 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation. I'm being joined today by Tom Burns, who's the Senior Vice President of Networking Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, welcome back to the Cube. Thanks Peter, it's great to be here again. Good to see you. So Tom, this is going to be a very, very exciting talk, conversation we're going to have. And it's going to be about AI. So when you go out and talk to customers specifically, what are you hearing them as they describe their needs, their wants, their aspirations as they pertain to AI? Yeah, we've always been looking at this as this whole digital transformation. Some studies say that about 70% of enterprises today are looking at how to take advantage of the digital transformation that's occurring. In fact, you're probably familiar with the Dell 2030 survey, where we went out and talked to about 400 different companies of very different sizes. And they're looking at all these connected devices at edge computing and all the various changes that are happening from a technology standpoint. And certainly AI is one of the hottest areas. There's a report, I think, that was co-sponsored by ServiceNow. Over 62% of the CIOs and the Fortune 500 are looking at AI as far as managing their business in the future. And it's really about user outcomes. It's about how do they improve their businesses, their operations, their processes, their decision-making, using the capability of compute coming down from a cost perspective and the number of connected devices exploding, bringing more and more data to their companies that they can use, analyze, and put to use cases that really make a difference in their business. But they make a difference in their business, but they're also, often, these use cases are a lot more complex. They're not, we have this little bromide that we use that the first 50 years of computing were about known process, unknown technology. We're now entering into an era where we know a little bit more about the technology. It's going to be cloud-like, but we don't know what the processes are because we're engaging directly with customers or partners in much more complex domains. That suggests a lot of things. How are customers dealing with that new level of complexity and where are they looking to simplify? You actually nailed it on the head. You know, what's happening in our customer's environment is they're hiring these data scientists to really look at this data. And instead of looking at analyzing the data that's being connected, that's being analyzed and connected, they're spending more time worried about the infrastructure and building the components and looking about allocations of capacity in order to make these data scientists productive. And really what we're trying to do is help them get through that particular hurdle. So you have the data scientists that are frustrated because they're waiting for the IT department to help them set up and scale the capacity that they need and infrastructure that they need in order to do their job. And then you got the IT departments that are very frustrated because they don't know how to manage all this infrastructure. So the question around, do I go to the cloud or remain on-prem? All of this is things that our companies or our customers are continuing to be challenged with. Now the ideal would be that you can have a cloud experience but have the data reside where it most naturally resides given physics, given the cost, given bandwidth limitations, given regulatory regimes, et cetera. So how are you at Dell EMC helping to provide that sense of an experience based on what the workload is and where the data resides as opposed to some other set of infrastructure choices? Well, that's the exciting part is that we're getting ready to announce a new solution called the ready solution for AI. And what we've been doing is working with our customers over the last several years, looking at these challenges around infrastructure, the data analytics, the connected devices, but giving them an experience that's real time, not letting them worry about how am I gonna set this up or management and so forth. So we're introducing the ready solution for AI which really focuses on three things. One is simplify the AI process. The second thing is to ensure that we give them deep and real time analytics and lastly provide them the level of expertise that they need in a partner in order to make those tools useful and that information useful to their business. Now, we want to not only provide AI to the business but we also want to start utilizing some of these advanced technologies directly into the infrastructure elements themselves to make it more simple. Is that a big feature of what the ready system for AI is? Absolutely. As I said, one of the key value propositions around making AI simple. We are experts at building infrastructure. We have IP around compute, storage, networking, infinity band, the things that are capable of putting this infrastructure together. So we've tested that based upon customers' input using traditional data analytics, libraries and tool sets that the data scientists are going to use already pre-tested and certified and then we're bringing this to them in a way which allows them through a service provisioning portal to basically set up and get to work much faster. You know, the previous tools that were available out there some from our competition, there were 15, 20, 25 different steps just to log on just to get enough automation or enough capability in order to get the information that they need the infrastructure allocated for this big data analytics. Through the service portal we've actually gotten it down to about five clicks with a very user-friendly GUI, no CLI required and basically again interacting with the tools that they're used to immediately rather than gate like in stage three and then getting them to work in stage four and stage five so that they're not worried about the infrastructure, not worried about capacity or is it going to work? They basically are one, two, three, four clicks away and they're up and working on the analytics that everyone wants them to work on and heaven knows, these guys are not cheap. So you're talking about the data scientists so presumably when you're saying they're not worried about all those things, they're also not worried about when the IT department can get around to doing it. So this gives them the opportunity to self-provision, am I got that right? That's correct, they don't need the IT to come in and set up the network to do the CLI for the provisioning to make sure that there's enough VMs or workloads that are properly scheduled in order to give them the capacity that they need. They basically are set with the preset platform. Again, let's think about what Dell EMC is really working towards and that's becoming the infrastructure provider. We believe that the silos of server storage and networking are becoming eliminated that companies want a platform that they can enable those capabilities. So you're absolutely right, the part about the simplicity or the simplifying the AA process is really giving the data scientists the tools they need to provision the infrastructure they need very quickly. And so that means that the AI or rather the IT group can actually start acting more like a DevOps organization as opposed to specialists in one or another technology. Correct, but we've also given them the capability by giving the usual automation and configuration tools that they're used to coming from some of our software partners such as Cloudera. So in other words, you still want the IT department involved making sure that the infrastructure is meeting the requirements of the users. They're giving them what they want, but we're simplifying the tools and processes around the IT standpoint as well. Now we've done a lot of research into what's happening in the big data now is likely to happen in the AI world. And a lot of the problems that companies had with big data was they conflated or they confused the objectives, the outcome of a big data project with just getting the infrastructure to work and they walked away often because they failed to get the infrastructure to work. So it sounds as though what you're doing is you're trying to take the infrastructure out of the equation while at the same time going back to the customer and saying wherever you want this job to run or this workload to run, you're going to get the same experience irregardless. Correct, but we're going to get an approved experience as well because of the products that we've put together in this particular solution combined with our compute, our scale out, NAS solution from a storage perspective, our partnership with Mel and Ostrman, Infinity BAN or Ethernet switching capability. We're going to give them deeper insights and faster insights. The performance and scalability of this particular platform is tremendous. We believe in certain benchmark studies based upon the Resnick 50 benchmark we perform anywhere between two and a half to almost three times faster than competition. In addition, from a storage standpoint, all of these workloads, all of the various characteristics that happen, you need a ton of IOPS. And there's no one in the industry that has the IOPS performance that we have with our all flash Isilon product. The capabilities that we have there, we believe are somewhere around nine times the competition. Again, the scale out performance while simplifying the overall architecture, very, very critical. So as we think about where this solution goes and where Dell EMC as a partner goes in this burgeoning and increasingly crucial space of AI, how do you regard or how do you think customers are going to be looking to you in a couple of years? For example, with that portal for data scientists, just be a portal that's focused on provision or do you anticipate the ecosystem getting stronger? I think the ecosystem will continue to get stronger. And I think that leads to kind of our third value proposition and that is we're building a team of experts. We have a services organization that helps customers in the implementation of these particular projects, not just provisioning of the infrastructure. We have a spectacular lab that we've built based upon the experiences that we have with our customers. So we can jointly look at some of these particular areas with our capability and our resources in our labs along with the customer. And then obviously we'll continue to do training. We have partnerships with companies such with the NVIDIA and so forth that helps companies build up the AI expertise within their particular space of their businesses. So it's not just about us becoming the infrastructure provider. It's also being seen as an expert in the industry and helping them go through this digital transformation, this journey of being able to use artificial intelligence and deep learning to truly help their business overall from the outcome. I once had a CIO tell me that in my world, the infrastructure must do no harm. That's true, that's true. Don't fix what's not broken or something. But the truth of the matter is, is that the way technology is moving today, CIOs are really challenged with really moving to kind of this future data center, software defined everything, the capability of again eliminating the silos and the management and people that are related to those silos and building a platform so that you can enable new applications, new workloads, new use cases, very, very quickly. That's really what the digital transformation is all about and that's what Dell EMC is very focused on. And nowhere is that more important than crucial new kinds of workloads like AI. Get to the outcome, don't screw around with the piece parts in between. Correct, let us do that. Let us do the testing, let us do the certifications, let us provide already proven libraries and tool sets that they're used to using. Let us jointly as a community improve on this provisioning portal so that it makes it even easier for the data scientists to focus on what they're really good at. And that's building the use cases, the algorithms, the various things, the models that help every vertical market. We've seen different use cases in healthcare, automobile, transportation, manufacturing, such as fraud and anomaly detection, the capability to look at object recognition, et cetera. I think these are going to continue to evolve over time. And we've got a host of customers that are already actively starting to work on these particular areas and they're already seeing tremendous business benefits. Tom Burns, Senior Vice President of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Thank you very much.