 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston Area Studio, our actually brand new studio, and I'm really excited to have, I believe it's a first-time guest, a long-time caller, you know, a long-time listener, first-time caller. Good buddy of mine, Dave Graham, who is the director, is a director of Emerging Technologies Messaging at Dell Technologies. Disclaimer, Dave and I worked together at a company, some of you might have heard on the past, it was EMC Corporation, which was a local company. Dave and I both left EMC, and Dave went back, you know, after Dell had bought EMC. So, Dave, thanks so much for joining, it is your first time on theCUBE, yes? It is the first time on theCUBE, Stu, so. So, some of the first times that I had actually interacted with this team here, you know, you and I were bloggers and doing lots of stuff, you know, back in the industry, so it's great to be able to talk to you on camera. Yeah, nice to be here. All right, so Dave, I mentioned you were a returning former EMC, or now, you know, Dell tech person, and you spent some time at Juniper, at some startups, but give your audience a little bit about your background, your passions. Oh, so background-wise, yep, so it started my career in technology, if you will, but EMC worked starting inside sales of all places, and worked my way into a consulting engineer-type position within ECS, which is, you know, obviously a pretty hardcore product inside of EMC, now, or Dell Technologies, now. Left, went to a startup, saying, you know, everybody's gotta do a startup at some point in their life, right, take the risk, make the leap. That was awesome, was actually one of those cloud brokers that's out there, like Nassuni, a company called Certis, had a little bit of trouble about eight months in, so it kind of fell apart. Yeah, the company did, not you. The company did, I was fine, you know, but yeah, the company had some problems, but it ended up leaving there, going to Symantec of all places, so it worked on the Veritas side, kind of the enterprise side, which just recently got bought out by Avago, evidently, this hit the new- Broadcom. Broadcom, Broadcom, part of the grand hold of Avago. Dave, you know we're getting up there in years in our tech, when we keep talking about something, because I was just reading about, right, Broadcom, which of course, Avago brought Broadcom in the second largest tech acquisition in history, but when they acquired Broadcom, they took on the name, because most people know Broadcom, not as many people know Avago, even those of us with backgrounds in the chip semiconductor and all those pieces, I mean, you got Brocade in there, you've got some of the software companies that they've bought over the time, so some of those go together, but yeah, Veritas and Symantec, those of us, especially with some storage and networking background and know those brands well. Absolutely, yeah, PLX is being the PCI switch, well, it's actually Broadcom, yeah, those things. So, yeah, went from Symantec after a short period of time there, went to Juniper Networks, ran, part of their Center of Excellence, kind of a data center overlay team. Only non-networking guy in a networking company felt like, I can't say that I learned a ton about the networking side, but definitely saw a huge expansion in the data center space with Juniper, which was awesome to see. And then the opportunity came to come back to Dell Technologies, you know, kind of everything all becoming new again, right, and go in and revisiting a whole bunch of folks that I had worked with about 10 years ago. David's interesting, you know, I think about, talk about somebody like Broadcom and Avago and things like that. I remember reading blog posts of yours that, you know, you'd get down to some of that nitty level, you and I would be ones that it would be, they'd talk about a product, all right now, pull the board out, let me look at all the components, let me understand the, you know, the spacing and the cooling and, you know, all the things there, but, you know, here, it's 2019, Dave, you know, software's eating the world. So tell us a little bit about, you know, what you're working on these days because some of the high level things definitely don't bring to mind, you know, the low level, you know, board pieces that we used to talk about many years ago. Exactly, yeah, it's no longer, you know, thermals and processing power as much, right? There's still aspects of that, but a lot of what we're focused on now or what I'm focused on now is within what we call the emerging technology space, you know, or Horizon 2, Horizon 3, I guess, or... It sounds like something some analyst firm came up with. Yeah, like Industry 4.0, 5.0 type stuff. It's all exciting stuff, but you know, when you look at technologies like 5G, fifth generation wireless, you know, both millimeter waves, sub-6 gighertz, AI, you know, everything will be coming new again, right? Stuff from the 50s and 60s is now starting to permeate everything that we do. You're not opening your mouth and breathing unless you're talking about AI at some point, you know? And you bring up a great point. So, you know, we've spent some time with the Dell team understanding AI but help connect for our audience that, you know, when you talk AI, we're talking about, you know, we're talking about data at the center of everything and it's those applications. Are you working on some of those solutions or is it the infrastructure that's going to enable that and, you know, what needs to be done at that level for things to work right? I think it's all of the above, you know, the beauty of kind of Dell technologies is that you sit across both infrastructure and software, right, you look at the efforts and energies, you know, stuff like VMware buying Bitfusion, right, as a mechanism of trying to assuage some of that low-level hardware stuff. Now, let's start to tap into what the infrastructure guys have always been doing. You know, when you bring that kind of capability up the stack, you know, now you can start to develop within the software mindset how we're, you know, how you're going to access this. Infrastructure still plays a huge part of it. You got to run it on something, right? You can't really do serverless AI at this point. Am I allowed to say that? Well, you can say that. I might disagree with you because absolutely there's AI that's running on it. Don't you know, Dave, I actually did my serverless 101. Article that I had, I actually had Ashley Guaparala who's the general manager of Dell servers holding the t-shirt that there is no serverless. It's just, you know, a function that you only pay the piece that you need when you need it and everything. But the point of the humor that I was having there is even the largest server manufacturer in the world knows that underneath that serverless discussion, absolutely there is still infrastructure that plays there. Just today it tends to primarily be in AWS with all of their services, but that proliferation, serverless, we're just letting the developers be developers and not have to think about that stuff. And I mean, Dave, this stuff we've had background, you know, we want to get rid of silos and make things simpler. I mean, it's the things we've been talking about for decades. It's just, you know, for me, it was interesting to look at. It is very much a, you know, developer application-driven piece top down as opposed to so many of the, you know, virtualization and infrastructure as a service is more of a bottom up. Let me try to change this construct. So that we can then provide what you need above it. It's just a slightly different way of looking at things. Yeah, and I think we're really trying to push forward that stuff. So, you know, you can bundle together hardware that makes a development platform easy to do, right? But the efforts and energy of our partnerships, you know, Dell has engaged in a lot of partnerships within industry, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, GraphCore, you name it, right? We're out in that space working along with those folks, but a lot of that is driven by software. You know, it's, you write to a library, like Kudo or, you know, PyTorch or using these type of elements and you're moving towards that, but then it has to run on something, right? And so we want to be in that both-and-space, right? We want to enable that kind of flexibility and capability, you know, and obviously not prevent it, but we want to also expose that platform to as many people within the industry as possible so they can kind of start to develop on it. You know, again, becoming a platform company really when it comes down to it. Yeah, you know, I don't want to get down the semantical arguments of AI, if you will, but you know, what are you hearing from customers and what's kind of driving some of the discussions lately that's kind of the reality of AI as opposed to kind of, you know, some of just the buzzy hype that everybody talks about? Well, I still think there's some ambiguity in market around AI versus automation even, you know? So what, you know, people that come and ask us, or, well, you know, I believe in this thing called artificial intelligence and I want to do X, Y, and Z, and these particular workloads could be better handled by simple, not to distill down to the barest minimum, but like cron jobs, right? Like something that's, you know, like go back into history and look at the things that matter that you could do very, very simply that don't require, you know, a large amount of libraries or an understanding of, you know, more advanced type algorithms or developments that way. In the reverse, you still have that capability now where, you know, everything that we're doing within industry use, you know, chat bots. You know, some of the intelligence that goes into those, people are starting to recognize this is a better way that I can serve my customers. And really it's that business out kind of viewpoint. How do I access these customers where they may not have the knowledge that here, but they're coming to us and saying it's more than just, you know, an IVR system, you know, like an electronic IVR system where I gotta come in and it's just quick response stuff. I need some context. I need to be able to do this and transform my data into something that's useful for my customers. Yeah, no, it's such a great point, Dave. The thing I've asked many times is, you know, my entire career, we've talked about intelligence and we've talked about automation. You know, what's different about it today? And the reality is, is it used to be all right, I was scripting things or I would have some batch processes or I would put these things together. The order of magnitude and scale of what we're talking about today is, I couldn't do it manually if I wanted to. And that automation is really, can be really cool these days and it's not as, you know, to set all of those up. There is more intelligence built into it. So, right, whether it's AI or just machine learning kind of underneath them. That spectrum that we talk about it, there's some real use cases, a real lot of things that are happening there and it definitely is, you know, order of magnitudes more improved than what we were talking about, say back when we were both at EMC and you know, the latest generation of Symmetrix was much more intelligent than the last generation but if you look at that 10 years later, boy, it is night and day and how could we ever use those terms before compared to where we are today? Yeah, it's, you know, somebody probably at some point I think coined it, you know, exponential. Like things become exponential as you start to look at it. Yeah, the development in the last 10 years both in computing horsepower and GPU, GPGPU horsepower, the, you know, the innovation around, you know, FPGAs are back in a big way now, right? Like all that brain power that used to be in these systems now, you now can benefit even more from the flexibility of those systems in order to get specific workloads done. It's not for everybody, we all know that, but it's there. I'm glad you brought up FPGAs because those of us that, you know, are hardware geeks, I mean, you know, some reason I studied mechanical engineering, not realizing that software would be, you know, a software world that we live in. I did a video with Amy Lewis and she's like, what was your software defined moments? I'm like, you know, gosh, I'm the frog sitting in the pot and, you know, love to, you know, if I can't network diagram it or, you know, put these things together, it's, you know, networking guys, my background. So, you know, the software world, but it is a real renaissance in hardware these days. Everything from the FPGAs you mentioned, you know, you look at, you know, NVIDIA and all of their partners and the competitors there, anything you geeking out on the hardware side? I yell a lot of this stuff. I mean, you know, the era of GPU showed up in a big way, right? We have NVIDIA to thank for that whole, I mean, the kudos to them for developing a software ecosystem alongside hardware. I think that's really what sold that and made that work. Well, you know, you have to be able to solve that Bitcoin mining challenge. Well, you know, so depending on which cryptocurrency you did, you know, AMD kind of snuck in there with, you know, their stuff and they did some of that stuff better. But you have that kind of competing architecture stuff, which is always good, composition you want. I think now that what we're seeing is that specific workloads now benefit from different styles of compute. And so you have the companies like Graphcore or, you know, the chip that was just launched out of China this past week, that's configurable to any type of network, neural network underneath the covers. You see that kind of evolution and capability now where general purpose is good, but now you start to go into reconfigurable elements. So, you know, I'll have FPGAs or some of these more advanced chips. The neuromorphic hardware, which is always, you know, I'm giving my background in psychology is always interesting to me. So anything that, you know, is biomorphic or neuromorphic to me is, you know, it's pinging around up here like, oh, you're gonna emulate the brain and Intel has done stuff, brain chip's done stuff in that space. It's amazing. I just, you know, the workloads that are coming along the way, you know, I think are starting to demand different types of more effectiveness within that hardware now. So you're starting to see a lot of interesting developments, IPUs, TPUs. I mean, Tesla's getting into the inferencing bit now, you know, with their own hardware. So you see a lot of effort and energy being poured in there. Again, there's not gonna be one ring to rule them all, the, you know, to cop-token there for a moment, but there's going to be, I think you're gonna start to see the desperation of workloads into those specific hardware platforms. Again, software. It's gonna start to drive the application for how you see these things going. And it's gonna be the people that can service the most amount of platforms or the most amount of capability from a single platform even, I think are the people that are gonna come out ahead and whether it'll be us or, you know, any of our August competitors remains to be seen, but we want to be in that space. We want to be playing hard in that space as well. All right, Dave, last thing I want to ask you about is just careers. So it's interesting at VMworld, I kind of look at it and like, wow, I'm actually, I'm sitting on a panel for opening acts, which is done by the VM underground people, the Sunday, you know, day before VMworld really starts, talking about jobs. And there's actually three panels, you know, careers and financial and some of those things. I'm gonna be there on Sunday, maybe I should join you. So come on by starting at one o'clock Monday evening. I'm actually participating in a career cafe, talking about people and everything like that. So, you know, all that stuff's online if you want to check it out. But, you know, right, you said, you know, psychology, you know, is what you studied, but you know, you worked in engineering, you were a systems engineer. Now you do messaging, you know, the hardcore techies, you know, there's always that boundary between, you know, kind of the techies and the marketing, but I think it's obvious to our audience and you're geeking out on the TPUs and all the things there that you were not, you know, just, you're quite knowledgeable when it comes about the technology and the good technical marketers I find tend to come from that kind of background, but give us a little bit, you know, looking back at, you know, where you've been and where you're going and some of those dynamics. Yeah, I mean I was blessed from a really young age with a father who really loved technology. We were building PCs back in the 80s, right, when that was a thing, you know, like I built my AMD 386 DX. Have you watched the AMC show, Halt and Catch Fire, when that was on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was that kind of, you know, always interesting to me and I, you know, with the way my mind works, I can't code to save my life, right? That's my brother's gift, not mine, but being able to kind of assemble things in my head was, you know, kind of always something that stuck in the back. So going through college, I, you know, worked as a lab resident as well, you know, working with computer labs and doing that stuff. It's just been, it's been a passion, right? I had the education was very, you know, it was my family, it was very hard on the education stuff, you're gonna do this. But being able to follow that passion, you know, a lot of things kind of fell into place with that and I mean, it's been a huge blessing. But even in grad school when I was getting my master's in clinical counseling, I ran my own consulting business as well, just buying and selling harder. And a lot of what I've done is just, I read and ask a ton of questions, you know, I'm out on Twitter, I'm not the brightest bulb in the, you know, like, of the bunch, but I've learned to ask a lot of questions and the amount of community support in that I think has gotten me a lot to where I am as well. But yeah, being kind of able to come out on this side, you know, marketing is like you're saying it's, it's kind of anathema to the technical guys. Oh, those are the guys that kind of shine the, you know, shine the turn, so to speak, right? But being able to come in and being able to kind of influence the way and make sure that we're technically sound in what we're saying, but you have to translate some of the hotter stuff, the more, you know, hardcore engineering terms and the layman's terms, because not everybody's gonna approach that. A CIO with the, you know, with the double E or, you know, an MS in electrical engineering or going on down that road is very few and far between. A lot of these folks have grown up or developed their careers in understanding things, but being able to kind of be going and translating through that, it's been, it's been a huge blessing and it's nice, but always following the areas where, you know, networking for me was never a strong point, but jumping in going, hey, I'm gonna, I'm here to learn. And being willing to learn has been one of the biggest, biggest things I think that's kind of reinforced that career process. Yeah, definitely Dave, that intellectual curiosity is something that serves anyone in the tech industry quite well, because, you know, nobody's gonna be an expert on everything and I've spoken to some of the brightest people in the industry and even they realize, you know, nobody can keep up with all of it. So that being able to ask questions, participate. And Dave, thank you so much for helping me, you know, come have this conversation. Greatest always to have a chat. Great to be here too, thanks. All right, so be sure to check out thecube.net, which is where all of our content always is what shows we will be at, all the history of where we've been. The studio is actually in Marlboro, Massachusetts. So not too far outside of Boston, right on the 495 loop. We're gonna be doing lots more videos here. Myself and Dave Vellante are located here. We have a good team here, so look for more content out of here and of course our big studio out of Palo Alto, California. So if we can be of help, please feel free to reach out. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thanks for watching thecube.