>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. Happy afternoon. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Valante of the Cube. We are live at MGM Grand. This is Palo Alto Ignite 22, our second day of coverage. Dave, we've had some amazing conversations, as we always do on the queue, but cybersecurity one of my favorite topics. So interesting to hear what Palo Alto Networks is doing, how it's differentiating itself and how it's ecosystem is >>Growing. Yeah, well one of the things I always, I often use ServiceNow as a reference example. I go back to 2013, had a kind of a tiny ecosystem and then sort of watched it grow. And one of those key signs was when the global system integrators actually began to lean in Accenture, obviously world class, one of the, you know, definitely in the top, you know, they talk about top five QBs, Accenture, you know, top five GSI easily. >>Yep. So, and in fact, Accenture, we've got Rex Stex in here, senior managing director at Accenture Security. You guys have been the GSI partner of the year for Palo Alto Networks for four years in a row, six years plus strong partnership. Give us a little flavor and history of the pan of the Palo Alto partnership with et cetera. >>I think, you know, we started early, right? And I think as they've evolved, we've evolved our partnership with them and as they've gone, you know, to more of a software footprint with, you know, around cloud security and network security and sassy, we've, we've seen a lot of growth and we're super excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us and the meaningful outcomes that we've been providing our clients as it relates to, you know, vendor consolidation, toll consolidation, tech debt reduction. You know, there's a lot of opportunity here to simplify our clients' lives with them. And that's something we're super excited about. >>Simplification, consolidation, been a theme of the last couple of days. Talk about some of the joint accomplishments that you guys have achieved. I know that you developed a lot of offers across all of Palo Alto Network's, GTMs, what are some of the highlights that come to mind? I >>Think one of the things that we're most excited about, you know, that being client specific is what we've been able to do on, on, on the network side with sasi and, and zero trust, network access. You know, as when Covid hit, there was a lot of change that happened with remote workforce and, you know, clients couldn't log in because their VPNs were crashing left and right. And so we were able to, you know, go in and help stand up, you know, this, you know, zero trust network infrastructure and help our clients get back online and get their employees back to work in a productive manner. And then it's evolved with the hybrid work model over time. And so it's, it's been a, that's probably the most gratifying cause there was a real crisis at, at a certain point in time, you know, a couple years ago were >>There Rex, were there unintended consequences of that, you know, rapid, we were forced, you know, the forced march to digital in terms of just multiple tools, plugging holes, and then sort of stepping back, you know, post isolation economy saying, okay, hey, we got through this, but now we need to take a new direction, new >>Strategy. I think that there, there isn't an intended consequence if you look at, most clients have, I saw a number 76, we counted as around 80 different security vendors and tools that they managed because a lot of people went and went after best of breed type capabilities. And, and so what we've seen now is, is the need to, you know, rationalize that, you know, their, their infrastructure and their, and their capability and, and consolidate and reduce that and, and move to, you know, more of what I would call platform providers. Cause if you may have, when you have 80 products, you have 80 integrations, 80 points of failure, and it gets very complex and, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing. And so as we're starting to see clients take a step back and say, Hey, look, if I, you know, spend the time to, you know, I call it modernization, but you know, modernize my security infrastructure and footprint focused around, you know, automation, orchestration, leveraging, you know, true ml and I know there's are buzzwords, but, you know, but you know, using 'em in, in, in the proper fashion, right? >>They, they can, you know, reduce that footprint, save a bunch of money, right? And, and, and drive that cost savings and then help scale their business. Cuz you have all these different vendors and what security is typically in the digital footprint is the slowdown, right? We, we've typically been the bottleneck in the past. And what we're seeing with, with, with what, you know, we've been very focused on is helping our clients scale their security footprints and their infrastructure and, you know, through automation orchestration, I i, I always say some folks do it your mess for less with labor arbitrage and bodies, but they're not enough security people in the world to do this. And so we're very focused on automation and orchestration and driving that into, into the market. >>Yeah. So you don't want to be in the business of, of filling those holes with labor. >>Exactly. You >>Want to actually get paid for outcomes. >>A hundred percent. And everything we've done is we've tried to simplify things not only for, you know, big Accenture, but even for our clients so that, you know, we can be focused on business outcomes, not necessarily technology outcomes. Cuz doing technology for the sake of technology. Is that unintended consequence that you described earlier, >>Speaking of transformation and outcomes I should say, what are you hearing most from CIOs and CISOs in terms of what they need now to be able to transform, to deliver the business outcomes so that they can become secure data companies regardless of industry? Yep. >>I think the, the biggest thing we're seeing right now is the need to, you know, leverage true automation and orchestration. We have to break the headcount model. There's not enough security professionals in the world to do, you know, to solve the world's problems. In order to scale that, you know, it's one of the reasons we're, you know, partnering with Palo Alto is because of, you know, the capabilities and the investments they've made in innovation to help drive that automation and orchestration through, you know, numerous capabilities from stock transformation to to to sassy cloud security, et cetera. But our clients need scale. They need to be able to go fast and net pace and they need to, they need to do it with confidence securely. And that, that's one of the big focuses. But the other focus is, is we're starting to see a need to, you know, vendor consolidation in the market. You've seen the acquisitions, I'm sure you've talked to people in over the last couple days. You know, there's, there's a, a tremendous amount of consolidation going around. And what our clients, you know, are asking for is, Hey, I need to reduce the number of vendors I interact with. I need to simplify my infrastructure, I need to focus on automation and, and orchestration from that perspective, >>What's happening with multi-cloud? What are you hearing from from customers? You know, we hear a lot of the, the, the conversations about, oh it's, you know, it's, and I agree by the way, multi-cloud is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor, you know, Chuck Whittens thing about multi-cloud by default versus design, you know, it's good, good line and I think rings true, but, but what a customer's telling you in terms of the real challenges generally and then specifically around security. >>I think it's, you know, each cloud service product has their own security capabilities and security models and, and, and being able to train the people to be able to manage those different models. I think that's where, you know, tools like, you know, Prisma Cloud for instance come in and help clients be able to manage the security and compliance of those infrastructures in, in a way to do that. And then to be able to manage applications security consistently, right? It's not just the cloud itself, but it's actually the applications that may, you know, cross, you know, be for, for resiliency but you know, be in, you know, multi-cloud, you know, multiple clouds and being able to make sure you have consistent security across those. And I think, you know, one of the things that it's permeated is, is just the, with data and identity and, and you know, cloud infrastructure and tolerance management, it's been a big problem cuz it's like the wild, wild west. I always look, when I look at identity and the cloud and how it's done, it, it looks like 1995 identity. It's, it's, it's ridiculously backwards. And so, you know, we've seen things like, you know, keem that have come into play to help manage those relationships and, and simplify it across multiple clouds consistently, if that makes sense. >>Yep. >>You, you mentioned Prisma Cloud most recently Accenture and Palo Alto developed the Secure Cloud Express. Correct. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and what outcomes is it gonna enable? Yeah, >>So great question and we're pretty excited about this cuz what we did with that was we manage cloud, you know, our cloud environments for numerous customers. So we've developed hundreds of policies that, you know, we implemented in Prisma Cloud to manage, you know, multiple clients, our internal infrastructure. And what we did was we said, well, most of our clients have to build those from scratch. So what we said is we will come in, in the best of week of time and come in and, and do a data-driven exercise to show our clients, you know, where where they sit from a, from a security perspective as it relates leveraging Prisma cloud and, and those policies that we've created. And what, what that has led to is another step, which is where we're focused on auto remediation. So, you know, when you, when you get, when you get the findings, then what do you do with them, right? If you have hundreds or thousands in some cases we've had clients with 1100 findings and they just sit there and they go, whoa, you know, so to speak. And so what we've done is we try to take those highest, most frequent findings and build securities code to auto remediate those for clients so they can choose to implement that and work down those, you know, findings very quickly, which helps, you know, drive more value out of, out of their prisma cloud >>Purchases. Accenture obviously has deep industry expertise around the globe. What are you seeing in terms of industries actually? So as they digitize not just their IT transformation but a business transformation, there are starting to see companies, financial services in particular bring their business to their cloud, sify their business. And specifically I'm interested in what's happening at the edge with operations technology. We just talked about healthcare and and medical devices. What's happening there? How connected or disconnected is that to the rest of the estate, the multi-cloud on-prem, et cetera? I >>Mean, I think OT is, is fairly disconnected, right? Sure. From, from that perspective, obviously, but I, I, I think what we're starting to see is an uptick, you know, on, I think secure edge and Sassy will come to OT cause it's a better way. Because what happens is if someone, you know, gets into the network, they can traverse it, right? And if they can apply those zero trust principles to ot, which is you're talking to people that have been, you know, wearing hard hats Yeah. And engineers, that's a big shift for them. And so, but I think that you'll start to see that play more prevalence, you know, with the industries like, you know, financial services, we're seeing a huge uptick in cloud adoption, right? They were, they were slow to do it, but now they're, they're going at pace and faster than most, right? Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, healthcare is a, is another big one where we've seen a lot of migration and a lot of need for multi-cloud. Cuz you know, some, they may be running their analytics on, you know, Google and, and their workloads on Azure, right? Or aws. And so you're starting to see a lot of people leveraging the best of what each cloud provider does well >>From that. And, and just an aside on that Palo Alto survey, we saw construction was one of the hardest hit industries. Yeah. Which I, I was like, what? And then of course it's because they're not really focused on security. They're focused on building stuff. No, >>It's really interesting. We're working with a large builder, I can't say the name, but one of the things that they're looking to do is, you know, they're moving to the cloud and they're building the capability to manage some of the, you know, largest skyscrapers in the world, but also manage the OT sensors and also do selling that creating another business, not only just managing those buildings, but managing other people's buildings for them and ha and selling security as a service for that because they built that capability around their devices and, and, and switches, hvac, et cetera. Do, >>Do you think that because I mean, you know, the operations technology, they're engineers and they're hardcore, like, don't touch my stuff. Exactly. And so do you feel like as, I mean I know that business has kind of done a reach around everything, you know, be becoming connected, but do you feel like they're gonna be more on top of it then, then, then sort of the, the broad commercial market has been? Or is it gonna be wild West all over again? >>My hope is that, you know, us as gsi, you know, my fellow GSIs, that we will help our clients make the better decisions this time around and, and not go to the wild, wild west. And you know, we see a lot of it in manufacturing, you know, if you saw, you know, with the, you know, the invasion Ukraine, you know, one of the big groups that was hit was manufacturing, right? There was factory shut down all over the world, you know, and, and so, you know, and that is an OT environment, but I, you know, what we've seen is them are, you know, those clients take more serious steps to protect those environments cuz they're on, you know, windows 10 servers running, you know, large machines. So we're starting to see a lot more care and feeding in into those environments as well. >>Can I ask you a question about the conversations that you're having? That survey that Dave mentioned, it's was released yesterday. There's a board behind us, what's next in cyber? That was the survey and amazing data that came from it. Like 96% of organizations have been hit by at least one attack in the last year. They were surprised that the number was that high, but we know that no industry, no company is safe. But one of the things that the survey found that, that surprised me was that we always say, oh, security is a board level conversation. We know that to some degree. But what they found was lack of alignment between the board and the executive level. In your Accenture's relationships, I know you guys have deep relationships across organizations and their boards. Can you help bring the board together with the executives and, and really not just talk about cybersecurity, but really develop a cybersecurity transformation strategy that actually delivers resilience? >>Yeah, no ab absolutely. And we've, we, we actually took a step back and, and reorganized our business this last year. And one of those areas that we focused on was within strategy and the C-suite agenda, right? And we actually published looking at gia, it was either the CEO handbook, I think it's what we called it, but they helped them and board be able to, you know, drive more meaningful conversations that relates to risk and and whatnot. And so we're very focused on that right now. And it's, we need to up-level our conversations within the organization. Cause even the buyers in these large, you know, two years ago was mainly the cso, now we're dealing with the cio, CTOs, cfo because these are, you know, meaningful business conversations, right? That are driving business outcomes and security needs to be a business enabler, not, not a a, a bottleneck >>Is the chief data officer starting to emerge as, as we see, you know, Nikesh said yesterday in his keynote and we talked about it with him when he was here, security is a data problem. >>Yep. It is. It's a huge data problem. And we're starting to, you know, I think we've talked a lot about zero trust, but zero trust data is, is a, is a significant problem, right? Because that you talk about the wild, wild west is we see clients that have people that have in, you know, they, they have access to, you know, what we call dev development environment data, right? But then you find out that they can hop four levels over into production data and this been exposed to, you know, the wrong people, you know, not focused on that least privileged aspect. I think data's a real problem, you know, per na kesha's statement in the cloud. It's something that really needs to be addressed. And I think we're starting to see a lot of innovation around that area. Cuz what typical data security has always been, I have all these problems, it creates, I call it noise, right? I got thousands of findings and then just, you know, need just sit there and they go, what do I do? Right? It's too much. And so I think there, there's gonna be more intelligence around that and more, you know, what I call auto remediation, right? Being able to remediate those findings quickly from from that >>Perspective. I've been watching this board behind us. Yeah. It's this what's next in cyber. And people come in and they write, it's just been growing, you know, all week and somebody just wrote sock transformation. Yeah. We were just sort of talking about earlier what, what, in your estimation, what percent of organizations that you target. I understand that you're not going after the, you know, mom and pop organizations, but what percent of that, you know, fat middle and the tip of the pyramid, that a euro, that's your sweet spot. What percent of those organizations don't have a sock? >>I mean, most every organization has a sock. You know, I talked to, you know, CISOs of large financial service organization, they said, do we even need a sock anymore? It could be a virtual sock so to speak, but I think, you know, am was SOC transformation. I think we could potentially head to something like that. But you know, but what's really been strange is there's been, you know, what we call soar, right? Security, you know, orchestration, automation, whatever. And what another, >>Another acronym, their >>Acronym that I security that I might brain is >>Hold apologize. >>But you know, they've, people have never really driven the value out of it because they build these automation playbooks and, and for one company to do it and build 20 of 'em or 30 of 'em to ha it doesn't pay off in the long run. And what we're starting to see is people, you know, bring to the table more crowdsource these capabilities so that they can scale those sock transformations. Cause it's really about, you know, orchestration and automation. That's where, you know, nirvana comes in because it's not about people with headsets on looking at, you know, 20 screens. It's not helpful, right? The humans, we make mistakes. And so if we can automate as much of that as possible, get rid of the false positives, leverage AI and and ML to do that. And I think we're starting to see, you know, what I would call more advanced AI and ml. I think in the early days in security, AI and ML was very nascent and, and, and now you're starting to see, you know, more powerful concepts come in better learning, better outcomes out of that. >>Well, it was a lot of modeling in the cloud still is, but it's increasingly going toward real time inference and that's, you know, game changing. >>Agreed. >>Last question for you. What's are some of the things that are next on the plate for Accenture and Palo Networks? What's next up? >>I think, you know, we're very focused on, on Sassy right now in, in the market. And I think we think that is, you know, I think both of us think that's the next big wave, right? Because I think what we learned out of, you know, these last two and a half, three years is that these concepts work, but they can actually scale out to drive significant cost savings. I mean, if you look at Accenture, you know, we don't have a a network backbone anymore. We're pure cloud wan, right? We're leveraging the internet for that. And I think that and what we're trying to do with Palo Alto and driving, you know, cloud WAN and Sassy as a service, I think will be super, super meaningful. And, and, and, and >>Well that's interesting. That has implications for a number of companies out >>There. Yeah. Well I think, you know, it's obviously the, you know, it, it's a, it is a big implication for a lot of, a lot of, you know, our customers even, right? Yeah. And so we have to be very careful and thoughtful about how we work to make that happen over time. >>Right. A lot of opportunity. Rex, thank you so much for joining us on the program and really dissecting what Accenture and Palo Alto are doing, all the value in it for organizations across industries. We appreciate your insights. Yep. >>Thank you >>For Rex Dexon and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cubes stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. This is the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the manager risk across the extended attack surface with Armis. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Got the demo. Got here, Bryan Inman sales engineer at Armis. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're looking forward to the demo. How you doing? >> I'm doing well, John, thanks for having me. >> We heard from Nadir describing Armis' platform, lot of intelligence. It's like a search engine meets data at scale, intelligent platform around laying out the asset map, if you will, the new vulnerability module among other things that really solves CISCO's problems. A lot of great customer testimonials and we got the demo here that you're going to give us. What's the demo about? What are we going to see? >> Well, John, thanks. Great question. And truthfully, I think as Nadir has pointed out what Armis as a baseline is giving you is great visibility into every asset that's communicating within your environment. And from there, what we've done is we've layered on known vulnerabilities associated with not just the device, but also what else is on the device. Is there certain applications running on that device, the versions of those applications, and what are the vulnerabilities known with that? So that's really gives you great visibility in terms of the devices that folks aren't necessarily have visibility into now, unmanaged devices, IoT devices, OT, and critical infrastructure, medical devices things that you're not necessarily able to actively scan or put an agent on. So not only is Armis telling you about these devices but we're also layering on those vulnerabilities all passively and in real time. >> A lot of great feedback we've heard and I've talked to some of your customers. Rhe agentless is a huge deal. The discoveries are awesome. You can see everything and just getting real time information. It's really, really cool. So I'm looking forward to the demo for our guests. Take us on that tour. Let's go with the demo for the guests today. >> All right. Sounds good. So what we're looking at here is within the Armis console is just a clean representation of the passive reporting of what Armis has discovered. So we see a lot of different types of devices from your virtual machines and personal computers, things that are relatively easy to manage. But working our way down, you're able to see a lot of different types of devices that are not necessarily easy to get visibility into, things like your up systems, IT cameras, dash cams, et cetera, lighting systems. And today's day and age where everything is moving to that smart feature, it's great to have that visibility into what's communicating on my network and getting that, being able to layer on the risk factors associated with it as well as the vulnerabilities. So let's pivot over to our vulnerabilities tab and talk about the the AVM portion, the asset vulnerability management. So what we're looking at is the dashboard where we're reporting another clean representation with customizable dashlets that gives you visuals and reporting and things like new vulnerabilities as they come in. What are the most critical vulnerabilities, the newest as they roll in the vulnerabilities by type? We have hardware. We have application. We have operating systems. As we scroll down, we can see things to break it down by vulnerabilities, by the operating system, Windows, Linux, et cetera. We can create dashlets that show you views of the number of devices that are impacted by these CVEs. And scrolling down, we can see how long have these vulnerabilities been sitting within my environment? So what are the oldest vulnerabilities we have here? And then also of course, vulnerabilities by applications. So things like Google Chrome, Microsoft Office. So we're able to give a good representation of the amount of vulnerabilities as they're associated to the hardware and applications as well. So we're going to dig in and take a a deeper look at one of these vulnerabilities here. So I'm excited to talk today about of where Armis AVM is, but also where it's going as well. So we're not just reporting on things like the CVSS score from NIST NVD. We're also able to report on things like the exploitability of that. How actively is this CVE being exploited in the wild? We're reporting EPSS scores. For example, we're able to take open source information as well as a lot of our partnerships that we have with other vendors that are giving us a lot of great value of known vulnerabilities associated with the applications and with hardware, et cetera. But where we're going with this is in very near future releases, we're going to be able to take an algorithm approach of, what are the most critical CVSS that we see? How exploitable are those? What are common threat actors doing with these CVEs? Have they weaponized these CVEs? Are they actively using those weaponized tools to exploit these within other folks' environments? And who's reporting on these? So we're going to take all of these and then really add that Armis flavor of we already know what that device is and we can explain and so can the users of it, the business criticality of that device. So we're able to pivot over to the matches as we see the CVEs. We're able to very cleanly view, what exactly are the devices that the CVE resides on. And as you can see, we're giving you more than just an IP address or a lot more context and we're able to click in and dive into what exactly are these devices. And more importantly, how critical are these devices to my environment? If one of these devices were to go down if it were to be a server, whatever it may be, I would want to focus on those particular devices and ensuring that that CVE, especially if it's an exploitable CVE were to be addressed earlier than say the others and really be able to manage and prioritize these. Another great feature about it is, for example, we're looking at a particular CVE in terms of its patch and build number from Windows 10. So the auto result feature that we have, for example, we've passively detected what this particular personal computer is running Windows 10 and the build and revision numbers on it. And then once Armis passively discovers an update to that firmware and patch level, we can automatically resolve that, giving you a confidence that that has been addressed from that particular device. We're also able to customize and look through and potentially select a few of these, say, these particular devices reside on your guest network or an employee wifi network where we don't necessarily, I don't want to say care, but we don't necessarily value that as much as something internally that holds significantly, more business criticality. So we can select some of these and potentially ignore or resolve for determining reasons as you see here. Be able to really truly manage and prioritize these CVEs. As I scroll up, I can pivot over to the remediation tab and open up each one of these. So what this is doing is essentially Armis says, through our knowledge base been able to work with the vendors and pull down the patches associated with these. And within the remediation portion, we're able to view, for example, if we were to pull down the patch from this particular vendor and apply it to these 60 devices that you see here, right now we're able to view which patches are going to gimme the most impact as I prioritize these and take care of these affected devices. And lastly, as I pivot back over. Again, where we're at now is we're able to allow the users to customize the organizational priority of this particular CVE to where in terms of, this has given us a high CVSS score but maybe for whatever reasons it may be, maybe this CVE in terms of this particular logical segment of my network, I'm going to give it a low priority for whatever the use case may be. We have compensating controls set in place that render this CVE not impactful to this particular segment of my environment. So we're able to add that organizational priority to that CVE and where we're going as you can see that popped up here but where we're going is we're going to start to be able to apply the organizational priority in terms of the actual device level. So what we'll see is we'll see a column added to here to where we'll see the the business impact of that device based on the importance of that particular segment of your environment or the device type, be it critical networking device or maybe a critical infrastructure device, PLCs, controllers, et cetera, but really giving you that passive reporting on the CVEs in terms of what the device is within your network. And then finally, we do integrate with your vulnerability management and scanners as well. So if you have a scanner actively scanning these, but potentially they're missing segments of your net network, or they're not able to actively scan certain devices on your network, that's the power of Armis being able to come back in and give you that visibility of not only what those devices are for visibility into them, but also what vulnerabilities are associated with those passive devices that aren't being scanned by your network today. So with that, that concludes my demo. So I'll kick it back over to you, John. >> Awesome. Great walk through there. Take me through what you think the most important part of that. Is it the discovery piece? Is it the interaction? What's your favorite? >> Honestly, I think my favorite part about that is in terms of being able to have the visibility into the devices that a lot of folks don't see currently. So those IoT devices, those OT devices, things that you're not able to run a scan on or put an agent on. Armis is not only giving you visibility into them, but also layering in, as I said before, those vulnerabilities on top of that, that's just visibility that a lot of folks today don't have. So Armis does a great job of giving you visibility and vulnerabilities and risks associated with those devices. >> So I have to ask you, when you give this demo to customers and prospects, what's the reaction? Falling out of their chair moment? Are they more skeptical? It's almost too good to be true and end to end vulnerability management is a tough nut to crack in terms of solution. >> Honestly, a lot of clients that we've had, especially within the OT and the medical side, they're blown away because at the end of the day when we can give them that visibility, as I've said, Hey, I didn't even know that those devices resided in that portion, but not only we showing them what they are and where they are and enrichment on risk factors, et cetera, but then we show them, Hey, we've worked with that vendor, whatever it may be and Rockwell, et cetera, and we know that there's vulnerabilities associated with those devices. So they just seem to be blown away by the fact that we can show them so much about those devices from behind one single console. >> It reminds me of the old days. I'm going to date myself here. Remember the old Google Maps mashup days. Customers talk about this as the Google Maps for their assets. And when you have the Google Maps and you have the Ubers out there, you can look at the trails, you can look at what's happening inside the enterprise. So there's got to be a lot of interest in once you get the assets, what's going on those networks or those roads, if you will, 'cause you got in packet movement. You got things happening. You got upgrades. You got changing devices. It's always on kind of living thing. >> Absolutely. Yeah, it's what's on my network. And more importantly at times, what's on those devices? What are the risks associated with the the applications running on those? How are those devices communicating? And then as we've seen here, what are the vulnerabilities associated with those and how can I take action with them? >> Real quick, put a plug in for where I can find the demo. Is it online? Is it on YouTube? On the website? Where does someone see this demo? >> Yeah, the Armis website has a lot of demo content loaded. Get you in touch with folks like engineers like myself to provide demos whenever needed. >> All right, Bryan, thanks for coming on this show. Appreciate, Sales Engineer at Armis, Bryan Inman. Given the demo God award out to him. Good job. Thanks for the demo. >> Thanks, thanks for having me. >> Okay. In a moment, we're going to have my closing thoughts on this event and really the impact to the business operations side, in a moment. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, welcome back to the manager risk across the extended attack surface with Armas I'm John fair host of the cube. Got the demo. God here, Brian Inman sales engineer at Armit. Brian. Thanks for coming on. We're looking forward to the demo, how you doing? >>I'm doing well, John, thanks for having me, >>You know, we heard from Nair, you know, describing arm's platform, a lot of intelligence. It's like a search engine meets data at scale intelligent platform around laying out the asset map. If you will, the new vulnerability module among other things that really solves CISO's problems, a lot of great customer testimonials. And we, we got the demo here that you're gonna give us, what's the demo about what are we, what are we gonna see? >>Well, John, thanks. Great question. And truthfully, I think as NAIA has pointed out what AIS as a baseline is giving you is, is great visibility into every asset on your that's communicating within your, within your environment. And from there, what we've done is we've layered on known vulnerabilities associated with not just the device, but also what else is on the device. What's is there certain applications running on that device, the versions of those applications and what are the vulnerabilities known with that? So that's really gives you great visibility in, in terms of the devices that folks aren't necessarily have visibility into now, unmanaged devices, OT devices, OT, and critical infrastructure, medical devices, things that you're not necessarily able to actively scan or put an agent on. So not only is Armas telling you about these devices, but we're also layer layering on those vulnerabilities all passively and in real time, >>A lot of great feedback we've heard and I've talked to some of your customers, the agent list is a huge deal. The Discover's at awesome. You can see everything and, and just getting real time information. It's really, really cool. So I'm looking forward to, for the demo for our guests, take us on that tour. Let's go with the demo for the guests today. >>All right. Sounds good. So what we're looking at here is within the Armas console is just a clean representation of the passive reporting of what Armas has discovered. So we see a lot of different types of devices, you know, from your virtual machines and personal computers, things that are relatively easy to manage, but working our way down, you're able to see a lot of different of the different types of devices that are not necessarily easy to, to get visibility into things like your up systems, IP cameras, dash cams, et cetera, lighting systems, and, and today's day and age, where everything is moving to the, that smart feature. You know, it's, it's great to have that visibility into, you know, what's communicating on my network and getting that, being able to layer on the risk factors associated with it, as well as the vulnerabilities. So let's pivot over to our vulnerabilities tab and talk about the, the ADM portion, the asset vulnerability management. >>So what we're looking at is the dashboard where we're reporting a, a, another clean representation with customizable dashboards that gives you visuals and reporting and things like new vulnerabilities as they come in, you know, what are the most critical vulnerabilities that are the, the newest as they roll in the vulnerabilities by type, we have hardware, we have application, we have operating systems. As we scroll down, we can see things to break it down by vulnerabilities, by the operating system, windows, Linux, et cetera. We can take, you know, create dashes that show you views of the, the number of, of devices that are impacted by these CVEs and scrolling down. We can see, you know, what, how long have these vulnerabilities been sitting within my environment? So how, what are the oldest vulnerabilities we have here? And then also of course, vulnerabilities by applications. So things like Google Chrome, Microsoft office. >>So we're able to give a, a good representation of the amount of vulnerabilities as they're associated to the hardware and applications as well. So we're gonna dig in and take a, a deeper look at one of these vulnerabilities here. So I'm excited to talk today about where Armas ABM is, but also where it's going as well. So we're not just reporting on things like the CVSs score from, from N N VD. We're also able to report on things like the exploitability of that, right? How, how actively is this, this CVE being exploited in the wild, right? We're reporting E EPSS scores. For example, we're able to take open source information as well as a lot of our partnerships that we have with other vendors that are giving us a lot of great value of known vulnerabilities associated with the applications and with hardware, et cetera. >>But we're where we're going with. This is we're in Fu very near future releases. We're gonna be able to, to take sort of an algorithm approach of what are the most critical CVSs that we see, how exploitable are those, what are common threat actors doing with these, these CVEs have they weaponized these CVS? Are they actively using those weaponized tools to exploit these within, within other folks' environments? And who's reporting on these. So we're gonna take all of these and then really add that Armas flavor of we already know what that device is, and we can explain. And, and so can the users of it, the business criticality of that device, right? So we're able to pivot over to the matches as we see the CVEs, we're able to very cleanly view, what are, what exactly are the devices that the CVE resides on, right? >>And as you can see, we're giving you more than just an IP address or more, you know, a lot more context, and we're able to click in and dive into what exactly are these devices and how, and more importantly, how critical are these devices to, to my, my environment, if one of these devices were to go down, if it were to be a server, if you know, whatever it may be, I would wanna focus on those particular devices and ensuring that that CVE, especially if it's an exploitable CVE were to be addressed or early, earlier than, than say the others, and really be able to manage and prioritize these another great feature about it is, you know, for example, we're looking at a, a particular CVE in terms of its its patch and build number from windows 10. So the AutoSol feature that we have, for example, we've passively detected what this particular personal computer is running windows 10 and the build and revision numbers on it. >>And then once Armas passively discovers an update to that firmware and patch level, we can automatically resolve that, giving you a, a confidence that that has been addressed from that particular device. We're also able to customize and look through and potentially select a few of these, say, you know, these particular devices reside on your guest network or an employee wifi network where we don't necessarily, I don't wanna say care, but we don't necessarily value that as much as something in, you know, internally that has holds significantly more business criticality. So we can select some of these and potentially ignore or resolve for determining reasons. As you see here, be able to really truly manage and prioritize these, these CVEs. As I scroll up, I can pivot over to the remediation tab and open up each one of these. So what this is doing is essentially Arma says, you know, through our knowledge base, been able to work with the vendors and, and pull down the patches associated with these. >>And within the remediation portion, we're able to view, for example, if we were to pull down the patch from this particular vendor and apply it to these 60 devices that you see here, right now, we're able to F to view, you know, which patches are gonna gimme the most impact as I prioritize these and take care of these affected devices. And lastly, as I pivot back, go again, where we're at now is we're able to allow the, the users to customize the organizational priority of this particular CVE, to where in terms of, you know, this has, has given us a high CVSs score, but maybe for whatever reasons it may be maybe this CVE in terms of this particular logical segment of my network, I'm gonna give it a low priority for whatever the use case may be. We have compensating controls set in place that, that render this CVE, not impactful to this particular segment of my environment. >>So we're able to add that organizational priority to that CVE and where we're going, as you can see that that popped up here, but where we're going is we're gonna start to be able to apply the, the organizational priority in terms of the actual device level. Right? So what we'll see is we'll see a, a column added to here to where we'll see the, the business impact of that device, based on the importance of that particular segment of your environment or the device type, be it, you know, critical networking device, or maybe a, a critical infrastructure device, PLCs controllers, et cetera, but really giving you that passive reporting on the CVEs in terms of what the device is within your network. And then finally we do integrate with your vulnerability, vulnerability management, and scanners as well. So if you have a scanner actively scanning these, but potentially they're missing segments of your net network, or they're not able to actively scan certain devices on your network, that's the power of Armas being able to come back in and give you that visibility of not only what those devices are for visibility into them, but also what vulnerabilities are associated with those passive devices that aren't being scanned by your network today. >>So with that that's, that concludes my demo. So I'll kick it back over to you, John. >>Awesome. Great, great walk through there. Take me through what you think the most important part of that. Is it the discovery piece? Is it the interaction what's your favorite? >>Honestly, I think my favorite part about that is, you know, in terms of being able to have the visibility into the devices, that a lot of folks don't see currently. So those OT devices, those OT devices, things that you're not able to, to run a scan on or put an agent on Armas is not only giving you visibility into them, but also layering in, as I said before, those vulnerabilities on top of that, that's just visibility that a lot of folks today don't have. So Armas does a great job of giving you visibility and vulnerabilities and risks associated with those devices. >>So I have to ask you, when you give this demo to customers and prospects, what's the reaction falling outta their chair moment? Are they more skeptical? It's almost too good to be true. And the end to end vulnerability management's is a tough nut to crack in terms of solution. >>Well, honestly, a lot of clients that we've had, you know, especially within the OT and the medical side, they're, they're blown away because at the end of the day, when we can give them that visibility, as I've said, you know, Hey, I, I didn't even know that those devices resided in that, that portion, but not only are we showing them what they are and where they are and enrichment on risk factors, et cetera. But then we show them, Hey, there's a known, you know, we've worked with that vendor, whatever it may be and, you know, Rockwell, et cetera. And we know that there's vulnerabilities associated with those devices. So they just seem to be blown away by the fact that we can show them so much about those devices from behind one single console. >>You know, it reminds me of the old days. I'm gonna date myself here. Remember the old Google maps, mashup days. This is customers. Talk about this as the Google maps for their assets. And when you have the Google maps and you have the Ubers out there, you can look at the trails, you can look at what's happening inside the, inside the enterprise. So there's gotta be a lot of interest in once you get the assets what's going on, on those, on, in those, on those networks or those roads, if you will, cuz you got in packet movement, you got things happening, you got upgrades, you got changing devices. It's always on kind of living thing. >>Absolutely. Yeah. It's what's on my network. And more importantly at times what's on those devices, right? Are the, what are the risks associated with the, the applications running on those? How are those devices communicating? And then as we've seen here, what are the vulnerabilities associated with those and how can I take action with them? >>All right. Real quick, put a plug in for where I can find the demo. Is it online is on YouTube, on the website. Where does someone see this demo? >>Yeah, the Amis website has a lot of demo content loaded. Get you in touch with folks like engineers like myself to, to provide demos whenever, whenever needed. >>All right, Brian, thanks for coming on this show. Appreciate sales engineer, Armas Brian Inman, given the demo God award out to him. Good job. Thanks for the demo. >>Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>Okay. You know, in a moment we're gonna have my closing thoughts on this event and really the impact to the business operation side. In a moment I'm John fur the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation with 40 net. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, Derek Minky is back. He's the chief security insights and global threat alliances at 40 minutes, 40 guard labs, Derek. Welcome back to the program. >>Likewise, we've talked a lot this year. And of course, when I saw that there are, uh, you guys have predictions from 40 guard labs, global threat intelligence and research team about the cyber threat landscape for 2022. I thought it was going to be a lot to talk about with Derek here. So let's go ahead and dig. Right in. First of all, one of the things that caught my attention was the title of the press release about the predictions that was just revealed. The press release says 40 guard labs, predict cyber attacks aimed at everything from crypto wallets to satellite internet, nothing. There is no surface that is safe anymore. Talk to me about some of the key challenges that organizations in every industry are facing. >>Yeah, absolutely. So this is a, as you said, you, you had the keyword there surface, right? That, and that attack surface is, is open for attack. That's the attack surface that we talk about it is literally be pushed out from the edge to space, like a lot of these places that had no connection before, particularly in OT environments off grid, we're talking about, uh, you know, um, uh, critical infrastructure, oil and gas, as an example, there's a lot of these remote units that were living out there that relied on field engineers to go in and, uh, you know, plug into them. They were air gapped, those such low. Those are the things that are going to be accessible by Elio's low earth orbit satellites. And there are 4,000 of those out there right now. There's going to be over 30,000. We're talking Starlink, we're talking at least four or five other competitors entering this space, no pun intended. And, um, and that's a big deal because that it's a gateway. It opens the door for cyber criminals to be able to have accessibility to these networks. And so security has to come, you know, from, uh, friends of mine there, right. >>It absolutely does. We've got this fragmented perimeter tools that are siloed, the expand and very expanded attack surface, as you just mentioned, but some of the other targets, the 5g enabled edge, the core network, of course, the home environment where many of us still are. >>Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that home environment like the edge, it is a, uh, it's, it's the smart edge, right? So we have things called edge access Trojans. These are Trojans that will actually impact and infect edge devices. And if you think about these edge devices, we're talking things that have machine learning and, and auto automation built into them a lot of privilege because they're actually processing commands and acting on those commands in a lot of cases, right? Everything from smart office, smart home option, even until the OT environment that we're talking about. And that is a juicy target for attackers, right? Because these devices naturally have more privileged. They have APIs and connectivity to a lot of these things where they could definitely do some serious damage and be used as these pivot within the network from the edge. Right. And that's, that's a key point there. >>Let's talk about the digital wallet that we all walk around with. You know, we think out so easy, we can do quick, simple transactions with apple wallet, Google smart tab, Venmo, what have you, but that's another growing source of that, where we need to be concerned, right? >>Yeah. So I, I I've, I've worn my cyber security hat for over 20 years and 10 years ago, even we were talking all about online banking Trojans. That was a big threat, right? Because a lot of financial institutions, they hadn't late ruled out things like multifactor authentication. It was fairly easy to get someone's bank credentials go in siphoned fans out of an account. That's a lot harder nowadays. And so cyber criminals are shifting tactics to go after the low hanging fruit, which are these digital wallets and often cryptocurrency, right? We've actually seen this already in 40 guard labs. Some of this is already starting to happen right now. I expect this to happen a lot more in 20, 22 and beyond. And it's because, you know, these wallets are, um, hold a lot of whole lot of value right now, right. With the crypto. And they can be transferred easily without having to do a, like a, you know, EFT is a Meijer transfers and all those sorts of things that includes actually a lot of paperwork from the financial institutions. And, you know, we saw something where they were actually hijacking these wallets, right. Just intercepting a copy and paste command because it takes, you know, it's a 54 character address people aren't typing that in all the time. So when they're sending or receiving funds, they're asking what we've actually seen in malware today is they're taking that, intercepting it and replacing it with the attackers. Well, it's simple as that bypassing all the, you know, authentication measures and so forth. >>And is that happening for the rest of us that don't have a crypto wallet. So is that happening for folks with apple wallets? And is that a growing threat concern that people need to be? It is >>Absolutely. Yeah. So crypto wallets is, is the majority of overseeing, but yeah, no, no digital wallet is it's unpatched here. Absolutely. These are all valid targets and we are starting to see activity in. I am, >>I'm sure going after those stored credentials, that's probably low-hanging fruit for the attackers. Another thing that was interesting that the 2022 predictions threat landscape, uh, highlighted was the e-sports industry and the vulnerabilities there. Talk to me about that. That was something that I found surprising. I didn't realize it was a billion dollar revenue, a year industry, a lot of money, >>A lot of money, a lot of money. And these are our full-blown platforms that have been developed. This is a business, this isn't, you know, again, going back to what we've seen and we still do see the online gaming itself. We've seen Trojans written for that. And oftentimes it's just trying to get into, and user's gaming account so that they can steal virtual equipment and current, you know, there there's virtual currencies as well. So there was some monetization happening, but not on a grand scale. This is about a shift attackers going after a business, just like any organization, big business, right. To be able to hold that hostage effectively in terms of DDoSs threats, in terms of vulnerabilities, in terms of also, you know, crippling these systems with ransomware, like we've already seen starting to hit OT, this is just another big target. Right. Um, and if you think about it, these are live platforms that rely on low latency. So very quick connections, anything that interrupts that think about the Olympics, right on sports environment, it's a big deal to them. And there's a lot of revenue that could be lost in cybercriminals fully realizes. And this is why, you know, we're predicting that e-sports is going to be a, um, a big target for them moving forward. >>Got it. And tell, let's talk about what's going on with brands. So when you and I spoke a few months ago, I think it was ransomware was up nearly 11 X in the first half of a calendar year, 2021. What are you seeing from an evolution perspective, uh, in the actual ransomware, um, actions themselves as well as what the, what the cyber criminals are evolving to. >>Yeah. So to where it's aggressive, destructive, not good words, right. But, but this is what we're seeing with ransomware. Now, again, they're not just going after data as the currency, we're seeing, um, destructive capabilities put into ransomware, including wiper malware. So this used to be just in the realm of, uh, APTT nation state attacks. We saw that with should moon. We saw that with dark soil back in 2013, so destructive threats, but in the world of apt and nation state, now we're seeing this in cyber crime. We're seeing it with ransomware and this, I expect to be a full-blown tactic for cyber criminals simply because they have the, the threat, right. They've already leveraged a lot of extortion and double extortion schemes. We've talked about that. Now they're going to be onboarding this as a new threat, basically planting these time bombs. He's ticking time bombs, holding systems for, for, for ransom saying, and probably crippling a couple of, to show that they mean business and saying, unless you pay us within a day or two, we're going to take all of these systems offline. We're not just going to take them offline. We're going to destroy them, right. That's a big incentive for people to, to, to pay up. So they're really playing on that fear element. That's what I mean about aggressive, right? They're going to be really shifting tactics, >>Aggressive and destructive, or two things you don't want in a cybersecurity environment or to be called by your employer. Just wanted to point that out. Talk to me about wiper malware. Is this new emerging, or is this something that's seeing a resurgence because this came up at the Olympics in the summer, right? >>Absolutely. So a resurgence in, in a sort of different way. Right. So, as I said, we have seen it before, but it's been not too prevalent. It's been very, uh, it's, it's been a niche area for them, right. It's specifically for these very highly targeted attack. So yes, the Olympics, in fact, two times at the Olympics in Tokyo, but also in the last summer Olympics as well. We also saw it with, as I mentioned in South Korea at dark school in 2013, we saw it an OT environment with the moon as an example, but we're talking handfuls here. Uh, unfortunately we have blogged about three of these in the last month to month and a half. Right. And that, and you know, this is starting to be married with ransomware, which is particularly a very dangerous cause it's not just my wiper malware, but couple that with the ransom tactics. >>And that's what we're starting to see is this new, this resurgent. Yes. But a completely new form that's taking place. Uh, even to the point I think in the future that it could, it could severely a great, now what we're seeing is it's not too critical in a sense that it's not completely destroying the system. You can recover the system still we're talking to master boot records, those sorts of things, but in the future, I think they're going to be going after the formal firmware themselves, essentially turning some of these devices into paperweights and that's going to be a very big problem. >>Wow. That's a very scary thought that getting to the firmware and turning those devices into paperweights. One of the things also that the report talked about that that was really interesting. Was that more attacks against the supply chain and Linux, particularly talk to us about that. What did you find there? What does it mean? What's the threat for organizations? >>Yeah. So we're seeing a diversification in terms of the platforms that cyber criminals are going after. Again, it's that attack surface, um, lower hanging fruit in a sense, uh, because they've, you know, for a fully patched versions of windows, 10 windows 11, it's harder, right. For cyber criminals than it was five or 10 years ago to get into those systems. If we look at the, uh, just the prevalence, the amount of devices that are out there in IOT and OT environments, these are running on Linux, a lot of different flavors and forms of Linux, therefore this different security holes that come up with that. And that's, that's a big patch management issue as an example too. And so this is what we, you know, we've already seen it with them or I bought net and this was in our threat landscape report, or I was the number one threat that we saw. And that's a Linux-based bot net. Now, uh, Microsoft has rolled out something called WSL, which is a windows subsystem for Linux and windows 10 and windows 11, meaning that windows supports Linux now. So that all the code that's being written for botnets, for malware, all that stuff is able to run on, on new windows platforms effectively. So this is how they're trying to expand their, uh, attack surface. And, um, that ultimately gets into the supply chain because again, a lot of these devices in manufacturing and operational technology environments rely quite heavily actually on Linux. >>Well, and with all the supply chain issues that we've been facing during the pandemic, how can organizations protect themselves against this? >>Yeah. So this, this is a big thing, right? And we talked about also the weaponization of artificial intelligence, automation and all of these, there's a lot going on as you know, right from the threats a lot to get visibility on a lot, to be able to act quickly on that's a big key metric. There is how quick you can detect these and respond to them for that. You need good threat intelligence, of course, but you also truly need to enable, uh, uh, automation, things like SD wan, a mesh architecture as well, or having a security fabric that can actually integrate devices that talk to each other and can detect these threats and respond to them quickly. That's a very important piece because if you don't stop these attacks well, they're in that movement through the attack chain. So the kill chain concept we talk about, um, the risk is very high nowadays where, you know, everything we just talked about from a ransomware and destructive capabilities. So having those approaches is very important. Also having, um, you know, education and a workforce trained up is, is equally as important to, to be, you know, um, uh, to, to be aware of these threats. >>I'm glad you brought up that education piece and the training, and that's something that 49 is very dedicated to doing, but also brings up the cybersecurity skills gap. I know when I talked with Kenzie, uh, just a couple months ago at the, um, PGA tournament, it was talking about, you know, big investments in what 40 guard, 40, 40 net is doing to help reduce that gap. But the gap is still there. How do I teach teams not get overloaded with the expanding service? It seems like the surface, the surface has just, there is no limit anymore. So how does, how does it teams that are lean and small help themselves in the fact that the threat is landscape is, is expanding. The criminals are getting smarter or using AI intelligent automation, what our it teams do >>Like fire with fire. You got to use two of the same tools that they're using on their side, and you need to be able to use in your toolkit. We're talking about a security operation center perspective to have tools like, again, this comes to the threat intelligence to get visibility on these things. We're talking Simmons, sor uh, we have, you know, 40 AI out now, uh, deception products, all these sorts of things. These are all tools that need that, that, uh, can help, um, those people. So you don't have to have a, you know, uh, hire 40 or 50 people in your sock, right? It's more about how you can work together with the tools and technology to get, have escalation paths to do more people, process procedure, as we talk about to be able to educate and train on those, to be able to have incident response planning. >>So what do you do like, because inevitably you're going to be targeted, probably interacts where attack, what do you do? Um, playing out those scenarios, doing breach and attack simulation, all of those things that comes down to the skills gaps. So it's a lot about that education and awareness, not having to do that. The stuff that can be handled by automation and AI and, and training is you're absolutely right. We've dedicated a lot with our NSC program at 49. We also have our 40 net security academy. Uh, you know, we're integrating with those secondary so we can have the skillsets ready, uh, for, for new graduates. As an example, there's a lot of progress being made towards that. We've even created a new powered by 40 guard labs. There is a 40 guard labs play in our NSC seven as an example, it's, uh, you know, for, um, uh, threat hunting and offensive security as an example, understanding really how attackers are launching their, their campaigns and, um, all those things come together. But that's the good news actually, is that we've come a long way. We actually did our first machine learning and AI models over 10 years ago, Lisa, this isn't something new to us. So the technology has gone a long way. It's just a matter of how we can collaborate and obviously integrate with that for the, on the skills gap. >>And one more question on the actual threat landscape, were there any industries that came up in particular, as we talked about e-sports we talked about OT and any industries that came up in particular as, as really big hotspots that companies and organizations really need to be aware of. >>Yeah. So also, uh, this is part of OT about ICS critical infrastructure. That's a big one. Uh, absolutely there we're seeing, uh, also cyber-criminals offering more crime services now on dark web. So CAS, which is crime as a service, because it used to be a, again, a very specialized area that maybe only a handful of organized criminal organizations could actually, um, you know, launch attacks and, and impact to those targets where they're going after those targets. Now they're offering services right on to other coming cyber criminals, to be able to try to monetize that as well. Again, we're seeing this, we actually call it advanced persistent cybercrime APC instead of an apt, because they're trying to take cyber crime to these targets like ICS, critical infrastructure, um, healthcare as well is another one, again, usually in the realm of APMT, but now being targeted more by cybercriminals in ransomware, >>I've heard of ransomware as a service, is that a subcategory of crime as a service? >>Absolutely. Yeah. It is phishing as a service ransomware as, and service DDoSs as a service, but not as, as many of these subcategories, but a ransomware as a service. That's a, another big problem as well, because this is an affiliate model, right. Where they hire partners and pay them commission, uh, if they actually get payments of ransom, right? So they have literally a middle layer in this network that they're pushing out to scale their attacks, >>You know, and I think that's the last time we talked about ransomware, we talked about it's a matter of, and I talk to customers all the time who say, yes, it's a matter of when, not, if, is, is this the same sentiment? And you think for crime as a service in general, the attacks on e-sports on home networks, on, uh, internet satellites in space, is this just a matter of when, not if across the board? >>Well, yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, but the good news is it doesn't have to be a, you know, when it happens, it doesn't have to be a catastrophic situation. Again, that's the whole point about preparedness and planning and all the things I talked about, the filling the skills gap in education and having the proper, proper tools in place that will mitigate that risk. Right. And that's, and that's perfectly acceptable. And that's the way we should handle this from the industry, because we process we've talked about this, people are over a hundred billion threats a day in 40 guard labs. The volume is just going to continue to grow. It's very noisy out there. And there's a lot of automated threats, a lot of attempts knocking on organizations, doors, and networks, and, you know, um, phishing emails being sent out and all that. So it's something that we just need to be prepared for just like you do for a natural disaster planning and all these sorts of other things in the physical world. >>That's a good point. It doesn't have to be aggressive and destructive, but last question for you, how can, how is 4d guard helping companies in every industry get aggressive and disruptive against the threats? >>Yeah. Great, great, great question. So this is something I'm very passionate about, uh, as you know, uh, where, you know, we, we don't stop just with customer protection. Of course, that is as a security vendor, that's our, our primary and foremost objective is to protect and mitigate risk to the customers. That's how we're doing. You know, this is why we have 24 7, 365 operations at 40 guy labs. Then we're helping to find the latest and greatest on threat intelligence and hunting, but we don't stop there. We're actually working in the industry. Um, so I mentioned this before the cyber threat Alliance to, to collaborate and share intelligence on threats all the way down to disrupt cybercrime. This is what big target of ours is, how we can work together to disrupt cyber crime. Because unfortunately they've made a lot of money, a lot of profits, and we need to reduce that. We need to send a message back and fight that aggressiveness and we're we're on it, right? So we're working with Interpol or project gateway with the world economic forum, the partnership against cyber crime. It's a lot of initiatives with other, uh, you know, uh, the, uh, the who's who of cyber security in the industry to work together and tackle this collaboratively. Um, the good news is there's been some steps of success to that. There's a lot more, we're doing the scale of the efforts. >>Excellent. Well, Derek as always great and very informative conversation with you. I always look forward to these seeing what's going on with the threat landscape, the challenges, the increasing challenges, but also the good news, the opportunities in it, and what 40 guard is doing 40 left 40 net, excuse me, I can't speak today to help customers address that. And we always appreciate your insights and your time we look forward to talking to you and unveiling the next predictions in 2022. >>All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Derek manky. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation with 40 net. Thanks for watching.

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

momentum is gathering [Music] business is evolving more and more quickly moving through one transformation to the next because change never stops it only accelerates this is a world that demands a new kind of compute deployed from edge to core to cloud compute that can outpace the rapidly changing needs of businesses large and small unlocking new insights turning data into outcomes empowering new experiences compute that can scale up or scale down with minimum investment and effort guided by years of expertise protected by 360-degree security served up as a service to let it control own and manage massive workloads that weren't there yesterday and might not be there tomorrow this is the compute power that will drive progress giving your business what you need to be ready for what's next this is the compute power of hpe delivering your foundation for digital transformation welcome to accelerating next thank you so much for joining us today we have a great program we're going to talk tech with experts we'll be diving into the changing economics of our industry and how to think about the next phase of your digital transformation now very importantly we're also going to talk about how to optimize workloads from edge to exascale with full security and automation all coming to you as a service and with me to kick things off is neil mcdonald who's the gm of compute at hpe neil always a pleasure great to have you on it's great to see you dave now of course when we spoke a year ago you know we had hoped by this time we'd be face to face but you know here we are again you know this pandemic it's obviously affected businesses and people in in so many ways that we could never have imagined but in the reality is in reality tech companies have literally saved the day let's start off how is hpe contributing to helping your customers navigate through things that are so rapidly shifting in the marketplace well dave it's nice to be speaking to you again and i look forward to being able to do this in person some point the pandemic has really accelerated the need for transformation in businesses of all sizes more than three-quarters of cios report that the crisis has forced them to accelerate their strategic agendas organizations that were already transforming or having to transform faster and organizations that weren't on that journey yet are having to rapidly develop and execute a plan to adapt to this new reality our customers are on this journey and they need a partner for not just the compute technology but also the expertise and economics that they need for that digital transformation and for us this is all about unmatched optimization for workloads from the edge to the enterprise to exascale with 360 degree security and the intelligent automation all available in that as a service experience well you know as you well know it's a challenge to manage through any transformation let alone having to set up remote workers overnight securing them resetting budget priorities what are some of the barriers that you see customers are working hard to overcome simply per the organizations that we talk with are challenged in three areas they need the financial capacity to actually execute a transformation they need the access to the resource and the expertise needed to successfully deliver on a transformation and they have to find the way to match their investments with the revenues for the new services that they're putting in place to service their customers in this environment you know we have a data partner called etr enterprise technology research and the spending data that we see from them is it's quite dramatic i mean last year we saw a contraction of roughly five percent of in terms of i.t spending budgets etc and this year we're seeing a pretty significant rebound maybe a six to seven percent growth range is the prediction the challenge we see is organizations have to they've got to iterate on that i call it the forced march to digital transformation and yet they also have to balance their investments for example at the corporate headquarters which have kind of been neglected is there any help in sight for the customers that are trying to reduce their spend and also take advantage of their investment capacity i think you're right many businesses are understandably reluctant to loosen the purse strings right now given all of the uncertainty and often a digital transformation is viewed as a massive upfront investment that will pay off in the long term and that can be a real challenge in an environment like this but it doesn't need to be we work through hpe financial services to help our customers create the investment capacity to accelerate the transformation often by leveraging assets they already have and helping them monetize them in order to free up the capacity to accelerate what's next for their infrastructure and for their business so can we drill into that i wonder if we could add some specifics i mean how do you ensure a successful outcome what are you really paying attention to as those sort of markers for success well when you think about the journey that an organization is going through it's tough to be able to run the business and transform at the same time and one of the constraints is having the people with enough bandwidth and enough expertise to be able to do both so we're addressing that in two ways for our customers one is by helping them confidently deploy new solutions which we have engineered leveraging decades of expertise and experience in engineering to deliver those workload optimized portfolios that take the risk and the complexity out of assembling some of these solutions and give them a pre-packaged validated supported solution intact that simplifies that work for them but in other cases we can enhance our customers bandwidth by bringing them hpe point next experts with all of the capabilities we have to help them plan deliver and support these i.t projects and transformations organizations can get on a faster track of modernization getting greater insight and control as they do it we're a trusted partner to get the most for a business that's on this journey in making these critical compute investments to underpin the transformations and whether that's planning to optimizing to safe retirement at the end of life we can bring that expertise to bayer to help amplify what our customers already have in-house and help them accelerate and succeed in executing these transformations thank you for that neil so let's talk about some of the other changes that customers are seeing and the cloud has obviously forced customers and their suppliers to really rethink how technology is packaged how it's consumed how it's priced i mean there's no doubt in that to take green lake it's obviously a leading example of a pay as pay-as-you-scale infrastructure model and it could be applied on-prem or hybrid can you maybe give us a sense as to where you are today with green lake well it's really exciting you know from our first pay-as-you-go offering back in 2006 15 years ago to the introduction of green lake hpe has really been paving the way on consumption-based services through innovation and partnership to help meet the exact needs of our customers hpe green lake provides an experience that's the best of both worlds a simple pay-per-use technology model with the risk management of data that's under our customers direct control and it lets customers shift to everything as a service in order to free up capital and avoid that upfront expense that we talked about they can do this anywhere at any scale or any size and really hpe green lake is the cloud that comes to you like that so we've touched a little bit on how customers can maybe overcome some of the barriers to transformation what about the nature of transformations themselves i mean historically there was a lot of lip service paid to digital and and there's a lot of complacency frankly but you know that covered wrecking ball meme that so well describes that if you're not a digital business essentially you're going to be out of business so neil as things have evolved how is hpe addressed the new requirements well the new requirements are really about what customers are trying to achieve and four very common themes that we see are enabling the productivity of a remote workforce that was never really part of the plan for many organizations being able to develop and deliver new apps and services in order to service customers in a different way or drive new revenue streams being able to get insights from data so that in these tough times they can optimize their business more thoroughly and then finally think about the efficiency of an agile hybrid private cloud infrastructure especially one that now has to integrate the edge and we're really thrilled to be helping our customers accelerate all of these and more with hpe compute i want to double click on that remote workforce productivity i mean again the surveys that we see 46 percent of the cios say that productivity improved with the whole work from home remote work trend and on average those improvements were in the four percent range which is absolutely enormous i mean when you think about that how does hpe specifically you know help here what do you guys do well every organization in the world has had to adapt to a different style of working and with more remote workers than they had before and for many organizations that's going to become the new normal even post pandemic many it shops are not well equipped for the infrastructure to provide that experience because if all your workers are remote the resiliency of that infrastructure the latencies of that infrastructure the reliability of are all incredibly important so we provide comprehensive solutions expertise and as a service options that support that remote work through virtual desktop infrastructure or vdi so that our customers can support that new normal of virtual engagements online everything across industries wherever they are and that's just one example of many of the workload optimized solutions that we're providing for our customers is about taking out the guesswork and the uncertainty in delivering on these changes that they have to deploy as part of their transformation and we can deliver that range of workload optimized solutions across all of these different use cases because of our broad range of innovation in compute platforms that span from the ruggedized edge to the data center all the way up to exascale and hpc i mean that's key if you're trying to affect the digital transformation and you don't have to fine-tune you know be basically build your own optimized solutions if i can buy that rather than having to build it and rely on your r d you know that's key what else is hpe doing you know to deliver things new apps new services you know your microservices containers the whole developer trend what's going on there well that's really key because organizations are all seeking to evolve their mix of business and bring new services and new capabilities new ways to reach their customers new way to reach their employees new ways to interact in their ecosystem all digitally and that means app development and many organizations of course are embracing container technology to do that today so with the hpe container platform our customers can realize that agility and efficiency that comes with containerization and use it to provide insights to their data more and more that data of course is being machine generated or generated at the edge or the near edge and it can be a real challenge to manage that data holistically and not have silos and islands an hpe esmerald data fabric speeds the agility and access to data with a unified platform that can span across the data centers multiple clouds and even the edge and that enables data analytics that can create insights powering a data-driven production-oriented cloud-enabled analytics and ai available anytime anywhere in any scale and it's really exciting to see the kind of impact that that can have in helping businesses optimize their operations in these challenging times you got to go where the data is and the data is distributed it's decentralized so i i i like the esmerel of vision and execution there so that all sounds good but with digital transformation you get you're going to see more compute in in hybrid's deployments you mentioned edge so the surface area it's like the universe it's it's ever-expanding you mentioned you know remote work and work from home before so i'm curious where are you investing your resources from a cyber security perspective what can we count on from hpe there well you can count on continued leadership from hpe as the world's most secure industry standard server portfolio we provide an enhanced and holistic 360 degree view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded end-of-life decommissioning and of course we've long set the bar for security with our work on silicon root of trust and we're extending that to the application tier but in addition to the security customers that are building this modern hybrid are private cloud including the integration of the edge need other elements too they need an intelligent software-defined control plane so that they can automate their compute fleets from all the way at the edge to the core and while scale and automation enable efficiency all private cloud infrastructures are competing with web scale economics and that's why we're democratizing web scale technologies like pinsando to bring web scale economics and web scale architecture to the private cloud our partners are so important in helping us serve our customers needs yeah i mean hp has really upped its ecosystem game since the the middle of last decade when when you guys reorganized it you became like even more partner friendly so maybe give us a preview of what's coming next in that regard from today's event well dave we're really excited to have hp's ceo antonio neri speaking with pat gelsinger from intel and later lisa sue from amd and later i'll have the chance to catch up with john chambers the founder and ceo of jc2 ventures to discuss the state of the market today yeah i'm jealous you guys had some good interviews coming up neil thanks so much for joining us today on the virtual cube you've really shared a lot of great insight how hpe is partnering with customers it's it's always great to catch up with you hopefully we can do so face to face you know sooner rather than later well i look forward to that and uh you know no doubt our world has changed and we're here to help our customers and partners with the technology the expertise and the economics they need for these digital transformations and we're going to bring them unmatched workload optimization from the edge to exascale with that 360 degree security with the intelligent automation and we're going to deliver it all as an as a service experience we're really excited to be helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses and it's been really great talking with you today about that dave thanks for having me you're very welcome it's been super neal and i actually you know i had the opportunity to speak with some of your customers about their digital transformation and the role of that hpe plays there so let's dive right in we're here on the cube covering hpe accelerating next and with me is rule siestermans who is the head of it at the netherlands cancer institute also known as nki welcome rule thank you very much great to be here hey what can you tell us about the netherlands cancer institute maybe you could talk about your core principles and and also if you could weave in your specific areas of expertise yeah maybe first introduction to the netherlands institute um we are one of the top 10 comprehensive cancers in the world and what we do is we combine a hospital for treating patients with cancer and a recent institute under one roof so discoveries we do we find within the research we can easily bring them back to the clinic and vis-a-versa so we have about 750 researchers and about 3 000 other employees doctors nurses and and my role is to uh to facilitate them at their best with it got it so i mean everybody talks about digital digital transformation to us it all comes down to data so i'm curious how you collect and take advantage of medical data specifically to support nki's goals maybe some of the challenges that your organization faces with the amount of data the speed of data coming in just you know the the complexities of data how do you handle that yeah it's uh it's it's it's challenge and uh yeah what we we have we have a really a large amount of data so we produce uh terabytes a day and we we have stored now more than one petabyte on data at this moment and yeah it's uh the challenge is to to reuse the data optimal for research and to share it with other institutions so that needs to have a flexible infrastructure for that so a fast really fast network uh big data storage environment but the real challenge is not not so much the i.t bus is more the quality of the data so we have a lot of medical systems all producing those data and how do we combine them and and yeah get the data fair so findable accessible interoperable and reusable uh for research uh purposes so i think that's the main challenge the quality of the data yeah very common themes that we hear from from other customers i wonder if you could paint a picture of your environment and maybe you can share where hpe solutions fit in what what value they bring to your organization's mission yeah i think it brings a lot of flexibility so what we did with hpe is that we we developed a software-defined data center and then a virtual workplace for our researchers and doctors and that's based on the hpe infrastructure and what we wanted to build is something that expect the needs of doctors and nurses but also the researchers and the two kind of different blood groups blood groups and with different needs so uh but we wanted to create one infrastructure because we wanted to make the connection between the hospital and the research that's that's more important so um hpe helped helped us not only with the the infrastructure itself but also designing the whole architecture of it and for example what we did is we we bought a lot of hardware and and and the hardware is really uh doing his his job between nine till five uh dennis everything is working within everyone is working within the institution but all the other time in evening and and nights hours and also the redundant environment we have for the for our healthcare uh that doesn't do nothing of much more or less uh in in those uh dark hours so what we created together with nvidia and hpe and vmware is that we we call it video by day compute by night so we reuse those those servers and those gpu capacity for computational research jobs within the research that's you mentioned flexibility for this genius and and so we're talking you said you know a lot of hard ways they're probably proliant i think synergy aruba networking is in there how are you using this environment actually the question really is when you think about nki's digital transformation i mean is this sort of the fundamental platform that you're using is it a maybe you could describe that yeah it's it's the fundamental platform to to to work on and and and what we see is that we have we have now everything in place for it but the real challenge is is the next steps we are in so we have a a software defined data center we are cloud ready so the next steps is to to make the connection to the cloud to to give more automation to our researchers so they don't have to wait a couple of weeks for it to do it but they can do it themselves with a couple of clicks so i think the basic is we are really flexible and we have a lot of opportunities for automation for example but the next step is uh to create that business value uh really for for our uh employees that's a great story and a very important mission really fascinating stuff thanks for sharing this with our audience today really appreciate your time thank you very much okay this is dave vellante with thecube stay right there for more great content you're watching accelerating next from hpe i'm really glad to have you with us today john i know you stepped out of vacation so thanks very much for joining us neil it's great to be joining you from hawaii and i love the partnership with hpe and the way you're reinventing an industry well you've always excelled john at catching market transitions and there are so many transitions and paradigm shifts happening in the market and tech specifically right now as you see companies rush to accelerate their transformation what do you see as the keys to success well i i think you're seeing actually an acceleration following the covet challenges that all of us faced and i wasn't sure that would happen it's probably at three times the paces before there was a discussion point about how quickly the companies need to go digital uh that's no longer a discussion point almost all companies are moving with tremendous feed on digital and it's the ability as the cloud moves to the edge with compute and security uh at the edge and how you deliver these services to where the majority of applications uh reside are going to determine i think the future of the next generation company leadership and it's the area that neil we're working together on in many many ways so i think it's about innovation it's about the cloud moving to the edge and an architectural play with silicon to speed up that innovation yes we certainly see our customers of all sizes trying to accelerate what's next and get that digital transformation moving even faster as a result of the environment that we're all living in and we're finding that workload focus is really key uh customers in all kinds of different scales are having to adapt and support the remote workforces with vdi and as you say john they're having to deal with the deployment of workloads at the edge with so much data getting generated at the edge and being acted upon at the edge the analytics and the infrastructure to manage that as these processes get digitized and automated is is so important for so many workflows we really believe that the choice of infrastructure partner that underpins those transformations really matters a partner that can help create the financial capacity that can help optimize your environments and enable our customers to focus on supporting their business are all super key to success and you mentioned that in the last year there's been a lot of rapid course correction for all of us a demand for velocity and the ability to deploy resources at scale is more and more needed maybe more than ever what are you hearing customers looking for as they're rolling out their digital transformation efforts well i think they're being realistic that they're going to have to move a lot faster than before and they're also realistic on core versus context they're they're their core capability is not the technology of themselves it's how to deploy it and they're we're looking for partners that can help bring them there together but that can also innovate and very often the leaders who might have been a leader in a prior generation may not be on this next move hence the opportunity for hpe and startups like vinsano to work together as the cloud moves the edge and perhaps really balance or even challenge some of the big big incumbents in this category as well as partners uniquely with our joint customers on how do we achieve their business goals tell me a little bit more about how you move from this being a technology positioning for hpe to literally helping your customers achieve their outcomes they want and and how are you changing hpe in that way well i think when you consider these transformations the infrastructure that you choose to underpin it is incredibly critical our customers need a software-defined management plan that enables them to automate so much of their infrastructure they need to be able to take faster action where the data is and to do all of this in a cloud-like experience where they can deliver their infrastructure as code anywhere from exascale through the enterprise data center to the edge and really critically they have to be able to do this securely which becomes an ever increasing challenge and doing it at the right economics relative to their alternatives and part of the right economics of course includes adopting the best practices from web scale architectures and bringing them to the heart of the enterprise and in our partnership with pensando we're working to enable these new ideas of web scale architecture and fleet management for the enterprise at scale you know what is fun is hpe has an unusual talent from the very beginning in silicon valley of working together with others and creating a win-win innovation approach if you watch what your team has been able to do and i want to say this for everybody listening you work with startups better than any other company i've seen in terms of how you do win win together and pinsando is just the example of that uh this startup which by the way is the ninth time i have done with this team a new generation of products and we're designing that together with hpe in terms of as the cloud moves to the edge how do we get the leverage out of that and produce the results for your customers on this to give the audience appeal for it you're talking with pensano alone in terms of the efficiency versus an amazon amazon web services of an order of magnitude i'm not talking 100 greater i'm talking 10x greater and things from throughput number of connections you do the jitter capability etc and it talks how two companies uniquely who believe in innovation and trust each other and have very similar cultures can work uniquely together on it how do you bring that to life with an hpe how do you get your company to really say let's harvest the advantages of your ecosystem in your advantages of startups well as you say more and more companies are faced with these challenges of hitting the right economics for the infrastructure and we see many enterprises of various sizes trying to come to terms with infrastructures that look a lot more like a service provider that require that software-defined management plane and the automation to deploy at scale and with the work we're doing with pinsando the benefits that we bring in terms of the observability and the telemetry and the encryption and the distributed network functions but also a security architecture that enables that efficiency on the individual nodes is just so key to building a competitive architecture moving forwards for an on-prem private cloud or internal service provider operation and we're really excited about the work we've done to bring that technology across our portfolio and bring that to our customers so that they can achieve those kind of economics and capabilities and go focus on their own transformations rather than building and running the infrastructure themselves artisanally and having to deal with integrating all of that great technology themselves makes tremendous sense you know neil you and i work on a board together et cetera i've watched your summarization skills and i always like to ask the question after you do a quick summary like this what are the three or four takeaways we would like for the audience to get out of our conversation well that's a great question thanks john we believe that customers need a trusted partner to work through these digital transformations that are facing them and confront the challenge of the time that the covet crisis has taken away as you said up front every organization is having to transform and transform more quickly and more digitally and working with a trusted partner with the expertise that only comes from decades of experience is a key enabler for that a partner with the ability to create the financial capacity to transform the workload expertise to get more from the infrastructure and optimize the environment so that you can focus on your own business a partner that can deliver the systems and the security and the automation that makes it easily deployable and manageable anywhere you need them at any scale whether the edge the enterprise data center or all the way up to exascale in high performance computing and can do that all as a service as we can at hpe through hpe green lake enabling our customers most critical workloads it's critical that all of that is underpinned by an ai powered digitally enabled service experience so that our customers can get on with their transformation and running their business instead of dealing with their infrastructure and really only hpe can provide this combination of capabilities and we're excited and committed to helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses neil it's fun i i love being your partner and your wingman our values and cultures are so similar thanks for letting me be a part of this discussion today thanks for being with us john it was great having you here oh it's friends for life okay now we're going to dig into the world of video which accounts for most of the data that we store and requires a lot of intense processing capabilities to stream here with me is jim brickmeyer who's the chief marketing and product officer at vlasics jim good to see you good to see you as well so tell us a little bit more about velocity what's your role in this tv streaming world and maybe maybe talk about your ideal customer sure sure so um we're leading provider of carrier great video solutions video streaming solutions and advertising uh technology to service providers around the globe so we primarily sell software-based solutions to uh cable telco wireless providers and broadcasters that are interested in launching their own um video streaming services to consumers yeah so this is this big time you know we're not talking about mom and pop you know a little video outfit but but maybe you can help us understand that and just the sheer scale of of the tv streaming that you're doing maybe relate it to you know the overall internet usage how much traffic are we talking about here yeah sure so uh yeah so our our customers tend to be some of the largest um network service providers around the globe uh and if you look at the uh the video traffic um with respect to the total amount of traffic that that goes through the internet video traffic accounts for about 90 of the total amount of data that uh that traverses the internet so video is uh is a pretty big component of um of how people when they look at internet technologies they look at video streaming technologies uh you know this is where we we focus our energy is in carrying that traffic as efficiently as possible and trying to make sure that from a consumer standpoint we're all consumers of video and uh make sure that the consumer experience is a high quality experience that you don't experience any glitches and that that ultimately if people are paying for that content that they're getting the value that they pay for their for their money uh in their entertainment experience i think people sometimes take it for granted it's like it's like we we all forget about dial up right those days are long gone but the early days of video was so jittery and restarting and and the thing too is that you know when you think about the pandemic and the boom in streaming that that hit you know we all sort of experienced that but the service levels were pretty good i mean how much how much did the pandemic affect traffic what kind of increases did you see and how did that that impact your business yeah sure so uh you know obviously while it was uh tragic to have a pandemic and have people locked down what we found was that when people returned to their homes what they did was they turned on their their television they watched on on their mobile devices and we saw a substantial increase in the amount of video streaming traffic um over service provider networks so what we saw was on the order of 30 to 50 percent increase in the amount of data that was traversing those networks so from a uh you know from an operator's standpoint a lot more traffic a lot more challenging to to go ahead and carry that traffic a lot of work also on our behalf and trying to help operators prepare because we could actually see geographically as the lockdowns happened [Music] certain areas locked down first and we saw that increase so we were able to help operators as as all the lockdowns happened around the world we could help them prepare for that increase in traffic i mean i was joking about dial-up performance again in the early days of the internet if your website got fifty percent more traffic you know suddenly you were you your site was coming down so so that says to me jim that architecturally you guys were prepared for that type of scale so maybe you could paint a picture tell us a little bit about the solutions you're using and how you differentiate yourself in your market to handle that type of scale sure yeah so we so we uh we really are focused on what we call carrier grade solutions which are designed for that massive amount of scale um so we really look at it you know at a very granular level when you look um at the software and and performance capabilities of the software what we're trying to do is get as many streams as possible out of each individual piece of hardware infrastructure so that we can um we can optimize first of all maximize the uh the efficiency of that device make sure that the costs are very low but one of the other challenges is as you get to millions and millions of streams and that's what we're delivering on a daily basis is millions and millions of video streams that you have to be able to scale those platforms out um in an effective in a cost effective way and to make sure that it's highly resilient as well so we don't we don't ever want a consumer to have a circumstance where a network glitch or a server issue or something along those lines causes some sort of uh glitch in their video and so there's a lot of work that we do in the software to make sure that it's a very very seamless uh stream and that we're always delivering at the very highest uh possible bit rate for consumers so that if you've got that giant 4k tv that we're able to present a very high resolution picture uh to those devices and what's the infrastructure look like underneath you you're using hpe solutions where do they fit in yeah that's right yeah so we uh we've had a long-standing partnership with hpe um and we work very closely with them to try to identify the specific types of hardware that are ideal for the the type of applications that we run so we run video streaming applications and video advertising applications targeted kinds of video advertising technologies and when you look at some of these applications they have different types of requirements in some cases it's uh throughput where we're taking a lot of data in and streaming a lot of data out in other cases it's storage where we have to have very high density high performance storage systems in other cases it's i gotta have really high capacity storage but the performance does not need to be quite as uh as high from an io perspective and so we work very closely with hpe on trying to find exactly the right box for the right application and then beyond that also talking with our customers to understand there are different maintenance considerations associated with different types of hardware so we tend to focus on as much as possible if we're going to place servers deep at the edge of the network we will make everything um maintenance free or as maintenance free as we can make it by putting very high performance solid state storage into those servers so that uh we we don't have to physically send people to those sites to uh to do any kind of maintenance so it's a it's a very cooperative relationship that we have with hpe to try to define those boxes great thank you for that so last question um maybe what the future looks like i love watching on my mobile device headphones in no distractions i'm getting better recommendations how do you see the future of tv streaming yeah so i i think the future of tv streaming is going to be a lot more personal right so uh this is what you're starting to see through all of the services that are out there is that most of the video service providers whether they're online providers or they're your traditional kinds of paid tv operators is that they're really focused on the consumer and trying to figure out what is of value to you personally in the past it used to be that services were one size fits all and um and so everybody watched the same program right at the same time and now that's uh that's we have this technology that allows us to deliver different types of content to people on different screens at different times and to advertise to those individuals and to cater to their individual preferences and so using that information that we have about how people watch and and what people's interests are we can create a much more engaging and compelling uh entertainment experience on all of those screens and um and ultimately provide more value to consumers awesome story jim thanks so much for keeping us helping us just keep entertained during the pandemic i really appreciate your time sure thanks all right keep it right there everybody you're watching hpes accelerating next first of all pat congratulations on your new role as intel ceo how are you approaching your new role and what are your top priorities over your first few months thanks antonio for having me it's great to be here with you all today to celebrate the launch of your gen 10 plus portfolio and the long history that our two companies share in deep collaboration to deliver amazing technology to our customers together you know what an exciting time it is to be in this industry technology has never been more important for humanity than it is today everything is becoming digital and driven by what i call the four key superpowers the cloud connectivity artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge they are super powers because each expands the impact of the others and together they are reshaping every aspect of our lives and work in this landscape of rapid digital disruption intel's technology and leadership products are more critical than ever and we are laser focused on bringing to bear the depth and breadth of software silicon and platforms packaging and process with at scale manufacturing to help you and our customers capitalize on these opportunities and fuel their next generation innovations i am incredibly excited about continuing the next chapter of a long partnership between our two companies the acceleration of the edge has been significant over the past year with this next wave of digital transformation we expect growth in the distributed edge and age build out what are you seeing on this front like you said antonio the growth of edge computing and build out is the next key transition in the market telecommunications service providers want to harness the potential of 5g to deliver new services across multiple locations in real time as we start building solutions that will be prevalent in a 5g digital environment we will need a scalable flexible and programmable network some use cases are the massive scale iot solutions more robust consumer devices and solutions ar vr remote health care autonomous robotics and manufacturing environments and ubiquitous smart city solutions intel and hp are partnering to meet this new wave head on for 5g build out and the rise of the distributed enterprise this build out will enable even more growth as businesses can explore how to deliver new experiences and unlock new insights from the new data creation beyond the four walls of traditional data centers and public cloud providers network operators need to significantly increase capacity and throughput without dramatically growing their capital footprint their ability to achieve this is built upon a virtualization foundation an area of intel expertise for example we've collaborated with verizon for many years and they are leading the industry and virtualizing their entire network from the core the edge a massive redesign effort this requires advancements in silicon and power management they expect intel to deliver the new capabilities in our roadmap so ecosystem partners can continue to provide innovative and efficient products with this optimization for hybrid we can jointly provide a strong foundation to take on the growth of data-centric workloads for data analytics and ai to build and deploy models faster to accelerate insights that will deliver additional transformation for organizations of all types the network transformation journey isn't easy we are continuing to unleash the capabilities of 5g and the power of the intelligent edge yeah the combination of the 5g built out and the massive new growth of data at the edge are the key drivers for the age of insight these new market drivers offer incredible new opportunities for our customers i am excited about recent launch of our new gen 10 plus portfolio with intel together we are laser focused on delivering joint innovation for customers that stretches from the edge to x scale how do you see new solutions that this helping our customers solve the toughest challenges today i talked earlier about the superpowers that are driving the rapid acceleration of digital transformation first the proliferation of the hybrid cloud is delivering new levels of efficiency and scale and the growth of the cloud is democratizing high-performance computing opening new frontiers of knowledge and discovery next we see ai and machine learning increasingly infused into every application from the edge to the network to the cloud to create dramatically better insights and the rapid adoption of 5g as i talked about already is fueling new use cases that demand lower latencies and higher bandwidth this in turn is pushing computing to the edge closer to where the data is created and consumed the confluence of these trends is leading to the biggest and fastest build out of computing in human history to keep pace with this rapid digital transformation we recognize that infrastructure has to be built with the flexibility to support a broad set of workloads and that's why over the last several years intel has built an unmatched portfolio to deliver every component of intelligent silicon our customers need to move store and process data from the cpus to fpgas from memory to ssds from ethernet to switch silicon to silicon photonics and software our 3rd gen intel xeon scalable processors and our data centric portfolio deliver new core performance and higher bandwidth providing our customers the capabilities they need to power these critical workloads and we love seeing all the unique ways customers like hpe leverage our technology and solution offerings to create opportunities and solve their most pressing challenges from cloud gaming to blood flow to brain scans to financial market security the opportunities are endless with flexible performance i am proud of the amazing innovation we are bringing to support our customers especially as they respond to new data-centric workloads like ai and analytics that are critical to digital transformation these new requirements create a need for compute that's warlord optimized for performance security ease of use and the economics of business now more than ever compute matters it is the foundation for this next wave of digital transformation by pairing our compute with our software and capabilities from hp green lake we can support our customers as they modernize their apps and data quickly they seamlessly and securely scale them anywhere at any size from edge to x scale but thank you for joining us for accelerating next today i know our audience appreciated hearing your perspective on the market and how we're partnering together to support their digital transformation journey i am incredibly excited about what lies ahead for hp and intel thank you thank you antonio great to be with you today we just compressed about a decade of online commerce progress into about 13 or 14 months so now we're going to look at how one retailer navigated through the pandemic and what the future of their business looks like and with me is alan jensen who's the chief information officer and senior vice president of the sawing group hello alan how are you fine thank you good to see you hey look you know when i look at the 100 year history plus of your company i mean it's marked by transformations and some of them are quite dramatic so you're denmark's largest retailer i wonder if you could share a little bit more about the company its history and and how it continues to improve the customer experience well at the same time keeping costs under control so vital in your business yeah yeah the company founded uh approximately 100 years ago with a department store in in oahu's in in denmark and i think in the 60s we founded the first supermarket in in denmark with the self-service and combined textile and food in in the same store and in beginning 70s we founded the first hyper market in in denmark and then the this calendar came from germany early in in 1980 and we started a discount chain and so we are actually building department store in hyber market info in in supermarket and in in the discount sector and today we are more than 1 500 stores in in three different countries in in denmark poland and germany and especially for the danish market we have a approximately 38 markets here and and is the the leader we have over the last 10 years developed further into online first in non-food and now uh in in food with home delivery with click and collect and we have done some magnetism acquisition in in the convenience with mailbox solutions to our customers and we have today also some restaurant burger chain and and we are running the starbuck in denmark so i can you can see a full plate of different opportunities for our customer in especially denmark it's an awesome story and of course the founder's name is still on the masthead what a great legacy now of course the pandemic is is it's forced many changes quite dramatic including the the behaviors of retail customers maybe you could talk a little bit about how your digital transformation at the sawing group prepared you for this shift in in consumption patterns and any other challenges that that you faced yeah i think uh luckily as for some of the you can say the core it solution in in 19 we just roll out using our computers via direct access so you can work from anywhere whether you are traveling from home and so on we introduced a new agile scrum delivery model and and we just finalized the rolling out teams in in in january february 20 and that was some very strong thing for suddenly moving all our employees from from office to to home and and more or less overnight we succeed uh continuing our work and and for it we have not missed any deadline or task for the business in in 2020 so i think that was pretty awesome to to see and for the business of course the pandemic changed a lot as the change in customer behavior more or less overnight with plus 50 80 on the online solution forced us to do some different priorities so we were looking at the food home delivery uh and and originally expected to start rolling out in in 2022 uh but took a fast decision in april last year to to launch immediately and and we have been developing that uh over the last eight months and has been live for the last three months now in the market so so you can say the pandemic really front loaded some of our strategic actions for for two to three years uh yeah that was very exciting what's that uh saying luck is the byproduct of great planning and preparation so let's talk about when you're in a company with some strong financial situation that you can move immediately with investment when you take such decision then then it's really thrilling yeah right awesome um two-part question talk about how you leverage data to support the solid groups mission and you know drive value for customers and maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you face with just the amount of data the speed of data et cetera yeah i said data is everything when you are in retail as a retailer's detail as you need to monitor your operation down to each store eats department and and if you can say we have challenge that that is that data is just growing rapidly as a year by year it's growing more and more because you are able to be more detailed you're able to capture more data and for a company like ours we need to be updated every morning as a our fully updated sales for all unit department single sku selling in in the stores is updated 3 o'clock in the night and send out to all top management and and our managers all over the company it's actually 8 000 reports going out before six o'clock every day in the morning we have introduced a loyalty program and and you are capturing a lot of data on on customer behavior what is their preferred offers what is their preferred time in the week for buying different things and all these data is now used to to personalize our offers to our cost of value customers so we can be exactly hitting the best time and and convert it to sales data is also now used for what we call intelligent price reductions as a so instead of just reducing prices with 50 if it's uh close to running out of date now the system automatically calculate whether a store has just enough to to finish with full price before end of day or actually have much too much and and need to maybe reduce by 80 before as being able to sell so so these automated [Music] solutions built on data is bringing efficiency into our operation wow you make it sound easy these are non-trivial items so congratulations on that i wonder if we could close hpe was kind enough to introduce us tell us a little bit about the infrastructure the solutions you're using how they differentiate you in the market and i'm interested in you know why hpe what distinguishes them why the choice there yeah as a when when you look out a lot is looking at moving data to the cloud but we we still believe that uh due to performance due to the availability uh more or less on demand we we still don't see the cloud uh strong enough for for for selling group uh capturing all our data we have been quite successfully having one data truth across the whole con company and and having one just one single bi solution and having that huge amount of data i think we have uh one of the 10 largest sub business warehouses in global and but on the other hand we also want to be agile and want to to scale when needed so getting close to a cloud solution we saw it be a green lake as a solution getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem and could deliver uh what we need to to have a fast performance on on data but still in a high quality and and still very secure for us to run great thank you for that and thank alan thanks so much for your for your time really appreciate your your insights and your congratulations on the progress and best of luck in the future thank you all right keep it right there we have tons more content coming you're watching accelerating next from hpe [Music] welcome lisa and thank you for being here with us today antonio it's wonderful to be here with you as always and congratulations on your launch very very exciting for you well thank you lisa and we love this partnership and especially our friendship which has been very special for me for the many many years that we have worked together but i wanted to have a conversation with you today and obviously digital transformation is a key topic so we know the next wave of digital transformation is here being driven by massive amounts of data an increasingly distributed world and a new set of data intensive workloads so how do you see world optimization playing a role in addressing these new requirements yeah no absolutely antonio and i think you know if you look at the depth of our partnership over the last you know four or five years it's really about bringing the best to our customers and you know the truth is we're in this compute mega cycle right now so it's amazing you know when i know when you talk to customers when we talk to customers they all need to do more and and frankly compute is becoming quite specialized so whether you're talking about large enterprises or you're talking about research institutions trying to get to the next phase of uh compute so that workload optimization that we're able to do with our processors your system design and then you know working closely with our software partners is really the next wave of this this compute cycle so thanks lisa you talk about mega cycle so i want to make sure we take a moment to celebrate the launch of our new generation 10 plus compute products with the latest announcement hp now has the broadest amd server portfolio in the industry spanning from the edge to exascale how important is this partnership and the portfolio for our customers well um antonio i'm so excited first of all congratulations on your 19 world records uh with uh milan and gen 10 plus it really is building on you know sort of our you know this is our third generation of partnership with epic and you know you are with me right at the very beginning actually uh if you recall you joined us in austin for our first launch of epic you know four years ago and i think what we've created now is just an incredible portfolio that really does go across um you know all of the uh you know the verticals that are required we've always talked about how do we customize and make things easier for our customers to use together and so i'm very excited about your portfolio very excited about our partnership and more importantly what we can do for our joint customers it's amazing to see 19 world records i think i'm really proud of the work our joint team do every generation raising the bar and that's where you know we we think we have a shared goal of ensuring that customers get the solution the services they need any way they want it and one way we are addressing that need is by offering what we call as a service delivered to hp green lake so let me ask a question what feedback are you hearing from your customers with respect to choice meaning consuming as a service these new solutions yeah now great point i think first of all you know hpe green lake is very very impressive so you know congratulations um to uh to really having that solution and i think we're hearing the same thing from customers and you know the truth is the compute infrastructure is getting more complex and everyone wants to be able to deploy sort of the right compute at the right price point um you know in in terms of also accelerating time to deployment with the right security with the right quality and i think these as a service offerings are going to become more and more important um as we go forward in the compute uh you know capabilities and you know green lake is a leadership product offering and we're very very you know pleased and and honored to be part of it yeah we feel uh lisa we are ahead of the competition and um you know you think about some of our competitors now coming with their own offerings but i think the ability to drive joint innovation is what really differentiate us and that's why we we value the partnership and what we have been doing together on giving the customers choice finally you know i know you and i are both incredibly excited about the joint work we're doing with the us department of energy the oak ridge national laboratory we think about large data sets and you know and the complexity of the analytics we're running but we both are going to deliver the world's first exascale system which is remarkable to me so what this milestone means to you and what type of impact do you think it will make yes antonio i think our work with oak ridge national labs and hpe is just really pushing the envelope on what can be done with computing and if you think about the science that we're going to be able to enable with the first exascale machine i would say there's a tremendous amount of innovation that has already gone in to the machine and we're so excited about delivering it together with hpe and you know we also think uh that the super computing technology that we're developing you know at this broad scale will end up being very very important for um you know enterprise compute as well and so it's really an opportunity to kind of take that bleeding edge and really deploy it over the next few years so super excited about it i think you know you and i have a lot to do over the uh the next few months here but it's an example of the great partnership and and how much we're able to do when we put our teams together um to really create that innovation i couldn't agree more i mean this is uh an incredible milestone for for us for our industry and honestly for the country in many ways and we have many many people working 24x7 to deliver against this mission and it's going to change the future of compute no question about it and then honestly put it to work where we need it the most to advance life science to find cures to improve the way people live and work but lisa thank you again for joining us today and thank you more most importantly for the incredible partnership and and the friendship i really enjoy working with you and your team and together i think we can change this industry once again so thanks for your time today thank you so much antonio and congratulations again to you and the entire hpe team for just a fantastic portfolio launch thank you okay well some pretty big hitters in those keynotes right actually i have to say those are some of my favorite cube alums and i'll add these are some of the execs that are stepping up to change not only our industry but also society and that's pretty cool and of course it's always good to hear from the practitioners the customer discussions have been great so far today now the accelerating next event continues as we move to a round table discussion with krista satrathwaite who's the vice president and gm of hpe core compute and krista is going to share more details on how hpe plans to help customers move ahead with adopting modern workloads as part of their digital transformations krista will be joined by hpe subject matter experts chris idler who's the vp and gm of the element and mark nickerson director of solutions product management as they share customer stories and advice on how to turn strategy into action and realize results within your business thank you for joining us for accelerate next event i hope you're enjoying it so far i know you've heard about the industry challenges the i.t trends hpe strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we want to do is focus on going deep on workload solutions so in the most important workload solutions the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you all right with that i'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler who's the vice president and general manager of the element chris has extensive uh solution expertise he's led hpe solution engineering programs in the past welcome chris and mark nickerson who is the director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings making sure we have the right solutions for our customers welcome guys thanks for joining me thanks for having us krista yeah so i'd like to start off with one of the big ones the ones that we get asked about all the time what we've been all been experienced in the last year remote work remote education and all the challenges that go along with that so let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environment uh so i i really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about vdi first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics one is scale it's one thing to say i'm going to enable vdi for a part of my workforce in a pre-pandemic environment where the office was still the the central hub of activity for work uh it's a completely different scale when you think about okay i'm going to have 50 60 80 maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe um whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning uh whether that's uh in the area of things like uh formula one racing where we had uh the desire to still have events going on but the need for a lot more social distancing not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real-time experience this really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that i think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the vdi experience was planned out with very specific workloads or very specific applications in mind and when you take it to a more broad-based environment if we're going to support multiple functions multiple lines of business there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side and so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are one customer that comes to mind would be tyler isd who did a fairly large roll out pre-pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort what they uncovered was even just changes in standard windows applications had become so much more graphically intense with windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than than they had counted on so in addition to planning for scale you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users how graphically intense those might be what's the login experience going to be as well as the operating experience and so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users uh is is kind of really two of the biggest most important things that i've seen yeah mark i'll i'll just jump in real quick i think you you covered that pretty comprehensively there and and it was well done the couple of observations i've made one is just that um vdi suddenly become like mission critical for sales it's the front line you know for schools it's the classroom you know that this isn't a cost cutting measure or a optimization nit measure anymore this is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation one aspect of about a thousand aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does and i think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error right you really need to deploy this in a way that that performs that understands what you're trying to use it for that gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom right so what we do in in the engineering side of things when it comes to vdi or really understand what's a tech worker what's a knowledge worker what's a power worker what's a gp really going to look like what's time of day look like you know who's using it in the morning who's using it in the evening when do you power up when do you power down does the system behave does it just have the it works function and what our clients can can get from hpe is um you know a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to making sure that the solution delivers on its promises so we're seeing the same thing you are krista you know we see it all the time on vdi and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business yeah and it's funny because when i talk to customers you know one of the things i heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you could really get a good sense of what the experience is before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise it's not like every other workload that people have done before so if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way okay one of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge so now i'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time i'll start with chris all right hey thanks okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for for every customer in every client and every single client that i've ever spoken to of hp's has an edge somewhere you know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge but but i think the industry when we're talking about edge is talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not to not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything's getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry and and i think mark's going to be able to talk through a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive but what we're learning about edge is it's not just how do you make the edge work it's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing and nobody's just the edge right and and so if it's if it's um ai mldl there's that's one way you want to use the edge if it's a customer experience point of service it's another you know there's yet another way to use the edge so it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like hpe does to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together including the ones that are running at the at the edge often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline you know what information is at the edge how does it flow to the data center how does it flow and then which data center uh which private cloud which public cloud are you using i think those are the areas where where we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things and so for example red bull and i know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark um uh the racing company you know for them the the edge is the racetrack and and you know milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for for the cars and how do they get quick access so um we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge and this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software we also have great containerized software with our esmeral container platform so we're really becoming um a perfect platform for hosting edge-centric workloads and applications and data processing yeah it's uh all the way down to things like our superdome flex in the background if you have some really really really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse proliance that can be configured to support almost every um combination of workload you have so i know you started with edge krista but but and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors but let's make sure you know if you're listening to this this show right now um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrate it with um with the rest of your operation mark you know what did i miss yeah to that point chris i mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here but the edge uh has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work changes and evolves and the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected um to your point uh talking about where that edge exists that edge can be a lot of different places but the one commonality really is that the edge is is an area where work still needs to get accomplished it can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center or back to some some other area for the work it's where the work actually needs to get done whether that's edge work in a use case like vdi or whether that's edge work in the case of doing real-time analytics you mentioned red bull racing i'll i'll bring that up i mean you talk about uh an area where time is of the essence everything about that sport comes down to time you're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds and that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car uh adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself and so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that you're right it can't just be here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time when we pull together a solution involving our compute products our storage products our networking products when we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge what you see are results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real-time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to to real-time uh test and track conditions yeah really great point there um and i really love the example of edge and racing because i mean that is where it all every millisecond counts um and so important to process that at the edge now switching gears just a little bit let's talk a little bit about some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing their workload for maximum outcome for business agility let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that mark yeah give it a shot so when we when we think about business agility what you're really talking about is the ability to to implement on the fly to be able to scale up to scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations and i think the last year has been has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that i think one of the areas that that i think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds if you take a look at the need that customers have to to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments app development environments that may be hosted on-site or maybe in the cloud the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up having the ability to have some of that some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers all right well i we could keep going on and on but i'll stop it there uh thank you so much uh chris and mark this has been a great discussion thanks for sharing how we helped other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads i thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on-demand sessions if you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today you can learn a lot more in those sessions and i thank you for your time thanks for tuning in today many thanks to krista chris and mark we really appreciate you joining today to share how hpe is partnering to facilitate new workload adoption of course with your customers on their path to digital transformation now to round out our accelerating next event today we have a series of on-demand sessions available so you can explore more details around every step of that digital transformation from building a solid infrastructure strategy identifying the right compute and software to rounding out your solutions with management and financial support so please navigate to the agenda at the top of the page to take a look at what's available i just want to close by saying that despite the rush to digital during the pandemic most businesses they haven't completed their digital transformations far from it 2020 was more like a forced march than a planful strategy but now you have some time you've adjusted to this new abnormal and we hope the resources that you find at accelerating next will help you on your journey best of luck to you and be well [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> As we reported last week, we believe that in the next decade, there will be changes in public policy that are going to restrict the way in which big internet companies are able to appropriate user data. Big tech came under fire again this week with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google going toe to toe with several U.S. senators. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, was not one of those CEOs in the firing line. Microsoft doesn't heavily rely on ad revenues, rather, the company's momentum is steadily building around Azure, which by my estimates is now roughly 19% of Microsoft's overall revenues. It's surpassed, maybe nearly got to $7 billion for the first time on a quarterly basis. I'll come back to you on that. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll respond to the many requests we've had to dig into the business of Microsoft a little bit deeper and provide a snapshot of how the company is faring in the ETR dataset. Let's take a quick look at Microsoft's financials, and the scope of Microsoft's business is actually mind-boggling. The company has roughly $150 billion in revenue, and it grew its top line 12% last quarter. It has more than $136 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Microsoft generates over $60 billion annually in operating cashflow. And last quarter alone threw off more than 19 billion in operating cash. Its gross margins are expanding across virtually all of its major business lines. So let's look at those business sectors. Microsoft, it doesn't suffer from the nagging problems that we've talked about with a lot of older tech companies. Companies like IBM and Dell and Cisco and Oracle and SAP, they struggle with growth sometimes because their growth businesses are not yet large enough to offset the declines in their traditional on-premises business segments. Now at the highest level, Microsoft breaks its business into three broad categories, and they're all growing quite nicely. Let me add some color here. Let's start with the productivity and business process line of business. LinkedIn, which is growing at 16%, is in this category as is Office. This business is shifting from one of on-prem licenses, which are really headwinds right now from Microsoft, to the cloud, in the form of SaaS with Office 365, which is growing at a 20% clip within its commercial market base. Even the consumer side of O365 is growing in the double digits. Dynamics is Microsoft's ERP and CRM business, and that falls into this slice of the pie, that's growing at 18%. And then the newer Dynamics 365, that's growing at 37%. So you can see, Microsoft is easily able to show growth despite the transitions from its legacy business. Intelligent cloud is the next segment. It's kind of the kitchen sink category, meaning there's stuff in there that includes a bit of cloud washing in my opinion, but Microsoft is not nearly as egregious as IBM with the liberties that it takes around its cloud categorization. For Microsoft it's a $13 billion quarterly business. And it's growing at 19%, as we show in the pie chart. Azure is an increasingly large portion of this segment. Azure is the most direct comparison with AWS. And I have said in the past quarter, I'd say it's around 50% of the intelligent cloud, and that it's approaching by my estimates around $7 billion a quarter. Azure grew at 47% annually this past quarter, the same growth rate as last quarter. Ironically, both AWS and Google Cloud grew at the same year over year rate this quarter as they did last quarter. AWS is 29% GCP in the high 50s by at my estimates. AWS revenue was 11.6 billion this past quarter, and I have GCP still well under 2 billion. We'll be updating our cloud numbers and digging deeper next week into this topic. So consider these estimates preliminary for Azure and GCP, which the respective companies don't break out for as Amazon, as you know, breaks out AWS explicitly. Now, back to Microsoft's intelligent cloud business. It includes on-prem server software, which is a managed decline business from Microsoft. They also include enterprise services in this category. So as you can see, it's not a clean cloud number for comparison purposes. Now finally, the third big slice of the pie is more personal computing. I know, it's kind of a dorky name, but nonetheless it's nearly a $12 billion business that's growing at 6% annually. The Windows OEM business is in here, as is Windows 10 and some security offerings. Surface is also in here as well and it's growing in the mid-thirties. Search revenue is in this category as well. It's declining per my earlier statements that it's not a main piece of Microsoft's business. Now, one of the most interesting areas of this sector is gaming. Microsoft's gaming business is growing at 21% and they just acquired ZeniMax Media for seven and a half billion dollars. Let me land on gaming for a minute. The gaming experts at theCUBE are really excited about Microsoft's XBox content services, which grew at about 30% this past quarter. Game Pass is essentially Microsoft's Netflix, or you can think of it as maybe like a Spotify model. You can get in for as low as $5 a month. I think you can pay as much as $15 a month and get access to a huge catalog of games that you can download. In November of last year, Microsoft launched its xCloud beta service, which allows you to download to a PC or a game box. Now eventually with 5G, the box goes away. All you'll need is a screen and you know, controller with the joysticks, no download. In fact, this is how it works today for Android. Now, interestingly, Apple is blocking Microsoft and some others like Google's Stadia, saying that they don't allow streaming game apps like Microsoft's xCloud service, because they don't follow the company's guidelines. What Apple's not telling you is that its adjacent offering, Apple Arcade, is considered subpar by hardcore gamers. And while Apple allows the streaming of movies and music from any service on the iPhone, it's decided not to allow streaming games. Now, the last thing I want to stress about Microsoft is its leverage point around developers. Developers is a big one here, we all remember the sweaty Steve Ballmer running around the stage like a mad man, screaming, "Developers, developers, developers!" Well, despite his obsession with Windows, he sure got that one right. The GitHub acquisition was Microsoft's way of buying more developer love. It does concentrate power with a tech giant, but you know what, if it wasn't Microsoft that bought GitHub, it would have been Facebook or Amazon or Google or one of the other tech giants. Now, despite some angst in the developer community over this, GitHub, it really is a linchpin for Microsoft to more tightly integrate GitHub with its pretty vast developer tool set. All right. Let's look deeper into the Microsoft data and focus on the enterprise. We'll bring in the ETR as we always do. We said last week that Google needed to look to the cloud and edge and get its head out of its ads. Well, Microsoft recovered from its Windows myopia after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, and by all accounts from the ETR survey data, Microsoft is killing it across the board. Let me start by putting Microsoft in context with some of the most prominent companies that both compete with, and sometimes partner with Microsoft. So this xy graph, it's one of our favorites. I show it all the time and it shows net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending momentum from ETR, and the horizontal axis shows what we call market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Now in the upper right hand table, you can see the data for each of the companies. There's an ETR survey taken in October and it had more than 1400 completes. Several points stand out here. Microsoft is by far the most pervasive in the dataset, and yet its net score or spending velocity is right there with AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday. Only Snowflake, which I put in there for context, because of its consistently strong net scores, shows a meaningfully higher net score, of course from a much smaller base. Now what makes this so impressive is it represents a pan-Microsoft view across its entire portfolio. And you can see where companies like IBM and Oracle struggle from a momentum standpoint compared to Microsoft, which is a much, much larger company. It's that problem that I referred to earlier regarding the smaller size of their respective growth businesses. Also called Cisco and SAP, which despite some earnings challenges lately, are able to maintain net scores that while not in the green, they're not in the red, either. Green essentially means your overall install base is expanding. Red indicates contraction. Now let's look at the spending patterns for Microsoft customers. This chart shows the granularity of ETR's net score for Microsoft. The green represents increased spend and the red decreased spend. What's impressive is that Microsoft's red zone, I mean it's essentially negligible at 6%, when you add two reds up, the pink and the bright red. Their customers, they're all spending more, or the same, and very few are leaving the platform. Now I made the case last week that Google should double or triple its efforts and focus on cloud and the edge. Microsoft has already made that transition in its business and is the, that's the premise really of my discussion today. Specifically, Microsoft Azure is powering the company across all of its products and services. It's giving Microsoft tremendous operating leverage and steadily improving marginal economics. You can see that in the gross margin lines this quarter, across all of its businesses. And here's a graphic showing its position within cloud computing in terms of net score. Microsoft Azure functions, which is the first bar on this chart, and Azure overall, which is the third set of bars, shows momentum that's as strong as any cloud category, including AWS Lambda, which as we've talked about many times is killing it. Now five over from the left, count them over, one, two, three, four, five, you can see AWS overall. So that's a really important reference point. And while its levels are still elevated, Azure overall, which again is number three from the left, has meaningfully more momentum with 65% net score versus 52% for AWS overall. Now reasonable people can debate the quality of these respective clouds and you could argue over feature sets, who's got the most features, who's got the most regions, which regions are most reliable, who's got the most data centers and all that stuff, but it's really hard to argue against Microsoft's "Good enough" strategy. It's working in the cloud, and it has been working for the company for decades. Now another Microsoft strategy has been to be a late comer to a category and then bundle multiple capabilities into one suite. We saw this at first, really in the late 1980s with Office, and it's continued in a number of areas. The latest example, Microsoft Teams. Teams combines features like meetings, phone, chat, collaboration, as well as business process workflows that leverage tools like SharePoint and PowerPoint. I mean, it's a killer strategy, and you can see the results in this chart. I mean, it's essentially competing with Zoom, it's competing with Slack and all the sort of productivity plays there in that space. And this graphic compares net scores from the year ago October survey for reference, the July survey from this year, and the most recent October survey, as I said, 1400 respondents. Look at the lead that Teams has relative to the competition. There's a story across Microsoft's portfolio. Look at Microsoft's products in the ETR taxonomy. Video conferencing with Teams, productivity apps, RPA, cloud, cloud functions, machine learning, artificial intelligence, containers, security, end point, analytics, mobile, even database. The only signs of softness are really seen in the company's legacy businesses like Skype or on-prem licenses business, which I said were a headwind for them. And while PCs and tablets are weaker, that's what you'd expect from this mature industry relative to some of these other categories. Now, again, the premise here today is that by pivoting to the cloud and going all in competing with infrastructure as a service, Microsoft has created a platform for innovation for its business, and its developer chops are really credible, so it's evolving its install base very successfully to Azure. It's got a very solid hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and story with Microsoft Arc, which eventually it can take to the edge. You know, we think its edge strategy needs some work, but nonetheless, the company is really, really well positioned. Microsoft has a huge partner ecosystem, heck, it even partners with Oracle and database, as well as using Azure to enter new markets, including vertical clouds like healthcare, which it talked about on its earnings call. I mean, there's really not much on which you can criticize Microsoft. You know, sure, they've had some high profile failures in the past. The Nokia acquisition, the Windows phone, you remember Zune? Mixer, you know, Bing. Is Bing a fail? I don't know. Maybe not really. I guess the fail is, you know, what I was talking about last week with antitrust, Microsoft was distracted by the DOJ and maybe that caused it to miss search, give it to Google, and in that sense, maybe it was a failure, but overall, pretty good track record from Microsoft. Yeah, maybe you can say Microsoft is somewhat of a copycat, you know, the graphical user interface that they copied from the Mac, but hey, even Steve Jobs stole that. Surface, okay. The cloud? But so what, ideas, they're plentiful, execution is the key, really. No matter how you slice it, the data doesn't lie. Microsoft's financial performance, its pivot to the cloud, and the success of its adjacent businesses, make it one of the most remarkable rebirths in the history of technology industry. Now I didn't use the word turnaround because the company was never really in trouble. It just became irrelevant and kind of boring. Today, Microsoft is far from immaterial. Okay. That's it for this week. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data and analytics. I appreciate always the comments on my LinkedIn posts or you can DM me @DVellante, or email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well, and we'll see you next time. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Q. Come to you from our Palo Alto studio with our ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The digital experience Let's jump into a really excited to have our next guest CIA Sam Bird, the president of the Client Solutions Group for Dell. Sam, where you joining us from today? >>Hey, I am joining you live from Austin, Texas. Jeff looks beautiful. All weather? Yeah, its's turning really nice. Uh, nice time to be here in Austin, right? So, >>Sam, let's jump into it. I mean, you, you cover, you know, kind of the heart of what Dell started with which was which was PCs. And, you know, it's funny. A couple days ago, Michael tweeted because he likes to tweet, which is fun. An article that said that the PC officially died today. It's a reference back to an article I had to look at the January 26 2010. Officially, the PC officially died today. >>That >>is so bizarre, and that is not in fact, not true, you guys. We're seeing unprecedented demand, so I wonder if it is You Look back at that. And I'm sure you saw Michaels tweet. What kind of goes through your head? Because we're in a very different space than we were 10 years ago. >>Yeah, I think the world's changed a lot, Jeff from 10 years ago. I got to say, uh, the PC died 10 years ago. It feels pretty good being being dead for 10 years. So I think we actually saw a, you know, still alive and very vibrant. PC. So you think about everything that's happened with Cove it We have seen the PC and people using technology to stay connected, whether it's, you know, working in their business, learning from home, staying connected with other family members. So we'd like to talk about it Is the renaissance of the PC. It kind of this rebirth reemergence of this really good friend that you had has become really core toe how we're getting stuff done in the world today, and we've stayed bullish about the opportunity around the PC. Michaels had that view from, you know, when he started this company, and we've since expanded to many other areas beyond selling PCs. But we continue to be really committed to the value of that technology in people's hands, >>right? So just in defense of the of the article, it was written on the launch of the iPad right, which was a new a new form factor. And, you know, we've seen this proliferation of form factors both within PCs and mobile phones, and you know, the sizes of screens getting bigger and the size of green getting smaller and surface all kinds of different things. So I wonder if you could share, you know, kind of your perspective in, you know, kind of the opportunity that opens up when people are looking for different types of form factors. And then, more importantly, I think now it's horses for courses. So when I'm sitting at my desk, you know, I haven't a big giant XPS with all the ram and GPU and stuff Aiken stuff into it. If I'm going to the airport with a long flight, I want something small and light and easy to carry and what's interesting, I think, with cloud it enables you now to basically have the form factor that you need where you need it for the types of work that you're trying to get done. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, if you if you take that 10 years ago, article to today we have had an enormous amount of innovation in the industry that's made the device is exciting and appealing for how people wanna want to operate. So, you know, we've seen Jeff a shift towards more mobile form factors with cove in. So, um, a commercial space that used to be maybe half desktops, half notebooks is now in the 70% range. More mobile form factors which reflects how people want to use them. You know, they're sitting at home, they need that device to be portable. They wanna go between rooms and home. That's the other thing that we found in some of our, you know, research and work on the spaces. You know, people might want to sit at the kitchen table in the morning in the afternoon. Maybe they're outside. They might have their kids do in school from home and have to be around them part of the day, so they still need a mobile kind of form factor, but it's plugged in. I want full power to run my applications. And, like you said, we will get back to a world with travel and people being mobile. And then you need to dial in the right form factor that has maybe a smaller screen, more portable device. So one of the things that's kept this business vibrant, you know, for the past 10 years and right now is a bigger screen experience is really, really valuable. A keyboard and multiple ways of in putting into devices are valuable, so there's core. Things are great. And then we've got systems that are set up for how people want to use them. You know, we still have designers sitting at home using big desktop workstations because the most powerful thing there times really valuable. There's a right system for how you want to use technology, and I think that that's attendant, you know, an approach we take in our business, and that's what we see in the industry. I think that's what's helped keep it very vibrant and alive. >>I love it, I love it. It is truly that work from anywhere and anywhere as you just defined, could be a whole bunch of things, and it doesn't even mean just at home or just at the coffee shop. That's really interesting. Is you even change locations where you're working within within the home. That really supports that. So, >>you >>know, Cove, it hits light switch moment. Everybody's gotta work from home. So huge, huge pressure there. And now, as you said, you know, we're seven months into it. Still gonna be going on for a little bit while a little while before people go back. Huge, huge boost to your guys business. I'm curious if you can share some thoughts in terms of, you know, now, I I need to kind of project a little bit of that office back to the work from anywhere situation. And, you know, you guys are that you're kind of that edge device that ultimately connects back to the mother ship. >>Yeah, I think it's and that's where we've seen people realized. It's a really valuable device that helps keep them, you know, productive and connected. Um, we have seen it's very interesting of it used to be, you know, pre co vid for Most people work with the location, you know, Post Cove. It it's something you do, and suddenly it's very location agnostic, and we see the world operating that way in the future Jeff of these devices at the edge or need gonna be working in a world where sometimes it makes sense to be in an office. Maybe there's collaboration, other things you need to dio. But we're going to see people working from home working from a coffee shop, working from, you know, anywhere in the world, and we're gonna need to stay connected. In that way, it's enabling a great set of talent. It's enabling people to be where they want, you know, get done what they need to do in their personal lives and then be contributing in a great way, thio to a business. So I think technology plays a huge role in going and getting that done. And to me, the world doesn't just return back to a you know, pre cove in space. But we're now in this. We've learned we can operate in this kind of multi modality world where technology can help keep us connected, collaborating, getting stuff done in some cases more productive than ever before, and it's kind of unleashed this new wave of thinking. I think we will continue to see great creativity on stuff we're putting in our devices to enable that, you know, software applications approaches that are gonna enable that that will really take us forward as we look at the future. >>You know, I'm just curious if you could share, uh, you know, kind of Ah, general breakdown by kind of form factor. What do you see between kind of, you know, I don't know if you split high end desktops and low on desktops and then, you know, kind of laptops and Chromebooks, what's kind of the high level kind of breakdown, and how's that? Is it change significantly over the last several years? And you you just mentioned a boost. You know, during the time of Cove in >>Yeah, we've seen a shift towards notebooks. Now you know much Is the article you you pulled up from 10 years ago? I think the death, the death of the desktop has also been much exaggerated. So we're Maurin, a mode of 70% of the systems that were selling our notebooks 70 to 80% range. It's a little higher, and consumer Andi, that's, you know, 20 points up in the commercial space. So we're seeing, you know, people have valued that kind of portability of systems. You know that, said is we talk through some of the ways people use it. There are great uses for desktops, for people are in the same place where I need ultimate ultimate power and then a z your home. We've seen a little more shift Teoh a suddenly you know, portability. That was really valuable because you had Salesforce's engineers on the road all the time. And I really wanted something that, you know, lasted had great battery life and was really easy to carry around. Suddenly we're in a world plugged in at home like we look at our devices, we've gone. Now more than half of our laptops are basically on is we have intelligence built into our systems. That tunes how battery management is done. Empower Management's done. More than half those systems are now in a mode of all, basically, always on a C. So people are, you know, plugged in all the time. They would like a little more powerful system. So whether they're running, zoom or teams or some other app. Multitasking. It's like there's a, you know, different requirements there. I think that changes Azzawi go forward and we get back to, you know, the notebook. It's like the ultimate design people want is a great big screen. That's super light, and the battery lasts forever. And I'm like that keeps our engineers and designers working every day because that's a really hard, complex thing to solve. And, you know, we're we continue to work and and and push that next forward. Now it's a little more biased to power. Sitting on a desk. We will be back in a world where it's gonna be, Yeah, I want power to sit on the desk, be on a video conference, get work done. But I also need to be able to take that on the road with >>Yeah, I just think, you know, because of the proliferation of online applications, right? And you know so much of our work day no pun intended, you know, is done in all these different cloud based applications, whether its sales force or slack or asana or whether we're, you know, working in in, uh, social media applications or even are you know kind of cloud enabled local applications. You know, a lot of times I find you don't have to carry your device right. E can lead the one device of one location, one of the other. I know it's almost like you pick up exactly where you were when you log back into chrome or you log back into whatever your browser is. If you've got it all configured, you know you don't even need to carry. A lot of times I find it's it's it's really nice. And if I have to check a message on the phone, No, it's a very different way of working, and, uh, I think it's really pretty slick. I do want to get into productivity, which you've talked about a lot. You know, I've always said the best productivity investment anybody could make is a second screen on the desktop. I mean, it's so much more productive to have a second screen the third screen. You go to places like Wall Street and the NASDAQ floor, where time matters and productivity matters, their screens all over the place and you guys are doing a ton of fun stuff with screens. Big giant curve things, and you made an interesting observation in other interviews that now people are consuming their entertainment content via those screens, whether it's an over the top service with Netflix or or whatever. So this this kind of shift to, you know, kind of mawr content consumption as this blend between kind of what you do in your personal life and what you do in your work life, both in terms of time and content, you know, continue to mix so lot of exciting stuff happening in big, beautiful screens. >>Yeah, totally agree, Jeff. And we see you know we've looked at productivity and see boosts with a bigger screen around your system. Same thing with exactly as you describe putting two screens around the system or go to a trading floor and their screens everywhere because it's about the you know, it's about the content that you can consume and the, um, you know, the work that you go get done, and it's a lot more efficient to be able to have multiple screens. Whether it's looking at a presentation and doing a call, you know, a video call for work on on one screen or either side of Ah, screen. And we're seeing people build out that, you know, their home office, their work office. I think that's to me. The, you know, the exciting piece of you think about how technology is arming people to get their job done. Like you can't imagine if you had all the technology taken away from you. You're like, Okay, what am I gonna What am I go do? Like if the internet goes down, I don't quite know how to get go. Be productive here. You know, I go try to find someone who has a landline phone on the block and call someone up. Andi have actually have a discussion, but, like, I'm not gonna build out a work, you know, a workspace. I've gotta build out a home space companies that are pretty progressive, the ones that are investing Maurin technology for their employees. We're seeing them be ah, lot more successful in this covert air, which equals go get on the right tools the screen around the system, You know, the extra devices. So it's like, Hey, my postures. Great. I can actually go get work done. And I'm in a nice space. Same thing back in the office. We've built stuff. We're building low blue light technology into our commercial PCs. We put that on our high end consumer PC. So you know, now you can walk into your home office early in the morning. You can goto late at night. It will have you all tune so your body is ready to go to sleep. You know, you don't even have toe. I don't have to talk to your family at all during the day. You could just work all the time from your home office. But I think little pieces like that are going. How do we put technology in this world where it's, like, very easy toe walk in and out of your you know, your office and being tuned on. But, hey, I need to go to sleep or I need to be chilling out after that and get the right technology and capabilities that let people be successful. So I think it's pretty exciting. Everything we've been able to dio, >>right? So I want to shift gears a little bit. Um, talk about user interface. What? One of the reason of this article that we keep referencing 10 years ago was the launch of the iPad, right? And in the launch pad or the iPad didn't have, Ah, traditional keyboard. Um, but I think people found out that not having a traditional keyboard, depending on the type of your work you're doing is a little bit of an inhibitor to your productivity. But it really begs the question as we enter this new world of different types of interaction with these devices and the increased use of voice, whether it's with Siri or or Okay, Google, um, >>we've >>had, you know, regulations on the A d a. In terms of access to websites and this and that. Aziz, you kind of look into the future of of human interaction with these devices as you get more and more horsepower toe work with on the GPU and the CPU and you know, can free up more. Resource is to this type of activity. I know you can't share anything too far down the road. But what? How do you see kind of the future evolving to get beyond this quality keyboard that was designed to slow people down because types were, too. I'm still waiting for the more efficient keyboard option to be to be available. But what's the future of human interaction with these things? To take the the degree of efficiency up another level? >>Hey, Jeff, we will do a custom keyboard for you. So you get me your you get me your high speed layout, we'll get you get you one of those. Um, you know, we do see it is pretty remarkable how long the keyboards been around and we still see it's It's also remarkable to me how powerful that is as a input device for, you know, for some tasks in the world. So what we see is it's not gonna be what replaces the keyboard. And there's one way of going and doing things. But all this compute the sensors that capability on the systems are just gonna allow people to operate the way that they want to operate. So you look at a PC today. It still has this great keyboard. It still has a laptop form factor that has, you know, been there for It's probably 25 years or so. It's actually pretty nice because it fits on your lap. It balances really well on the coffee table. Um, it's, you know, We've looked at so many different form factors, and it actually is a stayed around for a good reason because it it's pretty pretty functional. You know, you take on top of that, though we've built touch in tow, all our systems and screen. So a capability that's available to many of our customers and I go people are just starting. In the beginning, it was like Okay, Hey, how do I take this PC with touch on the screen and then you go? I don't want to do everything with touch, but gosh, it's like how maney you now touch it. If it's something's not touch, you know you have little marks on the screen. I went thio, I went. Thio was looking and working with someone here in a design, a design firm, and, uh, they had a product that was non touch, and it's like I reached in touch the screen to try to make it bigger because my eyes were not quite as good and they were like, Oh yeah, that's not a touch that's not a touch system and everyone touches the screen so it's like that becomes normal voice is going to become normal we have capability on the PC. Like you said, there's a bunch of voice ecosystems. Not everything is easiest to go do invoice. There are some things where you go ahead. I just want to go touch that, you know, gesture in the same way we look at intelligence on the system of also going There are things I wanna have just happen because I always I always do that and I shouldn't have to do voice. I shouldn't have to do gesture, touch everything else like, Hey, maybe I start the morning and I always pull up my calendar. Why doesn't that happen? Or I like to listen to her, You know, a song in the evening as I'm typing away on email on getting things buttoned up for the day. It's like your system can anticipate some of those things and it will just do that for you. So I think I think you're exactly right. We're going to see multiple ways of interacting with technology, and it needs to be natural and easy for us and then let the user pick pick the way that they want to go and do things right. >>Well, you just touched on a whole, you jumped ahead to questions on my list of things I want to talk about. And really, that's the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence, not in a generic way. That's an app that sits inside of the PC, but but in terms of using that intelligence as you just described based on my work flow based on my habit based on the applications I use based on you know what, you can observe and learn about me. Or maybe it SSM dictate down from from the corporate set up. You know how that PC operates for me? Because I think that's it is a really interesting thing, right? Everyone uses their machine differently, and whether they use, you know, shortcuts or not, How many tabs do they have open? You know, the the variability. You must have crazy studies on this in terms of the way people actually operate. These things is so, so high, so huge opportunity to, you know, again kind of remove the the get the signal from the noise and help people decide what they should do. Prioritize what they should do and add a layer of of simplicity to you. know it is a complex amount of notifications firing at me all day long. >>Yeah, I think that's a huge. You know, you talked about the potential you have in a world where more APS that we use our cloud cloud based of going How do I augment the capability in this client device at the edge To be intelligent and helped me go do mawr versus just being, you know, really dumb and serving up this other other content. And I think everything you describe is opportunity that we see We started Jeff about five years ago and have been very aggressive and putting intelligence and machine learning into the systems we started on our work stations, where there is an obvious application of, like, how do I tune a system to get the most performance out of an application? And we saw settings configurations making them different helped tune these very specific, you know, cad engineering programs that developers were running their times really valuable. They want the most performance. We used to have to have people sit down and we go. Okay, let's go run this application. Under this workload, we can put a table together. Here's a bunch of recommendations. We started going well, Hey, how do we have that happened? Automat like, let's try different settings. Figure out what works. The machines should should self tune itself then and figure out what's right and get based on exactly what I'm running. And people can be running different combinations so suddenly got a lot smarter than our great engineer sitting in the lab and figuring out those tables. And then, you know, from that time then we brought it to I think, what's just tip of the iceberg Now, where we start looking at, uh, performance across all our systems? What applications of my running go set things up so that it works? We talked a little bit about batteries and power management. Hey, how am I using this system if I am a really mobile person? Always, you know, taking my battery down to really low levels, hopping on a plane, I need to be quickly charged, like the system can figure out. Hey, I really need to tune things. Not for when, when you go through all the mechanics of a battery, it's like I am willing to sacrifice some on the longevity of the battery to enable really fast charging of that system because Jeffs always on the go Jeff runs his battery down. I need to make sure when he plugs in, he has maximum juice. Hey, here's Sam who's in a work from home mode, always plugged in. It's not great on any battery in the world to always be at, you know, maximum maximum charge every single minute of the day. And Sam has not unplugged his system in the past. You know, five days. Hey, we can run that at 95% and he will have a long life to that battery and be really happy with the system. And he's never gonna run out of power. You can start doing in that space. You can start doing it around sound and the environment that people are in, how we get smart. And I think there's an enormous amount you could do on top of that, like you described just how people have used the systems and it can sound a little eerie, but like it's what we you know, the machine suddenly knows how I'm going to go do stuff, but I'm like I would like that it to be anticipating what I'm doing, and then it starts taking that mundane stuff that we have to do that just eats up time and, you know, goes and gets that done for us. So we could be focused on the creative and the really pushing the boundaries, thinking >>I love it because it always goes back to kind of what do you optimizing for right? And there isn't necessarily one answer to that question, and there's a lot of factors that go into that in terms of the timing. As you said, the person their behavior you know happen to GPS is I'm at an airport. Probably need to plug in for you in the airplane. It's a good stuff. I want to. I want to shift gears a little bit, Sam, to talk about operating systems, Um, and and you know, chromebooks air out now. And you know, it was kind of this breakthrough to go beyond kind of Windows based systems. I think there's a lot of people that you know hope at >>some point >>will be, you know, have the option to run Lennox based systems. But it's just, you know, with a cloud based world and a multi, you know, kind of device interaction with all those different applications, whether it's it's my phone or my my desktop or my laptop or my my chromebook or my whatever. Um, Aziz, you start to think about kind of operating systems and opening up, you know, kind of a new level of innovation with because the expectation now for for like, a chromebook is that it's almost 100% Web based APS, right? That there's really not a lot of need for anything local. Maybe a quick download, a picture too attached to to an email or something. How do you kind of look at the future and kind of operating systems for PC? Specifically? >>Yeah. Well, I think is You describe Jeff, the applications and what you're doing on the system has become increasingly important over time, and it will only become more important as we go go forward. So, you know, from that point of view window, we dio work with windows. We do work with Google and chrome. I mean, Windows 10 is a really good based operating system. Chrome has a lot of nice capability in that operating system, you know, Obviously Apple, a competitor, has a different approach in that space. But I think we have a really good set of offerings that we can put on our our systems. And then we're focused on tuning that experience on top of the operating system. I I think it's still too complicated to go and put a, you know, get a new PC into a work or home environment, retire the old PC and manage that system. And what we look at is independent of that operating system. People want to go get their stuff done. We need to make that great. They wanna get their device, they want to turn it on and they want to go use it. And we want to build a world where, like, as I'm getting a new device, my device should know me well enough to go. Hey, Sam, this is this is the right time to get a device. This is the right kind of device that you should get based on what you're going and doing. Hey, I'm going to just keep you up to date. I am going to you think about any issues with the system. We still have too many things that flow through a traditional Hey, there's an I T. Help desk and then they figure that out and then I go toe level two or level three if they can't sort that out. Hey, how do we put that stuff to your point, Jeff before around intelligence, How do we automate those processes? So we're thinking through You know what needs to happen on that system, keeping it up to date and fixing and remediating that system. So I think there's a huge potential regardless of what operating system is beneath it, and we have very good choices there to go. We've got to make that experience the one that's great for the users and that that's where we're really focusing our, you know, our time and our energy, Right? >>So let me shift gears again a little bit and full disclosure I've bought, and I don't know how many XPS towers in a row. I think I'm on my third or fourth in a row. I love >>it. I >>mean, I'm a desktop. I like to just pack those things full of as much horsepower and GPU and CPU and memory as I possibly can because to me again, Back to an investment and productivity. I don't wanna be waiting for slow machines. I just to me it's a couple 100 bucks for this upgrade. That upgrade, it seems brain dead to me that people don't do that. But in terms of when you get these things now and it comes in the mail, it's basically a >>box and a machine, and >>you think back to the old days right when there was books and warranty cards and, you know, a whole plethora of stuff that kind of fell out of that box. I know you know. That's That's probably a leading indicator on the consumer side, about some of your efforts around sustainability and and being efficient and obviously taking advantage of things like the cloud in terms of activating these machines in this and that. But I wonder if you can share a little bit on what you guys have been doing about sustainability, because I know it's important. You know, there's a big focus around, you know, kind of environmental trash on old electron ICS, which is a riel, a real problem that people are dressing. So I wonder if you can. You know. Take a minute, Thio, to share your guys efforts in this area. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Jeff. It is. It is really important. And we see, you know, arming the world with technology so people can do better. Things really matters, but I love doing stuff outside, like I want the environment to be great. And we need to do that in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. So a couple of places we, you know, pushed really aggressively. You touched on the packaging. So whether that's taking, um, content out of boxes, that doesn't that doesn't need to be there. We've made very aggressive commitments with a series of 2030 goals that we're marching towards is a company where we said, you know, 100% of our packaging will be from sustainable or recyclable sources. So we've already moved aggressively in that space. When you look at what ocean bound plastic we're putting in our boxes, how we think about the materials that were picking, you know, cardboard, and using that in ways that go through the you know, the mail and can be shipped effectively. So we have maximum content there that can be recycled. We've we've committed that we will take back a system for every system that we ship. So getting and building this circular economy for electron ICS, we think is is very important. So we take the stuff that we've got out there and we put that back into a recycle process where you know your old PC can become part of your new cutting edge technology PC and we've led the industry and doing that in plastics were taking plastics from cases and plastics from systems, getting that back into new systems. We've done that with precious metals from the from the, uh, PCB lay board designs inside the systems. We've done that with rare earth metals and magnets, and we think there's opportunity to go farther in that space and then the 3rd 3rd kind of thing that we've committed Jeff is by by 2030 to have half the content of our new systems, be from recycled or renewable content. And we do a good job today of having the content in the systems be recyclable. It's almost over 90% by weight, but what we want to do and the work we need to go do is go get that recycled content going into a cutting edge technology that we're putting out there, and it's not. That's not a simple problem of going. People want things a structurally strong as possible, a super thin as performance as possible. And then we need to you, you know, we gotta use, um, basically waste that comes through and gets turned into new products. So we have our engineers are material science people working on how we make that riel. And we set some aggressive goals with, you know, Michael and the company that will be leadership and that we don't quite exactly know how to get there, but put us on the right kind of edge of pushing and doing the things that we need. Thio. We can have great technology and, you know, be responsible in the way that, as you said, is very important. >>It's great, and it's good to write it down, right? If you don't write it down, then it's just it just disappears into the into the ether. So, Sam, I really enjoyed getting to catch up. I want to give you the final word with a little bit. Look to the path and a little bit look to the future, right? A lot of conversation about Moore's law, and we got to the end of Moore's law and blah, blah, blah. And and I think that, you know, there's obviously technology behind that, and there's some real conversations. But to me, the more interesting topic around Moore's law is really the idea of Moore's law and this continual advancement of technology that's better, faster, cheaper. You've been doing this for 20 years at Del. You've seen tons of, you know, kind of Moore's law impacts and operating in this world where, you know, compute, compute storage and networking just is on this exponential scale on whether you want to talk about GP use or whatever again to me, it's not about the number, of course, and the transistor. It's about the transition in the core. It's about really the concept of this working in a world where you know you're gonna have a lot more. Where is power work with How do you How do you kind of reflect on, you know, the stuff that you're shipping today versus what you were shipping five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and then, more importantly, is you look forward. Um, you know what is what are you excited about? What gets you up in the morning? What puts a big smile on your face? Still come to work after 20 years of Dell? >>Yeah. You know, Jeff, it's a great question because the industry has changed so much over the last 10 20 years. So it's sometimes a fun thing. Toe. Look back at some of the products that we put out before. That seemed amazing at that point in time and you stack them against what we're doing now and then it could bring you down to Earth a little bit. So you see, the, uh, you see just the exponential improvements that we're able to make around the design of the product, the capability of the products. And I see that continuing the thing that gives me, you know, huge thought around this the device and the PC and the role is gonna play at the edge. We just did some research and we were looking at Millennials and Gen Z and looking around the world, and that is a huge and growing part of the population. It will be the the users of technology in the future with the world we're in today, 45% of them. So almost half of them said they would take their dollars and they want a premium, high end PC experience, and they would prioritize that versus other things they spend money on to go and have a great PC as a personal tool. Do you think about that translating to in a work environment they're gonna expect those same kind of great tools? And then to the question you asked, You know, I see a huge opportunity to continue to push forward the value and the way people use these devices, whether it's the intelligence we talked about. That to me is really exciting around building a machine that knows me and does things for me and how I want to use it, our ability to build immersive experiences so that you know, whether I'm gaming after work, collaborating with co workers like how do I put it so that we're together and it's a good Aziz that in person experience, we're gonna be able to do that with technology. You talked in a great questions around. Hey, the ways people interact with the systems, it will become natural. It will become whatever way they want to go and do that. And I think we can do that in a world where, yes, you can walk between all kinds of different devices. There will not be one device to end all. You'll be in a small screen device. You're gonna use a monitor. You're going to use a PC device. There will be technology across the home. But toe have that have that link together in the role that PC is gonna play in. That to me, is exciting. And we continue to, you know, invest aggressively. Michael saw that when he started the company. We continue to believe in the power of technology, and we're gonna figure out and drive those breakthroughs that will make the, you know, products exciting. And I love doing that every day of seeing the innovation we can put together and how that makes a difference for people. To me, that's really an exciting thing. >>Well, Sam, thank you. Thank you for the update. Again, the rumors of the PCs demise were greatly overstated. 10 years and glad to see that you're just kicking tail and doing exciting things. So thanks for for sharing your insight and your experience with us. >>Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Jeff. Great to talk to you. >>Absolutely. All right. He's Sam. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020 The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

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

>> Voice over: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Mittleman, and welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe for 2020. Get to talk to the participants in this great community and ecosystem where they are around the globe. And when you think back to the early days of containers, it was, containers, they're lightweight, they're small, going to obliterate virtualization is often the headline that we had. Of course, we know everything in IT tends to be additive. And here we are in 2020 and containers and virtual machines, living side by side and often we'll see the back and forth that happens when we talk about virtualization in containers. To talk about that topic specifically, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Steve Gordon. He's the director of product management at Red Hat. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. >> All right, as I teed up of course, virtualization was a wave that swept through the data center. It is a major piece, not only of what's in the data center, but even if you look at the public Clouds, often it was virtualization underneath there. Certain companies like Google, of course, really drove a container adoption. And often you hear when people talk about, I built something CloudNative, that underlying piece of being containerized and then using an orchestration layer like Kubernetes is what they talk about. So maybe stop for a sec, Red Hat of course, heavily involved in virtualization and containers, how you see that landscape and what's the general conversation you have with customers as to how they make the choice and how the lines blur between those worlds? >> Yeah, so at Red Hat, I think we've been working on certainly the current iteration of the next specialization with KVM for around 12 years and myself large portion of that. I think, one thing that's always been constant is while from the outside-in, specialization looks like it's been a fairly stable marketplace. It's always changing, it's always evolving. And what we're seeing right now is as people are adopting containers and even constructs built on top of containers into their workflows, there is more interest and more desire around how can I combine these things, recognizing that still an enormous percentage of my workloads are out there running in virtual machines today, but I'm building new things around them that need to be able to interact with them and springboard off of that. So I think for the last couple of years, I'm sure you yourself have seen a number of different projects pop up and the opensource community around this intersection of containers and visualization and how can these technologies compliment each other. And certainly KubeVirt is one of the projects that we've started in this space, in reaction to both that general interests, but also the real customer problems that people have, as they try and meld these two worlds. >> So Steve, at Red Hat Summit earlier this year, there was a lot of talk around container native virtualization. If you could just explain what that means, how that might be different from just virtualization in general, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, so back in, I think early 2017, late 2016, we started playing around this idea. We'd already seen the momentum around Kubernetes and the result the way we architected OpenShift, three at a time around, Kubernetes has this strength as an orchestration platform, but also a shared provider of storage, networking, et cetera, resources. And really thinking about, when we look at virtualization and containers, some of these problems are very common regardless of what footprint the workload happens to fit into. So leveraging that strength of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform, we started looking at, what would it look like to orchestrate virtual machines on that same platform right next to our application containers? And the extension of that the KubeVirt project and what has ultimately become OpenShift virtualization is based around that core idea of how can I make a traditional virtual machine to a full operating system, interact with and look exactly like a Kubernetes native construct, that I can use from the same platform? I can manage it using the same constructs, I can interact with it using the same console, all of these kinds of ideas. And then on top of that, not just bring in workloads as they lie, but enable really powerful workforce with people who are building a new application in containers that still need some backend components, say a database that's sitting in a VM, or also trying to integrate those virtual machines into new constructs, whether it's something like a pipeline or a service mesh. We're hearing a lot of questions around those things these days where people don't want to just apply those things to brand new workloads, but figure out how do they apply those constructs to the broader majority of their fleet of workflows that exist today. >> All right, so I believe back at Red Hat Summit, OpenShift virtualization was in beta. Where's the product that solution sets till today? >> Right, so at this year's KubeCon, we're happy to announce that OpenShift virtualization is moving to general availability. So it will be a fully supported part of OpenShift. And what that means is, you, as a subscriber to OpenShift, the platform, get virtualization as just an additional capability of that platform that you can enable as an operator from the operator hub, which is really a powerful thing for admins to be able to do that. But also is just really powerful in terms of the user experience. Like once that operator is enabled on your cluster, the little tab shows up, that shows that you can now go and create a virtual machine. But you also still get all of the metrics and the shared networking and so on that goes with that cluster, that underlies it all. And you can again do some really powerful things in terms of combining those constructs for both virtual machines and containers. >> When you talk about that line between virtualization and containers, a big question is, what does this mean for developers? How is it different from what they were using before? How do they engage and interact with their infrastructure today? >> Sure, so I think the way a lot of this current wave of technology got started for people was whether it was with Kubernetes or Docker before that, people would go and grab, easiest way they could grab compute for capacity was go to their virtual machine firm, whether that was their local virtualization estate at their company, or whether that was taking a credit card to public Cloud, getting a virtual machine and spinning up a container platform on top of that. What we're now seeing is, as that's transitioning into people building their workloads, almost entirely around these container constructs, in some cases when they're starting from scratch, there is more interest in, how do I leverage that platform directly? How do I, as my application group have more control over that platform? And in some cases, depending on the use case, like if they have demand for GPUs, for example, or other high-performance devices, that question of whether the virtualization layer between my physical host and my container is adding that much value? But then still wanting to bring in the traditional workloads they have as well. So I think we've seen this gradual transition where there is a growing interest in reevaluating, how do we start with container based architectures? To, okay, how has we transitioned towards more production scenarios and the growth in production scenarios? What tweaks do we make to that architecture? Does it still make sense to run all of that on top of virtual machines? Or does it make more sense to almost flip that equation as my workload mix gradually starts changing? >> Yeah, two thoughts come to mind on that. Number one is, are there specific applications out there, or I think about traditional VMs, often that Windows environments that we have there, is that some of the use case to bring them over to containers? And then also, once I've gotten it into the container environment, what are the steps to move forward? Because I have to expect that there's going to be some refactoring, some modernization to take advantage of the innovation and pace of change, not just to take it, containerize it and leave it. >> Yeah, so certainly, there is an enormous amount of potential out there in terms of Windows workloads, and people are definitely trying to work out how do they leverage those workloads in the context of OpenShift and Kubernetes based environment. And Windows containers obviously, is one way to address that. And certainly, that is very powerful in and of itself, for bringing those workloads to OpenShift and Kubernetes, but does have some constraints in terms of needing to be on a relatively recent version of Windows server and so on for those workloads to run in that construct. So where OpenShift virtualization helps with that is we can actually take an existing virtual machine workload, bring that across, even if it's say Windows server 2012, run it on top of the OpenShift virtualization platform as a VM, And then if or when you start modernizing more of that application, you can start teasing that out into actual containers. And that's actually something, it is one of our very early demos at Red Hat Summit 2018, I think was how you would go about doing that, and primarily we did that because it is a very powerful thing for customers to see how they can bring those, all the applications into this mix. And the other aspect of that I'll mention is one of our financial services customers who we've been working with, basically since that demo, they saw it from a hallway at Red Hat Summit and came and said, "Hey, we want to talk to you guys about that." One of the primary workload, is a Windows 10 style environment, that they happened to be bringing in as well. And that's more in that construct of treating OpenShift almost as a pool of compute, which you can use for many different workload types with the Windows 10 being just one aspect of that. And the other thing I'll say in terms of the second part of the question, what do I need to do in terms of refactoring? So we are very conscious of the fact that, if this is to provide value, you have to be able to bring in existing virtual machines with as minimal change as possible. So we do have a migration solution set, that we've had for a number of years, for bringing our virtual machines to Linux specialization stacks. We're expanding that to include OpenShift virtualization as a target, to help you bring in those existing virtual machine images. Where things do change a little bit is in terms of the operational approaches. Obviously, admin console now is OpenShift for those virtual machines, that does right now present a change. But we think it is a very powerful opportunity in terms of, as people get more and more production workloads into containers, for example, it's going to become a lot more appealing to have a backup solution, for example, that can cater to both the virtual machine workloads as well as any stateful container workloads you may have, which do exist in increasing numbers. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up a stateful discussion because as an industry, we've spent a long time making sure that virtual machines, have storage and have networking that is reliable in performance and the like. What should customers be thinking about and operators when they move to containers? Are there things that are different you manage bringing into, this brings them into the OpenShift management plane. So what else should I be thinking about? What do I need to do differently when I've embraced this? >> Yeah, so I think in terms of the things that virtual machine expects, the two big ones that come to mind to me are networking and storage. The compute piece is still there obviously, but I think is a little less complicated to solve just because the OpenShift and broader Kubernetes community have done such a great job of addressing that piece, and that's really what attracted us to it in the first place. But on the networking side, certainly the expectations of a traditional virtual machine are a little bit different to the networking model of Kubernetes by default. But again, we've seen a lot of growth in container based applications, particularly in the context of CloudNative network functions that have been pushing the boundaries of Kubernetes networking as well. That's resulted in projects like Motus, which allow us to give a virtual machine related to networking interface that it expects, but also give it the option of using the pod networking natively, for some of those more powerful constructs that are native to Kubernetes. So that's one of those areas where you've got a mix of options, depending on how far you want to go from a modernization perspective versus do I just want to bring this workload in and run it as it is. And my modernization is more built around it, in terms of the other container based things. Then similarly in storage, it's an area where obviously at Red Hat, we've been working close with the OpenShift container storage team, but we also work with a number of ecosystem partners on, not just how do we certify their storage plugins and make sure they work well both for containers and virtual machines, but also how do we push forward upstream efforts, around things like the container storage interface specification, to allow for these more powerful capabilities like snapshots cloning and so on which we need for virtual machines, but are also very valuable for container based workloads as well. >> Steve, you've mentioned some of the reasons why customers were moving towards this environment. Now that you're GA, what learnings did you have during beta? Are there any other customer stories you could share that you've learned along this journey? >> Yeah, so I think one of the things I'll say is that, there's no feedback like direct product in the hands of customer feedback. And it's really been interesting to see the different ways that people have applied it, not necessarily having set out to apply it, but having gotten partway through their journey and realized, hey, I need this capability. You have something that looks pretty handy and then having success with it. So in particular, in the telecommunications vertical, we've been working closely with a number of providers around the 5G rollouts and the 5G core in particular, where they've been focused on CloudNative network functions. And really what I mean by that is the wave of technology and the push they're making around 5G is to take what they started with network function virtualization a step further, and build that next generation network around CloudNative technologies, including Kubernetes and OpenShift. And as I've been doing that, I have been finding that some of the vendors are more or less prepared for that transition. And that's where, while they've been able to leverage the power of containers for those applications that are ready, they're also able to leverage OpenShift virtualization as a transitionary step, as they modernize the pieces that are taking a little bit longer. And that's where we've been able to run some applications in terms of the load balancer, in terms of a carrier grade database on top of OpenShift virtualization, which we probably wouldn't have set out to do this early in terms of our plan, but we're really able to react quickly to that customer demand and help them get that across the line. And I think that's a really powerful example where the end state may not necessarily be to run everything as a virtual machine forever, but that was still able to leverage this technology as a powerful tool in the context of our broadened up optimization effort. >> All right, well, Steve, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations on going GA for this solution. Definitely look forward to hearing more from the customers as they come. >> All right, thanks so much Stu. I appreciate it. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Stu Mittleman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we always love when we get to talk to practitioners, and not just any practitioner. CIOs, obviously under huge pressures in general, but in today's day and age, lots of pressures on the CIO. So, I'm happy to welcome to the program Rich Gagnon. He is the CIO from the city of Amarillo in Texas. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so, you know, CIO in a city in Texas, why don't you give us a little bit of what your role entails, a little bit of your background, and looking forward to the conversation. >> So, my background is actually more from the private sector side of the house. Previous to coming to the city of Amarillo, I was the Vice President of Systems Engineering for Palo Alto Networks, for the Americas. Before that, the Global Vice President of Systems Engineering for F5 Networks, and before that, the Director of Global Infrastructure for GameStop. So I stepped into government with a very private-sector, profit-centered mindset, if you will, coming from very high-growth companies. My role with the city is really to be an enabler for local government, to drive not only IT direction, but as a smaller community, I also have to wear the CSO hat, and the Data Privacy Officer hat. Pretty much anything when it comes to leadership of IT and technology, as an enabler to the government, that role falls on me. >> Wow, so a pretty broad mandate that you have there. Rich, give us a little bit, how does that span? How many constituents do you have in your infrastructure, your IT? Maybe you can sketch that out a little bit for us, too. >> Sure, so, I've had peers from the private sector ask me, "What's it like to actually lead in local government?" And the best comparison I can come up with is someone like GE. I have 49 different subsidiaries, different departments that operate as individual business units, only I don't have GE's money or their staff. We have 200,000 people and the departments we support span everything, from the obvious, like public safety, police, fire. We have an airport, a public clinic, water treatment plants, public health. There are streets, all the infrastructure departments. It's very diverse. >> Wow. And with all of those constituents that you have, why don't you give us the pre-COVID-19 discussion first, which is, what are some of those pressures there, from a budgeting standpoint? Are there specific initiatives you've been driving? And how are you responding to all those variables? >> Sure. Well, coming in, it was a little jarring. City leadership was very transparent that the city had sort of stood still for about a decade. I come from a high-growth environment where money was not the precious resource, really. It was always time. It was about speed to market. How do we get competitive advantage and move fast enough to maintain it? That was not the case here. I stepped into an environment where the limitations were Cat 3 cable and switches that still ran CatOS. The year before I came in, the big IT accomplishment was finally completing the migration to Windows 7 and Office 2007. That's where we started. So, for the past three years, I guess I'm starting my fourth year, we have undergone massive transformation. I think my staff thinks I'm a bit of a maniac, because we've run like we were being chased by a rabid dog. We have updated, obviously, the Layer 1 infrastructure, replaced the entire network. We've rolled out a new data center that's all hyper-converged. That enabled us to move our security model from the traditional Layer 3 firewall at the edge to a contextually-based data center with regulation on east-west traffic and segregation. We have rolled out VDI and Office 2016 and Windows 10. It's been a lot. >> Yeah, it really sounds like you went through multiple generations of change there. It's almost like going a decade forward, not just one step forward. Bring us through a little bit, that transformation. Obviously, there should be some clear efficiencies you had, but give us kind of the before and after as you started to deploy some of these technologies. Was there some reskilling? Did you hire some new people? How did that all go? >> Very much so. And like everything, it starts with financials, right? All of the resources at the city within IT were focused on operations, so there was literally no capital budget. As where typically you would update as you go, and update infrastructure, what happened was, as the infrastructure aged, the approach was to hire more staff to try to keep aging infrastructure up and running. That's a failing strategy. So, by moving to HCI, we've actually recovered about 26% of our operating budget, which allowed us to move that money into innovation and infrastructure updating. It took a tremendous amount of reskilling. Fortunately, the one thing that's been, I think, most surprising to me coming to local government, is the creativity of the staff. They were hungry for change. They were excited by the opportunity to move things forward. So, we spent an entire year doing nothing but training. We had a massive amount of budget poured into, "Let's bring the staff up to speed. "Let's get as many vendors in front of them as possible. "Let's get them educated on where the trends are going. "What is hyper-converged architecture "and why does it matter? "What is DevOps and why is the industry heading that way?" So as I said, we started, really, Layer 2-3, established that, built out the new data center, and now our focus is now, we built that platform, and our focus is starting to shift onto business relationship management. We've met with all 49 departments. We do that every six months. We're building 49 different roadmaps for every department, on "What applications are you using? "How do we help you modernize? "How do we help you serve the citizens better?" Because that's how IT serves the community. We serve the community by serving the departments that serve them directly, and being an innovation engine, if you will, for local government, to drive through new applications and ways to serve. So the transition has really started to happen is we've gotten that base platform out of the way and the things that were blocking us from saying, "Yes, and we can do more." >> Wow, so Rich, it's been an interesting discussion as the global pandemic has hit, so many people have talked about, "Boy, when I think about working from home "or managing in this environment, if I was using "10- or 15-year-old technology, "I don't know how, "or if I'd be able to do any of what I had." So, I know Dell brought you over, you're talking HCIs, so I believe you're talking about VxRail as your HCI platform. Talk to us about what HCI enabled as you needed to shift to remote workforce and support, that overall urgent need. >> It's been massive. And it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we matured, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments, but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt. With VxRail in place, in a week, we spun up hundreds of instant clones. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business, and now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> All right, so, Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that overall management? You talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. How does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. In the old environment, one, it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. It overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. It wasn't cost-efficient. And then, simple things, like, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. You simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment, and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management, because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and reskill them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> Well, it's definitely a great proof point. So often, you deploy a solution, and when push comes to shove, will it deliver on that value that we're hoping for? HCI has been around for quite a while, but a crisis like this, how can you move past, how can your team respond? Congratulations to your team on that. The Dell team has recently done a number of updates on the VxRail platform. I'm curious, as someone who's been using the platform, what particularly is interesting to you, and what pieces of that have the most relevance to your organization? >> There are a few. So we're starting to look at our SCADA environments, industrial controls. And we're looking at some processing at the edge in those environments. So the new organized D series are interesting. There's some plant environments where that might really make sense to us. We've also partnered with our local counties and we have a DR site where being able to extend the network out to that DR site is going to be very powerful for us. And then there's just some improvements in vSphere that will allow us to do a little QA-ing, if you will, on new code before we roll it out, that I think will have a pretty huge impact for us as well. >> Excellent. So, Rich, when you think about the services that you need to deliver to all of your constituencies, walk us through how the pandemic has affected the team, how you're making sure that your employees are taken care of, but that you can still deliver all of those services. >> So from an internal perspective, not running a legacy architecture has made that a whole lot easier. We've remoted most of the IT team. Our entire development team is at home. Most of our support team is at home. Most of the city is still at home. So being able to do that, one, just having the capability has been huge for us. But also, from a business perspective, it's allowed most of our city functions just to keep running. So, modified services, for sure, but we're still functioning, and I just don't think that would have been capable, we wouldn't have been capable of supporting that, even two and a half years ago. >> So, Rich, we've talked a bit about your infrastructure. I'm curious, is the city, are you leveraging any public cloud environments, or any specific SaaS solutions that are enabling some of what you're doing today also? >> Yes, and we could probably have a 30-minute discussion on what is hybrid cloud and what is multicloud. In our instance, we are leveraging quite a bit of SaaS. We've migrated a lot of our services to SaaS offerings. We have spun up several applications in the cloud. I wouldn't call them truly hybrid. In my mind, hybrid is, I am able to take the workload and very seamlessly move it between my private infrastructure and one or more clouds. This is more, workloads specifically assigned to a public cloud. But yes, we've leveraged that. Simple things like Office365 and Outlook, but just as powerful for us has been VDI and being able to offer Horizon to our employees at home. And, with my other hat on, still maintain the contextual-based security, right? So I didn't have to open up the kingdom. I can still maintain the control that I need to to be able to sleep at night. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I love to ask someone in your position is the role of data, how you think of security, how you think of the technology and put those together. Does it help that you wear both the CSO hat and the CIO hat? How do you think about leveraging data? Is there anything that you're sharing with other municipalities, without giving up, of course, personal information? >> Sure. It causes a lot of internal arguments, right? Because there's the two halves of my brain: the CIO half that wants to roll out as much service as I can and be innovative, and the CSO half of my brain that thinks about the exposure of the service that I'm about to roll out. That's part of where we're migrating now as we start to look into our whole approach to data. We've got the platform in place. We're now really migrating our thinking into revamping the way we look at data. I have seven sources for the same data. How do I consolidate and have one source of truth, and where does that reside? My development team is really starting to migrate out of classic development and more into the automation side of the house. How are we interfacing with all of our vendors? That's in review now. And how are we tying to third-party apps? Yeah, that's really the point we're at in our maturity that, now that the infrastructure is in place, we're now migrating to, "what is our data plan?" >> Excellent. Final question I have for you, Rich. I'd love your thoughts on the changing role of CIO. I loved the discussion you had at the beginning going from, really, the private sector to the public sector. Obviously, unique pressures on all businesses right now dealing with the global pandemic, but how do you see the role of the CIO today and how has it been changing? >> I think there's an expectation that you bring value to the business, whether that's local government, or retail, or banking. I think the expectation is that you're not just managing an infrastructure or managing a team, and providing service, but how do you bring actual value to the organization that you serve? And that means that you have to understand the business and all aspects of the business. I think you have to, at least I do as a CIO, I have to spend a tremendous amount of time understanding my internal customer and what are they trying to accomplish, and often, to show them a new way that they just may not be aware of. So I think there's a little more expectation as a CIO that you're going to drive value to whatever business that you're serving. >> Well, Rich, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on being able to react fast. So glad that you were able to get the transformation project done ahead of this hitting, because otherwise, it would have been a very different conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay safe and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>>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. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host to minimun. We are doing joined by Donna Sarkar. She is the advocate lead Microsoft power platform at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. Tai cube land. So tell us a little bit about power platform. It's something we're hearing some buzz about, but we still need the overview. What is it all about? All right, so for years, decades we in the tech industry, you have been on this mission where we say everyone in the world can benefit from learning to code, right? Uh, whether you're a farmer and accountant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, some sort of code will help you do your job better and you'll be able to automate away boring tasks and make apps and websites to solve your business problems. >>Right? We've been saying this forever and soon we started to realize like, why are we asking everyone to learn to code when the end goal is to solve those business problems, right? So instead of learning to code, why not create a suite of low code or no code tools? So all of these people who we call citizen developers who may not be professional developers as in they didn't go to computer science school, they didn't do a coding boot camp. They don't live in visual studio all day. How can they use these low code tools to solve their specific business problems? So that's like the vision of power platform and they're, I would say six independent pillars of it. Um, the first one, the one that most people know is power BI, which is a dashboard to visualize data and you know, um, traction in your business and all of that. >>So that's the one that most of the fortune 500 are like quite familiar with. The second one that I think a lot of people have used, used to be called Microsoft flow. So this is a automation tool where you'd say, if I get an email, send me a text, you know, a kind of a, if this happens, then that happens. It's just a logical tool that connects lots and lots of services in our life together that has been renamed to power automate to focus more on the automation that many businesses have that we actually have not thought about for decades. How do we automate some of these processes that people have to do all the time? Third thing if I could. So of course one of the new announcements this week, power automate is the RPA piece. Yes. Come out there. So I guess it's a suite and this is a new offering as RPA. >>The robotic process automation is how we can, um, do UI automation, which is a huge pain in the neck. Like it's terrible because you say, Oh click box, wait three seconds, wait for this thing to happen. Sleep 10 sec. It is terrible. I've done UI automation, I hate it. UI automation. So much. So RPA, what it does for you is you perform the act actions and the code is generated and it replays. So that is this powerful tool for anyone who has to do any sort of repetitive scan form, scan, form, scan form, you know, sort of thing. So power automate. The third pillar is PowerApps, which I think everyone hears a lot about today, which is um, apps that are generated from whatever data source that you've got. Say you've got an Excel spreadsheet having, and I saw all of your guests are it all tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, right? >>Donna's coming now, Christina is coming next and there's Christina now and imagine you can see them in an app instead. And all of you have this app on your phone, you can say, Oh, what's on the docket for today, right? Donna's showing up at 11 Christina's at 1130 what are the questions we want to ask Donna? Click on the Donna tab, you get all the questions you want to talk to her about, et cetera. So PowerApps is a way to quickly generate an app from a data source without code. We have a whole bunch of templates depending on what you're trying to do. So maybe you're trying to make a gallery of photos or you're trying to make like an expense tool or like a gas mileage tool or whatever you're trying to do that every single business in the world has the same tools, slightly different. >>So the fourth thing is, um, a new announcement called power virtual assist, which is, um, think about it as simplified chatbots, right? Chatbots are everywhere. Uh, the way people think about making them is, Oh, I have to go get Azure cognitive services and learn it deeply and become a AI expert and learn to like speak natural language processing stuff. But in fact, you can build a chat bot in five minutes using power virtual assist, which was fantastic and really cool. And running through all of this is my favorite that I learned a lot about this week, which is called the AI builder. And AI builder is a tool really that brings intelligence to all of these things and makes you feel it kind of a badass. I'm like, Oh, I trained an AI model and deployed it and tested it on stage. That's crazy and cool. And I learned to do that in five minutes and believe you me, I'm not a data scientist. >>So it was a really, really cool set of tools that I personally, even as a pro developer, I'm very excited about. Well, I want to dig into the tools more than what they can do. But I first want to ask you a personal question because you're new to the role. You've been there two weeks. What made you, what was exciting to you about working with power platforms? So I've been at Microsoft for 14 years and I've always been in the windows division and I've always worked in a software engineering function. So always dealing with like C plus plus code comm code, how do we, what product code do we changes, do we make to windows the. And recently I've been realizing that my personal mission that anyone in the world should have my opportunities. It's, that's really important to me. Right? I grew up underserved society in Detroit, Michigan, right? >>I don't, I often feel like I don't deserve this life that I have and I fell into it because of luck and circumstance and I want other people to have these opportunities and not feel that same kind of impostor thing. So I always believe that tech is this, you know, this sword, this weapon that you can wield and it will as you make your way through the world and it creates so many opportunities, right? It, the opera and anyone in the world wants to hire a software engineer. Every company, right? Every company wants to hire devs. It doesn't matter if you're like government or like oil rigs, you want software developers. And I thought, what an amazing economic power and I want lots of people to have that. And lo and behold, I was offered the opportunity to head up a brand new advocacy team for the power platform, um, as part of the Azure advocates organization. >>And I said, Oh, that's amazing to be able to line up my personal passion with a mission in the company that doesn't come along very often. So I love my job. So it's interesting thought. I would love your viewpoint as someone that's been with Microsoft for 14 years, cause I know a lot of the advocacy people and many of them are ones that if you ask them if they would have joined Microsoft five years ago, I'm not sure. Sure. So you know, moving from windows to there. Tell us a little bit about culturally what's different about Microsoft today and you know, much more obviously than just windows. Yeah. Um, I would say that there's three things that are dramatically different. There's a lot of like things that people notice, but three things I think that are just, you can't even argue about it. One, we are definitely a learn it all mindset rather than a nodal where it's actually much better now to say, I do not know. >>Let's go find out, let's go do an experiment and then we'll have an answer. And that's much better than with great confidence saying something wrong. Right. Oh I know this will work for sure. I guarantee you. And then it not working because you're being a know it all rather than the learn it all. So that tolerance is off the charts. It's, it's expected. If you come in with a strong opinion with no sort of experimental data to back it up, that's no longer a good thing right now. People almost are suspicious. Like, really? Why do you, why do you think that? Have you checked it? Have you done the experiment? The second thing is, um, this co-creating with customers before, like you're asking about windows. I've worked on windows five versions and it always went a little like this, right? We as the developers would go and hide in Redmond, Washington for three and a half years and one day we would show up and say, here is your operating system. >>We'll see you in three years, have fun using it by, and then we go off and make another operating system. Right? We didn't stick around to figure out, is this operating system working for you? Are you being successful? What's you're trying to do? Are your customer successful? We just went ahead and made what we thought was next, right? Because we were convinced we knew better. But with windows 10 and every other product at Microsoft, now we actually cocreate with our customers, right? That feedback loop is part of the product cycle where we don't ship a product without having a feedback loop. So we shipped something. How are we getting feedback? What is the time baked in to actually take that feedback and make changes? So that's one thing. It's dramatically different. Um, it used to all be timed to code, product, time to fix bugs. >>That's it. Now it's code product, listen to customer feedback, fixed bugs from customers. That's it. So it dramatically shorten the amount of time it took to build an operating system because we don't need to make a three year long product. Instead we make like a six month long product. And when I ran the windows insider program, we were testing windows every week, right? Twice a week we're rolling out versions of windows to millions of people and getting their feedback in real time. And the third thing I'd say that's been a dramatic transformation is this inclusivity of not just different kinds of, you know, race in the city, but work styles, the kinds of businesses we do work with. Like we're a, we do Linux now, right? We do eggs. Um, our platform itself pulls from all sorts of data sources. We don't just say we only pull from Microsoft tech. >>Like if you have Excel, if you have access, if you have Azure, if you've sequel, we support you and everyone else go the heck away. No, we're, we're saying whatever data source you've got, we don't care. We'll build you a power app based on your data source. Bring your whole self to work, right? It's that bring your whole self to a work mindset that I think has permeated just across the company and a chosen our products. So you were talking about this feedback loop and I'm interested because these, these, the power platform was rolled out into 2018 we haven't seen any major revenue yet, but Microsoft sees a ton of promise here. So what was the customer feedback you were given in terms of these updates that you've just announced here at ignite and what were customers demanding, wanting, needing from these platforms, these, these, these tools? >>Well, there's been a few things. One, um, the uptake in power platform, especially power apps is the fastest growth of any business app in Microsoft history. Um, in the last like just two years we've reached 84% of the fortune 500 are running power. Now. That's kind of wild, right? When you think these are normally traditional companies who can be quite conservative, but they've got people, whether it's an it, it's a citizen dove or a PRODA, they're actually building power apps to supplement their business needs, right? So it's been just astronomical growth, which is fantastic. Um, and the feedback from this group is actually what dictates all of the changes we've been making. So one of the key things a lot of people said was we just adopted teams like last year, right? Our company adopted teams, we're all in on teams. All of our communication like realtime has done on teams, but power platform is not with teams. >>What's, what's the deal with that? Right? So the par platform dev team engineering team actually went and figured out how can you have a teams channel, how can you build a power plant, a power app, and then share that power app within your teams specifically. So say the three of us are working on a teams channel and I make a Oh, track your attendees app, the one we're talking about, I can share it within the teams itself and we can just see it from within the team's window. So it'll run within the teams window. Um, we can just deploy it to our phones as well. And with the same team's credentials as we're working, that applies to the app as well. So that's something that just rolled out this week as direct feedback from people who say we're, we want an on the latest and greatest. And that means teams. That's one means SharePoint online. That means our platform. That means all the things now. >>Yeah. So Donna, one of the things I love that you talked about is it doesn't take months to get started on this. So many announcements that you talked through all the six pillars and everything. For those people out there seeing what's new, give them some final tips as to how they should get started with, with the power platform family. >>I would say that um, one of the best things you can do is just get your hands on it, right? Stop reading about it. Stop looking at the announcements. Just get your hands on it. Because I was at first reading all these blog posts trying to understand CDs, power platform, AI builder, all this stuff. Stop. Just don't do it. The best thing to do is to go get on Microsoft learn. There's a start, a starter tutorial called canvas apps for power platform. Um, and go do the tutorial. All it does is it deploys an Excel spreadsheet to your personal machine or your personal one drive, whatever it is and using that, it's just carpet, right? It's like black carpet, white carpet and shows pictures of carpet and then you generate a power app. And it shows it in a gallery view on an app that you just see on your computer and then you deploy it to your phone. >>All it does is show you the power of an Excel spreadsheet converted into an app. So I've created a short URL for it just to make life easier for everyone. So it's AKA dot. Ms power up, super straight forward, super simple. And I talk about this tutorial all the time, not because I think it's the best tutorial that's ever existed, but for someone who has absolutely no idea and they're feeling intimidated to start, this is exactly the right thing to do because this tutorial, I am not kidding you both of you can do it in five minutes. Like on the next break. Once you're finished with me and Christina, I challenge you to do the tutorial. All right? Okay. Challenge accepted. One, one final thing. So you are known for this Ted talk that you gave Unimpossible syndrome earlier in this, in our conversation you said you fell into this like, Oh absolutely, you've gotten lucky, but yet you're a smart woman. >>Talk about imposter syndrome. And then and then give your best advice for the young people out there and an old people to frankly who are suffering. Imposter syndrome is a killer because it is a disease that is a global epidemic. It's not. Some people think it's a woman's problem, it's a people of color problem. No, it's not. It's an everyone problem. Every time I give this talk, the Ted audience was thousands of people. I would say about 70% men and when I asked how many of you feel these symptoms? Hands are up. 70% of people, and this was men too, who feel like I got here. You know the thoughts are usually I got here by accident. It was dumb luck. There's a mistake in the process. I slipped in under the radar any minute. Now someone's going to show up here and say, you don't belong here. >>Get out or someone's going to check my credentials or ask me like, how do you think you're as good as the people around you? Or why are you qualified to speak on this topic? Right? People are convinced this is going to happen. Like, almost everyone is convinced and it's wild. And I've realized the reason that happens is because we are not used to doing that thing yet. That's it. We don't imposter about the things we do every day. You don't imposter about being in camera on front of the camera in front of everyone because you do it all the time and you've gotten good reviews and obviously people come to talk to you. But if tomorrow I was to be like you and I are going to write office abs, you may say, ah, I don't think I'm qualified to do that. I don't know if you are or not. >>I'm just making stuff up at this point. Um, and you may say, I am not qualified to do that. And the reason you say that is because you've never done it before. Why would you be qualified to do that? It's like me trying to be qualified to ride a unicycle, right? Which I can't. So my advice to people who feels this, well I don't feel like I belong here, is break it down right into steps, debug this process and say, all right, there are parts of this process that I feel qualified to do and there's parts I do not feel qualified to do. What are they? So from my own example, I absolutely do not feel qualified to lead an advocacy team for power platform. Right. I said, I joined this team two weeks ago. I just learned about this product last year. How am I qualified to lead advocacy for this? >>So I had to break it down and I said, what? What am I feeling and posturing about? Is it leading advocacy? No, I did it for windows. I did it for hollow lens. I do know how to do that. Is it speaking in front of lots of people? Not really. I do that all the time. Is it writing content so others can learn? Not really. I do that all the time. Is it the product? Yes, it's the product. It's the, I don't feel like I know the ins and outs of the product that well. So if you were to ask me where exactly is the connector for, you know, Azure sequeled or PowerApps, I would just freeze. Like I do not know. I think it's in the Azure portal somewhere, somewhere. So I would feel that sense of imposter and like, Oh, I don't know. >>So I don't belong here. It's no, I just don't know the product that well. That's okay. I know advocacy well, so what I need to do now is identify things. I'm good at advocacy things. I'm not good at product, learn the product. That's it. It just becomes a really easy to do list or to learn list. Right. Learn it all mindset, not know it all. Mindset. I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you is a really terrific conversation. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone. We are wrapping up three at days of wall to wall coverage of Microsoft ignite. It is a game day atmosphere on the show floor at the orange County civic center. Thank you so much to Cohesity for hosting the cube for this fantastic three days. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co host Stu Miniman. Still this is awesome. We talk about the buzz on the floor and the energy on the show and definitely guy here Cohesity always bright and activity >>in the booth and it's been a lot of fun hanging out here for the week with you Rebecca and our hosts and all, all of the guests. Yes, absolutely. So this is day three. We are starting our series of interviews, but I want to hear because you are so in this community you have a lot of connections, a lot of buddies, a lot of colleagues, former colleagues, current colleagues. What has impressed you about the show and what is missing? Let's start with the positives and it's interesting because this is only my second year coming. One of those, you know, my background networking, I've interacted with Microsoft for most of my career. I would not say I am deep in the community, but I know enough of the MVPs, have friends here and really have learned a lot in these two years. So first of all, the breadth of this show is just so impressive. >>One of the things that you and I've been talking about the last two years, years, what is the show? It started out as a windows admin show. Lot of discussion about office migration to windows 10 was the big thing last year. We haven't heard as much about this this year. Yesterday was a big developer day. Of course Azure sits at the center of everything. Lots of big announcements here. Felt like a kind of on par with what we hear at AWS. It shows with just so many announcements across the board. But really when you talk about the applications of business productivity, people come to this show. When I talk to people in the booth, I'm looking for solutions and how do I put those together? It's not some of the tech shows where you just, you're constantly down in the speeds and feeds and what they're doing and some of the competitive dynamics. >>I have a problem, my business needs something in, this is what I'm looking to solve. And Microsoft has a broad and diverse ecosystem and the word we kept coming back to the word of the week I think is of course trust. >> Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with what you've just said. That is what we hear. And the other thing about Microsoft is that at a time when big tech is really under a lot of fire, there's a lot of suspicion policymakers, regulators are bearing down on a lot of the tech CEOs. Microsoft really stands above. And when you think about antitrust, there's major presidential candidates talking about breaking up big Chuck, big tech. Microsoft is really riding above that fray. There's sort of a feeling of deja VU for Microsoft, I'm sure. But that they're really been there, done that. They're not. Yeah, I mean it was Satya Nadella to, you know, really put a pointed attack. >>He did not say it, but we all know it's Google. You know the company that was do no evil at the start. Now everybody's concerned because Google's model is primarily selling ads and while Google will say what they're doing in the enterprise, they just acquired Fitbit and said, you're not going to get ads on your Fitbit. We're not going to leverage that way, but there's not that trust built up. And then the number one competitor out there is AWS. And if you talk about the ecosystem, the concern that every AWS show is, Oh my gosh, what announcements are Amazon going to make and are they going to steal my lunch money if you were or put me out of business for the years worth of work on doing. Microsoft doesn't feel that way. They, you know, if you talk about the ecosystem I was talking, they made announcements that do compete against number the products, RPA, or was announced as part of the power platform out there. >>There's a number of RPA companies here. I talked to them there. Microsoft's a strong partner. We've been doing breakouts, we're talking with them. Yes, they are just like SAP getting into this market, but it's a Microsoft shop and it's not, you know, it is new. It's not the best of breed. They're on it. They are not concerned that they can still live in this environment. And I'd say both AWS and Azure very much about choice and ecosystem and building them out. >> So you're talking about the marketplace here. So in terms of the marketplace, what is Microsoft doing to drive business and is it effective? Well actually I'm glad you, so specifically we talk about the marketplace. So there's the ecosystem and then there's actually the marketplace. So AWS has what we really consider, it's the enterprise app store. If I want to go buy software, you know there's Salesforce and all of their connectors and everyone that uses Salesforce knows that. >>But AWS really has driven a robust ecosystem just like on amazon.com most of the products that are sold are from third parties. The AWS marketplace is mostly how I can procure and buy software. And they drive a lot of it. So a lot of the AWS adoption is through the marketplace and the ecosystem makes lots of dollars. Reminds me, we used to talk about VMware for years is for every dollar of VMware you bought you would buy, you know, 10 $20 worth of third party ecosystem. But we were talking about things like storage and like for AWS it's on procuring software and underneath on leveraging the AWS services. While Microsoft Azure has a marketplace, it is not as mature. They don't really push as many people through it. So while I've talked to a number of the partners that are, yes we're part of the marketplace, but people buy lots of different ways as opposed to AWS is trying to get everybody from a customer and an ecosystem through it. >>And part of that is to simplify the environment, how I purchase it. But it's that balance of trust and you know, ease of use out there. So when I look forward, what do I like to see from Azure is how will they mature there. I was actually something John furrier had had us digging into here and the marketplace at Azure definitely is, I would say years behind where AWS is, is there, but you know, Azure great growth, doing really well, a strong trusted ecosystem. Just some areas for improvement that I would look for going forward. >>But maybe that's part of their, their approach and their strategy is we'll work with you, we, we collaborate, we can do this together. Whereas AWS there is that, that feeling sometimes when you're at reinvent, as you said, roll out the beer, CURT's early please. My business is over. So, so, so comparing the two show, the three, the various cloud shows, and this is not just a cloud show, of course we're going to get into that more. But when you think about re-invent and you think about VM world, how does the, the feel and the energy here differ? >>Yeah. So the thing that always strikes me when I go to an AWS show, and I have been to many of them from the regional shows through the big one and reinvent, which is more than twice the size of this 26,000 person show. The customers there are always trying new things. They are open and looking for the environment that they can do new things. Here what we're talking about here feels like it's like a tweener. We had a lot of conversations about building bridges to where customers are while AWS is starting to talk hybrid more and meet you in your data center and doing outpost Microsoft, they have their windows install base, they have their own three 65 pieces. So there's a broad spectrum of from the latest and greatest autonomous systems. You want to talk about it. Microsoft has that through, you know, I'm a, you know, 20 year CIS admin and I, you know, I'm going to hold on to, you know, my servers, you know, as long as I can, they're there for you. >>So Microsoft does bam, that gamut and VMware is more, once again making that transition as we go to the cloud. So Microsoft right in the middle of that transition, we talked a bunch about digital transformation with the customers on here. So it really, it has all a lot for a lot of different people. You know is one of the things I've heard is they really ramped up some of the developer activity at this show. They just bought get hub, get hub, has their own show, get hub universe next week, which will stay very focused on that environment. But Microsoft also has a conference build and there's been some rumblings that maybe build an ignite get wrapped together. We saw that with IBM. IBM had lots of different shows and they put all the wood behind think and made that a massive show. There's pros and cons of that, seeing lots of companies that have taken a big show and put it into a 40 show around the globe. >>Now someone like Amazon has reinvented, but then they have of second tier and third tier regional shows to push that out. So lots of different ways to, to get to customers. Um, and it is interesting, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about Azure Ark. I'll be at the cube con cloud-native clown show in just two weeks and San Diego and expect that to be talked. And really it is in preview mode. So when I look at it at the end of the day is, you know, you've got red hat open shift, you have Google, you have what AWS is doing with outpost and welcome to the party. Microsoft, they have got a strong hybrid solution already because they played at both ends. But really as your arc is unifying and pulling those together so that it's not just my data center and Azure, but even AWS, they're saying, we'll see how this all plays out. >>Microsoft definitely has a strong data focus and a strong application focus. And so it be interesting to see where that adoption happens. I've been saying for a couple of weeks. Really Kubernetes just get baked in everywhere and you know, customers aren't going to have to think about it in a most Microsoft definitely strong partner focus. Just to reinforce something I've said a couple times this week, they still have a partnership with red hat. They still have a partnership with VMware. The Azure arc is not the only way to get the Kubernetes story in play into your Microsoft environment. And Microsoft's done well with that. We all know from the early days of Microsoft living on tops of lots of hardware. Now Microsoft software will live a lot of places. Yes, their cloud is large growing one of the top two choices out there. But they truly embrace that it will be multi-cloud and be able to live in lots of environments. >>So I want to talk about something that's more in my wheel, hasn't met his productivity. So we have heard a little bit about teams. I mean there was a lot of announcements. It's not exactly where we focused a lot here on the cube this week, but there were some really interesting announcements about the ways in which Microsoft is thinking about human productivity, both at individual productivity and team collaboration, the way teams interact and communicate. There are a lot of interesting new uh, characteristics and elements to what they're doing in terms of Cortana re read me my emails. Uh, I'm going to send this email but I'm actually gonna wait, it's good. It's going to be a scheduled send. It's going to send when the, when the, the person I'm sending it to is, is actually at his or her desk. Um, and so those are just some interesting things to me that really speak volumes about how Microsoft views the future of work and views the, the future of our, of our lives. And, and, and understanding how much technology has encroached in our lives because they're saying, read me my emails while I take my dog for a walk while I am actually doing, while I'm on a run first thing in the morning. I, you know, make me more productive but also give me my time back. And so I think those are some really, really interesting ways in which Microsoft, as I said, understands the technology has taken over and they're trying to give you a bit of your time back. >>It's interesting cause you know when I look back, Microsoft has a bit of a checkered history when it comes to some of those environments. We all know the office suite teams is now part of O three 65 and I hear very strong. The people that use it really do like it. But those of us look back and we said, Oh I used to like using Skype and then Microsoft got ahold of it and Oh my gosh, what a horrendous mess. Skype was for a long time when it taught to a collaborative environment. Google really jumped Microsoft with the G suite and many smaller companies were like, Oh, it's relatively easy to use and I can collaborate there. Well teams really has gone through and understand that and we talk about a collaborative environment, you know, Microsoft teams, best of breeds. I attended an enterprise connect earlier this year and I couldn't hear enough about how much that was going on. >>And you know, strong ecosystem of companies that Microsoft worked with. So it's very strong, but it's kind of, if you're a Microsoft shop, you're doing it. But they did lose many companies too free or less expensive or lighter weight options out there. And then everything from Slack ate into it. But you know, Microsoft has a good product. Absolutely. It just, some of it is the perception and some of it is the pricing. You know, they do a good job of making sure that when you get get to college, you, you want to use some of these environments. Oh yeah, the pricing is graded free. But then when you get in the real world, hopefully you'll like it. So Microsoft does a little bit about now something we focused a lot on but did hear really good things about it. And it does get lost a little bit in some of the general discussion about all the other pieces, you know, autonomous systems, AI and the leaders. This stuff of Azure take a little bit of precedent over the, some of the things that are a little bit more on just as you said, business productivity or even on the consumer side of the house for Microsoft. >>So we are, we're, we're wrapping up here but I want to hear just final thoughts, final predictions for 2020 and you've really gotten, you've, we've, we've covered a lot of ground here, this wording, but I'm interested to hear what you think is on tap for Microsoft in 2020 I'll bring >>back to something we kicked off with the jet ideal coming in here really has that that whole process of winning that bid was a fortune function from Microsoft to rapidly mature some of their environment. You talk about security and trust, you know the government is not going to give that environment if it to Microsoft, if they could not trust them. Back when AWS won a CIA deal, it was like, Oh wait, if the security is good enough for the CIA, it's probably good enough for me to consider it. So the government agencies, which historically is not who you think about when you talk about innovation in driving change today. Public sector is really interesting. Even when we were talking to some of the people about, Hey, how can we haven't heard as much about Azure stack over the years? Well, it's been a lot of service providers and government agencies that have been deploying this and therefore we'll do it. So Microsoft still has a lot of work to do contracts. They still have to get some more security clearances. They need to make sure their performance and reliability is up to snuff on because they just can't have outages. If I, if this becomes a greater and greater piece of my overall how I run my business, I can't say, oops, wait, you know the Internet's down. This is now 2019 going into 2020 and in 2020 we'll all have perfect. >>Oh, of course. Oh yes indeed. Sue, I'm looking forward to another great day of coverage with you, and thank you again to Cohesity for hosting us in this really cool booth. Uh, so please stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite coming up in just a little bit.

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by, Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here in the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is Microsoft's Big Show. 26,000 people from around the globe, all descending on Orlando. This is the big infrastructure show. Thoughts, impressions, now that we're on day two of a three day show. >> Yeah, Rebecca. Last year I had this feeling that it was a little bit too much talking about the Windows 10 transition and the latest updates to Office 365. I could certainly want to make sure that we really dug in more to what's going on with Azure, what's happening in 6the developer space. Even though they do have a separate show for developers, it's Microsoft build. They actually have a huge partner show. And so, Microsoft has a lot of shows. So it's, what is this show that is decades old? And really it is the combination of Microsoft as a platform today. Satya Nadella yesterday talked about empowering the world. This morning, Scott Hanselman was in a smaller theater, talking about app devs. And he came out and he's like, "Hey, developers, isn't it a little bit early for you this morning?" Everybody's laughing. He said, "Even though we're kicking off at 9:00 a.m., Eastern." He said, "That's really early, especially for anybody coming from the West Coast." He was wearing his Will Code For Tacos shirt. And we're going to have Scott on later today, so we'll talk about that. But, where does Microsoft sit in this landscape? Is something we've had. I spent a lot of time looking at the cloud marketplace. Microsoft has put themselves as the clear number two behind AWS. But trying to figure out because SaaS is a big piece of what Microsoft does. And they have their software estate in their customer relationship. So how many of those that are what we used to call window shops. And you had Windows people are going to start, Will it be .NET? Will it be other operating systems? Will it come into Azure? Where do they play? And the answer is, Microsoft's going to play a lot of places. And what was really kind of put on with the point yesterday is, it's not just about the Microsoft solutions, it is about the ecosystem, they really haven't embraced their role, very supportive of open source. And trust is something that I know both you and I have been pointing in on because, in the big tech market, Microsoft wants to stand up and say, "We are the most trusted out there. And therefore, turn to us and we will help you through all of these journeys." >> So you're bringing up so many great points and I want to now go through each and every one of them. So, absolutely, we are hearing that this is the kinder, gentler Microsoft, we had Dave Totten on yesterday. And he was, as you just described, just talking about how much Microsoft is embracing and supporting customers who are using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of other companies. I'm not going to name names, but they're seemingly demanding. I just want best to breed, and this is what I'm going to do. And Microsoft is supporting that, championing that. And, of course we're seeing this as a trend in the broader technology industry. However, it feels different, because it's Microsoft doing this. And they've been so proprietary in the past. >> Yeah, well, and Rebecca, it's our job on theCUBE actually, I'm going to name names. (laughs) And actually Microsoft is-- >> Okay. >> Embracing of this. So, the thing I'm most interested in at the show was Azure Arc. And I was trying to figure out, is this a management platform? And at the end of the day really, it is, there's Kubernetes in there, and it's specifically tied to applications. So they're going to start with databases specifically. My understanding, SQL is the first piece and saying, it sounds almost like the next incarnation of platform as a service to our past. And say, I can take this, I can put it on premises in Azure or on AWS. Any of those environments, manage all of them the same. Reminds me of what I hear from VMware with Hangzhou. Vmworld, Europe is going on right now in Barcelona. Big announcement is to the relationship with VMware on Azure. If I got it right, it's actually in beta now. So, Arc being announced and the next step of where Microsoft and VMware are going together, it is not a coincidence. They are not severing the ties with VMware. VMware, of course partners with all the cloud providers, most notably AWS. Dave Totten yesterday, talked about Red Hat. You want Kubernetes? If you want OpenShift, if you are a Red Hat customer and you've decided that, the way I'm going to leverage and use and have my applications run, are through OpenShift, Microsoft's is great. And the best, most secure place to run that environment is on Azure. So, that's great. So Microsoft, when you talk about choice, when you talk about flexibility, and you talk about agility cause, it is kinder and gentler, but Satya said they have that tech intensity. So all the latest and greatest, the new things that you want, you can get it from Microsoft, but they are also going to meet you where you are. That was Jeremiah Dooley, the Azure advocate, said that, "There's, lots of bridges we need to make, Microsoft has lots of teams. It's not just the DevOps, it's not just letting the old people do their own thing, from your virtualization through your containerization and everything in between microservices server list, and the like. Microsoft has teams, they have partners. Sure that you could buy everything in Microsoft, but they know that there are lots of partners and pieces. And between their partners, their ecosystem, their channel, and their go-to-market, they're going to pull this together to help you leverage what you need to move your business forward. >> So, next I want to talk about Scott Hanselman who was up on the main stage, we're going to have him on the show and he was as you said, adorned in coder dude, attire with a cool t-shirt and snappy kicks. But his talk was app development for everyone. And this is really Microsoft's big push, democratizing computing, hey, anyone can do this. And Satya Nadella, as we've talked about on the show. 61% of technologist's jobs are not in the technology industry. So this is something that Microsoft sees as a trend that's happening in the employment market. So they're saying, "Hey, we're going to help you out here." But Microsoft is not a hardware company. So how does this really change things for Microsoft in terms of the products and services-- >> Well right, >> It offers. >> So really what we're talking about here, we're talking about developers right? 61% of jobs openings for developers are outside the tech sector. And the high level message that Scott had is your tools, your language, your apps. And what we have is, just as we were talking about choice of clouds, it's choice of languages. Sure they'd love to say .NET is wonderful, but you want your Java, your PHP, all of these options. And chances are, not only are you going to use many of them, but even if you're working on a total solution, different groups inside your company might be using them and therefore you need tools that can spam them. The interesting example they use was Chipotle. And if there's a difference between when you're ordering and going through the delivery service, and some of the back-end pieces, and data needs to flow between them, and it can't be, "Oh wait, I've got silos of my data, I've got silos of all these other environments." So, developer tools are all about, having the company just work faster and work across environments. I was at AnsibleFest show earlier this year. And, Ansible is one of those tools that actually, different roles where you have to have the product owner, the developer, or the the operations person. They all have their way into that tool. And so, Microsoft's showing some very similar things as to, when I build something, it's not, "Oh, wait, we all chose this language." And so many of the tools was, " Okay, well, I had to standardize on something." But that didn't fit into what the organization needed. So I need to be able to get to what they all had. Just like eventually, when I'm picking my own taco, I can roll it, bowl it, soft or hard shell-- >> It was a cool analogy. >> And choose all my toppings in there. So it is Taco Tuesday here-- >> Yes. >> At Microsoft Ignite and the developers like their choices of tools, just like they like their tacos. >> And they like their extra guac. So going back to one of the other points you made at the very opening. And this is the competitive dynamic that we have here. We had David Davis and Scott Lowe on yesterday from a ActualTech Media. Scott was incredibly bullish about Microsoft. And saying it could really overtake AWS, not tomorrow, but within the next decade. Of course, the choice for JEDI certainly could accelerate that. What do you make of it? I mean, do you think that's still pie in the sky here? AWS is so far ahead. >> So look, first of all, when you look at the growth rates, first of all, just to take the actual number, we know what AWS's, revenue is. Last quarter, AWS did $9 billion. And they're still growing at about a 35% clip. When I look at Microsoft, they have their intelligent cloud bucket, which is Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server and GitHub. And that was 10.8 billion. And you say, "Oh, okay, that's really big." But last year, Azure did about $12 billion dollars. So, AWS is still two to three times larger when you look at infrastructure as a service. But SaaS hugely important piece of what's going on in the cloud opportunity. AWS really is more of the platform and infrastructure service, they absolutely have some of the PaaS pieces. Azure started out as PaaS and has this. So you're trying to count these buckets, and Azure is still growing at, last quarter was 64%. So if you look at the projection, is it possible for Azure to catch up in the next three years? Well, Azure's growth rate is also slowing down, so I don't think it matters that much. There is a number one and a number two, and they're both clear, valid choices for a customer. And, this morning at breakfast, I was talking to a customer and they are very heavily on Microsoft shop. But absolutely, they've got some AWS on the side. They're doing Azure, they've got a lot of Azure, being here at our Microsoft show. And when I go to AWS, even when I talked to the companies that are all in on AWS, " Oh, you got O 365?" "Of course we do." "Oh, if you're starting to do O 365, are there any other services that you might be using out of Azure?" "Yeah, that's possible." I know Google is in the mix. Ali Baba's in the mix. Oracle, well, we're not going to talk about Oracle Cloud, but we talked about Oracle, because they will allow their services to run on Azure specifically. We talked about that a lot yesterday, especially how that ties into JEDI. So, look, I think it is great when we have a healthy competitive marketplace. Today really, it is a two horse race. It is, AWS and Azure are the main choices for customers. Everyone else is really a niche player. Even a company like IBM, there's good solutions that they have, but they play in a multi cloud world. Google has some great data services, and absolutely a important player when you talk about multi cloud for all they've done with Kubernetes and Istio. I'm going to be at Kube Con in a couple of weeks and Google is front and center there. But if you talk about the general marketplace, Microsoft has a lot of customers, they had a lot of applications and therefore, can they continue to mature that market and grow their environment? Absolutely. AWS has so many customers, they have the marketplace is stronger. It's an area that I want to dig in a little bit more at this show is the Azure Marketplace, how much we talked about the ecosystem. But, can I just procure through the cloud and make it simpler? Big theme we've talked about is, cloud in the early days was supposed to be cheap and simple. And it is neither of those things. So, how do we make it easier, so that we can go from the 20% of applications in the public cloud, up to 50% or more? Because it is not about all everything goes to the public cloud, but making customers put the applications and their data in the right place at the right time with the right services. And then we haven't even talked about edge computing which Microsoft has a big push on, especially with their partners. We talked to HP, a little bit about that yesterday. But really the surface area that this show and Microsoft covers is immense and global. >> It is indeed, and we are going, this is our second day of three days of coverage and we're going to be getting into all of those things. We've got a lot of great guests. We have Cute Host, Keith Townsend, Dave Cahill, a former Wikibon guy, a lot of other fantastic people. So I'm excited to get it on with you today, Stu. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Great stuff. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music`)

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Nutanix. Dot. Next we are here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with Stu minimun. We are joined by Nicola Bosun awic. He is the VP GM desktop services at Newtanics. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And also you piss Carr who is an industry analyst and and the many time guest on the cube. That's right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you are actually the founder of frame and frame was bought by Nutanix a about a year ago. So tell us a little bit about the acquisition, how its acquisitions are challenging. How has it has, how has it been going? >>It's mayor great year. Uh, there's no better place than a tannics to do end user computing in VDI. And that's what frame was all about. How we make it simple. Uh, that was also all about Newtanics. How do you make computing simple, fast, delightful, and um, we've done, uh, so many things to really bridge that world of on prem and cloud off traditional legacy VDI, like Citrix and VMware on hyperconverged infrastructure and now new broker like frame. And we are really looking at that as one end user computing team and just do what's right for the customers. So it's been a blast. Yeah. Nicola, you know, last year when we had you on, we talked a lot about frame, so you've got a broader mandate now to do the whole desktop services. Give us your view of the landscape a little bit out there as you know, definitely. >>I understand, you know, VDI traditionally, boy was it complicated building that stack, the infrastructure and the software pieces. Um, you know, where are your customers today and you know, how's the industry doing it a whole on that modernization journey. >> Uh, it, as I said, it's been a great 12 months. If you're in VDI. A lot of people who are in the traditional VDI world with brokers like Citrix and VMware are looking to modernize their data centers and there is no better options than uh, hyperconverged and Newtanics to have bite size and linearly, um, scaled infrastructure, run VDI. We continue to innovate, we continue to work closely with um, the vendors, especially Citrix. Um, and at the same time as the focus is shifting to the public clouds, uh, we are, um, having our own opinion and how the broker in the public cloud should look like with frame and then mixing and matching where the desktops really are and really looking at very, um, industry and vertical specific use cases. We're seeing lot of new adoption in healthcare and financial services and with frame, we're seeing a lot of new use cases in education and public sector as well. Right. >>Is this, is this jiving with what you see as the terms of the way they're positioning themselves and what you're hearing from your sources in the market? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, you know, given the trend that, you know, applications are going into the cloud, um, it makes sense to kind of pick up those, you know, those applications that are harder to virtualize, harder to move to the cloud and you know, find a way to bring them to the cloud as well. To bring that, I don't know, that cloud like experience for the older applications as well. Um, and then the other hand there's, you know, the simplicity of running the, um, the older desktops. Uh, the traditional VDI just likes to set, I mean, it's difficult to set up that whole environment to manage it, to make sure it continues to operate and then to have something that kind of replaces that with a simple solution. I mean, that's what customers are looking for. Yup. >>Nicola, I know some of the conversations I had years ago was, you know, it's not even desktop. It's, it's about my applications, it's about my users. It's about how things, things are changing. They're in today's world where have many customers who are trying to do SAS first. You know, how, how do you, I guess, reframe that conversation of, you know, what was, you know, we spent over a decade with that VDI discussion. Look, I think we're going to end up, when it comes to infrastructure and when it comes to virtualization, we're going to come ups where some somewhere in the middle where not everything's going to be public cloud and that everything's going to be on prem. It's going to be somewhere in the middle of when it comes to application delivery versus full desktops. It started obviously with app virtualization, but more and more people are looking at delivering full desktop solutions. >>There is a great benefit to it, consistent performance, um, you know, isolation and security or some things that come to mind and we are now able to deliver great performance. Look at windows 10, which is a big migration. We can deliver great windows 10 performance using Citrix or using frame and um, for example, some of the innovation that NVIDIA's bringing to market with a virtualizing GPS. So for the longest time it was a niche and as becoming more of a mainstream, if you just want your desktop to be scrolling smoothly, you'll probably need your GPU. So I think that's where a VDI and a simplicity of VDI, um, really takes over. >>So you are talking about speed and security. What about design? How does that play into it? >>Well, kind of Newtanics is all about, you know, data delivery, design and delight. And a, I think with end user computing, uh, it's end user for a reason. It's experienced by a user, it's experienced by an administrator, and at the end of the day, best user experience is going to win. So for administrators, if they can install their applications and manage them in one click, that's a great benefit. Then that's what we bring with combination of hybrid converged and a frame. Same goes for end user experience, um, as opposed to, let's say 10 years ago when everybody was in a wired network. Uh, these days people work from anywhere. They work from Starbucks, they work over and allows a seller a. So it's very important to have that user experience. Um, you know, uh, be delightful. And, um, that's something that we're very focused on. Yeah. I think I've had so many discussions this year about kind of the CX, the customer experience as well as the employee experience. So, you know, I would think that this whole EUC discussion ties it. What, what are you hearing from them and seeing out there? >>So, you know, the, the whole, the whole discussion about experience. Um, I think it's really important. I mean, employees have to do their job. They are given the tools to do the job, but sometimes the tools that are given or you know, slightly older, um, they may not be modern, they may not be web-based, they may not be performant or, so the issue is how do you, you know, in a very specific niche and a very specific use case, how do you make sure that the older application will actually continue running? Right? Um, how do you bring that, you know, windows application into a, um, into a framework where you can actually work with it everywhere on any device? Right. And that's, that's of where, where I see the, um, um, the wish for a good employee experience cannot be broken down by the technical technical limitations of what applications can do. Right. Um, and the issue is, you know, not every application is cloud native, not every, every application runs in the cloud. So you have to have something that kind of bridges that gap between, you know, on the one hand what you want to offer to the employee and the other hand what you're kind of forced to use in specific use cases. Um, there's just no other way than, you know, w using that old windows application. Yeah. >>Nicola, once again, I think back to some of the years of talking about VDI deployments and it was like up, well, organizationally, we're now off to have the desktop team versus the server team and the storage people need to get involved. And you brought a customer to come talk to the analyst yesterday and they didn't, they were like, we don't want to worry about any of this. We want to worry about our application, what's going on. So help, help explain a little bit, kind of some of the transformational potential of the new model. It's almost the same way we can hyper converged compute within storage and hypervisor. We're hyper converging all these different roles from the storage role to the it role to the business for all where to be honest, you don't need three separate people or three separate teams to do it. Um, solutions like, um, frame for example, make it possible to do that from a single pane of glass and to manage it all. So the customer that we had yesterday is doing that thing. Exactly. And it's not going even to there. It, um, in some cases, um, like, Oh customer we're going to have tomorrow Vodafone, uh, that is, they're on a hyperconverged still has lot more than what I'd call a legacy. It's 5,000 applications delivered to 50,000 concurrent users and they're just doing a new refresh shot. It's here to stay. VDI is here to stay. Yeah. What are >>you see as some of the biggest challenges facing companies like Nutanix? Um, particularly in this space? >>So, I mean, the biggest challenge is going to be integration, right? I mean Nutanix is becoming a big company. It's up to you, I don't know, 5,500 people. I think it's a big company. It's a lot of products that, you know, the portfolio is expanding. And so making sure that all of those solutions fit into the portfolio. And again, coming back to that experience, right? Um, so can candidates annex deliver a solution for many different problems within the data center and Indiana briars cloud without it seeming to be, you know, different products that are not integrated where the user experience is bad. I mean, we've all been there where you try to run a data center and you got bogged down with all of the details simply because the products that you use are not integrated. Um, so I think, you know, from, from any tannics perspective, making sure that everything's integrated and worked well with all of the other products in a portfolio, that's going to be the big challenge for the next year. You know, Nicola, we had Dera John this morning and he talked about those experiences. You know, customers shouldn't have >>Oh my gosh. You know, I looked on the slide and there's 30 different Nutanix products and I can't even spell all of them. Um, you know, uh, so, uh, tell us a little bit about, uh, you know, integrating frame through and making sure a desktop just becomes a, you know, a piece of that experience. The big switch for us as being thinking about solutions, not products for that same reason because there's so many products right now in a portfolio and end user computing or VDI has been one of the key solutions that we are focusing on in the next 12 and 24 mods. So would, that really means is that all the products are designed to work seamlessly. So it starts with your, um, hyper-converged, um, widths, um, Citrix as a broker, horizon as a broker, a frame as a broker, but it extends way beyond that. >>So talking about files, you obviously need your enterprise file server that is very, very seamlessly integrated with the end user computing solution. Same goes for flow. You can now have boundaries of who can access VMs or now we have identity based micro segmentation. Um, and then, uh, things like beam where you can seamlessly again have one-click integration and now how much is something costing you right now and how much the same workload would cost you if you ran it on prem or in a different cloud. So I think all of these things are designed to work seamlessly and we spend a ton of time, I mean literally a ton of time to get together with all the teams and to make sure that that user experience is as seamless as possible. >>So I want to go deeper into your past when at the age of 22, you helped lead a revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. I want to know the lessons that you learned as a revolutionary and how and how you apply them to the technology industry today. I mean because there is a lot of, you know, move fast and break, which is what you were doing then. Yeah. >>Now also like, ah, I, I spoke to a group of executive last night and mentioned, um, uh, those times in the 90s. I grew up in Serbia where the rest of the world was going for dotcom. Boom. We were dealing with, um, um, basically Yugoslavia breaking apart and in 96, from, um, um, pretty anonymous student in the, in a crowds after Milosevic's stolen election, um, I became the leader of what was a very, uh, uh, natural, but also very attentive, um, movement. Uh, within four weeks I was sitting with him just like this, negotiating and negotiating with about a hundred thousand people yelling and screaming under his window, and he had to, um, reverse the results of his election fraud. It took another couple of years. Then we got rid of him. The lesson that I learned at a very young age and just, you know, things just happen was that if you do things in an authentic way, if you speak with conviction ed the right time, you know, there, there are no things that you can do. >>And that was probably the revolutionary spirit that Newtanics shares when I met Dhiraj that, uh, you know, everything's possible that incumbencies not are insurmountable. And that's what led me to move to the U S um, go to my grad school, get BHD start gobbling companies. And looking back, I'm in my mid forties right now. It's pretty crazy to looking at the odds and they'll, what it takes to build a company, make it successful and how risky that is. Just going through some of these experiences when I was in my early twenties, certainly helped me. And, um, I think we'll live in the day and age where the risk is probably overestimated and that we should probably all take more risk. Uh, in modern day and age, the gain is potentially very large and the risk is relatively small. >>Those are that, that's great. But then the timing is everything too >>thing. And I know there was, um, a fall of two 96 20 cup, 20 something years ago. And I remember, um, you know, the biggest lesson that I've learned, if we've done exactly the same thing and we've done it 10 times better six months before or six months after, it wouldn't happen. It was really the right moment and the right wave of underlying energy that if you serve that way the right way, you can move mountains. But it's really important to have a krill clear message to do it with conviction and to do it the right time. >>Right. So it's a little bit of luck, but then also the willingness to take a risk. Absolutely. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. You've and Nicola. Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you both. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more coming up tomorrow from nutanix.next.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis I want to talk to you about what I learned this week at Dell Technology's financial analyst meeting in New York. They gathered all the financial analysts, Rob Williams hosted it, he's the head of IR, Michael Dell of course was there. They had Dennis Hoffman who is the head of strategic planning, Jeff Clarke who basically runs the business and Tom Sweet, of course, who was the star of the show, the CFO, all the analysts want to see him. Dell laid out its longterm goals, it provided much clearer understanding of its strategic direction, basically focused on three areas. Dell believes that IT is getting more complex, we know that, they want to capitalize on that by simplifying IT. We'll talk about that. And then they want to position for the wave of digital transformations that are coming and they also believe, Dell believes, that it can capitalize on the consolidation trend, consolidating vendors, so I'll talk about each of those. And so let me bring up the first slide, Alex, if you would. The takeaways from the Dell financial analyst meeting. Let me share with you the overall framework that Tom Sweet laid out. And I have to say, the messaging was very consistent, these guys were very well-prepared. I think Dell is, from a management perspective, very well-run company. They're targeting three to 5% growth on what they're saying is a 4% GDP forecast. Or sorry, 4%, I have GDP here, it's really 4% industry growth. GDP's a little lower than that obviously. So this is IDC data, Gartner data, 4% industry growth. So that's an error on my part, I apologize. The strategies to grow relative to their competition. So grow share on a relative basis. So whatever the market does, again, not GDP, but whatever the market does, Dell wants to grow faster than the market. So it wants to gain share, that's its primary metric. From there they want to grow operating income and they want to grow that faster than revenue, that's going to throw off cash. And then they're going to also continue to delever the balance sheet. I think they paid down 17 billion in debt since the EMC acquisition. They want to get to a two X debt to EBITA ratio within 18 months. And what they're saying is, you know, they talked about, Tom Sweet talked about this consistent march toward investment-grade rating. They've been talkin' about that for awhile. He made the comment, we don't need to have a triple A rating but we want to get to the point where we can reduce our interest expense, and that will, 'cause they'll drop right into the bottom line. So they talked about these various levers that they can turn, some of them under the P and L, gaining share, some are their operating structure and their organizational structure, and one big one is obviously their debt structure. The other key issue here is will this cut the liquidity discount that Dell faces? What do I mean by that? Well, VMware has about a $60 billion valuation. Dell owns about 80% of VMware, which would equate to 48 billion. But if you look at Dell's market cap, it's only 37 billion. So it essentially says that Dell's core business is worth minus 11 billion. We used to talk about this when EMC owned VMware. Its core business only comprised about 40% of the overall value of the company, in this case because of the high debt, Dell has a negative value. And it's not just the high debt. Michael Dell has control over the voting shares, it's essentially a conglomerate structure, there's very high debt, and it's a relatively low margin business, notwithstanding VMware. And so as a result, Dell trades at a discount relative to what you would think it should trade at, given its prominence in the market, $92 billion company, the leader in every category under the sun. So that's the big question is can Dell turn these levers, drop EBITA or cash to the bottom line, affect operating income, and then ultimately pay down its debt and affect that discount that it trades at? Okay, bring up, if you would, Alex, the next slide. Now I want to share with you the takeaways from the Dell line of business focus. This really was Jeff Clarke's presentations that I'm going to draw from. Servers, we know, they're softer demand, but the key there is they're really faced tough compares. Last year, Dell's server business grew like crazy. So this year the comparisons are lessened. But there's less spending on servers. I'll share with you some of the ETR data. Storage, they call it holding serve, you saw last quarter I did an analysis, I took the ETR data and the income statement, it showed Pure was gaining share at like 22% growth from the income statement standpoint. Dell was 0% growth but is actually growing faster than its competitors. With the exception of Pure. It's growing faster than the market. So Dell actually gained share with 0% growth. Dell's really focused on consolidating the portfolio. They've cut the portfolio down from 80, I think actually the right number is 88 products, down to 20 by May of 2020. They've got some new mid-range coming, they've just refreshed their data protection portfolio, so again, by May of next year, by Dell Technologies World they'll have a much, much more simplified portfolio. And they're gaining back share. They've refocused on the storage business. You might recall after the acquisition, EMC was kind of a mess. It was losing share before the acquisition, it was so distracted with all the Elliott Management stuff goin' on. And kind of took its eye off the ball, and then after the acquisition it took awhile for them to get their act together. They gained back about 375 basis points in the last 18 months. Remember a basis point is 1/100th of 1%. So gaining share and their consistent focus on trying to do that. Their PC business, which is actually doin' quite well, is focused on the commercial segment and focused on higher margins. They made the statement that the PCs are kind of undersupply right now so it's helping margins. There's a big focus in Jeff Clarke's organization on VMware integration. To me this makes a lot of sense. To the extent that you can take the VMware platform and make Dell hardware run VMware better, that's something that is an advantage for Dell, obviously. And at the same time, VMware has to walk the fine line with the ecosystem. But certainly it's earned the presence in the market now that it can basically do what I just said, tightly integrate with Dell and at the same time serve the ecosystem, 'cause frankly, the ecosystem has no choice. It must serve VMware customers. The strategy, essentially, is to, as I say, capitalize on vendor consolidation, leverage value across the portfolio, so whether it's pivotal, VMware integration, the security portfolio, try to leverage that and then differentiate with scale. And Dell really has the number one supply chain in the tech business. Something that Dave Donatelli at HP, when he was at HP, used to talk about. HPE doesn't really talk about that supply chain advantage anymore 'cause essentially it doesn't have it. Dell does. So Jeff Clarke's reorganization, he came in, he streamlined the organization, really from the focus on R and D to product to collaboration across the organization and the VMware integration. I actually was quite impressed with when I first met Jeff Clarke I guess two years ago now, what he and the organization have accomplished since then. No BS kind of person. And you can see it's starting to take effect. So we'll keep an eye on that. The next slide I want to show you, I want to bring in the ETR data. We've been sharing with you the ETR spending intention surveys for the last couple of weeks and months. ETR, enterprise technology research, they have a data platform that comprises 4,500 practitioners that share spending data with them. CIOs, IT managers, et cetera. What I'm showing here is a cut off of the server sector. So I'm going to drill down into server and storage. So these are spending intentions from the July survey asking about the second half of 2019 relative to the first half of 2019. And this is a drill-down into the giant public and private firms. Why do I do that? Because in meeting the ETR, this is the best indicator. So it's big, big public companies and big private companies. Think Uber. Private companies that spend a ton of dough on IT. UPS before it went public, for example. So those companies are in here. And they're, according to ETR, the best indicators. What this chart shows, so the bars show, and I've shared this with you a number of times, the lime green is we're adding, we're new to this platform, we're new adoption. The evergreen is we're spending more, the gray is we're spending the same, the light red or pink is we're spending less, and the dark red is we're leaving the platform. So if you subtract the red from the green you get what's called a net score, and that's that blue line. And this is the overall server spending intentions from that July survey. The end is about 525 respondents out of the 4,500. And this is, again, those that just answered the question on server. So you can see the net score on server spend is dropping. And you can see the market share on server is dropping. The takeaway here is that servers, as a percentage of overall IT spend, are on a downward slope, and have been for quite some time. Back to the January '16 survey. Okay, so that's going to serve us. Let's take a look at the same data for storage. So if, Alex, if you bring up the storage sector slide, You can see kind of a similar trend. And I would argue what's happening here, a couple of things. You've got the CLOB effect, I'll talk about that some more, and you've also got, in this case, the flash, all-flash array effect. What happened was you had all-flash arrays and flash come into the data center, and that gave performance a huge headroom. Remember, spinning disk was the last bastion of mechanical movement and it was the main bottleneck in terms of overall application performance. IO was the problem. Well you put a bunch of flash into the system and it gives a lot of headroom. People used to over-provision capacity just for performance reasons. So flash has had the effect of customers saying, hey, my performance is good, I don't need to over-provision anymore, I don't need to buy so much. So that combined with cloud, I think, has put down the pressure on the storage business as well. Now the next slide, Alex, that I want you to bring up is the vendor net scores, the server spending intentions. And what I've done is I've highlighted Dell EMC. Now what's happening here in the slide, and I realize it's an eye chart, but basically where you want to be in this chart is in the left-hand side. What it shows is the spending intentions and the momentum from the October '18, which is the gray, the April '19, which is the blue, and then the July '19 which is the most recent one. Again, the end is 525 in the servers for the July '19 survey. And you can see Dell's kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd love to be in the left-hand side, you know, Docker, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, Ubuntu. And you don't want to be on the right-hand side, you know, Fujitsu, IBM, is sort of below the line. Dell's kind of in the middle there, Dell EMC. The next slide I want to show you is that same slide for storage. And again, you can see here is that on-- So this is vendor net scores, the storage spending intentions. On the left-hand side it's all the high growth companies. Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Pure, VMware with vSAN, Veeam. You see Dell EMC's VxRail. On the right-hand side, you see the guys that are losing momentum. Veritas, Iron Mountain, Barracuda, HitachiHDS, Fusion-io still comes up in the survey after the acquisition by Western Digital. Again, you see Dell EMC kind of holding serve in the middle there. Not great, not bad. Okay, so that's kind of just some other ETR data that I wanted to share. All right, next thing we're going to talk about is the macros market summary. And Alex, I've got some bullet points on this, so if you bring up that slide, let me talk about that a little bit. So five points here. First, cloud continues to eat away at on-prem, despite all this talk about repatriation, which I know does happen. People try to throw everything to the cloud and they go, whoa! Look at my Amazon bill, yeah, I get that. That's at the margin. The main trend is that cloud continues to grow. That whole repatriation thing is not moving the on-prem market. On-prem is kind of steady eddy. Storage is still working through that AFA injection. Got a lot of headroom from performance standpoint. So people don't need to buy as much as they used to because you had that step function in performance. Now eventually the market will catch up, all this digital transformation is happening, all this data is flowing through the system and it will catch up, and the storage market is elastic. As NAN prices fall, people will, I predict, will buy more storage. But there's been somewhat of a lull in the overall storage market. It's not a great market right now, frankly, at the macro level. Now ETR does these surveys on a quarterly basis. They're just about to release the October survey, and they put out a little glimpse on Friday about this survey. And I'll share some bullet points there. Overall IT spending clearly is softening. We kind of know that, everybody kind of realizes that. Here's the nuance. New adoptions are reverting to pre-2018 levels, and the replacements are rising. What does this mean? So the number of respondents that said, oh yes, we're adopting this platform for the first time is declining, and the replacements are actually accelerating. Why is that? Well I was at ETR last week and we were talking about this and one of the theories, and I think it's a good one, is that 2016, 2017 was kind of experimentation around digital transformation. 2018, people started to put things into production or closer to production, they were running systems in parallel, and now they're making their bets, they're saying, hey, this test worked, let's put this heavy into production in 2019, and now we're going to start replacing. So we're not going to adopt as much stuff 'cause we're not doing as much experimentation. We're going to now focus and narrow in on those things that are going to drive our business, and we're going to replace those things that aren't going to drive our business. We're going to start unplugging them. So that's some of what's happening. Another big trend is Microsoft. Microsoft is extending its presence throughout. They're goin' after collaboration, you saw the impact that they had on Slack and Slack stock recently. So Slack Box, Dropbox, are kind of exposed there. They're goin' after security, they've just announced a SIM product. So Splunk and IBM, they're kind of goin' after that base. The application performance management vendors. For instance, New Relic. Microsoft goin' after them. Obviously they got a huge presence in cloud. Their Windows 10 cycle is a little slower this time around, but they've got other businesses that are really starting to click. So Microsoft is one of the few vendors that really is showing accelerated spending momentum in the ETR data. Financial services and telcos, which are always leading spender indicators, are actually very weak right now. That's having a spillover effect into Europe, which is over-banked, if I can use that term. Banking heavy, if you will. So right now it's not a pretty picture, but it's not a disaster. I don't want to necessarily suggest this as like going back to 2007, 2008, it's not. It's really just a matter of things are softening and it's, you know, maybe taking a little breath. Okay, so let me summarize the meeting overall. Again, it was a very well-run meeting. Started at 9:00, ended at 12:00, bagged lunch, go home. Nice and crisp. So these guys are very well-prepared. I think, again, Dell is a extremely well-managed company. They laid out a much clearer vision for Wall Street of its strategy, where it's headed. As they say, they're going after IT complexity. I want to make a comment on this. You think about Legacy EMC. Legacy EMC was not the company that you would expect to deal with complexity. In fact, they were the culprit of complexity. One of the things that Jeff Clarke did when he came in, he said, this portfolio's too complex, needs to be simplified. Joe Tucci used to say, overlap is better than gaps. Jeff Clarke said we got too much overlap. We don't have a lot of gaps so let's streamline that portfolio. Taking advantage of vendor consolidation, this is an interesting one. Ever since I've been in this business, which has been quite a long time now, I've been hearing that buyers want to consolidate the number of vendors that they have. They've really not succeeded in doing that. Now can they do that now 'cause there are less vendors? Well, in a sense, yes, there are less sort of on-prem big vendors. EMC's no longer in the market, you don't have companies like Sun and Digital anymore, Compact is gone. HP split in two, but still. You're not seeing a huge number of new vendors, at scale, come into the market. Except you've got AWS and Google as new players there. So I think that injects sort of a new dynamic that a lot of people like to put cloud aside and kind of ignore it and talk about the old on-prem business, but I think that you're going to see a lot of experimentations and workload ins and outs, particularly with AWS and Google and of course Azure, which is in itself, their cloud is almost a separate force. So we'll see how that shakes up. As I say, servers right now, Dell's got a very tough compare. I think Dell will be fine in the server space. Storage, it's all about simplifying the portfolio, they've got a refreshed portfolio focused on regaining share. They've rebranded everything Power, so their whole line is going to be Power by, if it's not already, by May of next year, Dell Technologies World. It's a much more scalable portfolio. And I think Dell's got a lot of valuation levers. They're a $92 billion company, they've got their current operations, their current P and L, their share gains, their cross-company synergies, particularly with VMware, they can expand their TAM into cloud with partnerships like they're doing with AWS and others, Google, Microsoft. The Edge is a TAM expansion opportunity to them. And also corporate structure. You've seen them. VMware acquired Pivotal. They're cleaning that up. I'm sure they could potentially make some other moves. Secureworks is out there, for example. Maybe they'll do some things with RSA. So they got that knob to turn and they can delever. Paying down the debt to the extent that they can get back to investment grade, that will lower their interest rates, that'll drop right to the bottom line, and they'll be able to reinvest that. And Tom Sweet said, within 18 months, we'll be able to get there with that two X ratio relative to EBITA, and that's when they're going to start having conversations with the rating agencies to talk about you know, hey, maybe we can get a better rating and lower our interest expense. Bottom line, did Wall Street buy the story? Yes. But I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything in the near term. This is a show me from Missouri, prove it, execute, and then I think Dell will get rewarded. Okay, so this is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching this Cube Insights powered by ETR. We'll see ya next time. (electronic music)