 Okay, we're here at Intel Forecast 2012 for siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv, CUBE Conversations, and I'm joined with Marvin Wheeler, the chairman of the Open Center Data Alliance, and now I don't know what your official title is Verizon, you were, what's your, what's your official title? Well, so, so at the conclusion of the the acquisition when TerraMark was acquired by Verizon, I stayed on for a couple months and then I kind of stepped out and but it was a it was something that was mutually discussed and and everything was good. How long ago was that? So that was August of this past year and it's been about nine months now where I'm kind of spending time trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. So it's been fun. Okay, great. So we're here at Forecast. Marvin, you're an industry luminary, obviously very successful in the cloud business sold last company Verizon. Talk about the transition around the Open Data Center Alliance. It's real thought leadership and real demonstrative value that you guys offer with people dealing with data centers and data center folks love scale, they love SLAs, they love to operate their businesses, but now the cloud offers them new new opportunities and this challenges and this opportunity is there. Can you just talk about how that's changed your organization here? Yeah, so the good news here is that the the members, the core membership, which is the board and all the contributors and so on, they're on all the working teams. These guys are coming from organizations that have massive scale to their given their given issues. So I mean, these guys are running many multiple data centers all over the world. They have legacy processing that probably any one of them is as big of an IT shop as many of the cloud providers are out in the in the business today. So if you look at, you know, how, you know, what percentage of the overall compute and storage that's occurring in the industry, what percentage is out with say third party providers as partners? It's a very it's a fraction. And when you meet with the folks here, the 300 some odd members, it is there is so much, you know, 90% of what they do is not with a partner or a third party provider and so on and so forth. So you look at the just the tremendous greenfield that's out there for smaller companies that want to do innovative things and be able to partner with the large the large buyers. So, you know, the we talk about it, the membership is over $100 billion a year of IT buying power. So imagine, you know, just incremental growth within that is a huge industry. So being able to be with these guys and listen to them and understand exactly what's driving their buying behavior is just a it's a godsend. Let's talk about the buying behavior. So also the past a few years go back decade, maybe not that far, but the timeline has pretty much been a mandate server consolidation, standardized on servers, virtualization, sand storage, now network virtualization. So you've had that infrastructure mindset very server centric, kind of perspective. So you've kind of got data centers operating thousands of servers by thousands of applications, huge infrastructure. Now cloud comes around the promise of the cloud. Okay, so what in your mind are you seeing that's disruptive for those buyers? Because I'm a buyer. I'm saying to myself, Okay, I have an investment. I have done all these projects. What are you offering me from an economic and value perspective that I can't already get here? Because that's kind of the number one concern. And so so is it compliance? Is it shadow IT? Is it new services? Is it just for greenfield applications? Which is kind of a confusing. Could you help tease that out? Yeah, so you know, a couple things there that come to mind is number one, it's that, you know, if you go back, say even five years or 10 years, the IT department at when they were running large data centers, run a mainframes, all sorts of things. Most often, they were a cost center within the company. They were just they they their whole world was we're going to try to run this efficiently and so on and so forth. But they're in the background and they were a cost center. Today's CIO is an integral part of the marketing team. The the services that the marketing and sales and go to market organizations require require so much more agility than what was in the old days of the the old CIO IT environment. So what the cloud computing architectures do is allow today's CIO to stay up with all these innovative things. I mean, now you if you're a company and you're in business, and you don't have some sort of Twitter community, and you don't have a, you know, a Facebook community, and you don't have data being correlated between those two. And you don't you just you're behind in today's marketing and so on. And even retail, I mean, you know, they you go in stores and they they're doing things now that your smartphone will tell you as a buyer, you should go over to the other aisle, because there's a sale on something that you typically buy and and all this. But this is all coming from, you know, getting data from Facebook and Twitter and Groupon and every all these all these new, new things that are going on out there. So I believe that's really what the deal is, is that the cloud that the typical CIO it's very, very hard to stay up with everything that's going on. So you you have to be looking at these new cloud architectures, cloud providers, new app providers, and so on to bring them into your environment, because it's not yesterday's CIO world. We've been we've been talking on SiliconANGLE on the Cube since the past two years now, since you've been on you were part of our initial inaugural year of the Cube when you were talking with you at VMworld. But the conversation of consumerization of IT is driving a lot of this, bring your own device to work with big data. And ultimately, after all you talk about big data, consumerization of IT, all that stuff when it all settles down, it comes down to this business at real time. Seems to be the theme that's driving a lot more agility and speed. So IT has been slow. If you could, you need to dial to turn up the speed game for IT. Because of big data, because of the fact that point of purchase retail now smartphones, QR codes. So this is new. So during the server consolidation, downsizing this, doing all that things I talk about, well, during that time, this new stuff hits the table in the marketplace. So is that really what cloud's about? I mean, how do you talk to the big CIOs and now the C levels, not just CIOs, the CFO, the general counsel and the CEOs of these big companies are driving the change. Right? So a whole nother dynamics going on up to and including the CIO of the government itself is one of the, you know, these guys are some of the largest evangelists for needing the government to get the cloud technologies for the very reasons of cost savings, efficiency and agility. And that is what IT is going forward. And you know, to me, it's almost really the other way around it. That's what's coming. It's got to be cost savings, agility, large scale and, and an efficiency. And it just so happens that cloud computing is the thing that's that's helping to drive it. We're not for cloud computing. They still need to do all those things. It just wouldn't be as effective without it. It's an accelerant, really. We were talking with Caps early on, he's an analyst and, you know, we talked about shadow IT and shadow IT is just a symptom of slowness of IT. And what cloud can do is especially formalize shadow IT, because now they can move faster. With that, I want to ask you, because you have a unique perspective being, you know, working at an entrepreneurial capacity and working into the big company now with the data center alliance. What's the use cases right now that are the real deal that you can point to, to say, to your CEO buddies and people who are on the business side of the equation, who are mandating real time analytics, big data type techniques and applications and to match the speed of business with IT. What do you say to them when you talk to them and say, you know, Marvin, what do I do? I've got to get there. What should I be doing? What use cases do you pop out? Well, I particularly think the the transparency type use cases that we've got as well as the federation type things. One of the things that you even noticed here today in some of the early demonstrations earlier today is that now there's many options for the CIO and the CEO, whoever to say, we're going to go commit to this cloud technology without having to go into like a siloed environment. So you see them today demonstrating that one console can allow somebody to put, say, developer workloads on Amazon, maybe some more highly secure ones on Terramar, federal cloud, and it may, maybe there's some other stuff they want to put out on Rack Space or maybe they, wherever they want to put it. So what's ended up happening is you're not going to the CIO anymore and say in my way or the highway, you know, you have to take everything you're doing and put it into this box, one size fits all. Now they're able to say, well, my environment's much more dynamic than that. And the options are there for them to procure cloud resources using these common consoles that are almost like a ring bus, if you will, pointing at all these different cloud technologies. And I mean, it's almost like you, if whatever your problem is or whatever your own data requirements are, one of those cloud guys works. And if you can get to all of them with one pane of glass, it's not a complicated environment anymore like it used to be. You know, these guys would have to have five different management consoles for all that. Now they don't have to. And I think that that to me is going to be one of the biggest change agents for large scale adoption. Is that to know they can manage their environment, one one pane of glass, multiple clouds underneath it, multiple storage environments, multiple of everything you just mentioned, everything can you can have an asundry of providers, but all they are under one concept. I wanted to get your take on big data. Okay. Big data is about business transformation at the end of the day. Right. However you want to look at the technologies, you know, you got IT transformation, that's cloud, right? You got social and mobile also making some impact on real-time analytics. Right. And social being and mobile being about applications, right? And social being about real-time. But big data wraps that all together, right? So what's your take on big data as a disruptive force of good? Yeah, so this is another thing. So if you look at, you know, the variance of like how, you know, what are the reasons why this is so important and why it's so, it can be so good. It goes all the way from, in the federal world, defense, you know, intelligence to be able to, you know, there's, there's field forces out there that are doing things where they need a commander to be able to say, hit the button, say yes, go. That commander needs to have information at now, right now, real-time, that authorizes this field troops to go do whatever they have to do. So there's massive amounts of information coming in from sensors, from drones, for whatever. So you can take this one topic and there's this very highly, you know, national defense oriented answer, then you go all the way to the other side, which is for a retail, for any business, any, that all this information from Twitter, Facebook and all, getting all kind of brought together in an analytic form, allows them to target very specifically where they're going to go to market with their products and who they're going to market them to and things like that. So there's these... That's the future you're saying. Yes, and this is where the commercial side's going, but yet even, it's so critical that even onto the far left in this high, you know, in a defense industry... Specialized, highly specialized. It is, it's also very critical. So to me, when anything spans that, all the way across, you know it's here to stay and it's important. Yeah, and certainly disrupts, you know, the speed question because data warehousing and business intelligence, all right, we're at months and weeks and getting answers back. Right, right. Now, that needs in seconds and milliseconds. They need to know this buyer is in the store. You know, how do we make sure to maximize our, you know, what we get from that buyer while they're in the store? Because when they leave the store, it's probably over. We're totally on the same page there. That's our religion, big data we love that we think it's very disruptive. We think that actually highlights the cloud as a viable path to take advantage of compute and other things like flash memory, right, right, right. Well, real big data to me is as game changing as the PC revolution. I've said that on record many times that, you know, PC did put the productivity in the hands of the person, hold the paradigm. Big data is putting data in the hands of normal people, analysts, CEOs, anyone, machine data for IT, people data for business, military, so totally agree. Final question for you. I'm from South Florida. So, you know, we're fishing is in our background and they always have these comments about 90% of the fish are in 10% of the ocean. There's no one where that 10% is. So when the way you're describing it when you're in business, rather than troll the open ocean and be over top of the 90%, you need to be able to know how to get to the 10% and and be able to, you know, catch fish. Absolutely. We'd love to show you our little fish finder product that we built using big data. You're going to like that one. Final question just to kind of close the interview out. The Open Data Center Alliance has been around for a while. You know, the agenda has changed over the years and has evolved and the leadership is moving more towards use cases and with cloud and the things we were talking about these disruptive elements is creating a lot of change. What's on the agenda for the Open Data Center Alliance? What do you guys need to do to stay with this change and this new value is being created? What's your agenda and what's your plans to be successful? So, you know, if you look back, it's been about 18 months getting close at the end of the hit the fall, it'll be two years. And what's happened is gone from membership drive to organization to create working teams to publishing information. Then the next phase was getting the OEMs to come in and actually provide solutions based on these recommendations and use cases. And now, this next phase that's happening right now is that all this work that's being done by the working teams is being put and documented in forms that is usable by the CIO team for RFPs. So, now what you're going to see the next phase is this 300 member team beginning to send RFPs out to the provider and OEM community saying, this is what I want and the tools that we have on the website where you can just cut and paste language from the, you know, these use cases right into your RFPs, that is going to be kind of the final testimony to everybody that, no, in fact, this organization is very real that buying patterns are being greatly affected by the output of these working teams. And we're seeing it already. We're charting it and there's already been a series of RFPs let out by member companies that have literally take and cut and pasted the language right in. That's great for the members. Thanks for coming inside our Cube Conversations. This is the Intel Forecast 2012 with SiliconANGLE. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Appreciate it. Great. Cool.