 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 here in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Steve Nolan. He is the lead product manager, Private Cloud at CenturyLink. Thank you so much for coming in direct from St. Louis, Missouri. Thank you, thanks for having me today. So let's start by having you tell our viewers a little bit about CenturyLink. Okay, CenturyLink is a very large carrier, international. With our recent acquisition of level three, we have a little over 500,000 fiber optic miles blown to us. We're wired into over 100,000 buildings globally across approximately 60 countries. Connected into over 300 data centers. So that's kind of our telecom network story. I actually work within a division of, essentially, that handles managed hosting products. Through an acquisition they did a number of years ago called the company called Savas, where we now have about 20 years, a little over 20 years in managed hosting services to customers in the business. And there's been a lot of news this week at Dell Technologies World and you, your CenturyLink had a big announcement just this morning. Yes, we just released a press release on, it's a product option we've been working on for about six months now. It's for a private cloud product that I manage, that I released actually a year and a half ago. We just added now Dell options for that product based on the Dell PowerEdge 6R640 server. And that, of course, we did that to be able to expand options and choices for our customers to open up the opportunities to those situations where we weren't able to get into before. So we're very excited about it, it's new, it's exciting, it's of course a great, great platform. Very amazing technology. So Steve, the term private cloud, it's almost about 15 years old now. But there were many years that we didn't all agree as to what private cloud should be. And I read an article recently about hybrid cloud and even hybrid cloud was basically like, oh, I had private cloud and public cloud and a bunch of pieces and I put them together and like, well, the hybrid multi-cloud stories we're hearing this week and many other shows, very different, we're trying to get our arms around this. So, I'm familiar with Savis, I've seen Century like many times at VMworld. So bring us inside that private cloud, it tells a little bit about what you've been seeing in the environment, some of those key use cases to what customers are doing and how this is different than the virtualized environments of the past. Certainly. So what we've been seeing happen in the industry and you go back a number of years, a few years later to cloud and you ask six people, what does cloud mean? You get six definitions, right? But what we've seen is that there's this huge move towards public cloud over the last number of years, the hyper-clouds and all the activity we've seen plenty of it and there's been challenges associated that you don't find out day one, you find out over time. Certain things that are challenged to work within in a public cloud type of scenario. Customers say, you know what, I still want to hold on to some infrastructure and what we're seeing now relative to what private cloud is, it is an infrastructure that's 100% dedicated to one client and a story. All of that infrastructure belongs to one company, one entity, it is not shared, nothing is shared. That is true private cloud. And so that's what I manage for our company is our private cloud products where we have one that's been with us not for about 15 years. It's on VMware, we're a large VMware shop, we're 100% VMware today, we've been working with VMware for I think a total of 15 years, a little over 15 years and the various types of products and solutions and platforms. We work with them for a year and a half to be able to create our new private cloud product that is a hyper-converged infrastructure software to find networking based on VMware cloud foundation software suite. So that's where the movements are and what's happening with this, now if we want to go into what's happening in the industry and the world is the way that you build infrastructure historically is you build your compute, your network, your storage and your security. Those are the four minimum columns of which technology you need for a solution and then you connect it all together. It's done by four different groups, four different subject matter or expert groups and it can be very time consuming to piece all that together. Now we roll into this hyper-converged world and you just give me a stack of servers that have some CPU, some RAM, some disks and I layer on some very well designed and architected software, likes a VMware cloud foundation and I define everything from one interface through software. It makes the ability for enterprise customers to be able to move much faster on making changes in the environment. I can spin up a firewall in minutes, a server load balancer, a router that's very powerful compared to how it was done in the past. So Steve, one of the years expertise I know CenturyLink has is on the networking side of things. It's something we've heard Dell talking about, the networking and how that's expanding the HCI market today as well as if you talk about that hybrid or multi-cloud environment, networking's a critical component, things like SD-WAN put into it. So can you help, you know, where does that, those pieces fit into your environment from a networking? Well, where we see that going and it's a common theme that we've been talking through a little over a year now and this topic of milliseconds matter is the edge. And so that's where it's really evolving to and that's what we're working towards as well. So one of the things we're doing with our products is moving our products out to the data centers, many more data centers than what we've done in the past and then taking that a step further when we go to edge computing because of our telecom expertise and experience and our thousands of points of presence, we can put those systems into a pop, if you will. We can put those systems, of course, on customer prem, getting the response times down to just a few milliseconds which is critical to businesses' response times, delivery companies or various companies where that's important to the middle, the middle seconds matters because it saves them money because they're able to be more responsive to their customers. Well, that's exactly what I want to drill into a little bit. You say milliseconds matter, which is absolutely true and you're talking about how customers feel this need to move so much faster and we know about the breakneck speed of technological change. Can you give us a real business impact? I mean, as you said, this really is game-changing for so many companies. Can you just give us an example of a customer you're working with and how this really, the ROI on this stuff? Yeah, I can't name customers, yeah. So we're working with some shipping companies who, of course, they've got the little responders when they deliver the package. They have hundreds, maybe as many as a few thousand, locations, they want to be able to put that data right neck in those locations so that the response on that package gets that information faster. They get closure on that, they're able to build faster, they're able to move on to the next item faster, provide the information to their customers faster. Those are the real, live examples that we're seeing with the middle seconds matter type of scenario. We actually did a demo of this at VMware last year. We just give an example where, and we did a test of going across the internet and then going across a dedicated circuit. And we painted this one page, one screen, and it took a second going across the internet. And it took a half a second to go across a dedicated circuit. And so it's like, well, you take that one page and it's the thousands of pages that one of your employees goes through in a day and then multiply it by your thousands of employees, that's now where we're adding up to cost savings, more efficiencies of your employees when they can get that information faster. So one of the important areas here is the management piece. So I understand you're partnering deeply with VMware. Is it primarily the VRealize Suite from Management ToolLink? Anything, what's special about the CenturyLink offering? So relative to my product offering is in the private cloud, we actually have, here's the situation. Customers don't just have one cloud. We all know the true story is it's not about public or private, it's about both. It's not about one cloud or one other cloud, it's about many. And so we actually, through an acquisition we had done, we created a product called Cloud Advocation Manager. It's a multi-cloud management product that is designed today to support from one interface. I can have AWS Azure Google, my private cloud product, we call the CenturyLink Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation, our public cloud product, all from one interface. I can manage my workloads. I can monitor the OSes. We will manage and monitor those OSes and applications for the customer. Laren will be called our managed services anywhere, a methodology for customers that want that management to provide that for them. So it's really about being able to take all those different environments in that hybrid IT solution, the vast majority of enterprise folks either have one or are stuck with, and be able to trim it down to singular interfaces to be able to support them. How closely are you working with customers on the actual implementation onboarding of these new technologies and making sure that employees are also really on board with these things? So, well, first of all, when we work through solutions with our customers, we don't just say here, pick this from a menu and so we sit down and design for them. So we're very specific in how we've designed our products to where we actually allow over 1,000 configuration options. So you have to right size the infrastructure. That's what you start. That's the foundation. You're right size that infrastructure for your work environment, for what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you allow flexibility to be able to grow it. And so we allow flexibility to be able to have RAM or storage to those systems or add more systems, give the flexibility to grow as you need to grow, whatever button it is you want to push, it's growing on you, right? So that's where we start with this and that design aspect of this and that's how we solution all of our managed hosting products, okay? Great. Well, Steve, you started this conversation at cube Ricky, you're ending at cube alum. So, thanks so much for coming on the show. Well, thank you for having us, having me, right? Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.