 Okay, we're back here at NAB, live from the Intel Studio Experience, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecaster. We go out to the events and talk to the smart people we can find, extract the signal from the noise, and I'm joined with Lori Udu-Hill from Dell, James Siegel from Edgecast Network, and Keith Wimes from Elemental. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, Dell Deliver, Lori, what does Dell Deliver and what does it mean? So, Dell Deliver is basically a solution that we're offering to the marketplace, and specifically focused on telecommunication, media and entertainment customers, and service providers in particular, the ability to have an end-to-end platform by which they can take all various types of endpoints of content, take it through the solution, be able to encode, transcode, do whatever they have, massage they have to do the data in order to deliver it out to the network. Because if you think about today, that the problems that service providers are facing is that there are multiple endpoints of data from video to texting to structured data, and video has become quite the significant trouble, a problem they're dealing with, and so they need to have ways in which they can not only take that data in, but then we've got multiple endpoints and devices. It's no longer just a PC. There's 20 endpoints at times and they need to be able to stream the data. On siliconangle.com we started a new section called DevOps, and I'll see, Dell is actually a sponsor of that, different group, it's a hyperscale group within Dell, really doing some amazing things around these large-scale infrastructures around like the Facebooks of the world and the startups, and last night Mark Hopkins and I as editor at SiliconANG we're talking about, there should be another section called NetOps because NetOps is kind of in the same boat with evolving from the CDN world where network operations and development are kind of converging where you need kind of flexibility in time to market and you need real-time capabilities. You cannot be slow or down, you gotta be real-time. So Jim, tell us about NetOps concept. Is it, how real is it, is what's going on in the network slash development of the networks, topologies out there, and some of the critical factors that are out there? Sure, so Edgecast is one of the world's largest content delivery networks. We power about 4% of the internet and have 4,000 customers running on our network today. I'd say that the demands of the consumer out there, the multiple devices, the broadband penetration, and then the complexity of the websites where you've got more apps, more software downloads, more rich media is causing a network congestion that's pretty remarkable. And so we're at this point where the service providers, the networks are really struggling to figure out how they can scale in real-time to support this massive demand. At the same time, they're figuring out what's the revenue model here. They're in the middle. They're charging users for access to the internet. They're charging, or companies like ours are charging content owners for the ability to speed and scale their sites. And they're in the middle of trying to figure out who's gonna pay for all this. So I think the combination of Dell Elemental and Edgecast going together into the service provider and saying we can figure out this network problem for you. We can scale your network. We can do so quickly. We can do so cost effectively. That's really the problem that we're all trying to solve together. You mentioned revenue model. I mean, the Netflix CEO called out Comcast this morning around net neutrality. And so there's a lot of obviously business factors. The stakes are high in this business. The content business, whoever you look at it, whichever perspective. But talk about the complexities. I mean, CDNs were built on the notion of hosting images. Now you've got video, a lot of other complex computation and scale issues as well as tech. What's the core things that you're seeing out there? The trends that are driving the move to having smarter CDNs and smarter networks. Well, it's device driven, right? So you've got to be able to support all these different formats. One of the things that Elemental does is basically transform media to be ready for any device anywhere. And then we have to get it delivered to that end user device and make sure we recognize it. And it's getting more and more complex. Complex for the content owner to manage and control that content. And complex for us to figure out how to best optimally deliver it. You also think about the complexities of optimizing a hardware solution for this. One of the great things about the Intel computing platform and Dell is our preferred partner is that you can really rack and stack server after server after server. And you can optimize the output in data centers much more efficiently that you can with some of the other solutions that are out there on the market. So we've seen that if you really take smart software and you put it on really, really good computing hardware that you can really sort of make fungible and extend the capabilities of, you can do so much more and so much more quickly. Laurie, talk about commodity hardware. I mean, it's been a term that's been banded around. Commodity hardware implies kind of off the shelf components. Dell obviously made a huge business in that in the servers, you know, rack and stack. But now, you know, it gets complicated. So commodity servers is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that you can do anything with it. But software has always been the enabler. Talk about what's happening with the software side of it. How does Edgecast and Elemental play into Dell Deliver? Because at the end of the day, to do those things, you got to be pretty smart with the gear and you got to have good, I don't want to say OS-related features, but like net compatibility and some key intelligence software. What do you guys say to that? Sure, so the heart and soul of Dell Deliver is the software solutions that we choose. So if you think about the hardware infrastructure that is beneath it is setting up the platform, certainly you could say it's commodity hardware, but what we've done is we've looked at what are the unique capabilities that are needed to deliver a unique value prop and we've added that capability to the hardware, but the heart and soul of the actual solution and the value to the customer comes in the software, which is why we have chosen in order to get to the marketplace faster is to partner with world-class partners like Edgecast and Elemental to be able to drive the solutions that are relevant today versus taking 12 to 18 months of product development to create those on our own. So it's an integral part of what we do and our strategy moving forward and the solutions that you'll see us taking to market will be very much partner-driven and very much solution overlay and Dell as a company in general is focused on solutions moving forward, software acquisition, software partnerships because we know that drives the value. Well, being open has a lot of benefits. Keith, talk about Elemental, how they fit into the platform because you guys are actually partnering with Dell. Talk a little bit about what you guys do in the platform. Yeah, so we sit upstream of the Edgecast network so we do video compression technology, we're a software-based approach going on, we wouldn't necessarily call it commodity hardware but off-the-shelf hardware for sure and our proposition in the market is really one of unbelievable performance. As you look at the multi-screen world, typically you're coming out with anywhere from 20 to 25 different renditions of that video and that stresses the existing platforms that were out there in the early days of internet streaming. We're able to handle that level of complexity and that level of performance that was required in order to deliver to every different device out there whether it be tablet, mobile, over-the-top scenarios to a set-top box or to a smart TV. Yeah, we're going to have new tech on after this interview and the CTO and anyone can stream now. Obviously, we're a new company, it was based because of the technologies that like new tech and others. But the problem just gets more complicated when you think about the endpoints. So whether it's Xbox, mobile, iOS, Android, Roku, there's a ton of different diverse platforms. How do you guys deal with that? We deal with it by having a hybrid architecture underlying. We always have systems that have a combination of CPUs and GPUs in them so that they can evolve as the industry evolves. So we're able to show, for instance, in our booth here, the encoding and decoding of 4K. And that's in an existing hardware platform. The evolution to Dash as a streaming technology is something that's very hot right now in the last five months or so. And that's something that we're able to enable very quickly because we have a software package that runs on very powerful hardware from Dell and Intel. Jim, how did the Edgecast Dell relationship come together? I mean, honestly, Dell's big name. But, you know, actually you look at other sources. I mean, Dell in particular, why Dell? So when we started the company about seven years ago, we did an evaluation of who is the best infrastructure provider to help us scale and build our CDN. We looked at performance, we looked at economics, we looked at availability and support. And the other thing is we looked at our competitors. So if you walk into a data center anywhere and you look at the cages with all the CDN servers stacked in them, and you go one after another after another, the one thing we saw consistently was it was Intel Compute. It were not proprietary boxes that somebody had bought from a streamer here or a streamer there. It was all Intel boxes stacked and racked. And so we figured that, you know, if the smartest guys in the business who control 100% of the industry know this, that's the path that we're going to go down. And we knew that we had to have locations all over the world. We have 25 POPs in every major metropolitan city and major interconnect point around the world. So we needed somebody who could also deliver servers there, support them, make sure that we had, you know, four-hour support contract where they can run in and swap a hard drive if they need to. And when you look, the world thins pretty quickly. There's not a lot of folks who can do that. And Dell became the clear choice when we looked at the support, we looked at the pricing and so forth. So we have thousands and thousands of Dell servers running our CDN, powering a marked percentage of the internet today around the world. And it just became clear that this partnership felt so good just from a customer vendor perspective. Let's take it to the next step. Let's see what we can do to really help service providers solve these problems. Okay, Lori, talk about the Dell, because we've been covering you guys on the hyperscale side of the market and also in the storage, in the cloud, and within these kinds of flexible solutions that people need to really have that robust, bulletproof, operational, but yet build on top of you. Why should customers look at Dell in this space? What's the differentiators for you guys right now? How do you feel about that? So it's interesting, every conversation I have with analysts or in any briefing, we talk about being open and they laugh and they say your competitors talk about being open, but we believe you're the only one who can truly talk about that and actually be real about it. And that is our differentiator. When you think about from an open standard capability and the fact that we're not on a proprietary stack and the open KPI and API ability to add and take away functionality in a day, in a week's notice, versus six months, provides, it provides a totally different world for the service providers to be able to get and monetize things to market much faster. Also our focus on energy, power, and density at a low cost solution. Right now with our new 12G line that just came out, there are none that can touch us from that standpoint when you combine all three with the price point. And so for us, open and leading from an open standard and continuing to do all of our development around that as well as being committed to power efficiency and energy and staying low cost. And that's a true advantage for us. And we have POCs with both of these partners today and customers and we're able to outperform our competitor, their competitor as a joint solution hands down. Yeah, I think the solution package is the new way. And that's what we were talking about last night about net ops, it's not so much dev ops in the sense of some of the developer worlds like node.js and things are going on in the cloud world but really, you can't really develop on a network as it goes down, everyone's in trouble. Someone gets fired. But the ops, it's really ops first, everything else second, operationally efficient and then also have the ability to bring the new solutions to market and not foreclose the upside by not having the ability to partner. So I think that's what you guys can bring to the table and I think that's great validation for Dell. Just on the final, as the clock's ticking down just one final question to go down the row here to end it out is, share with the audience out there your view of the marketplace, the content marketplace. Share an observation with the folks that they may or may not know that's happening here at NAB in the future of media around content. I'll go first on that one. One thing that I'm hearing in the show is a real specific event that's happening in the summertime and that's the Olympics and I think you're going to see over the next four or five months a lot of press and a lot of awareness raised around the sheer volume of content that's going to be distributed for the Olympics this year. It's going to be the most streamed event in history. It'll be interesting to see how well it goes, how different it is from just a few short years ago and also kind of some of the challenges that are going to be created there. I think in the CDN world it creates an enormous value for a strong CDN to come and actually help deliver all that content. It's going to be enormous and I think it's something really that shows kind of the future of what we'll be in terms of video streaming. So one thing I'll add that builds on that is because of the limited resources that are available out there and networks sort of straining under the demand, when you have events like the Olympics you need something to sort of help you deal with that spike capacity and so we've developed a technology and a lot of the servers providers are participating here where you can actually interconnect CDNs called open CDN and you can actually exchange capacity. So if you think about it you build out a certain amount of capacity for your steady state and then when you have a massive spike and it goes up you can federate out the need and the demand for that technology across multiple providers. So I'd say that that's a big trend in that the cloud has been a way to sort of spread load and now a lot of the service providers in the CDN and content space are looking for a solution that can allow them to spread load as well. Laura, we have 10 seconds. I would say that content is king, the consumer is king, it doesn't matter if it's in the enterprise space or if it's in the consumer space and we can see consumerization driving no longer that service providers have a choice, they have to get the content to multiple endpoints. Okay, content is king, watch the Olympics, network ops, ops networks, it's really changing the media landscape and a lot of good action and we'll be right back with our next guest at this break. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.com.