 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back to everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017 with 100,000 of our closest friends, but we actually do have one of my friends here who I can't believe we haven't had on theCUBE since I think 2013, service down knowledge, just down the road at the Cosmopolitan. Brian Lilly, he is now the Chief Customer Officer in EVP Technology Services from McWinnix. Brian, that's always great to see you. Jeff, it is always a good thing to be on theCUBE, and I love NAB, love it. Yeah, so what do you think? You've been coming here for a while. What's kind of your takeaway? What's the vibe? Well, so the vibe, it feels as innovative and as exciting as ever. And I really think that people are seeing, we're starting to hit a tipping point where they're seeing what's possible, what's possible with the cloud, what's possible with increased collaboration. When I first started coming here a few years ago, saw very few of these kinds of projects. Now we're seeing tons of innovative approaches to using the cloud, using our facilities, using really some of our network providers that are really innovating around this vertical. Yeah, it's pretty interesting, Brian, because this is our first time for theCUBE being here and what's surprising me is how many of the macro trends that we see time and time again at all the other shows about increasing capacity, flexibility, democratization of data, democratization of assets, all these kind of typical IT themes that are being executed here within the media and entertainment industry both on the creative side, as well as the production side. That's right, that's very well said. I think this industry as really even more than many is very, very collaborative. Everything from acquisition to pre-production, production, post-production, delivery, it feels like a community that wants to share, wants to learn, sees that they don't necessarily own all the best ideas and that we're seeing some young, innovative startups from all over the world, everywhere from Europe to Asia, coming up with ideas that the big houses, the big players are starting to see as viable. And I do think, I think when you talk about it being maybe some of these IT trends, I think some of the secular trends, the fact that consumers want their content anytime, anywhere on any device, really if you work from the customer backwards, everybody else has to adjust to that. And we're parents, we see what our kids want and it's really driving I think the whole industry. And good stuff for you, I mean you guys at Equidex made a big bet on cloud long time ago. And the fact of the matter is, as we're surrounded with all this crazy hardware both in the production side, the data center side, no one's buying this, you don't just take the stuff home anymore and plug it in, it's just too big and too expensive. And as you said, I think what's interesting about the media businesses, everybody comes together around a project and the project's over and they go away. I mean, how many people has Quentin Tarantino employed directly? Probably not that many, but the guy kicks out a lot of big budget movies. That's right. I think when you think about the creation of a production like a QT movie, wherever that set is, it's ephemeral. I mean, you go, you set up and it's big data needs. It's high bandwidth, low latency. You've got to get the data in some cases centrally, but in some cases you're processing it at the edge, but it's very cloud-like. And we're seeing a lot of this unfold. We're seeing these players not only in the centers where it makes sense to consolidate, but we're actually seeing some of this kit show up in our data centers in a distributed mode where they say some information, some equipment we want to keep behind our firewalls on our premise, which could be an equinex cage or their own, but then I want to absolutely connect to multiple clouds. I want to use the tools in Azure, the tools in Amazon, the tools in Google, and others to further enhance our abilities. And so it's this truly hybrid best of breed. I got a lot of tools in my toolkit, some cloud, some on premise, and there's never been a better time to be in this industry. And you see a lot of industries, you guys have a lot of customers. How do you see kind of it compare? Are financial services, media entertainment, are they all kind of progressing pretty much down the same path at the same rate, or do you see some significant laggers or significant people ahead of the curve? Well, I would say the financial services is way ahead, to be frank. Financial services have been doing this for a long time. Like when we built equinex, it was really starting with the networks at the core, and the first vertical to take advantage of that was the financial services where they said, hey, I want low latency routes between New York and London, low latency routes between Chicago and New York. And so they've been doing that and then building communities of interest where they could reach all the folks in their digital supply chain on the financial services side, guys like Bloomberg and Reuters, they said, I can reach all my customers in one place and I can direct connect to them. So they built early. The content guys did see it right after that. Guys like Yahoo, and if you remember, MySpace. So it's wonderful to see Facebook video here. I mean, here's now Facebook, real time video live at NAB, and with a big presence. So I think content and digital media has been a little bit slower to move, but it's one of these ramps. And they over the last two years, I think they've been the fastest accelerating vertical using the cloud and interconnection to build their brand, to build their business. Right, it's interesting, because some of our other guys were talking about the theme, I guess last year here was a lot of VR. It's all about the VR theme. But now we're hearing about machine learning and metadata and a lot more kind of traditional themes, not necessarily just about the VR and the 360, to add more value to these assets, to be able to distribute them better, to have the metadata, to create an experience for that individual person, even within the context of a bigger asset, have all these small, is a pretty interesting trend. Yeah, it's spot on. I don't think, I mean, I think VR, virtual reality and augmented reality is the future. I mean, it's the future. I think what maybe people are realizing is, is that it's really early days, but data we have and this whole notion of data science and analytics that you can put around the customer experience in real time, in situ, they're like, we can do that now. Where virtual reality, the massive bound with the storage, the compute, the compute, because it's no longer that you're watching the movie in a third person, you are the movie, you are the experience, you're in it. And that's just going to require just massive compute that in my opinion, only the cloud can do. So I think it's a little bit further off, but I think VR and AR is the wave, it's the future. And certainly in the AR I think is really cool because there's so much potential there. So from a data center perspective, you guys are sitting right at the heart of this thing and you're taking advantage of these tremendous Moore's Law impacts on not only compute and store, but networking, I mean, it's got to be phenomenal to see the increased demands. I always think of the whole Microsoft Intel, you know, back in the day, you get a better microprocessor, well, Microsoft's OS eats up another 80% of that one back and forth, but now we're really hitting huge, huge efficiencies in these core components that are enabling ridiculous scale that you could never even imagine before. I think that the Intel, Microsoft example or analogy is a really, really interesting one because, you know, in fact, when you look at companies like Mesosphere and Google's Kubernetes and these others that are, they're calling themselves, you know, the data center operating system, which is operating containers and with the move to microservices and all this technology that's coming that's making compute more ubiquitous, where you can run workloads anywhere. The fact that we sit, we feel privileged because we sit in the middle of not only all the networks, but of the clouds, the multi-cloud. And if you're a, whether you're a producer or you're in production, you're in delivery, you're an over-the-top guy, where you want to be is where you can connect very directly with low latency and high security and high reliability to the cloud you need, to the networks you need, to the partners you need. And I think that's just a powerful thing. Now the operating system is, is how do we make that easy? Like how do we, you know, create the easy button for these folks to access these resources? And what's the value we provide as that neutral, in the middle provider that brings people together? You know, I was at an event last night and DPP, Mark from DPP was there and we were talking about the question of who owns this new business model? He said he saw a panel on Sunday because it's transforming in front of us. And it's an excellent question. I don't know who owns it, but I know we see it and we're seeing people talk about it. I think the community owns it. They own what this new business model looks like and so we're just listening to our customers and letting them lead us to the place we need to go. Interesting. So we're running a little long time, just want to get kind of what are your priorities for 2017? Well, priorities in this area is really to make cloud ubiquitous globally. It's to push that out to the edge, make that available in as many markets to as many customers as we can with our big partners, with Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Oracle and all the rest. That's a big priority. Second is this notion of the easy button. How can we add value? How can we take friction out of the system to make collaboration and communication between this industry that much easier, that much faster? I mean, those are two big ones in particular here and I'm delighted to see this vertical just taking off with the cloud. Yeah, pretty exciting times. It's a great time. All right, I got an embarrassment before I let you go, Brian. Never have I met an executive that takes such pride in losing good employees to better jobs. I just want to compliment you on that. I know you take pride in seeing CIOs all over the industry that were once your charges so I just want to give you a shout out for that. All right, he's Brian Lilly. Keep working for him. Don't go take the other CIO job just yet, but if you do, he'll be happy to mentor you. All right, thanks for stopping by. He's Brian Lilly, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks, Jeff. Good to see you, buddy. Thanks. Well done.