 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at NAB 2017, on day three from Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. Excited to introduce you to our next guest, Jim Blakely, the GM of the Visual Cloud Division at Intel. Hey Jim, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you, it's good to be back. Great to have you here again, you are a CUBE alumni. You've been at NAB, you said this is your third fourth year, talk to us about from a cloud perspective, technology perspective, what are some of the trends that you've seen really emerge as leading technologies? Well I would say this year particularly, there's a much more focus on the things that are near and dear to Intel's heart, which are virtualization, IP networks, the drive to move all the workflows to standard compute platforms. That's sort of the thing we've seen in many, many industries over the years, and we've talked about it here before at NAB, but this is the first time that I'm really seeing it taking hold, really exciting, yeah. So talk to us about Visual Cloud, what are the benefits of Visual Cloud for studios, for broadcast news, for streaming companies, producers? Yeah, there's two real values. One is it's just a simplification of the infrastructure in the long term, it just makes it easier to procure equipment and easier to run a software-based infrastructure as opposed to having to do it all with purpose-built hardware, which this industry currently does use a lot of. But the other thing that's really critical is it starts to open up the opportunity for new types of experiences, things like augmented reality, virtual reality, what we refer to as media analytics, which is the application of artificial intelligence to media, and those sorts of capabilities give you the ability to tell a story in a way that you weren't able to tell it before. Talk to us about how a movie studio, speaking about storytelling, which sometimes technology, in a long time, it's phenomenal, but there are times we see where it actually sort of gets in the way of storytelling and you sort of lose. So we were talking to some folks the other day here, I think on Monday, about really leveraging analytics to determine even sort of the sequence of a movie trailer, how much time should the lead actor or lead actress be on camera in a trailer? Give us maybe an example of a studio where they're really leveraging analytics to improve the viewing experience, where nowadays a lot of the younger audience isn't going out to the movie theaters because they're used to having access on tablets, mobile devices, et cetera. Yeah, I guess I haven't seen a lot of it. I've seen a few of the studios that are doing work in that area. We do see also research happening at some of the bigger universities, particularly those that are tied to the studios. Maybe USC, with their ECC. We just actually announced here a collaboration, what's called an Intel Science and Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford that is doing research in this area and they're partnered with some of the UC schools to be able to do those sorts of analytics, to be able to sort of almost understand how certain directors change scenes, where how many shots from this angle, how many shots from that angle, coloring, and so forth. And using the analytics to sort of understand how another story was told in order to apply it in the creation that they're making today. So interesting, so cloud adoption, you're seeing that on the rise maybe in media and entertainment whereas some of the things like analytics maybe are more emerging? It's much earlier, it's much earlier, both for the technology behind artificial intelligence, media analytics, deep learning has come on enormously over the last couple of years and it's being applied very heavily in this space. But it's still early in terms of real applications where you can see a real result from it. So the amount of data and content that studios, broadcast news, streaming companies are generating, we're talking petabyte scale, media archives, how do studios, broadcast news, et cetera, how do they evolve their IT infrastructure to get to the visual cloud? What's that journey like? Yeah, so there's a few things to focus on in that. There's sort of how do you manage your compute and applications in that environment? What sort of infrastructure do you have? And that's where we sort of move to a standard virtualized infrastructure really makes sense. We've seen that in a lot of different industries that you first have to make the decision that you're going to move to that sort of an infrastructure. Then networking becomes very critical because especially in this industry because the size of the data is so large, moving it from place to place becomes one of the big constraints. So you need to think through your networking infrastructure that can lead you to a shift from SDI over to IP-based networks and give you much more flexibility both within your environment but also to move things out into cloud environments, service provider environments or other services that you can get access to. And then of course, storage is a huge portion of the transformation. In traditional storage systems from the traditional vendors they're great for file-based storage. That typically is the way we see people do it. More and more a lot of those platforms are also built out of standard hardware, standard equipment but really building an expertise on how to operate your cloud infrastructure across those three domains as the critical first step. And where's the conversation typically? Is it with IT? Is it with the business? Do you see those two sides aligning to facilitate and plan this journey together? Yeah, over time, yeah, the initial, frankly the initial seeds usually come out of the CTO office or whoever is looking at the edge of technology and pushing the transformation. And in companies that listen to their CTO which not all companies actually do that but the CTO typically goes through an exploration process understanding what the technologies are and how to apply it in their particular space. And then as that learning takes place through proof of concept through testing, evaluation, vendor cooperation, learning from peers in the industry that's how it begins to deploy. We were talking the other day to a guest who was driving large scale rendering through the cloud. How can visual cloud enable this large scale rendering these workloads that studios are now? It already is. Most of the large render farms are in fact large clouds and they're made up of servers that are tied together often with a special purpose network that gives you really good performance to share between them but effectively they are clouds specifically set aside for rendering. And some of the open source software like RenderMan that's in that space has facilitated the ability of people who may not have been creators of rendering farms to be able to pick it up and do it fairly quickly. You mentioned storage, cloud, compute. Tell us a bit about what Intel is doing on the Alliance's side to enable visual cloud. Yeah, so Intel has always been an ecosystem player. We don't typically sell direct to most people. So 100% of my job or 90% of my job is making sure that our relationships are in place with the equipment providers, the systems providers, the solution providers, people like Ericsson, Harmonic, Cisco, as well as many of the smaller players to really help them adopt the technologies, go through this journey themselves as they transition their products from more purpose built systems to open standards cloud oriented systems. And so we act as both a technical advisor to them and of course if you've seen any of Jim Parsons recent Intel ads, Intel is 98% of the cloud infrastructure, so. So one of my favorite shows is the big big three. So from a perspective of industries, obviously here at NAB, entertaining in media, as we look at a lot of companies like NVIDIA, for example, who's really, and a lot of companies like them and others across industries that are starting to leverage technology for social impact, almost every company these days is a tech company. What other industries do you work with that are great candidates for visual cloud that are generating a tremendous amount of video content besides media? Yeah, well I think the healthcare environments are very big, not so much from the video creation but in terms of image processing and being able to look at medical images and CAT scans, great 3D models out of all the data sets that they have so that they can manipulate and view them and make diagnosis off of them. That's a big industry. The other one that we think, particularly for virtual reality and augmented reality will be education. So both in terms of the typical K through 12 and college but also enterprise-based training. So if you're trying to learn how to assemble a new machine, you could do that assembly through a virtual augmented reality system. And it scales much better than having to have everybody get their own machine to work on. Absolutely. Well Jim, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE again. It's great to have you back on the program and we hope you have a great rest of your day three at NAB. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here. Absolutely, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE again we're live in Las Vegas from NAB 2017. Stick around, I'm Lisa Martin, we'll be right back.