 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. And welcome indeed here to theCUBE in our coverage of VMworld 2019. We are in the Moscoti Center in San Francisco. They're open, they're back in business and so is VMware. We're watching the folks stream out from this morning's keynote session. Pat Gelsinger hosting that session and it was an impressive setup to say the least. Thousands packing that ballroom downstairs for a plethora of announcements all from Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Walls, Justin Warren joins us. We haven't been together for a while. It's good to see you. It's been a little while, yeah. How have you been? I've been well, I've been well. I'm surprised they brought us back together after the last outing. Let's not talk about that incident. I thought it won't so well, we've just ended on a high note. But it is a pleasure to be with Justin. We'll be with him throughout the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, our coverage here. We're joined right now by two guests, Paul Seville, who is the SVP of Network and Technology Solutions at Centrary Link and Omar Suna, who is the director of digital products at GE Healthcare. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Good to have you here on theCUBE. Thank you, John. First off, let's just give me your both, your take just on VMworld 2019. What you're looking for, what you're expecting and kind of the early vibe that you have going on. Paul, why don't you take that first? Sure, one of the things I've really been impressed with is how VMware is expanding the kind of open nature of its relationships. It's developing its ecosystem, really broadening it out. It's making a number of acquisitions to enable new capabilities. And we're really excited about that. Centrary Link and VMware have been partners for I think around 12, 15 years, as we've been building out our own cloud services. And so it's a very exciting time with to see all of this technology coming together in the way that it is. I love the way you put it to acquisitions. Pat made a little comment about that. It's like, I can't wait to find out who I'm going to buy next. And they've been certainly been in a full speed ahead mode for the past year, year and a half. Omar, your take, early. Yeah, I mean, I think I look at it from a healthcare solutioning perspective. And it's exciting to see this level of technology and kind of the building out of the ecosystem and what can enable for healthcare consumers, especially with a big focus around privacy and data management. I think some of their insecurity, some of their latest acquisitions could actually help grow that ecosystem and offer more options specific to the healthcare industry. Now let's talk about your portfolio that worked out a little bit at GE Healthcare. Obviously, health systems, healthcare is a huge user. These days, if it will, it's kind of simplified a bit. But just talk about what your concerns are, what your attention is, and kind of the things that are keeping you up at night these days in terms of healthcare and what you're doing in the IT space. Yeah, I mean, I think the, when we look at our customer environment globally, we tend to kind of summarize some of the key challenges for our customers around three pillars, access. So being able to provide access to all the patients that needed regardless of location with aging population in a lot of developed countries, with also a lot of people having the means to receive more proactive healthcare, it is challenging the health systems to be able to provide adequate access to patients. Capacity, providing capacity with the resources, including the human capital resources that health systems have. So how do you free up your specialists to make sure that they're able to provide the right level of patients who need it, patient care for the patients that need it, as well as clinical efficacy. How do we help with software applications, with technology to help reduce the variation of care and improve patient outcomes, regardless where the patient is receiving care, whether in the rural community or in advanced academic medical centers. So we try to kind of think of our solution technologies as helping our customers solve for access, capacity, and clinical efficacy. Yeah, so a lot of healthcare, it's kind of a retail setup in that there's lots of, and there's hospitals and other allied health professionals who have lots of different locations that they need to provide healthcare from, and that technology needs to live where the patients are and where the doctors are. So it was interesting to see in the keynote earlier this morning talking about edge and different kinds of edge as well. We've got thin, medium, and thick edge, according to VMware. So how do you see that rise of edge computing affecting the way that you deal with healthcare? Yeah, I mean, tremendous opportunity for us. And GE is working on capitalizing on the technology, on edge technology to allow us to bring in AI application right to where kind of within the customer network. And that's helping us solve for a lot of concerns around private security as well as moving large data sets up to the cloud to process to be able to get benefits out of algorithm and additional applications. So that's actually an exciting area. And I'd agree with you. I mean, we're seeing more and more large distributed healthcare networks in more. In the US, we've definitely seen huge merger and acquisition movement that we continue to see in consolidation. And we also see that globally with regional delivery networks coming up and being able to have software applications live within this distributed network and provide information for the right clinician at the right time is a big initiative for us. And for us, this makes a huge difference in the way our providers are able to deliver care for their patients. This seems like an ideal opportunity for the folks at CenturyLink to help you with that. Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. I mean, CenturyLink really to that point sees this landscape evolving rapidly. And we even have a phrase internally we use that the network is the data center. We believe that in the future, compute is going to be distributed so widely in such a broad geography and dropped in places where it's most efficient to run it and where it's most efficient to connect it with network that really the data centers we think about it today becomes this very widely distributed platform that is connected together with high performance networking solutions. And that's part of what we're working with GE Healthcare on. I'm old enough to remember when the network is the computer was the slogan that we're all following now. And it seems that it's actually coming true now where we have this idea of it's not just cloud and it's not just data centers and it's not just edge. It's actually a combination of all of them. And you need to be able to deal with that technology wherever it needs to live. Which is I think is a positive change from it from what we were talking about a few years ago where it seemed to be we'd had to make one choice. Now the choice is well actually you need a bit of everything. Right. Tell me about your decision or at least in terms of on-prem off-prem. And healthcare I would assume extremely sensitive obviously to security concerns and management and certain policies about who can access what, where, when and how, whatever. How are you going about making that decision in this new multi-cloud environment, this hybrid cloud environment when people are making migrations with their businesses and they're going off-prem. But you I would assume have to be a lot more sensitive or more sensitive to other factors than perhaps other businesses have to be. Yeah, we definitely do. There is, you know, with regulations, you know, and for example in Europe, GDPR, there's in-country regulations around where data resides. All of that kind of plays a factor in customer adoption of technologies and where they're comfortable. We talked a lot of CIOs in the healthcare sector. And a lot of them say, hey, listen, we're on a journey. We're used to hugging our servers. We're used to controlling it. And, you know, technology has evolved, but in terms of our policies, ability to accept liability of data breaches and what technology providers are willing to sign up for, all of that kind of plays a role in that journey. Like Justin had mentioned, it is actually a, you know, developing an ecosystem where you have a combination of off-prem and off-prem is a lot of where healthcare systems are investing their money. So we're seeing certain data that resides on-prem that is mission-critical versus more historic data can go into, you know, cloud technology, cloud storage technology and others. But there's no doubt that we're at an inflection point. We're seeing a lot more health systems assigned up to cloud-based SaaS applications, invest in private cloud, hosting services, invest in also public cloud, hosting services. And all of that actually will create as a software provider, all that could actually help us create more opportunities and more solutioning for our customers. I love using some of the cloud computing power that would allow us to develop newer applications. So it's actually exciting. It's a journey with our customers. You know, we're choosing to kind of be alongside of our customers and help them. Doing a lot of education and being able to have relationship with Centrelink, be able to see the advances and the availability of resources that Centrelink makes available for us as well as other partners that we have help us really make sure that we're able to build the right level of technology meeting the healthcare customer needs. So Paul, fill in the gaps then a little bit about where Centrelink is in trying to solve this, I would say dilemma, but it certainly is a puzzle of some sort, right? Its decisions are made about what's going to be offloaded, what's not, you know, how are we going to access, what do we allow? How do you see Centrelink's role when you have a customer like OMAR, like GE Healthcare, coming to you with their unique needs and addressing those? Sure, well, as unique as GE Healthcare is in the healthcare industry, there are some common characteristics about how we are seeing enterprise customers look at these situations. And one of them is that place and compute on the premise itself that is generally the most expensive real estate that an enterprise has when it has to go in the hospital, and it has to go at the retail store location. And a lot of enterprises today are doubling the amount of compute and storage that they're having at their premise locations every year because the volume is just growing so much. That's becoming a problem because you don't want your, you don't want your hospital becoming a bigger and bigger data center, so to speak, right? And so the way that we're approaching the problem in working with these is VMware was actually expressing a very similar viewpoint about the edge and about how the thick edge and the thin edge. And the thin edge of the customer premise is where you want to have the lightest load, but you want to have the most critical applications that are sitting there. You want to have the information that you have to protect in a most guarded way that's most important for your operations there. But from there, you can more efficiently run things from a distance backing out, going all the way back to the public cloud core. If you connect it with high-performance networking from end to end. And so what CenturyLink has been doing is putting together these solutions that make that balance of trade, so to speak, between the cost of compute, the cost of where you have to put it to where its best can be housed, what kind of latency performance that it needs to have to meet it to the performance specification all the way back to the public cloud design and how to tie it into the public cloud. And that's where we've been building our competency and the solutions we've been putting together for customers. Nate, you mentioned the need for high-performance networks in there, so I've got to ask you about 5G. From what I know about 5G, it looks like the kind of situation that you have with healthcare where you've got lots of mobile tablet devices, you've got lots and lots of other actual equipment IOT devices in a healthcare situation. That seems like an ideal use case for 5G. Is that what 5G is actually for? Is the hype real? Well, 5G is certainly going to transform the world in terms of its ability to provide wireless high bandwidth connectivity and low latency connectivity to devices. But Edge Compute is not about 5G. You can have Edge Compute without 5G. It's in fact, it's a bit of a myth that Edge Compute can't arrive until 5G comes because Edge Compute is something that is available to do today. And in fact, CenturyLink is deploying Edge Compute solutions by basically building fiber into enterprise locations and then housing compute at different areas of the network at the point that's most optimal for the solution. And there are a variety of wireless solutions that can be used in that campus environment other than 5G to connect wireless devices back securely and safely to that Edge Compute that sits there. But it seems like it still should be or at least looks like it could be a game changer in what it's going to allow in terms of, I guess, advancing Edge Compute. But you're still going to provide new capabilities and new reach, new functionalities that don't currently exist. I take Paul's point though, because there are other technologies like Wi-Fi 6, for example, which is basically the same thing as 5G. It just uses a different radio communications mechanism. But, and I also take your point that you can do Edge Compute today, absolutely. You can put computing into retail situations and you can have, I mean, we have tablet devices now. So, we have laptops. So we kind of have Edge Compute. We always have. It just now, now it has a name. Yes, that's correct. All right, so tell me before we let you go, Catalyst Award winner from Century League and VMware. Paul, first off, let's talk about what, how you assess that. What's the determination, the criteria for that? And then I'm going to let you crow a little bit Omar about receiving that award. But tell us about the Catalyst Award first. Yes, well we call it the Catalyst Award because when you think about it, a catalyst is something that excites a chemical process. Technically, that is the definition of catalyst. But Catalyst, in the way we view it, is something that we wanted to recognize a person or a company that we felt like was really driving innovation that was really solving a problem and working also collaboratively together with VMware and CenturyLink in solving some of these problems. And so we looked at GE Healthcare and really felt like in a place where certainly we have seen such great advances in healthcare administration and ability to save people's lives, and, oddly, medical errors is becoming an increasing amount of now the problems in terms of death rates because there's just, while we have so many ways to solve problems, so many ways to address it, that portion of what's causing deaths is actually on the rise. And so GE Healthcare is taking the technology that they're deploying and helping to solve that problem. That's why we wanted to recognize Omar and the company today. And that, an honor for you. I would assume you all are pretty proud of that. Yeah, absolutely, and thank you. And, yeah, I mean it was really fantastic to be recognized by our partners. And a great testimony to the team at GE Healthcare. You know, our team wakes up in the morning and our mission is to improve lives in the moment that matters. A lot of our technology is used in mission critical and the way we're able to deliver that to our customers relies heavily on our ability to leverage advances in technology and be able to improve our ability to deliver different applications for our customers. So it has actually been fantastic. The relationship has been tremendous for us. Where we have hosted our solutions in Centrelink, the level of support that we have received have really enabled us to deliver important applications for our customers and meet their SLAs and meet their clinical use cases and the needs of software uptime. So that has been tremendous for us. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Well, thanks for the time. Enjoy the show. Enjoy San Francisco. We've got good weather this week. That's right. Get out and enjoy that. Thank you, Paul and Omar. Back with more on theCUBE. You're watching our coverage here live in San Francisco at VMworld 2019.