 Silicon Angle Media presents The Cube. Covering Alibaba Cloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angles, The Cube here on the ground in Hengzhou, China. We're here at the Intel booth as part of our exclusive coverage of Alibaba Cloud Conference here, The Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon Angle, Wikibon and The Cube, and I'm here with CJ Bruno, who's the corporate vice president and general manager of global accounts of the sales and marketing group at Intel. That's a mouthful, but basically you run a lot of the major accounts, you bring a lot of value Intel supplier to these big clouds. I do, John, we look after our top 20 or so largest partners and customers around the world. Amazing like Alibaba. Edge to cloud enterprises, deep rich engagements, just an exciting, exciting time to be in the business with these big customers. And you know, there's no borders to the cloud, so it's not as easy as saying a PC, like people might think of Intel in the old days, but you guys have these major cloud providers. There's a lot of Intel inside, so to speak, but that value is enabling a new kind of functionality. We're hearing it here at the show. You are. We work together with a partner like Alib in the area of such big artificial intelligence development, big data analytics, and of course the cloud. We've been working with them for over 12 years now, and you can see the advancements and the services that they're providing to their customers, not only domestically here in China, but on a global stage as well. It's interesting, Intel, you've been working with these guys for 12 years. What a journey from an entrepreneurial 12 guys in a dorm room or in the apartment for Jackie Ma, he talks about it all the time, to now the powerhouse. What's it like? Because these guys have an interesting formula going on here. They're bringing culture and art with science. Kind of sounds like Steve Jobs' technology means liberal arts, bringing a cultural aspect. And how far have they come? Give us some insight into where they've come from and where you think they're going. It's amazing. Jack Ma, yesterday in his keynote, talked about this event eight years ago. 120 people, John. We're standing among 60,000 or so in this event today, just eight short years later. It's amazing what they've been able to do. They are driving innovation. This is not a copy economy, it's an innovation economy. They invest very high degree of technical acumen, willingness to break barriers, try things people have not, fail fast and correct, take risks. They're entrepreneurs at heart. They're technologists in their bloodstream and they really invest to win. You guys are supplying. We had some people we've talked to talking about photonics. D. Raj Malak was really going deep on these pathways around some of the Intel innovation. Some of it's like, wow, mind-blowing. The other end is just practical stuff. Making it easier, faster, simpler to run things. IoT, they're a big use case. I mean, you can't get any more sexier than looking at a city cloud that's actually running the city with traffic and all those IoT devices. So what is the big thing that you guys do for Alibaba? Talk about that journey because it's not one thing. What's the magical formula? Sure, of course. First off, we deliver, we think, world-class ingredients to their world-class cloud and enable them to deliver amazing services to their customer at the base level. But we really work together to solve societal problems. Look at the precision medical cloud that we announced last April together, John. Genome sequencing, solving people's cancer problems in a matter of days instead of months. Just one example of the kind of real use case that we bring these technologies to bear on and have an amazing influence. We work on them with a Tanachi medical imaging competition. 3,000 entrants competing to see who can identify lung cancer quickest and we have some winners selected just this week. So these things are real. Taking this technology, solving real life problems and business problems around the globe. And it's not just the big heavy lifting technologies that move the needle like you were mentioning, but it's also the micro technologies like FPG and A. I mean, you guys got a lot of things. I mean, this is like the new Intel. So I'd love to get your thoughts on it. You can just take a moment to share the journey that Intel's on right now because you gave a talk yesterday, kind of a keynote on stage. What is the Intel journey right now look like? Sure, we're transforming ourselves from a PC-centric company to a company that runs the cloud and powers countless numbers, billions and billions of smart connected devices. That's a big journey we're on. We've diversified our business significantly in a five year period, John. Driving our data center business, our IoT business, our programmable logic business, as you said, our friends from former Altera now two years inside Intel. Our memory business, our NSG technologies, 3D NAND, Optane, driving breakthroughs in SSDs, and of course, new technologies that we're exploring like drones and neuromorphic computing, making sure we never miss the next big thing. I've been following Intel for 30 years of my career and life as an initial user developer now in the media. It's interesting, Intel's never done it alone. It's always been part of the ecosystem, but you've brought a lot of goods to the party, so to speak, in technology, Moore's Law, and this list is endless. Now it's an end to end game because you look at 5G, for instance, and you kind of connect the dots. That puts a radio frequency cloud over a city. You got to run the IoT devices like City Brain, they're showing here. You got to tie it together with programmable arrays, that's a hardware thing, but now software guys are doing. You've got cloud native with the Linux Foundation, that's DevOps, and you got data centers that are 10 to one silicon to the edge. I mean, this is a wide opportunity. How do you guys make sense of it to customers because it's a complex story? It is, John. Look, we're the ultimate ingredient supplier, right? We're bringing forward technologies in artificial intelligence, in 5G, in VR and AR, areas that are just autonomous everything, autonomous driving in particular. These are big investment areas we're driving into that require an enormous amount of compute, storage, networking, and connectivity, and we're making the investments to make sure we're critical partners with our customers in all those huge growth areas, making us a big growth company now. I had a great conversation with Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud. He's on the steering committee, chairman of technology steering committee for Alibaba Group. And yesterday they just announced a $15 billion investment over three years for FinTech across the board, IoT, AI, collaborating with scientists, as well as artisans. This is a big deal. It is, John. This is exactly an example of what I mentioned earlier. These guys invest to win, and they have a will to win, and they want to pioneer, and they want to innovate, and they put their money where their mouth is in that announcement. It's pretty exciting. So the cloud service product market is doing really well. Your global accounts are doing well, certainly in Asia, and people's Republic of China, PRC, as you guys call it, extremely well. But now there's a renaissance in cloud in general, so we're expecting to see a lot more. Cloud service providers, maybe not as big as Alibaba, but Alibaba's going to start getting customers that will become SaaS companies. That's technically a cloud service provider. If you think about it, if they have an application, how do you guys look at that more? What's your view? We see what is known as the super seven in the industry, the large folks, both US based and China based. But then we've identified a next 60, 70 next wave CSPs that are growing vibrantly around the globe. And there's a long tail of another 120 that we're interacting with. You're absolutely on point. An exploding area, significant double digit growth for years to come, and just solving big, big life and business problems. So at Silicon angle, obviously Silicon's in the name and also Wikibon research, very big in China here. Interesting dynamic that's happening here, we're seeing with the data and the software. And was brought up with Dr. Wang about the IoT. It's kind of nuanced point, but I want to get it out for the folks watching that you're going to start to see new compute at the edge because data is now the currency of the future. Okay, it needs the flow, it's like water. But at the edge, it could be expensive, low latencies, the table stakes that everyone wants to get to. You're going to see a lot more compute or Silicon at the edge of the network, Internet of Things is coming, your view on that. There's no question, John, that's exactly the way we see it. The time to get the data back to the long haul to the data center is very expensive and very challenging and requires an absolute redo of the network. We're moving the compute closer and closer to the data. Of course, the cloud remains a vital, vital part of that. But we move that compute capability closer to where the data is sensed. You can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions and you can implement those decisions at the edge. CJ, final question for you. Obviously Alibaba, big part of their growth strategy is going outside mainland China. Obviously doing very well here. Not to knock them there, but great opportunity to go into the global market rate, specifically North America. That's going to put more competition. Competition was good. But it's also going to require more growth. How are you helping Alibaba and how does your relationship at Intel expand with Alibaba? Yeah, we work with Alibaba not only on the technical front, of course, but on their go-to-market plans, on ecosystem development plans, and even some business models. And we do that across our entire customer and partner base, John. We're seeing this explosive growth in cloud and being able to work with our partners on all four of those fronts. Technology development, ecosystem development, business model development, obviously are a benefit to both of us. Alibaba's going to need some help because you know it's competitive. Amazon had a nice run for a while. Microsoft nippling at the heels, Google. Now Alibaba coming in, competition is good. We're proud to call all those innovators our customers and we work hard every day to earn their business. Final, final question, since everyone just popped in my head. What should folks in America know about this PRC market or China market that they may not know about? Obviously, they read what they read in the paper. They see the security hacks. They see the cryptocurrency temporarily on hold. But blockchain certainly has got a lot of promise. But it's a dynamic market here. A lot of opportunities. What should that audience know about the China market? I think the first thing they should know is if they haven't come to experience it themselves, they should. The scale of the opportunity, the scale of the country is like nothing people have ever seen before. As I said, the investments they're making to innovate, to drive an innovation economy is breakthrough. You take that scale and that investment, this is a market to be reckoned with. Congratulations on 12 year run with Alibaba and now Alibaba Cloud looking really, really strong and love the culture. You got a unique twist, artistry, scientific cultures coming together, looking good. Absolutely, John. Thanks for letting us tell our story. CJ Bruno, Group Vice President, General Manager, Global Accounts for Intel. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. Thanks for watching.