 Okay, next up, Jeff Cortley is here. Jeff is the vice president of product management at Alcatel Lucent. Jeff, welcome. Hi. Good to see you again. The first time Cube person, so good to have you on. So a little different perspective here. You know, we've been talking to a lot of people from HP. We're talking a lot of industry analysts and folks with that independent perspective. You're coming at it from yet another independent perspective. You're an OEM customer of HP and of Gen 8 as well, right? Good, so well, anyway, welcome to the Cube. Why don't we start by talking, please get close to the mic so everybody can hear you. Let's talk about your business, just so people understand the framework and the context. So you sell, obviously, to telecom companies, but talk a little bit about your business. Sure, so we're in the category of a network equipment provider, but basically we manufacture, develop all the communications infrastructure that a service provider, be it a cable company, a wireless network operator, a fixed line data operator, and even, you know, large enterprises, et cetera. So all the equipment that they need to build, operate, and manage a network. So what are the big drivers in your business? What are customers telling you? Where's the big pressure points? Well, obviously data, right? So the consumption of data. We've been talking about that all day. So video and just the whole smartphone phenomenon, et cetera. So, you know, increasing the speed of mobile access and convergence across different devices. Those are real big drivers. So we heard a lot about it. I mean, obviously in the telecom business, the service providers are really evaluating the cloud in a big way and other new technologies with big data analytics. This seems to be some discussion like, hey, you know, over the top can be monetized. You know, applications, et cetera. So, you know, is this a good thing? I mean, you've got really fast compute. Can you talk about how this is and a vectoring into your business model? Sure, so I think there's two things there. Like I said, it's not, you know, that over the top and the traditional network operators are mutually exclusive. That what we're seeing is there's a lot of value in what the operators can provide in terms of putting things on the customer's bill, validating their identity and preferences, et cetera. So you can do mashups between an over-the-top application and a traditional communication application and create a lot of new services. Being able to federate that data between a cloud operator and a more traditional network data center environment is going to be important. So I think what you're gonna see is a lot of hybrid deployment typologies or configurations where some of an application's gonna exist in the cloud, some of it's gonna be more traditional infrastructure and you're gonna need to be able to manage across those disparate environments. Can that affect your SLA environment? Also you need to have some really good SLAs and performance to meet that, right? So SLA really constitutes a number of different attributes, right? So there's basically zero downtime, right? So these are mission-critical applications and if there's an outage, a lot of times it makes the Wall Street Journal forget DevOps then. Yeah, it affects people's jobs, right? So they take this seriously. So it's not, but then there's also SLAs related to how quickly we respond and restore when there is a problem. So it's a combination of leveraging the technology to create a robust design, but then also the whole life cycle support and a lot of things that are incorporated in the whole Gen 8 philosophy in terms of those intelligent architecture and proactive maintenance monitoring, et cetera. So there's the catastrophic aspect, right? Of an unplanned outage, which we kind of all can understand that that's a disaster recovery scenario and clearly the more automation the less human interaction you can inject into the system the better off you're gonna be. What about planned downtime? You probably, your customers probably spend a lot of time planning windows where they have to do updates and patches and make new code fixes or whatever it is. How do you see that changing as a result of this announcement or do you see it changing? Well, I'd say two things. It is a big challenge because you've got applications that are distributed across the entire network. So when you're trying to do an upgrade and bring new functionality out to the marketplace you wanna do that as quickly as possible and to the extent that it's very complex it takes a lot of maintenance windows which elongates the time because you only have so many slots to do the work. So with a lot of the automation and simplification of configuration management and auto discovery, et cetera you eliminate a lot of that startup steps so that we can then leverage that and shrink the interval and therefore reduce the number of maintenance windows we need to do a software update. How do you sell to your end customers? Do you go in? Do they make a business case? Are you quantifying things? Is it a different type of sell? No, absolutely. I mean, obviously we'd like to differentiate on the capabilities that we're offering but the operator's really doing a business case in terms of how much revenue are they gonna generate based upon the capabilities of the technology that we're offering to them. So it really becomes a total cost of ownership and the compute platform and the Gen 8 infrastructure is a part of our overall system. And so when we can show faster time to revenue, lower cost, the total cost of ownership, simplification in terms of manageability, et cetera it's also an all element. And even another thing that's much more prevalent in the RPs we respond to now is energy consumption. Real estate and energy are bigger factors than they have ever been. And so there's usually specific requirements. So the fact that we're getting benefits from Gen 8 is very helpful. Explicitly calling those out in business cases. So you're updating your TCO calculators and all that good stuff? Constantly. Because the technology is always moving and we're trying to be, part of the reason why we're an early adopter of the Gen 8 platform is to be ahead of our competition in terms of bringing those capabilities to market. Can you talk about the innovation around the energy because space, power and cooling is a real sweet spot for HP. I've interviewed some of their HP labs guys a couple years ago and we talked about the notion of a data center operating system, making things more, I don't want to say network management, but very much aware with sensor technology and big data analytic type functionality. But relative to the power and cooling and the auto discovery like features that they talk about thermal, et cetera. How is that going to affect you guys? Can you talk about that and how would you rate that impact to your business? Oh, sure. I mean, because of the scale of our systems, I mean, we could have a system that's supporting a network the size of AT&T Verizon. So you're talking 50, 80, 100 million subscribers, right? So we're not talking about a single server or single rack, we're talking multiple racks of equipment. So you can get a lot of variation in terms of the thermal properties or CPU utilization across that because the way you're partitioning the application, especially if you're doing multi-tenant instances, et cetera. So the more visibility that you have about the real-time performance of the application, the better you can tune that dynamically, right? And again, reduce the amount of server machines that are required to run a system to support that. So you like these features, what they're talking about here? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You talked, when we met, you talked about applications in your industry moving from the central office to the data center. Yeah. So talk a little bit more about what that means. So, it used to be not too many years ago that there was a strong demarcation between systems that ran in the network and then systems that were like the business systems that ran in the CIO domain, the data center, et cetera. You know, more and more you talk about over the top services, right? So more and more you've got applications that are looking to dip in and get real-time information out of the network like a user's presence or how they're connected to the network, et cetera. But those systems are coming from, you know, outside the network, et cetera. So there's very much a blurring in terms of some of our systems are deployed in a central office type of environment, some of them are deployed in an IT environment. So the flexibility we get of, you know, being able to deploy the same software on either server architecture, blade architecture, DC power, AC power, et cetera. We've got all those types out in the marketplace. Excellent. All right, Jeff Cortley, thanks very much for spending some time with us and sharing your unique industry's perspective. And, oh, so Gen 8, you've got Gen 8 in-house, obviously, right? We do. You've kicked the tires a little bit? Yeah, so our developers have been doing some benchmarking and migrating some of our existing applications that run on previous versions of the HP ProLiant line onto the Gen 8. So we'll be bringing those to market pretty soon. Excellent. All right, well, thanks for coming on. My pleasure. Good to see you again. Okay, all right, take care. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.