, a little, sort of innovate traditional interfaces, so for example, you can train Chat GPT to create code, sample code for Couchbase, right? You can go and get it to give you that sample app which gets you a headstart or you can actually get it to do a better job of, you know, sorting through your documentation, like Chat GPT can do a better job of helping you get access. So it improves the experience overall for developers, so we're excited about, you know, what the prospect of that is. >> So you're playing around with it, like everybody is- >> Yeah. >> And potentially- >> Looking at use cases- >> Ways tO integrate, yeah. >> Hundred percent. >> So are we. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always great to see you, my friend. >> Great, thanks very much. >> All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, theCUBE will be back live from Barcelona at the theater. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of MWC23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, theCUBE.net is where all the videos are, keep it right there. (cheerful upbeat music outro)

>> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the Theater Live and MWC 23. You're watching theCUBE's Continuous Coverage. This is day two. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also in the house. John Furrier out of our Palo Alto studio covering all the news. Check out silicon angle.com. Okay, we're going to dig into the core infrastructure here. We're going to talk a little bit about servers. Manya Rastogi is here. She's in technical marketing at Dell Technologies. And Abdel Bagegni is technical program manager at the Telecom Infra Project. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Abdel, what is the Telecom Infras Project? Explain to our audience. >> Yeah. So the Telecom Infra Project is a US based non-profit organization community that brings together different participants, suppliers, vendors, operators SI's together to accelerate the adoption of open RAN and open interface solutions across the globe. >> Okay. So that's the mission is open RAN adoption. And then how, when was it formed? Give us the background and some of the, some of the milestones so far. >> Yeah. So the telecom infra project was established five years ago from different vendor leaders and operators across the globe. And then the mission was to bring different players in to work together to accelerate the adoption of, of open RAN. Now open RAN has a lot of potential and opportunities, but in the same time there's challenges that we work together as a community to facilitate those challenges and overcome those barriers. >> And we've been covering all week just the disaggregation of the network. And you know, we've seen this movie sort of before playing out now in, in telecom. And Manya, this is obviously a compute intensive environment. We were at the Dell booth earlier this morning poking around, beautiful booth, lots of servers. Tell us what your angle is here in this marketplace. >> Yeah, so I would just like to say that Dell is kind of leading or accelerating the innovation at the telecom edge with all these ruggedized servers that we are offering. So just continuing the mission, like Abdel just mentioned for the open RAN, that's where a lot of focus will be from these servers will be, so XR 8000, it's it's going to be one of the star servers for telecom with, you know, offering various workloads. So it can be rerun, open run, multi access, edge compute. And it has all these different features with itself and the, if we, we can talk more about the performance gains, how it is based on the Intel CPUs and just try to solve the purpose like along with various vendors, the whole ecosystem solve this challenge for the open RAN. >> So Manya mentioned some of those infrastructure parts. Does and do, do you say TIP or T-I-P for short? >> Abdel: We say TIP. >> TIP. >> Abdel: T-I-P is fine as well. >> Does, does, does TIP or T-I-P have a certification process or a, or a set of guidelines that someone like Dell would either adhere to or follow to be sort of TIP certified? What does that look like? >> Yeah, of course. So what TIP does is TIP accredits what solutions that actually work in a real commercial grade environment. So what we do is we bring the different players together to come up with the most efficient optimized solution. And then it goes through a process that the community sets the, the, the criteria for and accepts. And then once this is accredited it goes into TIP exchange for other operators and the participants and the industry to adopt. So it's a well structured process and it's everything about how we orchestrate the industry to come together and set those requirements and and guidelines. Everything starts with a use case from the beginning. It's based on operators requirements, use cases and then those use cases will be translated into a solution that the industry will approve. >> So when you say operator, I can think of that sort of traditionally as the customer side of things versus the vendor side of things. Typically when organizations get together like TIP, the operator customer side is seeking a couple of things. They want perfect substitutes in all categories so that they could grind vendors down from a price perspective but they also want amazing innovation. How do you, how do you deliver both? >> Yeah, I mean that's an excellent question. We be pragmatic and we bring all players in one table to discuss. MNO's want this, vendors can provide a certain level and we bring them together and they discuss and come up with something that can be deployed today and future proof for the future. >> So I've been an enterprise technology observer for a long time and, you know, I saw the, the attempt to take network function virtualization which never really made much of an impact, but it was a it was the beginning of the enterprise players really getting into this market. And then I would see companies, whether it was Dell or HPE or Cisco, they'd take an X 86 server, put a cool name on it, edge something, and throw it over the fence and that didn't work so well. Now it's like, Manya. We're starting to get serious. You're building relationships. >> Manya: Totally. >> I mentioned we were at the Dell booth you're actually building purpose built systems now for this, this segment. Tell us what's different about this market and the products that you're developing for this market than say the commercial enterprise. >> So you are absolutely right, like, you know, kind of thinking about the journey, there has been a lot of, it has been going for a long time for all these improvements and towards going more open disaggregated and overall that kind of environment and what Dell brings together with our various partners and particularly if you talk about Intel. So these servers are powered by the players four gen intel beyond processors. And so what Intel is doing right now is providing us with great accelerators like vRAN Boost. So it increases performance like doubles what it was able to do before. And power efficiency, it has been an issue for a long, long time and it still continues but there is some improvement. For example 20% reduction overall with the power savings. So that's a step forward in that direction. And then we have done some of our like own testing as well with these servers and continuing that, you know it's not just telecom but also going towards Edge or inferencing like all these comes together not just X 30,000 but for example XR 56 10, 70, 76 20. So these are three servers which combines together to like form telecom and Edge and covers altogether. So that's what it is. >> Great, thank you. So Abdel, I mean I think generally people agree that in the fullness of time all radio access networks are going to be open, right? It's just a matter of okay, how do we get there? How do we make sure that it has the same, you know, quality of service characteristics. So where are we on on that, that journey from your perspective? And, and maybe you could project what, what it's going to look like over this decade. 'Cause it's going to take, you know, years. >> It's going to take a bit of time to mature and be a kind of a plug and play different units together. I think there was a lot, there was a, was a bit of over-promising in a few, in the last few years on the acceleration of open RAN deployment. That, well, a TIP is trying to do is trying to realize the pragmatic approach of the open run deployment. Now we know the innovation cannot happen when you have a kind of closed interfaces when you allow small players to be within the market and bring the value to, to the RAN areas. This is where the innovation happens. I think what would happen on the RAN side of things is that it would be driven by use cases and the operators. And the minute that the operators are no longer can depend on the closed interface vendors because there's use cases that fulfill that are requires some open RAN functionality, be the, the rig or the SMO layers and the different configurations of the rUSE getting the servers to the due side of things. This kind of modular scalability on this layer is when the RAN will, the Open RAN, would boost. This would happen probably, yeah. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, it would happen in, in the next few years. Not next year or the year after but definitely something within the four to five years from now. >> I think it does feel like it's a second half of the decade and you feel like the, the the RAN intelligent controller is going to be a catalyst to actually sort of force the world into this open environment. >> Let's say that the Rick and the promises that were given to, to the sun 10 years ago, the Rick is realizing it and the closed RAN vendors are developing a lot on the Rick side more than the other parts of the, of the open RAN. So it will be a catalyst that would drive the innovation of open RAN, but only time will tell. >> And there are some naysayers, I mean I've seen some you know, very, very few, but I've seen some works that, oh the economics aren't there. It'll, it'll never get there. What, what do you, what do you say to that? That, that it won't ever, open RAN won't ever be as cost effective as you know, closed networks. >> Open RAN will open innovations that small players would have the opportunity to contribute to the, to the RAN space. This opportunity is not given to small players today. Open RAN provides this kind of opportunity and given that it's a path for innovation, then I would say that, you know, different perspectives some people are making sure that, you know the status quo is the way forward. But it would certainly put barriers on on innovation and this is not the way forward. >> Yeah. You can't protect the past in the future. My own personal opinion is, is that it doesn't have to be comparable from a, from a TCO perspective it can be close enough. It's the innovative, same thing with like you watch the, the, the adoption of Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like cloud was more expensive it's always more expensive to rent, but people seem to be doing public Cloud, you know, because of the the innovation capabilities and the developer capabilities. Is that a fair analogy in this space, do you think? >> I mean this is what all technologies happens. >> Yeah. >> Right? It starts with a quite costly and then the the cost will start dropping down. I mean the, the cost of, of a megabyte two decades ago is probably higher than what it costly terabyte. So this is how technology evolves and it's any kind of comparison, either copper or even the old generation, the legacy generations could be a, a valid comparison. However, they need to be at a market demand for something like that. And I think the use cases today with what the industry is is looking for have that kind of opportunity to pull this kind of demand. But, but again, it needs to go work close by the what happens in the technology space, be it, you know we always talk about when we, we used to talk about 5G, there was a lot of hypes going on there. But I think once it realized in, in a pragmatic, in a in a real life situation, the minutes that governments decide to go for autonomous vehicles, then you would have limitations on the current closed RAN infrastructures and you would definitely need something to to top it up on the- >> I mean, 5G needs open RAN, I mean that's, you know not going to happen without it. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, yeah. But, but what is, but what would you say the most significant friction is between here and the open RAN nirvana? What are, what are the real hurdles that need to be overcome? There's obviously just the, I don't want to change we've been doing this the same way forever, but what what are the, what are the real, the legitimate concerns that people have when we start talking about open RAN? >> So I think from a technology perspective it will be solved. All of the tech, I mean there's smart engineers in the world today that will fix, you know these kind of problems and all of the interability, interruptability issues and, and all of that. I think it's about the mindset, the, the interfaces between the legacy core and RAN has been became more fluid today. We don't have that kind of a hard line between these kind of different aspects. We have the, the MEC coming closer to the RAN, we have the RAN coming closer to the Core, and we have the service based architectures in the Core. So these kind of things make it needs a paradigm shift between how operators that would need to tackle the open RAN space. >> Are there specific deployment requirements for open RAN that you can speak to from your perspective? >> For sure and going in this direction, like, you know evolution with the technology and how different players are coming together. Like that's something I wanted to comment from the previous question. And that's where like, you know these servers that Dell is offering right now. Specific functionality requirements, for example, it's it's a small server, it's short depth just 430 millimeters of depth and it can fit anywhere. So things like small form factor, it's it's crucial because if you, it can replace like multiple servers 10 years ago with just one server and you can place it like near a base band unit or to a cell site on top of a roof wherever. Like, you know, if it's a small company and you need this kind of 5G connection it kind of solves that challenge with this server. And then there are various things like, you know increasing thermals for example temperatures. It is classified like, you know kind of compliant with the negative 5 to 55 degree Celsius. And then we are also moving towards, for example negative 20 to 65 degree Celsius. Which is, which is kind of great because in situations where, which are out of our hands and you need specific thermals for those situations that's where it can solve that problem. >> Are those, are those statistics in those measurements different than the old NEB's standards, network equipment building standards? Or are they, are they in line with that? >> It is, it is a next step. Like so most of our servers that we have right now are negative five to five degree Celsius, for especially the extremely rugged server series and this one XR 8,000 which is focused for the, it's telecom inspired so it's focused on those customers. So we are trying to come up like go a step ahead and also like offering this additional temperatures testing and yeah compliance. So, so it is. >> Awesome. So we, I said we were at the booth early today. Looks like some good traffic people poking around at different, you know, innovations you got going. Some of the private network stuff is kind of cool. I'm like how much does that cost? I think I might like one of those, you know, but- >> [Private 5G home network. >> Right? Why not? Guys, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. For Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin this is Dave Vellante, theCUBE's coverage. MWC 23 live from the Fida in Barcelona. We'll be right back. (outro music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is "theCUBE' conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to 'theCUBE' I'm excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. >> So data protection in the news, what's going on? >> Yeah you know, it's been a busy year. We had obviously our power protect DD appliance launched last year and then this year, we've have announcements on the software side. We had announcements at the VMworld some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect PP series appliances, the new integrated appliances. And it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DD,xx the next generation of data domain, and we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protecting software in a single converge, all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the back of appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the targeted market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, and it's not that dissimilar to actually our DD series from last year which is there's in four models in the new DP series. There's a 4,400 which is actually now taking the PowerProtect brand and putting that on the existing DP 4,400 and then three new appliances: the 5,900, the 8,400 and then the 8,900. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency. We've got new hardware, assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery, in fact you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity, 65 to one theater application, which is just incredible and 60,000 IOPS for instant access. So really ups the game, both in performance and an efficiency. >> Those are big numbers, you mentioned the DD launch last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now. What's the significance of the DP series? >> And that this is exciting for us because it does a couple things. It expands our PowerProtect appliance family with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. On the software side, PowerProtect data manager, which we've enhancing and continuing to talk about all year also has some new improvements. The ability deploy it in Azure, in AWS GovCloud for in-cloud protection. The enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about, not that long ago at VMworld about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes right And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marketing of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect data manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one-stop shop for all of your data protection needs no matter where the data lives, no matter what SLA, whether it's a physical, virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated, you've all bought them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent. All right. Last question for you, Caitlin we know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, it's cloud VMware and Cyber Recovery. Anything else you want to add here? Yeah, I'll pick up, especially on that last one, we talke%d a little bit about the enhancements we've done with cloud in cloud data protection, longterm recovery, disaster recovery, as well as what we've done on the VMware front, really important that we continue to have that automation at simplicity with VM-ware but cyber resiliency, cyber recovery ransomware has really risen to the top of the list. Unfortunately for many organizations and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offer in market for a couple of years, with the exciting new enhancement here. It is the first cyber recovery solution and endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. So it is the first Cyber Recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect data, PowerProtect, if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news, Caitlin. Thanks for sharing what's new congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> For Cait%lin Gordon I'm Lisa Martin. You're watch%ing 'theCUBE'. (calm music)

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite here in the sunshine state. I'm your host, Rebecca, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Theresa Miller. She is the principal technologist technology advocacy group at Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So you are an an it veteran and a Microsoft MVP MVP. Uh, you're here to talk about some of the integrated solutions with Microsoft at Cohesity. But this conference is really all about community and I'd love to have you riff a little bit on what it means to be part of this community, to be such a key player and to be partnered with Mark, Microsoft and how you all come together here. Right. So outside of Cohesity, being part of the MVP program is really a pretty spectacular thing. Um, it does take a lot of work and commitment to it. >>Um, I always tell people to pace themselves if they're going to try to, uh, work toward, um, a Microsoft MVP. But it really is about, um, helping others, teaching others and being involved. Um, now from the Cohesity side, I do see a lot of benefits to both. Um, one kinda supports the other and vice versa. Cohesity's doing a lot of really spectacular things in the Microsoft space as a partner. Um, specifically it really, um, is a nice relationship. Um, we have a lot of products that support like Azure stack. We just announced this week for example. Um, we're in the office three 65 space protecting data there and, um, traditional Azure backflow, uh, backups as well. >>Yeah. So Theresa, I, I'd love if you could bring us inside the community a bit more. So, you know, this show has been around for decades, wasn't called ignite back in the day. It was tech ed. Uh, but you know, one of the things that was highlighted in the keynote is community and the future of jobs in the citizen developer. Uh, and moving people from, you know, they might've been four, been, you know, configuring their, a server to run email in their office. And today I'll office three 65 takes care of a lot of that. So bring us through as to how the community's helping. Introducing new people as well as the people that have been here for a while. Helping them learn new skills and uh, be ready for the, the, you know, cloud, AI, you know, world that we live in today. >>Yeah. The community around office three 65 is pretty amazing. I get to network and be involved with some pretty spectacular people in that space. Um, there are some podcasts that people can definitely check out. There's always new writing that happens that covers the various angles of what people need to learn to make sure they're successful. And, um, you know, it, it really is pretty tight knit group, um, to be a part of. There've been so many new product announcements and new developments that they're being announced here. What are you most interested in? What are you most excited about in terms of getting it in front of your customers? So from the Cohesity side, there's two different angles that I'm really interested in getting in front of the customers. Um, one being the office three 65 piece exchange online and one drive specifically and how data protection can get them to that next level. I'm also, uh, very excited to talk to companies about, um, a tool we have called cloud spin that will help them take advantage of 2008 servers end of life. They can, um, Microsoft has a nice program that will allow customers to stick with their 2008 servers if they go to the cloud and we can help them get there, um, as well as protecting their Azure workloads. >>Yeah. Up to Theresa, bring us inside the, the customers today we all talk about cloud journeys and what they're doing. Uh, what's going well, uh, you know, what, what, what are some of the challenges that they have day to day and, uh, the, the type of activities that they do at a show like here, uh, to, to help further their businesses. >>Yeah. Enterprises, I think the long term is going to be hybrid. Everybody's going to be maintaining some level of on-prem as well as cloud. And so with that in mind, you really need, um, I'm gonna put my Cohesity hat back on here. You really do need a solution that can support you in both areas, from a single location. Um, if you try to piece it together, you're, you're not going to have a single solution to manage everything. You're going to have kind of a confusing a mess at the end of the day. So having a single solution to help support that hybrid journey is a big deal. >>Yeah, no, I think you bring up a great point as a, you know, customers went when they move to SAS, when they moved to public cloud, you know, data protection security are even more important than they were when I had it in the four walls of my, my data center. Uh, so having a solution that can span those environments, uh, and companies like Cohesity are doing that. We're actually, uh, in, in our analysis this morning, we talked about Microsoft in many ways, uh, in the announcements that they're making this week, uh, is putting out their vision for how they think it should be. Uh, and uh, well Microsoft has positions in all of the, all of the environments that we know that there's work that we all need to do to make that hybrid environment of today and tomorrow even better. >>One other thing I'd like to add to that is I think a lot of enterprises assume when they go to the cloud that their data is just protected. And so I like to really call out the differentiation between what, what a cloud provider like Microsoft offers and your corporate data. At the end of the day, your corporate data is your corporate data. If you're attacked by ransomware, if there's not a backup of some form or a copy of that data, then you may not ever be able to recover it. And so, um, cloud companies like Microsoft are really great at making sure you have disaster recovery and high availability. Um, companies like Cohesity help with the backup, the point in time backup that protects your data for the long run. I mean, what you just described with companies not even realizing, just assuming that once they're in the cloud, everything is safe and secure. >>Is, would you describe companies as naive to, to what the cloud can offer? I mean, how would you, how, how are companies thinking about this and approaching this particularly when it becomes, when it comes to those, those disasters? Right. I certainly don't think companies are naive. I think we don't know what we don't know. Right. And I think sometimes too, like I've talked to even enterprise peers, people that I've, I've worked with in the past that you think you have the most secure system ever and stuff just happens. Things happen. And so backup and recovery in an ad in a way becomes an insurance policy. Even you'll, you may not ever need it, but if you do, you'll be glad you had it. >>Teresa, one of the things that socked into Dell spent a lot of time this morning talking about was trust. So talk a little bit about the relationship customers have with Microsoft. You know, Microsoft is in a great resurgence, uh, under Satya Nadella, uh, went from a company that most of us didn't spend much time talking to, uh, to now. Microsoft is once again a front and center for, for the people that have been, you know, in the trenches working with that D did they have a different relationship with Microsoft today to, does the word trust resonate with you and your peers when they think about Microsoft? >>It absolutely does resonate. Things have changed a lot since Satya has, has stepped in. I absolutely do trust what they're doing and I think a lot of companies do, uh, where they're growing pains as part of that process. Absolutely. Did it take time? Absolutely. But yes, I do see a lot of enterprise customers trusting what Microsoft is doing and what does that mean? I mean, what, so what, so how does that manifest itself at a time where there is deep distrust and skepticism toward a lot of big technology companies? How do you think that that that trust is, is, is enabling Microsoft to go from strength to strength? I find them to be a very transparent company. I think when they're, there have been issues in the past, they've always been very forthcoming about it and transparency does go a long way for the customer. Plus, I've seen a lot of stability out of the products, um, and a lot of enhancements and improvements across the board that also, um, create that trust that companies want. >>Theresa, you're going be doing some speaking this week for people that don't have the chance to, to see it in person. It gives a little taste of what a, you'll be sharing with everyone at the show here. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I have three theater sessions this week, one of which we'll cover it burnout. I brought in a panel of some Microsoft MVPs from around the world. I wanted that global perspective and we're going to really kind of hammer through what people are facing, but also how they can avoid burnout. So that's one of them. The second one that I'm doing is a Cohesity sponsored session, but I actually take on a subject matter expert approach in that session where I talk about backup and recovery from an office three 65 and Azure perspective, what Microsoft offers and some of the challenges that I see companies needing to consider if they move forward with those native options. And then I'll talk a little bit about Cohesity in that session where I'll cover more. We may be able to help if, um, some of those challenges are concerning to customers. >>And then the third session that I'm doing is my MVP session on exchange online security where I'll dive into exchange online protection and advanced threat protection. >> So I'd love to talk about the first session because it just sounds so interesting. I mean this is the time and it's extremely tight job market. Everyone's being asked to do more with less. There's a lot of industries that face burnout and stress. What is, what are the special challenges that it industry workers face, would you say? So I'm gonna step back a few years in my career I did go through burnout and I think that for me, and I think this will, will correlate and translate to probably what others feeling burnout are going through is one, I didn't even realize I was burned out when I was burned out. That's one issue. But stepping back when I finally realized it, cause I knew I needed a change, I took the leap, I made a change looking back. >>Um, I didn't take lunch breaks. I didn't take long enough vacations. And how I start my day makes a big difference. I work out every morning, even if it's just a light jog, I'm taking time for me. Every day has really gone a long way, um, to how I feel, which not only benefits me and my quality of life, it benefits my employer as well. So that's kind of my nutshell version of what I'm, what I think some of we'll talk about what are the tools that Microsoft is introducing or reintroducing as Microsoft teams. And it has a lot of those time management, uh, attributes and characteristics to it. Some of the, the email reminders and one if there's one, uh, element that will not, if you want to write an email to a colleague, it will say, wait, let's make sure this person is actually not working right now. >>It's 10 o'clock at night. Why don't we send it the next morning at seven 30. So it's waiting for them when they, they get debt that get in. How, how much do you think Microsoft is thinking about these things? Tech burnout, stress, uh, employee satisfaction in terms of the way they are. They're bringing this humanity to the tools that they're putting out there. So I think the tools say a lot for that already, but you bring it, you bring up a good point. And actually one of the things I've noticed from some of the Microsoft employees, and I haven't quite done it yet, but I'm very tempted to, you'll see in a lot of their email signatures that, you know, even though they have sent that email, maybe they didn't wait til the person's working at seven 30 in the morning, but they understand that everybody has different working hours. It's okay to wait, cause you're right, that can be a stressor too. If you don't know when to disconnect and you're checking email all night long and email could drag you right into work when you're not expecting. So it's a great point. Great. Well Theresa, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a pleasure tapping you on. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, buddy. This is David Lantz. Welcome to this cube. Conversation with Dr Rico is the CMO of infinite out. It's still I still have a hard time saying that doctor or an engineer and I love having you on because we could talk storage. We could go deep and we could talk trends and marketing trends, too. But so welcome. Thanks for coming on my sled. So tell me what's new since the scale to win launch that you guys had. Tell me what you know. Is everything shipping Now What's the uptake been like with customers? And the reaction? Yeah, >> they're the reaction has been phenomenal. This, as you may recall, you were there. It was biggest launch in our history, which was fantastic. And the reaction has just been overwhelmingly positive, with customers with partners with analysts. Human scum cases with competitors is an interesting you know, we had a lot of things that were already shipping. They were an early customer release. There were a few things that we had started shipping in December on the things that we said we'd be coming in three Q. We G eight on time. So there, there now all generally available except the stuff that we talked about that would be available in 2020 which right now looks like it's on track. It's doing very, very well. >> So VM wear VM world eyes coming up later on this month, things are obviously changing. There was announcement recently that that VM wears gonna choir pivotal. So a little bit of financial engineering going on stock stock rose 77% on the day when the Dow dropped 800. So okay, the funny money. But things are changing in the V m where ecosystem you certainly saw we we This is our 10th year the M world. We go back and you hear Tod Nielsen back in the day, talk about for every dollar spent on a V M where lice and 15 was spent a Negro system, you know, we're kinda del izing vm wear now, which is sort of interesting, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing what that all means to you. I mean, still half a million 600,000 customers, you've got to be there you guys have great success at that show. So your thoughts what's going on? But VM world this year? Yeah, I >> kind of kind of loaded their first of all congratulations on the milestone. That's great. 10 years is super. Remember, probably seeing you with the 1st 1 there. Of course we knew each other longer. Uh, you know, and sure I get the incestuous, you know, money changing of hand there, I think I think it's it's good in one respect. You certainly CBM where, you know, making big inroads with VM wear on AWS. And this isn't now with Pivotal will be a good launching platform for Della's well, a svm where to be a little bit more in control of their own destiny. And it's certainly the way a lot of people are going. We're doing a lot of that ourselves. Not so much, in a sense. We don't have a cloud platform that we sell is a total encompassing platform. But of course, with new tricks cloud on big players and then certainly a large portion of our our customer base, our cloud service providers, they love our stuff. It helps them compete. It actually gives them in some respects, a competitive advantage, but VM world itself. Lots going on there. We have amplified our presence once again because VM where does represent a large portion of our customer base? So we're we're very proud of that. We're very proud to be a technology alliance partner of the M wears Andi. We're expecting to see a really good show in a really good cloud. A cloud crowd has they return back to their home base in San Francisco for us this year, it's It's gonna be a different experience. Were tellingme or of the software story, more of the portfolio story more about how you scare scale the win. We have a virtual presence this year, which is going to be very helpful in telling that story. Customers can come in and they can see more than just a ah box that in our world is really not important because it's for us. It's all about the software and stuff we do. We even in Booth Theater, we have some private meeting spaces well, to take people into a bigger, deeper drill down. But the virtual experience will allow them to touch and feel stuff that maybe they didn't get to do before, and that's gonna be kind of exciting as well. >> So you mentioned C S P s. We had Michael Gray thrive on a while back, and you know, he was saying that Look, he likes your product because it allows him to do other things. And don't worry about, you know, the old sort of tuning and managing and ableto re shift labor. I felt like that was an interesting discussion, primarily because you've got all these cloud service providers that everybody thought aws was just gonna kill. And if anything, it's elevated them. What are you seeing in the CSP space? Yeah, you know, >> Michael had a lot of interesting things to say that definitely love the fact that we enable multiple workloads without them having to do lots of cautious planning and re planning and shifting and shuffling. And we are seeing C S P is becoming more value. Add to a lot of businesses, especially the mid market and the smaller enterprise where people may want more than just infrastructure. You know, they don't they need that application level support and companies like thrive in some of our other really good customer, US signal and you know they're all capable of Flex Central's. Another one they're all capable of providing service is beyond the hardware they're capable of providing that application support the guidance and, in the case of Thrive, the cybersecurity guidance especial Really, which is really, really critical. So they're growing, and they're also, by the way, working with eight of us and Google and Azure to provide that capabilities well, when necessary. >> Well, that leads me to the sort of multi cloud discussion in our industry. We tend to have this alphabet soup of acronyms like another reason I like talking to you because we can kind of cut through that. And, you know, I love the marketing. I think marketing helps people understand what's going on differentiate. It gives you an indication of where the industry is going, and multi cloud is one of those things that I mean. I've kind of said it's a symptom of multi vendor and more so than a strategy. But increasingly it seems like it's becoming a strategy with customers, and you just gave an example of thrive working with multiple cloud vendors. Clearly, VM where wants to be in that business. What your thoughts on multi cloud and and hybrid. What does it mean for for infinite at What's your strategy there? You know, it's it's interesting because I >> just read an article the other day about you know, the definition of multi cloud on whether it's being abused and, you know, I I look at it as someone just trying to tell their story and give it. Give it some favor. I think at the end of the day, uh, every business is going to be talking to multiple platforms whether they want to or not. You know, there are many customers and companies out there, businesses who are in our customers who have gone the way of the cloud and repatriated. Certain things is they've they found that it it may work. It may not work, and there are many cloud providers who were trying to do things to accelerate migration of applications because they see that certain applications don't work. You know, we got one of the cloud providers buying Ah, now as provider, another one buying very recently, you know, an envy me based flash company to try to pick up those loose workloads where they might struggle today. But the end of the day everybody's going to be multiple. And whether it's because they're using cloud service is from from a software perspective or whether they just need to basically broker and maintain sort of that that independence so that they can maintain some cost control, availability, control, security, control and in some cases it will remain on premises. And some of things will be off just so they could get the applications closer to their end users. So you know what is multi Cloud? Multi Cloud really is just one of those terms that literally means what it says. It's your business running in multiple places. It doesn't have to necessarily be simultaneously by the same application. >> A big part of your value proposition is the simplicity. We've heard that from your customers, and you guys obviously push that out there. I want to ask you because you mentioned repatriation and you know, Cloud keeps growing like crazy. Sure, and the on prem not so much. You guys are smaller company. You're growing your stealing share, So yep. So maybe is that simplicity thing. Here's my question. So it's around automation. The cloud providers, generally an Amazon specifically have have driven automation. They've attacked the IittIe labor problem and they're able to charge for that on Dhe. So my question is, are you seeing that you're able to attack that labor problem in a similar sense and bring forth the value proposition to customers is Look, we can create a cloud like experience on Prem if you want MacLeod. Great. But if you want to stay on Prem, you're gonna get the benefit of being able to shift. Resource is two more strategic things and not have to worry about all this heavy, heavy lifting. You You seeing tangible evidence of that? >> We're seeing significant tangible evidence of that on and, you know, a couple of things. You know, you talk about growth, right? And I think when we did the launch, you know, only a few months ago we were at about 4.6 exabytes of capacity shipped. We just passed 5.1. That's some significant growth in in just a few months. It's like a 33% growth just from the same time last year, which is which is fairly significant. And of course, if you're familiar with the way we talk, you know you have an engineer is the head of marketing. We like to tell the truth. You know, we don't like to mask, do many things and confuse people. We don't like talking about effective storage because effective capacity doesn't really mean much to some people. So that's, you know, this is what we This is what we shipped and it's growing rapidly. And a lot of that is growing, in part because of the significance of the message and in part because of this need to control costs, contain costs and really operate in a more modern way. So get back to your comments about cloud and cloud operation. That's really what people want. People like the consumption model of cloud. They don't always like the cost on hidden costs. So simplifying that, but giving them the flexibility Thio have either an op X or cap ex that allows him to grow and shrink as they move workloads around. Because everybody grows even on Prem is growing. It's just, you know, it's the law of numbers, right? Cloud is growing, absolutely. But on Prem really is growing. And then the other thing I want is they want the operational flexibility. And that's what we talked about in our elastic data fabric. They don't like constantly having to re jigger and re balance workloads. Infinite box by itself. The platform of infinite Box takes away a lot of that mystery and magic, because it it kind of hides all of the complexity of that workload. And it, you know, we take the randomness out of the I o. I think maybe Craig Hibbert mentioned in his video is he was describing in detail how that happens. Remember Michael Gray talking about that as well, you know, So those those things come out in a single infinite box. But even if you said well, I still want to move my workload from, uh, you know this data center to an adjacent data center or perhaps a data center in another facility. Um, excuse me, Another city. So that's closer to the end user. Making that transparent to the applications is critically important. >> Yes, he talked about growth in about 1/2 a PETA bite. Sorry, half an exabyte in just a few months. A couple months? Really Right. That's that's growth. But I want to ask you about petabytes. Petabytes scales. Kind of key of companies that don't do that in a year day, eh? Exactly. So that's a petabytes scale. Is big party of marketing two questions? Why is that relevant? Or is that relevant to VM? Where customers? Why so and then, does it scare some people owe you? Asked a great question. >> It absolutely scared some people. And I know that there are some pundits out their industry pundits who who basically don't agree with our messaging. But this is this is the business problem that we we targeted the solve rate. Um, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they're petabytes scale yet because maybe they're individual applications aren't petabytes scale. But when you add it up, they get there and a lot of our customers are existing. Customers didn't start with infinite at at petabytes scale. They started a couple 100 terabytes, perhaps, but they're petabytes skill now. In fact, over 80% of the customers and systems that we have out there today or above the petty bite. We have customers that are in the tens of petabytes. We have customers that are in the hundreds of petabytes. They grow, they grow rapidly on. Why is that? Well, to two factors. Really. Number one, if you go back to. Probably when I first met you back when I had your hair, at least in quantity, way had way. Were kind of crusting that terabyte mark. Right? Right. And what was the problem? The problem was nobody could figure out how to deal with the performance. Nobody wanted to put that much risk on a single platform, so they couldn't deal with the availability. And they really didn't know how to deal with even the serviceability of that scale. So terabyte was a problem solved No, 25 years ago, and then things were rapidly from there. Now we're at the same juncture, just three orders of magnitude later. Right? >> Well, that's interesting, because, you know, you're right. People didn't want to put all all that capacity under an actuator that cost performance problems. They were concerned about, you know, just availability. And then two things happen so simultaneously, flash comes along. And, you know, you would say was put sort of a Band aid to some of the performance problems. Sure. And you guys came up with, like, this magic sauce to actually use spinning disc and get the same performance or better performance you would argue with flash. And so as a result, you were now able to do a lot Maur with the data, the concerns about that much date under the actuator somewhat attenuated because, I mean, you've got now so much data, you've got to do something that's almost that's flywheel effective. You've got tons of data machine intelligence and a I. Now, coming into the picture, you've got Cloud, which has been this huge tail when for the industry and for data creation in general. And so I see. You know, you see, like the I. D. C numbers and for forecasting growth of data and storage could be low. I mean, the curve could be bending, you know, kind of more than exponentially your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting observation. I think what it really comes down to is our storyline is math is greater than media, all right? And when you when you look at the flash being, you know, the panacea to performance it was just a step in the evolution, right? You go back and and say, spinning disc was the same solution to the performance problem 20 years ago. 25 years ago, even it was 5400 rpm discs and then very rapidly. Servers got faster. The interconnects got a little bit faster. They were still mostly differential. Scuzzy. There was 7200 rpm discs. And I promise you, by the way, that if you're running 5400 rpm desk, you install 7200 rpm. All yours performance problems will go away until the day you install it. And then it was 10,000 rpm discs and I was 15,000 rpm disc, and it still wasn't getting fast enough because, you know, you went to Fibre Channel One Gig Fibre channel and then to Geek Fibre, Channel four, Gig fibre, Channel eight, gig fibre channel. The unified connects got faster. The servers got faster. That was more cash on the servers. Then this thing came along, cuts called solid state disc. Right. And then it was it was SLC single layer cell technology. But don't worry about it's very expensive. Not a problem. You only need 4% of your application, right? Jerry? No, no, I'm sorry. percent. No, I'm sorry. 30%. What the heck? You know, M l c is now a little bit more reliable, so let's just make make it all slash. Right? So that was the end of the story, right? No. Servers continue to get faster. Uh, the media continue to get faster and denser, right? So now the interconnect isn't fast enough, So envy me. Is that the answer to life? The universe and everything? Well, wait. I got a better answer for your test. CIA storage class memory in parallel with that. By the way, there are some vendors out there who said that's still not fast enough. We want to put more d ram and the servers and do things in memory. We went in memory databases. I guarantee whatever you do from a media perspective on my personal guarantee to you, it's obsolete by the time you're up and running. By the time you get your applications migrated, configured and running with business value, it's already obsolete. Some vendors got something better coming out. The right answers. This stuff you talked about, the right answer is everything that you're doing for your business. APs. It's a it's a Mel. It's solving the problems in software and, you know, you said we use disc and make it fast. It's not despite itself, of course, right? It's D Bram. It's a lot of the Ram, which, by the way, is orders of magnitude faster than flash the NAND flash. And even if its ECM and still orders of magnitude faster than that, what we use the disk for today in the architecture is the cost factor. We take the random ization out in the flash and we take the >> end and in the in the diagram >> and we used the SAS in the back end to manage costs. But we use it in a way that it performs well, which is highly sequential, massively parallel. And we take full advantage of that Beck and Ben with to do that with that massive dear am front end. Our cash ratios are unparalleled in the industry and and we use it even more effectively that way. But if architecture already evolves, so if if SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that that S S D layer with the cm. And if you know, if the economics of Q L C or something beyond that. Come down will replace the back end with that, do you? Do >> you ever look at what you're doing today as sort of a modern day symmetric. So I mean, a lot of things you just said. I mean, you've got a lot of memory. You've got a massive back end. You know, those were two of the characteristics of symmetric snow. Of course. Fast forward. Whatever. 30 years, right. But a lot of it was sort of intelligence and understanding. Sure. So how data works, is it Is it a fair sort of, or is it radically different? Well, in terms of mindset, I mean, I know the implementation is >> right, right? >> Yeah. I mean, it's not an unfair comparison. I mean, tiered storage was around before some metrics. Right? So it's certainly existed existed then, too. It was just at the time. It was a significant innovation course to layer at the time, right? A big cash front, ending some slower media and then taking advantage of the media on the back end. The big difference today is that if you look at what some metrics became through its Evolution's DMX and V Max and now Power Max. It's still tiered storage, you know, you still have some cash. That's that's for unending some faster media with power. Max, you're you're dealing now with us with an SS a back end. But what happened with those types of architectures is the tearing became more automated. But you're still moving information around. You're still moving Information from one said it This to another set of this leader in the cycle. You're still trying to promote things you know, to to the cash up front. We're doing it in real time. We're >> doing it by analyzing >> the data on the way it comes in. We're reassembling it again, taking the random ization out we're reassembling it and storing it across multiple disks in a way that it it increases our probability of pulling that information associated information back when we need it later. So there's there's no movement. Once its place, we don't have to replace it. You know it's already associated with other data that makes sense, and that gives us a lot of value. >> And secret sauce is the outcome of the secret sauce is you're able to very efficiently. Well, historically, you haven't been able to do a lot of garbage collection, a lot of data movement, and that just kills performance. There's >> really no garbage collection necessary in our in our world way. Also use very modern data structures or patents. Ah, lot of them on our neural cash Deal with the fact that we use a try data structure. So we're not using old fashioned hash tables and you know, l are you algorithms, You know it Sze very, very rapid traverse a ll of these trees >> and you're taking advantage of machine intelligence inside the software architecture. That really is some of the new innovation that really wasn't around to be able to take advantage of that 20 years ago. Maybe it was it was just not cost effective. Do the math was there, put it that the math of the mouth was there and >> there there There's been lots of evolutions of that over the years, a swell, but we continue to evolve and innovate. And, you know, one of the one of the cool things I think about working infinite at is is the multiple multiple generations of engineer where you've got people who understand that math they understand the real nuances of what it means to operate in a world of storage, which is quite a bit different than operating, saying networks or proceed be used because data integrity is paramount. There's lots of lots of things that go on there as well. But we also have younger generations, generations who like new challenges and like to re invent things so they find newer and greater ways to do things. >> This is exciting. So systems, thinkers and I mean server thinkers. I mean, people who understand, you know, systems designed it all the way through and and, you know, newbies who are super smart like you say, wanna learn and solve problems? Go back to the petabytes scale discussion, >> solve problems at petabytes scale, right? Even if the customer doesn't need that necessarily to solve that problem is critically important because even if you look at Les, just take, you know NFS, for example, most NFS systems deal with thousands of objects. Hundreds to thousands of objects are an F s. Implementation deals with billions, right? Do you need billions? How many applications you know that have billions of objects, But being able to do that in a way where performance doesn't degrade over time and also do it in a way where we say our nlm implementation isn't impacted by any any type of service events, we can take a note out, and it doesn't impact in ln There's no no degradation and performance. There's no impact or outage in service. All that's important. Even when you're dealing with smaller application sizes because they add up, they really do add up. He also brought up the point about, you know, density and actually intensity. Great. You know, back 25 years ago, when we were dealing with, you know, the first terabyte storage system, you know, how much how much stories did you have on your laptop? How much you have today, right? You know, you're probably more than a terabyte. They were laughing about putting things terabyte on the floor. And now you get more than a terabyte on your laptop. Things changing? >> Yeah. Um, I wanna ask you where you see the competition. We talked about all flash. We've had a long conversation, long, many conversations in the past about this, But you really, you know, the all flashy kind of described it as a Band Aid, essentially my words, but it was sort of a step function. Okay, great. Um, you have one company, really us who achieve escape velocity in that business in terms of pure But is that where you see in competition and you're seeing it from, you know, the hyper scale er's where you Yeah, you know, >> it's interesting. You know, you look at companies like, you know, we admire what they dio, especially with regard to marketing. They do a really good job of that. They also, um I have some really interesting ideas innovating the media, which is which is great. It helps us in the long run as well. Um, we just look at it as a component of our system, not these system, which makes it different. We don't really see the A f a. You know, the small scale a FAA is are the majority of our competition. We do run into them, but typically it the lower end of the opportunity. Even within the bigger companies that have competitors to those products, we run into them and smaller opportunities, not bigger opportunities where we run into them where there's a significant performance advantage as long as you don't mind the scale out approach to solving the problem. Unfortunately, when you're using a phase two skill out, you know you're putting all of the intelligence requirements on some poor storage administrator or system administrator to figure out what those where right, we take all of that away. So once it starts to scale, that's where we come in a plan. We don't see tons of competition there. Certainly, we're seeing competition from the clouds. And the competition from the clouds is more born of customer mandates and company mandates. Sometimes they I'm not quite sure that everybody knows why there who think to the cloud and we're problem they're trying to solve. But once they start to see a story that says, Hey, if the reasons are and you do understand those reasons, if the reasons are agility and financial flexibility and operational agility not as well as his acquisition agility, you know, we have answers to that and it starts to become a little bit more interesting and compelling. >> All right. One of the highlights of the M world each year is your dinner. Your customer I crashed in a couple of years ago when there were no other analysts there. And then last year again, it was in Vegas. Shows a nice steak house. This year we're in San Francisco, but But I had some great conversations with customers. I remember speaking to one customer about juxtaposing the sand thio to infinite debts platform. And you know the difference. The Sands taken off doing really well, but But he helped me understand the thinking from their standpoint of how they're applying it to solve problems and why v san wasn't a good fit. Your system was, um that was just one of many conversations last year had again other great conversations with customers. What do you do in this year? You have a customer dinner. We are? Yeah. We love to have you in and gave the invitation there. Yeah, the invitation. Is that definitely there? You know, a couple of >> years ago we didn't invite analysts, and you know what it was? It was a mistake. We and we learned that lesson into a large part. We credit you for for showing us how wrong we are. Our customers are very loyal. They're some of the most loyal in the industry. Don't take my word for it going. The gardener Pierre Insights and and look at our numbers compared to everybody else's any pick. Pick a vendor. We're at the top of the list with regard to not only the ratings but, more importantly, the customers willingness to recommend in every category, too. By the way, it's It's not just product quality and performance, and it's it's service support. It's easy doing business. It's an entirely different experience. So we love having the customers there, and the customers love having you there, too. They love having you and your appears in the industry there because they love learning from you and they love answering the questions and getting new insights. And we'd love to have you there. We're gonna be in the Mint this year. San Francisco meant not the not the current one that that's pretty coins, but the original historical site on duh. You know we have. We have invitations out thio to about 130 people because there's only so much room we have it at the event, but we're looking forward to a great time and a great meal and good conversation. >> That's great. Well, VM World is obviously one of the marquee events in our industry. It's the It's the fat middle of where the IittIe pro goes on dhe We're excited. Used to be Labor Day started the fall season. Now it's VM world. Well, Doc will see you out there. Thanks very much for your good to see you. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is day Volonte in the Cube will see you next time we'll see you at the M World 2019.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning. Welcome to the Cubes coverage. Day three. Odell Technologies, World from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin With student Amanda We're pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the key. We've got Jay Snyder with us SPP of global alliances, service providers and industries chaebol. Thank >> you so much for having me again. >> Our pleasure. So we have been talking for This is our third day of covering the lots of news, lots of technology conversations We know there's a big global Cartner summit. >> It's been fantastic, actually. >> Abd el Technologies World Thriving partner ecosystem Give us an overview of global alliances and some of the feedback from the last few days of the partners. So >> fantastic. Thank you again for having me. I'll tell you this. The feedback is off the chart eye. Don't even I've lost the ability to find new words to describe how excited are partners seem to be with the messaging that we've had here. But what's been consistent is best l technologies world ever and best global partners. Summer that we've ever had and I think the reason behind that is not just because we've done a great job presenting the content. It's because of the content, right. If you think about the partner ecosystem, it's interesting. We've always worked incredibly well with them and our partners love what we do in the products we make. But our messages have never been perfectly aligned. Think about the messages we have now on the main stage. We have four transformations and delivering outcomes and then we have multi cloud and the multi cloud strategy and then think about what the partners do. They deliver the strategy around designing and defining what a multi cloud architecture is going to look like and or being the providers that actually deliver it. Our messages are perfectly aligned, so they're so excited to see that there now at the epicenter of everything that we go and do, and the fact that I would say probably more exciting is our entire sales force is trained on those messages, understanding those messages and embracing those messages. So they're getting huge lift now from our cellars, as opposed to kind of. I wouldn't say we were never at conflict. But we're Maurin Parallel. And now we're really lock. Step. Well, does that make sense? >> It does, Jay. And and he brought up a really good point, you know? Congratulations. Glad to hear everybody's in lock step. Because I remember we talked about the transformation of the channel. Yeah, and I go back when converge infrastructure first rolled out. They're people. Oh, my gosh. I make millions of dollars racking it, Stacking, shoveling stuff. I need to shift Cloud that there was, you know, at VM wears partner Summit, you know, one of the executive V M. Where you know, every time Amazon winds, you know, we all lose. Sure. So helped us for today. You know, cloud big theme of the message. How Teo his partners fit into those environments. And how have they gotten to over the fear of cloud and to be fully embracing in executing a multi cloud? >> Maybe I should just context to about who my partners are, so that would be helpful. So we representing alliance is the largest global systems integrators. So think about firms like in HCL, Deloitte dating, censure. And I hate to leave anybody out, but there's eighteen of them. And then we represent the clouds of the cloud service provider ecosystem. So a couple of hundred cloud providers that actually do provide manage private clouds off from or public clouds. So they're super excited about the message because they fit in on both ends, right, As I was just describing right there, the ones that are really gonna have to deliver the strategy around what it's going to look like and how they're going to get their customers ask us all the time. Hey, I want to get to the cloud, but they don't really know what it means. So we have to ask them, What do you really trying to accomplish and why? Right, Once we understand that we can engage with these partners, and it's a perfect entree for them to go figure out, articulating design that architecture. And then last time I checked, we're actually not a cloud company, right? We have great products. We have great services. We've rate platforms, but we're not a cloud company, right? We don't provide those types of capabilities. So when you think about being able to leverage >> multi cloud and it started just clever, you're saying you're not a public cloud company because company Private Cloud absolutely se Eun apart >> from Private Cloud, right? But when we want to go off from and create that multi claude environment based on use case now all those partners fit into that play and they have the ability through the capabilities we just announced with Del Technologies clown tow leverage, those hyper scale er's. So where they used to see them as foe. They're now part of the solution, and they can deliver that solution through our new platform that we just brought to market. So again it gets back to we used to fight it. Now we're embracing it and leveraging it and delivered a comprehensive solution. >> So starting Monday, when Michael walked out on stage your hat with Jeff, the message over lying on, of course, with salt from Microsoft was collaboration integration. So really starting to see all the layers of Del technologies and its brands come together in a much more cohesive way than we've seen so far in terms of what the partners are now enabled to deliver. Some of the feedback on that is, do they feel that it's been made more simplified that has been made more streamlined, that it's opening up new market opportunities with, you know, the Del Technologies Cloud and some of the related announcements. >> So So it's a complicated question you're actually asking, because for years the partners have been saying We'd love to view you as a single company, right? That's kind of the missing ingredient to really a lot unlock the full potential. I think the first big piece big mover in this is the Del Technology Cloud platform. It's really the end, Stan, she ation of what Michael's been talking about for the last three years, which is I'm going to bring all this stuff together and create a force in the industry where we compete in the market together, not against one another. So we're seeing that so the partners are ecstatic right there, seeing the best of all the piece parts come together in that platform, and we've told him that's the first step. But we have been working with them for years to provide what I'LL call an umbrella effect across all the different companies to allow them to tap into all those resource is. So in some degree, we've been doing it already. We've been playing that multi cloud game and working cross strategically aligned business to bring those values to life. But now we put our money where our mouth is, and we have simplified the approach with the product and the platform to make it easier for them to go tomorrow. Way to have a little bit. We do have a little bit a ways to go, though. I want to be clear. >> So, yeah, and Jay really good points there because I I one article recently about hybrid cloud cut a lot of history with it and simplifying a piece of the overall puzzle. But as you said, those hyper scales fit into it. Sergeant Dellape, upstate eight of us, a strong partner on VM where you know, Google announcement. You know, just a few weeks ago, those s eyes that air your partner's There are some of the critical pieces because there's a lot of complexity out there and we need key partners to be a help us to do there. You know, the Del of Technology family is a piece of it, but those s eyes air really thie arms and legs that are going to go help all of the customers understand. Try to get their arms around and, you know, hopefully simplify. And what what I said is they need to turn from a bunch of point pieces in the new overall solution. They do that, help me drive innovation and drive by. Visit forward, not trying to manage all of the pieces >> We had talked about it yesterday. I mean, I D c. Says that sixty two percent of customers will have a multi cloud architecture. But for my partner Rico system, it's more interesting. You know that seventy percent of the customers are going to choose a provider to design, architect and manage that infrastructure. So if you think about that seven ten, customers will use one of those global systems integrators and or cloud service writers or, more likely both to deliver on their vision and their outcomes that they need to achieve to change their business models, which is again great for our business. >> How influential are your is your partner ecosystem in terms of some of the announces that we've heard this week? They're out feet on the street there, talking with customers about the challenges that they're having emerging trends. A. M L. What's that sort of center? Just a partner. Feedback loop like that helps Del Technologies, right thruster >> way Run partner advisory boards in each major theater multiple times a year, and these are the exact things we ask them. What tribe trends are you seeing? We map it against our product portfolio in our solutions to identify where there's gaps. Five g's a great example, right? We're looking at where the market's going happen. Have responsibility for a big chunk of our telco vertical as well within the company. So it's a hot topic and, you know, for a while we were. We were honestly lagging in this particular space. If I think back two years ago, we talked Telco, but we didn't walk Telco. We've made a lot of investments over the last two years to build a product business unit specifically around Telco solutions, and I'm proud to say, especially coming out of Mobile World Congress this year that we have arrived. We have incredible products solutions that really are exactly what are partners are looking for and our end user customers looking for. And it's an interesting dynamic because a lot of our partners, our customers. If you think about the telco community that's really gonna embrace and drive five G, we both sell to them and we sell through them. So we love the fact they'LL consume our underlying technology. But more importantly, I love the fact that we can use them as a route to market to expose hundreds thousands of customers to those capabilities in the broader scale. >> Yeah, J that the networking is such a critical component of that service fighter piece. So how much of that solution that you're talking about? Polls in some of the aspects from GM wear, you know, NSX, the SD win. Those pieces seem natural fit to help drive that overall solution. >> Yeah, I would actually tell you that my opinion is probably the first products that we brought to market that were really crossed Company cross collaboration. You know, even before we got to the Del Technologies cloud were exactly what you're talking about. Some of those networking asked it some security assets that vm where has integrated with some of our products server technology to build some integrated telco specific things for the core and the edge, which is really where they're operating specifically around the edge. Fellow cloud is going to be a huge piece of that SD. When we see the telcos, has a huge route to market again for that particular product and as a massive consumer of that particular product, we understand they have to cannibalize some of their own business. But it's the way the markets going. So the answer is yes. We're seeing great integration, great collaboration between our product business unit under cabin, Kevin Shots Camera in Telco and his V M or counterparts. And I think I said his name right there, too. >> Yeah, I had to interview him once, and absolutely nothing I'm getting that right was tough. You know, one of things always at the show is just the feedback that you get from from customers and from from your partners. So gives the mood, you know, Where are they? What are some of, you know, key opportunities, challenges? What? What's top of mind issues for? >> I'm telling you like I can't make this up. The mood is off the chart, right? They've said consistently best sessions ever. I was talking to one particular partner last night. I won't say his name, but he's worked in this industry for thirty years. He's worked for major companies ASAP. Adobe, Microsoft. This is his first time Adele Technologies world working as a partner of ours, he said. Hands down. This is the best partner driven partner content partner event I've ever seen in the industry. So excited about the focus Del Technologies has as a company on our ecosystem and the types of conversations we're having to actually not just sell to us, but sell through us, right? We're really, I think we've really worked hard to view our partners not as customers, but truly as partners. It's all about the business. We build together, not about the business we do together. If that makes sense, right >> well, that trust trusting relationship is absolutely table stakes. It is for an organization. It sounds like you guys have really done a tremendous amount of work in the last few years to get that to the highest level that it's ever been on. >> I would agree. I think we've come a long way from where we were. We have a lot more work to do it .'LL never end, but I'm super excited with what achieved. I think our partners are, too, because the results they're getting are fantastic. I talked about the profitability of our business and their business together, which means what we're selling has value, which is fantastic as well. So it's good to know that we're not just winning in the market, but we're winning with high value, and again it gets back to where this conversation started, which is everyone talking about transformation and outcomes. It's hard to deliver value if you're not delivering an outcome or vice versa, right >> J. One of the areas that I I think your partner's and the solutions that your help bringing to market what would have some good opinion on is this move from kind of the Catholics, the optics model, you know, one of things. We look at the cloud announcements and it's like, Okay, wait, which of these air as a service? Which one of these he's, you know, can I do financing on and which one of these you know are mostly built on hardware? We're just that fit in the overall discussion, and it's what what do you get feedback from your partners and to cultivate that >> users? It's literally in every single conversation we have. So I can't think of a particular partner conversation that doesn't send around a variety of things. One is always our technology. One is our go to market engine and how we can leverage that and the other is commercials. And it's not the price. It's the consumption, right? How are we going to consume your technology, CAF, ex office and everything in between? And that everything in between used to be one or two things. Now it's ten or fifteen things right. The models have got very complex and very dynamic, so it's top of mind. And the beautiful thing is, you know, a few years ago the only way to get a consumption model on as a service model. It was through my partner Rico system. Now Dell's done a good job to catch up to some degree. But to truly deliver what a lot of the customers air accident for, which is pure op X, no caf X pays you grow. Models were still leveraging heavily our partner ecosystem to Babel. Deliver that, and the challenge for us is to be able to keep up with them, right? They're moving at such a rapid pace and the dynamics of those models Archangel. We have to evolve too quickly to be able to offer what our competitors aire doing. I'm excited to say, so far, so good, but we're doing a great job of that. But I would I would agree with you, right? The commercial model, The consumption models are top of mind, and every conversation had to today right on how we're going to structure these things. And it's really exciting, right? Because when we do it right, it tends to be not only great for Dell and great for the partner, but great for the customer. So it really is. It's the classic win win win. >> Are you know, one of the things that it seems that Dell has been technologies working to Dio for awhile now has become this sort of one stop shop for all things partners. Are they looking to have that single trusted source Do they appreciate now that they've got that, that they can really go today l technologies and enable their customers and your customers to transform security work for us? We heard a lot about work first. Urination, >> very common, >> are they now seeing Dallas? This Hey, this is this really a one stop shop. We can actually deliver everything that our customers are looking for. >> They're definitely seeing because we're telling it to him all the time, right? But yes, the answers without question, I think one of the big drivers for our business has been the ability to aggregate the breath of Del Technologies and bring the full portfolio to beer to them. I'd love to see them all standardised on us exclusively. That's my job, right? That's what we do. We try to eliminate white space and own all marketshare. We'LL never get there one hundred percent. But we've seen, you know, we look out of right of metrics in our business. We look at revenue, growth, probability, growth way. Also, look at white space, which is what you're talking about. Have we consume the white space where competitors used to be with inside our partners, and we've seen massive growth there in the last two years significant growth across the board. And the reason is because of what you just described. We now have an economies of scale advantage in a breath of portfolio advantage where it just makes sense for them to bet on us to get what they need, right, whether it's a pivotal capability or of'em were capability or Bhumi capability. When we have that, everybody pointed in the same direction. This story is just so much more powerful and there, and I'm not going to say they're buying it. They're believing it and they're seeing it in the field. So again, I talked about it earlier. If weaken transact at that level at Adele Technologies level, it means more value to our partners. But ultimately they can provide more value to their customers. So they're more profitable or customers get better solutions. So yes, yes, and yes, >> everybody went well. Jay, thank you so much for joining student May assuring the tremendous momentum that you guys have achieved. We look forward to hearing next year. >> I do to >> even better news will be Thanks. Thank you again for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Great to meet you. Thanks, Tio for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on the Cube. Live from jail technology World twenty nineteen day three of the cubes to set coverage continues after this

(upbeat music) >> Live from Time Square in New York City, it's The Cube. Covering IBM's change the game, winning with AI. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to The Big Apple. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here in the Theater District at The Westin Hotel covering a Special Cube event. IBM's got a big event today and tonight, if we can pan here to this pop-up. Change the game: winning with AI. So IBM has got an event here at The Westin, The Tide at Terminal 5 which is right up the Westside Highway. Go to IBM.com/winwithAI. Register, you can watch it online, or if you're in the city come down and see us, we'll be there. Uh, we have a bunch of customers will be there. We had Rob Thomas on earlier, he's kind of the host of the event. IBM does these events periodically throughout the year. They gather customers, they put forth some thought leadership, talk about some hard dues. So, we're very excited to have John Thomas here, he's a distinguished engineer and Director of IBM Analytics, long time Cube alum, great to see you again John >> Same here. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to have you. >> So we just heard a great case study with Niagara Bottling around the Data Science Elite Team, that's something that you've been involved in, and we're going to get into that. But give us the update since we last talked, what have you been up to?? >> Sure sure. So we're living and breathing data science these days. So the Data Science Elite Team, we are a team of practitioners. We actually work collaboratively with clients. And I stress on the word collaboratively because we're not there to just go do some work for a client. We actually sit down, expect the client to put their team to work with our team, and we build AI solutions together. Scope use cases, but sort of you know, expose them to expertise, tools, techniques, and do this together, right. And we've been very busy, (laughs) I can tell you that. You know it has been a lot of travel around the world. A lot of interest in the program. And engagements that bring us very interesting use cases. You know, use cases that you would expect to see, use cases that are hmmm, I had not thought of a use case like that. You know, but it's been an interesting journey in the last six, eight months now. >> And these are pretty small, agile teams. >> Sometimes people >> Yes. use tiger teams and they're two to three pizza teams, right? >> Yeah. And my understanding is you bring some number of resources that's called two three data scientists, >> Yes and the customer matches that resource, right? >> Exactly. That's the prerequisite. >> That is the prerequisite, because we're not there to just do the work for the client. We want to do this in a collaborative fashion, right. So, the customers Data Science Team is learning from us, we are working with them hand in hand to build a solution out. >> And that's got to resonate well with customers. >> Absolutely I mean so often the services business is like kind of, customers will say well I don't want to keep going back to a company to get these services >> Right, right. I want, teach me how to fish and that's exactly >> That's exactly! >> I was going to use that phrase. That's exactly what we do, that's exactly. So at the end of the two or three month period, when IBM leaves, my team leaves, you know, the client, the customer knows what the tools are, what the techniques are, what to watch out for, what are success criteria, they have a good handle of that. >> So we heard about the Niagara Bottling use case, which was a pretty narrow, >> Mm-hmm. How can we optimize the use of the plastic wrapping, save some money there, but at the same time maintain stability. >> Ya. You know very, quite a narrow in this case. >> Yes, yes. What are some of the other use cases? >> Yeah that's a very, like you said, a narrow one. But there are some use cases that span industries, that cut across different domains. I think I may have mentioned this on one of our previous discussions, Dave. You know customer interactions, trying to improve customer interactions is something that cuts across industry, right. Now that can be across different channels. One of the most prominent channels is a call center, I think we have talked about this previously. You know I hate calling into a call center (laughter) because I don't know Yeah, yeah. What kind of support I'm going to get. But, what if you could equip the call center agents to provide consistent service to the caller, and handle the calls in the best appropriate way. Reducing costs on the business side because call handling is expensive. And eventually lead up to can I even avoid the call, through insights on why the call is coming in in the first place. So this use case cuts across industry. Any enterprise that has got a call center is doing this. So we are looking at can we apply machine-learning techniques to understand dominant topics in the conversation. Once we understand with these have with unsupervised techniques, once we understand dominant topics in the conversation, can we drill into that and understand what are the intents, and does the intent change as the conversation progress? So you know I'm calling someone, it starts off with pleasantries, it then goes into weather, how are the kids doing? You know, complain about life in general. But then you get to something of substance why the person was calling in the first place. And then you may think that is the intent of the conversation, but you find that as the conversation progresses, the intent might actually change. And can you understand that real time? Can you understand the reasons behind the call, so that you could take proactive steps to maybe avoid the call coming in at the first place? This use case Dave, you know we are seeing so much interest in this use case. Because call centers are a big cost to most enterprises. >> Let's double down on that because I want to understand this. So you basically doing. So every time you call a call center this call may be recorded, >> (laughter) Yeah. For quality of service. >> Yeah. So you're recording the calls maybe using MLP to transcribe those calls. >> MLP is just the first step, >> Right. so you're absolutely right, when a calls come in there's already call recording systems in place. We're not getting into that space, right. So call recording systems record the voice calls. So often in offline batch mode you can take these millions of calls, pass it through a speech-to-text mechanism, which produces a text equivalent of the voice recordings. Then what we do is we apply unsupervised machine learning, and clustering, and topic-modeling techniques against it to understand what are the dominant topics in this conversation. >> You do kind of an entity extraction of those topics. >> Exactly, exactly, exactly. >> Then we find what is the most relevant, what are the relevant ones, what is the relevancy of topics in a particular conversation. That's not enough, that is just step two, if you will. Then you have to, we build what is called an intent hierarchy. So this is at top most level will be let's say payments, the call is about payments. But what about payments, right? Is it an intent to make a late payment? Or is the intent to avoid the payment or contest a payment? Or is the intent to structure a different payment mechanism? So can you get down to that level of detail? Then comes a further level of detail which is the reason that is tied to this intent. What is a reason for a late payment? Is it a job loss or job change? Is it because they are just not happy with the charges that I have coming? What is a reason? And the reason can be pretty complex, right? It may not be in the immediate vicinity of the snippet of conversation itself. So you got to go find out what the reason is and see if you can match it to this particular intent. So multiple steps off the journey, and eventually what we want to do is so we do our offers in an offline batch mode, and we are building a series of classifiers instead of classifiers. But eventually we want to get this to real time action. So think of this, if you have machine learning models, supervised models that can predict the intent, the reasons, et cetera, you can have them deployed operationalize them, so that when a call comes in real time, you can screen it in real time, do the speech to text, you can do this pass it to the supervise models that have been deployed, and the model fires and comes back and says this is the intent, take some action or guide the agent to take some action real time. >> Based on some automated discussion, so tell me what you're calling about, that kind of thing, >> Right. Is that right? >> So it's probably even gone past tell me what you're calling about. So it could be the conversation has begun to get into you know, I'm going through a tough time, my spouse had a job change. You know that is itself an indicator of some other reasons, and can that be used to prompt the CSR >> Ah, to take some action >> Ah, oh case. appropriate to the conversation. >> So I'm not talking to a machine, at first >> no no I'm talking to a human. >> Still talking to human. >> And then real time feedback to that human >> Exactly, exactly. is a good example of >> Exactly. human augmentation. >> Exactly, exactly. I wanted to go back and to process a little bit in terms of the model building. Are there humans involved in calibrating the model? >> There has to be. Yeah, there has to be. So you know, for all the hype in the industry, (laughter) you still need a (laughter). You know what it is is you need expertise to look at what these models produce, right. Because if you think about it, machine learning algorithms don't by themselves have an understanding of the domain. They are you know either statistical or similar in nature, so somebody has to marry the statistical observations with the domain expertise. So humans are definitely involved in the building of these models and claiming of these models. >> Okay. >> (inaudible). So that's who you got math, you got stats, you got some coding involved, and you >> Absolutely got humans are the last mile >> Absolutely. to really bring that >> Absolutely. expertise. And then in terms of operationalizing it, how does that actually get done? What tech behind that? >> Ah, yeah. >> It's a very good question, Dave. You build models, and what good are they if they stay inside your laptop, you know, they don't go anywhere. What you need to do is, I use a phrase, weave these models in your business processes and your applications. So you need a way to deploy these models. The models should be consumable from your business processes. Now it could be a Rest API Call could be a model. In some cases a Rest API Call is not sufficient, the latency is too high. Maybe you've got embed that model right into where your application is running. You know you've got data on a mainframe. A credit card transaction comes in, and the authorization for the credit card is happening in a four millisecond window on the mainframe on all, not all, but you know CICS COBOL Code. I don't have the time to make a Rest API call outside. I got to have the model execute in context with my CICS COBOL Code in that memory space. >> Yeah right. You know so the operationalizing is deploying, consuming these models, and then beyond that, how do the models behave over time? Because you can have the best programmer, the best data scientist build the absolute best model, which has got great accuracy, great performance today. Two weeks from now, performance is going to go down. >> Hmm. How do I monitor that? How do I trigger a loads map for below certain threshold. And, can I have a system in place that reclaims this model with new data as it comes in. >> So you got to understand where the data lives. >> Absolutely. You got to understand the physics, >> Yes. The latencies involved. >> Yes. You got to understand the economics. >> Yes. And there's also probably in many industries legal implications. >> Oh yes. >> No, the explainability of models. You know, can I prove that there is no bias here. >> Right. Now all of these are challenging but you know, doable things. >> What makes a successful engagement? Obviously you guys are outcome driven, >> Yeah. but talk about how you guys measure success. >> So um, for our team right now it is not about revenue, it's purely about adoption. Does the client, does the customer see the value of what IBM brings to the table. This is not just tools and technology, by the way. It's also expertise, right? >> Hmm. So this notion of expertise as a service, which is coupled with tools and technology to build a successful engagement. The way we measure success is has the client, have we built out the use case in a way that is useful for the business? Two, does a client see value in going further with that. So this is right now what we look at. It's not, you know yes of course everybody is scared about revenue. But that is not our key metric. Now in order to get there though, what we have found, a little bit of hard work, yes, uh, no you need different constituents of the customer to come together. It's not just me sending a bunch of awesome Python Programmers to the client. >> Yeah right. But now it is from the customer's side we need involvement from their Data Science Team. We talk about collaborating with them. We need involvement from their line of business. Because if the line of business doesn't care about the models we've produced you know, what good are they? >> Hmm. And third, people don't usually think about it, we need IT to be part of the discussion. Not just part of the discussion, part of being the stakeholder. >> Yes, so you've got, so IBM has the chops to actually bring these constituents together. >> Ya. I have actually a fair amount of experience in herding cats on large organizations. (laughter) And you know, the customer, they've got skin in the IBM game. This is to me a big differentiator between IBM, certainly some of the other technology suppliers who don't have the depth of services, expertise, and domain expertise. But on the flip side of that, differentiation from many of the a size who have that level of global expertise, but they don't have tech piece. >> Right. >> Now they would argue well we do anybodies tech. >> Ya. But you know, if you've got tech. >> Ya. >> You just got to (laughter) Ya. >> Bring those two together. >> Exactly. And that's really seems to me to be the big differentiator >> Yes, absolutely. for IBM. Well John, thanks so much for stopping by theCube and explaining sort of what you've been up to, the Data Science Elite Team, very exciting. Six to nine months in, >> Yes. are you declaring success yet? Still too early? >> Uh, well we're declaring success and we are growing, >> Ya. >> Growth is good. >> A lot of lot of attention. >> Alright, great to see you again, John. >> Absolutely, thanks you Dave. Thanks very much. Okay, keep it right there everybody. You're watching theCube. We're here at The Westin in midtown and we'll be right back after this short break. I'm Dave Vellante. (tech music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco. It's The Cube, covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we are live here in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. It's our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the CEO of SiliconANGLE Media, joined by co-host Peter Burris all week. Three days of wall-walk of day three. He's the head of research at SiliconeANGLE Media Inc., as well as the general manager of Wikibon research. Our next guest is Roddy Martin, VP of SC Supply Chain Cloud Product Marketing at Oracle. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity. I look forward to the discussion. >> Thanks for coming on. Really want to hear your thought leadership around the supply chain transformation, because it might be a little bit bumpy depending upon your perspective. But is a huge opportunity going on in every single theater of where software used to be a point solution. The cloud is now an opportunity for customers to think differently, and is a catalyst for essentially a business model change as well as a fundamental data-driven change. Your thoughts on this? What do you see going on? What are the key inflection points? >> So a very interesting part of my background is I came out of the brewing industry in South Africa. and then I led the supply chain practice at AMR Research, which today is Gartner. And we did a lot of studies on, what are companies doing to lead this transformation? Because it's a transformation of the interim business operating model of a company. This is not stitching data together in the traditional supply chain system sense. So one of the very first foundations that is really fundamental, and Gartner has done a great job of carrying the search forward, is the idea that every company progresses to an interim operating model in five stages of capability, and every one of those builds on the other. So they're either reacting in stage one's problem and never saw the shortage coming and ran out of product. Stage two is I performance improve around projects. Stage three is I drive functional excellence. And stage four I start working as an engine outside an operating model. In other words, I'm driving the business from what's happening in the market and I'm making sure that supply is matching demand. So it's very interesting and it's very important to consider that as the base foundation for this whole discussion. >> So that outside is interesting, we've heard this before, a lot of people are going that way, but there's no shortcuts. Can you talk about, cause you talk about the endpoint is then outside-in. >> Right, when you're operating as a demand-driven interim supply channel operating model, you can't run out of supply, right? So if you saw a change happening in the marketplace but there's nothing to supply, you've really just messed up the business. And so, each of these stages builds on every other stage. So functional excellence is: Am I good at planning? Am I good at product management? Am I good at logistics? Because those are the foundations for operating in the interim business model. This is why the Oracle's blanching in the cloud, in fact all of Oracle's developments in the cloud are so important because you're effectively building a new process oriented operating model that spins the entire business. If I started off with ERP systems and then I put logistics in place and tied it together, there's all sorts of disconnects in the business. When you pick it up in cycle times, you pick it in disconnect sometimes, they don't see changes to the marketplace for weeks. So, this overarching end to end supply chain operating model in the cloud is a fundamental enabler. >> So how do you gauge a customer? First of all, I buy everything that you said, but I want to bring up a point, because it seems to me that the theme of Oracle OpenWorld that traditional applications and I won't say, I'll just say the word Silo just to use it as a point, has been a specific domain specific thing. But to be end to end and be outside-in, which is the end game, you have to know how to talk and integrate with other systems which might have been a problem if you built the most badass end to end system. >> That is a part of the challenge and in fact, a lot of companies that I've worked with over the 15 years I've been researching this, they get stuck for that very reason. In other words, this is a re-engineering of the whole IT infrastructure versus having a thousand consultants come in and tie all my data together over a question of four years and move 15 instances of whatever system you want to one. >> So, if I question on the journey thing, you mentioned thousands of consultants, which customers are now seeing. They want faster mile posts, they want to see faster agility but a lot of the customers actually outline the journey for the customer. So they're saying, here's your journey and they shorten the mile posts for the deliverables. But they're the one getting paid for it so is that the right model, should they be outlining the journey for the customer? >> And they are. It's been very interesting because I was a partner with a major global consulting company for four years and I've been mixing with them here, they suddenly recognizing that this path to the cloud is something they've better get on the bandwagon because they're not going to have a thousand consultants deploying whatever ERP system you talk about as the future of IT. So, what's happening is the business is having much more of a say in this fast deployment, fast time to value, putting these new-- >> So they're driving the journey for parameters? >> They are gearing up for this new journey, the consultants are. >> So, let's get to the fundamentals behind all this and ask a question about it. At the end of the day, digital technologies give customers an option to do their journeys very differently whether in a B2B sense or a consumer sense. And as they use digital technologies, they're also giving data up and so we have now a combination where customers are getting something out of digital, they are demanding it as part of the engagement model. They are giving up data along the way, and the technologies for sensing and doing something with that data in business are now, we're not figuring out how that impacts business design, process design, and offering design. >> So, that's stage 4S, what we talk about is people, process, and technology versus, in the past, when you had stage one, two, and three. People as one set of projects, process as another set of projects, and technology as another set of projects. >> Yeah, I may or may not take some middlings with the model you put out, but it does matter. At the end of the day, what is driving this increasingly is that it used to be that the dominant consideration in, I think, and I'm testing you, the dominant consideration was assets. Where is the physical asset, where are the materials, where is the machine, and we'll focus our returns on this things and then presume that there's a demand for it and now we're getting all this data about demand and that is having an impact on how we talk about arranging the assets. >> That is the inside-out to outside-in. So, let me give you an example without mentioning companies. A major retailer and a major pharmaceutical company. They share pollen data, they share weather data, they mine Facebook to find out what are people saying about allergies, let's say in New England. And the ragweed's busting and they say, do we have the right levels of inventory, and they're moving inventory to make sure that people who aren't on Facebook are saying we can't buy this particular product. They're moving inventory, that's the difference. >> So, they're sharing data amongst themselves. >> Yes, and they're collaborating between retailers. >> Arguably a similar example, and a retailer that's actually not moving inventory but moving pointers and offering new channel options so that someone decides may not, that they know somebody's going to come into the store, the size may not be there but they can still get it to them that day. >> So, it's very interesting, Procter and Gamble, who I did a lot of work with, and this is public domain information, the CEO drove two fundamental transformation messages in the business. And they called it the two moments of truth. He said, we will always have our product when we say we've got a product. So, if we promote a new product, the consumer goes to the shelf, it will be there. Moment of truth number two, we understand why consumers choose and use our products. And you don't fix number two until you fix number one because if I wanted a small tube of toothpaste and I went in and there were only big ones, it's the wrong buying signal. So, what you're seeing is that whole flip to measuring what the market's looking for and shaping their demand and then making sure that the assets and the supply system is geared to deliver. >> Right, I want to ask you a question. First of all, I love that point, I love your point about the data, but here's the question: cause supply chain has been very instrumentation drive, okay, and that certainly is transforming but now you mention Procter and Gamble. We are living in an era where, in the history of business, you can actually now potentially measure everything. So how does that impacting the reconfiguration of the business model? I mean, Procter and Gamble has those moments of truth, every company will have a moment of truth which is, everything is now measurable so, advertising to employee things and everything. >> So let's take the asset story versus the on shelf thing, right, so when I have assets and I'm getting all the data out of my assets, what am I doing with all of that data, right? Because it's not connected to demand. What I got to know is what demand data do I really want to be able to move my assets to the right place. >> Peter: By the way, the shelf is an asset. >> Of course it is, yes. It's a sensing point and it's an asset. They own it, they replenish that shelf. So the point is, data is everywhere and now these, the consulting and the BPM organizations supporting and companies doing their own business process manner, they got to know what data is really important and what data from the outside-in is going to allow me to leverage a new operating model for my business and become digital. >> So, this is really awesome, I was talking with an Oracle executive last night at one of their customer parties and we had a conversation around this data sharing. This is a new, different behavior. This is a theme of the show that no one's really talking about but it's in plain sight which is there is a data sharing aspect of systems and vendors and companies. >> Roddy: That's why the cloud is so important. >> John: This is now impacting everything. >> Everything. >> How do companies go forward and do this? What are you seeing, is there a best practice, is there a starting point? Is there a five step process on that? >> Well, first of all, these transformations are being lead by the C level executive team in a business. This is now longer somebody who decides to buy a new IT system and plug it in to the business. So, the business is saying, how do we change the operating model of the way we work, right? So, and then, what are the capabilities, and this is where that five stage model comes in, what capabilities do we need to look at building over the next three years so that we can operate in this intent way because you can't wake up tomorrow and go from an inside-out asset driven business to an outside-in demand driven business in two weeks. It ain't going to happen. >> So what's the progression? What's the progress bar look like when you have that moment of an epiphany and say, you know, I'm the CEO-- >> What's the earning point of the business? If it's Procter and Gamble, I want X number of one billion dollars brands. If you're a pharmaceutical company, you want to launch brand new drugs and you want to do it at half the price and half the speed that you're used to. It's the business articulating, this is why the leadership teams are so fundamental, articulating what's the burning platform and then translating that back into the capabilities-- >> So you get a reverse engineer. >> Outside-In. >> Outside-In, I love it. >> The way our research says it, and it's very similar but I want to test this because it's, we say start with context. >> Yes. >> What are you going to do with your customer that you have to do better than everybody else? And then identify the community that you're going to do it with and identify the capabilities that are going to delight that community. So it's context, community, and capabilities. >> Now here's the context, further piece to context. If context changes, how quickly do I sense that change and how fast can I respond to that change? Because if I've got all my asset capabilities and my supply capabilities locked into one set of context and that changes and I now have to re-engineer my whole business, I may lose the whole show in the process. I got to see those changes as they are happening, literally in real time. This is where the internet of things, this is where demand shaping, demand sensing, retailers collaborating, supplies connected into supply chain, everybody sharing that information and the fact that not many people, they don't know how to do it. The culture of business is not yet at the points-- >> That's why the measurement thing I brought up, I mean Procter and Gamble, they used to say to their agencies, we know that 50% of our advertising is good, we don't know which half. So now they can measure it all just like in every other aspect so this is where the business model-- >> You also have to be careful about whether or not, again going back to context changes, measurements change, data can blow you away. You have to be very smart about how you do it so a lot of these intelligent things, machine learning, how the models get built, how the insides get delivered, all become very very important. Very quickly, I have two quick questions for you. One is really approximate to the conversation, one less so but the approximate one: IOT. IOT is, has many many applications. Certainly turning analogue data into digital data so you can build models is a crucial piece of it. But it also has another implication in how you enact the output of that model back into the real word. How does supply chain and IOT come together? >> So if you look at the studies that are being done by Oracle and Gartner et cetera on what's important to the supply chain, two things come up. One is visibility and the other is analytics. Right, so there's tons of data available, to your point just now. That data could cause massive noise to the business unless you know what you're looking at. I know companies that will say, 95% visibility of changes on their demand side is good enough but I'm good enough on the supply side to be able to adjust. But you got to know which data to look at. So I'm looking at on shelf. I'm looking at what consumers are choosing and using, I'm looking to see what of my contract manufacturers-- >> Peter: Analyze key constraints. >> Bingo, so it's not about, I think what we're all going to have to learn in the internet of things is we need, again, a cloud based internet of things platform that does the analytics. >> Because we can rewire things faster. >> Exactly, you can adjust the business to new scenarios based on what you're reading from the demand side and what you're reading from the supply side. >> So you're a great foil for my second question. My second question is you look back at the history, or the recent history let's call it, of strategy, very asset based, Porter said pick the industry that has the best returns, pick your position in that industry, then choose your games based on the five factor analysis that you want to play to get to that position. Very asset oriented, we're in control, that's going to dictate how things change. What you just suggested was a very very different way of thinking about strategy. >> Same fundamentals. It's the same fundamentals but it's allowing yourself to adjust those fundamentals based on what's happening in the market place. >> Peter: But you're not going to base it on just the assets. >> No, we're not going to base it on the assets unless you've focused on, like if you're an engineering company and that's all you make is machines, you can't suddenly start producing toothpaste, for example. There are, that's why I say it's a reconfiguration of those same principles but flexible enough to meet demand. >> So how does, how does the world of design and the world of strategy start to come together in C suite? >> Fundamentally, because it's the voice of the customer that starts to count. It's the voice of the customer that dictates the strategy. So if my customers don't want green Guinness for Saint Patrick's Day, don't make any, because it's going to hang around and get thrown away, right? So, the voice of the customer determines what's happening on the demand side and the supply side has to be agile enough to meet that need. >> So, I would suggest keep Guinness the way it is because it's damn good the way it is, so personally I would agree on the Guinness comment. No green Guinness. >> So, what's the South Africa beer? >> Castle Lager. Well, SAB, South African Brewery, has been bought by Anheuser-Busch InBrev, a massive big giant. >> We love beer and if there's any beer sponsors out there, we're happy looking for our Budweiser. We want a, maybe an IPA in there. Roddy, thanks for spending the time, coming in with you, appreciate it. Some thought leadership here on Reconfiguration and looking at some of the nuances that are really going to impact the buyers here on The Cube. Oracle Open will be back with more live coverage from SiliconANGLE's The Cube after this short break.