 Okay, welcome back everyone, live coverage here with theCUBE. At Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, 2023, also AnsibleFest folded in as well. It's open source, it's cloud native, it's Edge, it's Compute, we've got two great guests here. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, Rob Stretch of the Analyst, breaking it all down. We've got Greg Ernst, corporate vice president, sales and marketing group, general manager for America's reason, for Intel, and top of phone, president of strategic partnerships. Gentlemen, thanks for joining theCUBE. Good to see you again. Thank you for having us, good to see you again. Got a CUBE alumni here, good first time CUBE alumni. Now you're in this distinguished alumni's family. There you go, I'm gonna get the techs, you like this. We're here at Red Hat Summit, Dell, Intel, Red Hat, working together, what's the relationship? You guys had big news here, so the appliance with Red Hat, that's a big wave. More compute, more servers, a lot more action. For people who want performance faster, faster, faster. What's the relationship, Dell, Intel, and Red Hat? Yeah, so as you said, Intel, we're the computing company, and continue to innovate, drive more compute, so that every company in the world can extract value from it, create products, services that help everyone. But we realized early in our history, a semiconductor by itself is, you can't extract the value. And so early in Intel's history, we made a decision, open source, open community, and partner ecosystem. And in our history, Dell, they're our largest customer, they're our largest technology partner, and Red Hat, everything we do, we start and drive with Red Hat as well. In order, first with Rail, now with OpenShift, first with private data centers, now public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. So Dell and Red Hat are key partners of ours. Yeah, well go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead. I say, look, it's great. I mean, we've obviously been partners a long time as I shared with everyone this morning. I mean, we've been a partner with Red Hat for 20 plus years, but we really feel like we've doubled down on the partnership over the last year or so, and that was a big announcement this morning, right? And so when we talk about double down, we talk about co-engineering and innovating new offers and solutions, and today we had a big announcement with our Apex Cloud for OpenShift, and we're really excited about that. Enabling our 30, 40,000 global sellers around the world to take this to our customers, our hundreds of partners. So yeah, I mean, with Intel, powered by Intel, with Red Hat, with Dell, there's three unbelievable brands and they're trusted, and we think we really have a good impact. Yeah, and with the big AI wave coming, you can just see more and more needs for having more faster servers. It was a time, you know, it was theCUBE's 13th season, doing CUBE interviews over the years. It was an era where the cloud was growing. Don't talk about speeds and fees. It's not about the hardware. I'm like, I'm a hardware guy. I love hardware. Come on. And then, oh, software is really the hardware. We're now in, we're past that now. You're seeing people acknowledge that the physics at getting now the lower physical layer with software, with silicon, with advanced compute, that's gonna really, that empowered the AI movement. Now with AI having all the horsepower, software and hardware at that level is a big deal. People care about it. Yeah. Oh, I didn't, so we love it. We're geeks, spin the propeller nonstop without hardware. But just one example right now, we launched our fourth generation Xeon a few months ago and it's got built-in accelerators for matrix math. I think the world's learning that AI performs really well on matrix math. We saw that a few years ago. We integrated those accelerators in and now that's one of the reasons why we work closely with Red Hat because well, Red Hat, what you're able to do is almost take a straw straight down in the CPU and make those accelerators accessible for all the applications that run on top. You and I were talking before we turned on the cameras around natural language processing. The accelerators that we're just talking about. 12x improvement for natural language processing in the Xeon. It's integrated in PyTorch. It's integrated in TensorFlow and that's why we love working with Red Hat because you all create that straw, like I said, and make those accelerators accessible. Great, that's a great call out, Todd. This brings up the point of the innovation up and down the stack again. Reminds me of the old OSI model that we're dating ourselves now, but physical to application layer. AI and capabilities will be embedded in every layer. You're seeing that obviously now, but it creates a partnership. You're seeing more partnerships, more integrations. You run strategic partnerships for Dell. What are some of the things that you see coming that are challenges and opportunities that you're going to help solve for customers as they realize, I have to have a hard and secure solution that performs great and enables this next wave. Yeah, look, I mean, as the world's gotten more complex and technology's moving so fast, it's clear that you need partnerships in order to be successful. And if you can go take the work as partners by integrating and innovating together, you're removing the work that our customers would have to do on their own. And that is the key, right? So as I shared earlier, the challenge that all of our customers have is that they are the key to the business succeeding or failing. And that means if they can't spend the majority of their time and energy and budget on maintenance, they got to work on strategic initiatives. And if we can offload that work by giving them an integrated turnkey offer and solution where they don't have to worry about it just works, it accelerates their time to market, it does it in a resilient, safe way, that enables them to spend time on the things that are important and strategic to them. And again, I'm going to bring this up as more of a tell sign as well. I think it's indicated how the future is going to go, especially with the edge and the intelligent edge. Your announcement with Red Hat, with the appliance, take a minute to explain that because I think this is a significant announcement here. It kind of gets lost in the AI hype, but it's blocking and tackling. It's an edge device, it's server, powerful. Yeah, I mean, Red Hat appliance. Yeah, basically we built a fully turnkey platform based on Red Hat OpenShift, fully integrated into Dell, software-defined storage. And the beauty of it is there's a lot of engineering that we have built between the Dell infrastructure and OpenShift, engineering that typically customers would have to go do. So what this allows customers to go do, they can rapidly deploy and start building out applications day one. They don't have to go build out that infrastructure themselves, they don't have to deploy OpenShift, it's all done for them. And then if they have issues with that, they just go to one company for support and it's seamless, it's resilient, it's compliant, it's all the things that you expect, but the reason why that's so important is all about trying to build apps much faster and do things much faster than you would traditionally done and hopefully that's the goal of what we're trying to deliver. So we're super excited about it. The partnership has been a great one, but we really doubled down on the partnership and obviously the long-standing partnership with Intel makes this to me super important. And back to your earlier question, ecosystem partnerships are the way of the future. You can't do things on your own and if you can do them with a strategic partner and you can bring that to our customers jointly, that to me is where you really differentiate yourself. Yeah, and I think that's a great point. The question I would have for you guys is, plus I agree by the way, if you believe that then the next question is, how do you make sure that they're enabled to be either sustainable or disruptive? I mean, that's classic, right? So I'm going to continue to innovate or I'm a new entrant, I want to build on top of it. Yeah, yeah. What would you say to that? From an actual enterprise. Enablement, okay, you got, I got a lot of players and a lot of ecosystem partners. Supports one, obviously one, but like. Well, what I love with what Delle and Rad had have done with us, the few challenges I hear from CIOs, IT all the time. One, there's a lot of value for them to have a single company manage this, service it, deploy it. And that alone, that Delle delivering that. The other thing I hear a lot of is despite everything that Red Hat does to build out the number of open shift developers, rail, administrators, there's still a shortage. And the skill set is rare. There's a lot of them, but there's not enough. And that's the second thing that I love that Delle's doing here. This is a great point, I mean, to interrupt you, but I just left a customer right before he came here and they were telling us their biggest issue is they don't have the right skills. And if we can help them go deliver a solution where they don't require as many skills, they can go change their skill sets and apply them to the things that are strategic important. And that, I mean, that's the key takeaway, right? Is again, allowing them to go focus on the things that are strategic and helping them retool and repurpose those skill sets. So I think you hit on a great point. I freeze them up to invest elsewhere. Yeah. Well, I want to ask Greg, this is your killer point with then you got, okay, security. You guys invested a ton in security, the fiscal layer. You tie that in with Red Hat security, software supply chain. I mean, you're a car manufacturer. You're going to have a hard top. You can then enable to bring their own foundation models in to the application workload. So you kind of decoupled that piece. And especially as it moves to the edge. And as we said earlier, multiple clouds, there's unintentional vulnerabilities that could be created by the users. And that's what Intel's worked with Red Hat and Dell. So how did it all come about? I mean, I just love this appliance idea of Red Hat. I could see deployment, you got built-in security from Intel, all the benefits that comes with those years of relationships. But as an app developer, it's out there and not a lot of configurations in the net. There's a note in the network, it's secure. I'm going to care about my app. It's going fast. How did it all come together? Just one day you guys drew it up on the board and said, let's do it. Yeah, that's it. You go deep into the cut. Go to the post. Run the edge up. You'll appreciate this. So many years ago, when I first joined EMC, which obviously is now Dell, I went on a sales call with Dick Egan, which is the EMC. And we were with a big bank at the time. And the bank said to Dick, how do you come up with your great innovation ideas? And he said, I never get in the way of a customer. Customer always comes back and say, I wish you could go do this. And we listen, we innovate, we iterate. And that's how we've always invented all of our new solutions. It's the same thing here. So we heard loud and clear from customers that they were looking for a way to accelerate the OpenShift platform powered by Dell and Intel technology. And so when you hear that, you're like, all right, how can we go do that? And that gets the ball rolling. And then you get the engineering teams together. You get alignment. You work as if you're actually one integrated engineering team. And then you put the power of the go-to-market behind it. And then it's not lost on the trust of the brands behind it. Because when you brought up AI, it's moving so fast. But to me, trust is going to be so important in this AI landscape. And when you have three brands like Intel, Red Hat, and Dell supporting these solutions, customers trust those brands because we've been here a long time and we're not going anywhere. I think what's also interesting about Apex and what Dell announced and the whole Apex line is being cloud adjacent and being near. I think with sovereignty and especially with AI and where you actually train your models, where is your data? You have France and others that are really clamping down on Austria. Is that a really a key component to this as well? So my opinion, compliance is a critical component to this. Compliance and security, data integrity, how you manage that, how you provide transparency to that are absolutely critical. And if you're big banks or big financial institutions, just as an example, you need to have that or you can't make those investments. So I completely agree with you. That is certainly important. And again, I think we're lucky because of the companies we have and the investments we've made in those areas, that what we build takes advantage of that. Well, I think the edge too, sorry. Oh, I was going to say one of the things that makes Dell unique that power edge server lineup but also the Dell EMC storage. And as you said that when it comes to data sovereignty, the location of the data and the storage and building the stuff and some of the blueprints that Dell brought to the solution, that's one of the things that it's complex for customers and they're going to see what the work Dell is done here with Apex with Red Hat. It's going to make their life easier. Yeah, and I think one of the other points to the Apex and the equation is cost. And not that I'm a repatriate fan, I'm not a repatriate. And I love the New England Patriots, look at me wrong. Yeah, you are embossed. Repatriation means cloud is going to still be there but now you got on-premise and edge and you look at cost of ownership. Would you guys are masters at it? I know that for a fact we're covering it. But when you add in like over provisioning concepts, you can look at certain use cases and say, I could rather have stack servers at the edge than cloud from a GPU or AI perspective because you kind of know what you need, right? And people are getting more out of hardware that's not in the cloud for certain use cases. That's not repatriation, that's just refactoring for cloud operation. So there's a whole trend going on now where people are starting to see, okay, I want a box, I want to have it stacked, I want to be at the edge or whatever for a use case. This is huge. If you're a business owner or a business, you don't care actually where the workload resides. This is as long as you get it when you want it at the cost of willing to pay for it. But if you're a CIO, you have to manage that. So you're almost a broker of these workloads, right? We're based on security, based on risk and cost, availability. And then you figure out this edge on premise, your data center, cloud, and then you have all that flexibility to decide where it goes. So if you can enable CIOs to make those trade-offs of where these workloads go based upon those requirements, but then the business can get what they want when they want it, then it works. And I think part of the whole solution is also the flexibility from a cost perspective, right? Because there is the pay-as-you-go component to it as well as that it is hardware and software and all of that performance. Is that, has that been a big key with the extended ecosystem? So outside of the hyperscalers and when you get to some of those other MSPs and things that are partnering with you on this? I think, yeah, it's a proven way that companies are managing the balance sheet these days. And so kudos to Dell to figure out the financial balance sheet ability to bring that on-prem mod or that same model to a hybrid motion as a pure cloud. Yeah, I think you have to have that flexibility. You got to give that flexibility of choice and funding and how you're making those financial decisions. And so yeah, I mean, that's the beauty of our APEX line. It provides that choice and flexibility. And I think that's just part of how you have to deliver any of your services or solutions today. Now on the Intel side, just processor-wise, is 4th Gen Xeon? I believe 4th. That's the 4th Gen. We didn't even confirm. Yes, 4th was the... What's under the hood? What's the big Intel piece here? That's the power. Is it the power and the solution? Well, it'll be, it'll start with our 4th Gen and then we'll expand it to our full portfolio Xeon products. One of the things that we've done unique, as I mentioned earlier with this generation, we've built in a lot of different accelerators. I talked to the Matrix Acceleration for AL. We've also done a lot with what we call QAT. So it allows compression, decompression, encryption. Dell takes advantage of that line as well. That's a huge benefit is you're moving data from one cloud to another cloud. You can imagine that the encryption of the data really saves cost on core count. Todd, when are we going to see this in markets? Are timeframe... So yeah, by second half of the year you'll see it in market as a timetable. So not too far off, right? And then there's certainly some things that we could do as a precursor in steps to take with customers today. So if they want to adopt now, there's some things we can share with customers today also. What was the big feedback you got from the announcement? That people, wait a minute, were they surprised? I mean, I was totally surprised. I was like, that's huge. Yeah, no, we've got an awesome feedback because it's funny as we're running Red Hat Summit here in Boston, we've got Dell Tech World in Vegas. So I'm keep going back and forth with my peers there. The feedback from customers, partners, analysts, everybody has been tremendous. Because back to the point, this is customers are looking for these types of solutions today when you take world leaders in innovation companies like Intel, Dell and Red Hat and you bring them together in a turnkey offer and you can deliver that and you can help them accelerate their time to market. That's what customers are looking for. So now the excitement's been great. And I saw Michael's interview Dave Vellante. I had foam oil because I wasn't there. Normally I do the interviews a little bit. You're stuck with us. Greg, you're going to appreciate this. When I interviewed Pat Gelson the last time I talked to him before he joined Intel, he was right on hybrid cloud from day one. I remember talking to him early on. He always said it's an architectural play. Certain industry inflection points. It's an architectural play. And I think when you start looking at the edge and how this is all going to come together, it's essentially a distributed computing paradigm. So we're kind of in this architectural game right now where, okay, we get how cloud works. We've got on premise with hybrid, check. Now you've got another multicloud slash edge kind of dynamic happening. I mean, this is going to be a compute. It's going to be a data game. All of that is right in you guys wheelhouse. What's your reaction to that? What's your view? Well, it's why we've been excited for the maturation that just incredible maturation of containers. Because containers and Kubernetes and an open shift, it's what really makes this all to your point, all possible and gives IT organizations a chance at actually fulfilling this hybrid cloud concept. It's why for our product line, we design first four hybrid cloud features, the capabilities that we put in there enable it. I mean, to Pat's early point, it's, and it takes a few years to design and produce a semiconductor. So when Pat was all in on hybrid cloud early, I guess no shock then he came back to Intel and said, all right, let's make sure the semiconductor product line supports it. We had some great conversations. I won't go into it, it's all in a meme already on the web. Kyle, to give you the last word, what's on your agenda, strategic partnerships, ecosystems as the future? What's your strategy? What do you got going on? Yeah, look, I think anything you're going to see us continue to go evolve our strategic partnerships where it's about trying to simplify what is a pretty darn complex world for our customers. And we talked a lot about the Dell tech world from ground to cloud, cloud to ground, anything you can do to make that seamless. So back to that example I gave where the business doesn't care, but how do we enable CIOs to go deliver a transformational infrastructure where they can manage workloads, regardless of their edge on-prem or in the cloud and make that completely seamless. You're going to see us invest in those areas with those partners to make that seamless. And the exciting thing AI is going to change the game. It's going to change it. It's going to make things go faster. Yeah, again. Yeah, again. Morris Law, they know what fast is. You guys know what fast is. Yeah. Greg, thanks for coming on. Morris Law's doing well, thank you. Greg, Todd, thanks for coming on. Thank you, I appreciate it. Okay, CUBE live coverage here, Red Hat Summit with Ansible Fest Folded. I'm John Furrier, Rob Stretcher. We'll be right back with our next segment after this short break.