 Live from Midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data, New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem sponsors. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in New York, this is theCUBE here in Manhattan for Big Data NYC's three days of coverage. We're on day three. Things are starting to settle in, starting to see the patterns out there. Obviously it's Big Data week here in conjunction with Hadoop World, formerly known as Strata Conference, Strata Hadoop, Strata Data, soon to be Strata AI, soon to be Strata IoT. Big Data, Mike McKay, who's the global Big Data practice lead at Dell EMC. We've been in this world now for multiple years and what a ride it's been. Yeah, it has. It's been really interesting as the organizations have gone from their legacy systems, they have been modernizing and we've sort of seen Big Data 1.0 a couple years ago, Big Data 2.0 and now we're moving on sort of the what's next. And it's interesting because the Big Data space has really lagged the application space. You talk about microservices based applications and deploying in the cloud and stateless things. The data technologies and the data space has not quite caught up. The technologies there but the thinking around it and the deployment of those, it seems to be a slower, more methodical process. And so what we're seeing a lot of enterprises is the ones that got in early and have built out capabilities are now looking for that, how do we get to the next level? How do we provide self-service? How do we enable our data scientists to be more productive within the enterprise? If you're a startup, it's easy, right? You're somewhere in the public cloud, you're using cloud-based APIs, it's all fine. But if you're an enterprise with the inertia of those legacy systems and governance and controls, it's a different problem to solve for. Let's just face it. We'll just call it space. Total cost of ownership is out of control. Hadoop was great but it was built for something that tried to be something else. And that's good hustle because we need to decentralize and democratize the incumbent big data warehouse stuff. But let's face it, Hadoop is not the game anymore, it's everything else around it. So we've seen that a couple years old. It's about business value right now. That seems to be the big thing, the separation between players that can deliver value for customers and show a little bit of headroom for future AI things that've seen that and have the cloud on-premise play. Right now, to me, that's the call here. Would you agree? I absolutely see it. It's funny, you talk to organizations and they say, we're going cloud, we're doing cloud. What does that mean? Can you even put your data in the cloud? Are you allowed to? How are you going to manage that? How are you going to govern that? How are you going to secure that? So many organizations, once they've asked those questions, they've realized maybe we should start with the model of cloud on-premise and figure out what works and what doesn't. How do users actually want to self-serve? What do we templatize for them? And what do we give them the freedom to do themselves? And they sort of get their sea legs with that and then we look at sort of a hybrid cloud model. How do we be able to span on-premise, off-premise, whatever your public cloud is in a seamless way? Because we don't want to end up with the same thing that we had with mainframes decades ago where IBM had the best, it was the fastest, it was the most efficient, it was the new paradigm. And then 10 years later, organizations realized they were locked in, there was different technologies. The same thing's true if you go cloud-native. You're sort of locked in. So how do you be cloud agnostic? How do you get locked in a cloud-native? You mean with Amazon? Or any of them, right? So they all have their own APIs that are really good for doing certain things. So Google's TensorFlow happens to be very good. Amazon EMR, but you build applications that are using those native APIs, you're sort of locked. And maybe you want to switch to something else. How do you do that? So the idea is to- That's why Kubernetes is so important right now. That's a very key workload and orchestration container-based system. That's right. So if you leave a containerization of workloads that you can define in one place and deploy anywhere is the path forward, right? Deploy them, on-prem deployment, a private cloud, public cloud, it doesn't matter the infrastructure. Infrastructure's irrelevant. Just like Hadoop is sort of not that important. So let me get your reaction on this. So Dell EMC also, you guys have been a supplier. We've been, you know, the leading supplier now with Dell EMC across the portfolio of everything from Dell computers, servers and whatnot to storage EMCs, run the table on that for many generations. Yeah, people nipping at your heels like pure, okay, that's fine. I'm sure it's still storage, it's storage. You got to store the data somewhere. So storage will always be around. Here's what I heard from a CXO. It's the pattern I hear, but I'll just summarize it in one conversation and then you can give a reaction to it. John, my life is hell. I have application development, investment plan. It's just boot up all these new developers, these new DevOps guys. We're going to do open source. I got to build that out. I got to try to get DevOps going on. That's a huge initiative. I got the security team. I'm unbundling from my IT department into a new different center reporting to the board. And then I got all this data governance crap underneath here and then I got IoT over the top and I still don't know where my security holes are. And you want to sell me what? So that's the fear. That's right. Their plates are full. How do you guys help that scenario? You walk in. I see security is pretty much, you know, important obviously to see that, but how do you walk into that conversation? Yeah, it sort of stopped the madness, right? And all of that. This is all critical. Every room in the house is on fire. It is. And I got to get my house in order. So what you're coming to me would better not be hype. TensorFlow, don't give me this TensorFlow stuff. I want real deal. I love TensorFlow, but that doesn't put the fire out. They just want Spark, right? I need to speed up my ingest. So how do you help me? So what we do is we want to complement and augment their existing capabilities with better ways of scaling their architecture, right? So let's help them containerize their big data workloads so that they can deploy them anywhere. Let's help them define centralized security policies that can be defined once and enforced everywhere so that now we have a way to automate the deployment of environments and users can bring their own tools. They can bring their data from outside, but because we have intelligent centralized policies, we can enforce that. And so with our Elastic Data Platform, we are doing that with partners in the industry, Blue Talent and Blue Data. They provide that capability on top of whatever that customer's infrastructure is. How important is it to you guys at Dell EMC on partnering? I know Michael Dell talks about Alzheimer's, so I know it's important, but I want to hear your reaction. Down on the trenches, you're in the front lines providing the value, pulling things together. Partnerships seem to be really important. Explain how you look at that and how you guys do your partners. You mentioned Blue Talent and Blue Data. That's right. Well, I'm in the consulting organization. So we are on the front lines. We are dealing with customers day in and day out and they want us to help them solve their problems, not put more of our kit in their data centers on their desktops. And so partnering is really key and our job is to find where the problems are with our customers and find the best tool for the best job, the right thing for the right workload. And you know what? If the customer says we're moving to Amazon, then Dell EMC might not sell any more compute infrastructure to that customer. They might, we might not, right? But it's our job to help them get there and by partnering with organizations, we can help that seamless and that strengthens the relationship and they're going to purchase. So you're saying that you will put the customer over Dell EMC? Well, the customer is number one to Dell EMC. Net promoter score is one of the most important metrics that we have. Just want to make sure to get on the record. And that's important because Amazon, you know, we saw NetApp, I got to say, give NetApp credit. They heard from customers early on that Amazon was important. They started building into Amazon support. Some people say, are you crazy? VMware, everyone's like, hey, you capitulated by going to Amazon. Turns out that was a damn good move. Look at Gelsinger, look at VMworld. They're going to own the cloud service provider market as an arms dealer. I mean, you would have thought that a year ago, no way. Then when they did the deal, they said, we've really smart leadership in the organization. Obviously, Michael is a brilliant man. And it sort of trickles on down. And it's customer first, solve the customer's problems, build the relationship with them, and there will be other things that come, right? There will be other needs, other workloads. We do happen to have a private cloud solution with Virtustream. Some of these customers need that intermediary step before they go full public with a hosted private solution using a Virtustream. All right, so what's the final question? What's the number one thing you're working on right now with customers? What's the pattern? You get the stack rank, your requests, your deliverables where you spend your time. What's the top things you're working on? The top thing right now is scaling architectures. So getting organizations past, they've already got their first 20 use cases. They've already got lakes, they got petabytes in there. How do we enable self-service so that we can actually bring that business value back, as you mentioned, bring that business value back by making those data scientists productive? That's number one. Number two is aligning that to overall strategy. So organizations want to monetize their data, but they don't really know what that means. And so within a consulting practice, we help our customers define and put a roadmap in place to align that strategy to their goals, the policies, the security, the GDPR, the regulations. You have to marry the business and the technology together. You can't do either one in isolation or ultimately you're not going to be efficient. All right, and just your take on big data NYC this year. What's going on in Manhattan this year? What's the big trend from your standpoint that you could take away from the show? Besides it becoming a sprawl of, you know, everyone just promoting their wares. I mean, it's a big hype show it'll rally it does, but in general, what's the takeaway from the signal? It was good hearing from customers this year. Customer segments, I hope to see more of that in the future. Not all just vendors showing their wares. Hearing customers actually talk about the pain and the success that they've had. So the Barclay session where they went up and they talked about their entire journey. It was a packed room, standing room only. They described their journey and I saw other banks walk up to them and say, we're feeling the same thing. It's the highly competitive financial services space. We had Paxata's customer on the standard bank. They came up with their journey and how they're wrangling, automating. Automating is the big thing. Machine learning, automation, no doubt. If people aren't looking at that, they're dead in my mind. And that's what I'm seeing. That's right. And you have to get your house in order before you can start doing the fancy gardening and organizations aspire to do the gardening. I couldn't agree more. You got to be able to drive the car. You got to know how to drive the car if you want to actually play in this game. But it's a good example. Got to get the house in order. Rooms are on fire right now. Put the fires out, retrench. That's why Private Cloud's kicking ass right now. I'm telling you right now, Wikibon nailed it in their true Private Cloud survey. No other firm nailed this. They nailed it and it went viral. And that is Private Cloud is working and growing faster than some areas because the fact of the matter is there's some bursting to the cloud, some great use cases in the cloud, but people have to get the ops right on premise. That's right, yep. I'm not saying on premise is going to be the future. Not forever. The stack and rack operational model is going cloud model. That's absolutely happening. That's growing. You agree? Absolutely, we see that pattern over and over and over again. And it's the Goldilocks problem. There's the organizations that say we're never going to go cloud. There's organizations that say we're going to go full cloud. For big data workloads, I think there's an intermediary for the next couple of years where we figure out operating roles. It's evolution. It was fun about the market right now and it's clear to me that people who try to get to a spot too early, too many just economies of scale, let the evolution to Kubernetes looking good off the tee right now. Docker containers and containerization in general has happened, happening, DevOps is going mainstream. So that's going to develop. While that's developing, you get your house in order and certainly go to the cloud for bursting and other green field opportunities, no doubt, but wait until everything's teed up. That's right, the right workload and the right place. I mean, Amazon's got thousands of enterprises using the cloud. Yeah, absolutely. So it's not like people aren't using the cloud. No, they're, yeah. It's not 100% yet. And what's the workload, right? What data can you put there? Do you know what data you're putting there? How do you secure that and how do you do that in a repeatable way? And you think cloud's driving the big data market right now. That's what I was saying earlier. I was saying, I think that the cloud is the unsubtext of this show. It's enabling. I don't know if it's driving, but it's the enabling factor. It allows for that scale of speed. Yeah. Accelerates. That's a better word, accelerate. Accelerates that horizontally scale. Mike, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. More live action. We're going to have some partners on with you guys. Next, stay with us live in Manhattan. It's the Cube.