 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, day three of Dell Technologies World coverage on theCUBE, two sets, lots of CUBE coverage. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Andy Englund, the director of cloud strategies at Halliburton Landmark. Andy, thanks for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. You're welcome, thanks for having me. So Halliburton, everybody knows the Halliburton name. In fact, Halliburton celebrating their 100th year anniversary this year. That's right, it's a big year. It is a big year. Halliburton Landmark, talk to us about what that is. So Halliburton is obviously an upstream oil and gas services provider. Landmark is the business unit within Halliburton that provides petrotechnical software solutions to our customers. Okay, so customers all across the country, all across the world. Across the world, we work with NOCs, we work with independence, we work with the majors, we work with everybody. Okay, so here we are at Dell Technologies World. How is Halliburton Landmark working with Dell Technologies to, we're talking about digital transformation of your business, enabling your customers. So we're helping our customers through their digital transformation and one of the things that we're helping them do is move their petrotechnical workloads to the cloud. So we're leading the way right now in providing petrotechnical solutions in the cloud. We do that both on public cloud and on private cloud and for our private cloud solution, which we call Landmark Earth, we've been partnering with Dell EMC for about four years now on building that solution. And this is a co-engineered solution. That's correct. Talk to us about that. What does that entail? So what we did was we worked with the Dell EMC engineers and we took, originally it was the VX Block technology but we've since moved it to the VX Rail technology. We built that, we took that technology and we built the solution, built an appliance and took our blueprint, put that on top of that and then had the two groups work together to co-engineer that to bring optimal performance and reliability. We're then able to deploy that anywhere in the world. So initially, most of the customers that were interested in it were the customers that were in locations where you couldn't find any public cloud. But now, because of the performance and the reliability that it's able to deliver, we have customers even in places like North America where most people were originally looking to go to public cloud, now they're looking for this solution. So this sounds like it's giving you quite the competitive advantage. Absolutely, yeah, we were a little bit ahead of the competition and putting the solution together. We're looking to push to the cloud quickly. That's a good place to be as a head of the competition. You talked about kind of the speed reliability performance, what are some of the other really key values, business values, that your customers are gleaning from the solution already? So a couple things, one of the things that we can deliver is faster time to value. So a lot of our customers have tried to go do something on their own. And generally speaking, they've met with a lot of challenges trying to do that. They try to build something themselves, it takes a long time, ultimately it doesn't really work. And so what we can give them is a proven solution that we can stand up very quickly and deliver value to them very fast. The second thing that I would say is that we can significantly lower their total cost of ownership. That's always good. So our petro technical workloads are a little bit unique from some other industries. They're very heavily dependent on GPUs. So our customers are used to having these really massive, powerful workstations with heavy duty GPUs on them. And in order to manage that type of environment, not only do you have the upfront cost of buying all these workstations, but you now have to go manage all these workstations individually with these petro technical solutions that you've deployed on them by leveraging a hyperconverged infrastructure like we have with VxRail. With the Landmark Earth appliance, we can provide all of that in a single hyperconverged environment. So now you can manage it in one place. So the total cost of ownership for ongoing operations is drastically reduced. We also see performance increases that are pretty significant, like we mentioned before, because one of the major things that we do is we load massive amounts of data. And when you're in a client server environment, that massive data is coming from a database that's somewhere else. But when you're in a hyperconverged environment, your compute and your data are sitting right next to each other so we can significantly reduce the time to load that data. So how much of this is sort of a cultural shift for the upstream oil and gas industry? Absolutely, so oil and gas industry has historically kind of lagged a little bit behind in terms of keeping up with the latest technology. The oil and gas downturn that we went through in the last couple years has really been an impetus to drive that technology transformation. And so a lot of customers are looking for digital transformation strategies in general. And as part of that, this is something that a lot of them are looking into. A lot of the customers that we go talk to are still using that legacy client server environment, and this is something new to them. And they don't expect that they would be able to take something and virtualize it somewhere else and get better performance than what they're used to seeing on the front end. How is it also, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, this is the Halliburton's 100th year. Partnership with Dell EMC. How is what you're doing with them and with the Landmark Earth Appliance, how is that changing Halliburton's business as well, and even from a cultural perspective? So one of the things that's changed in our business model and how we do this is that we actually leverage the same environment internally. So as our R&D teams are building the solutions, they actually will build and test them on the same type of appliance, which means that when we go deploy it to a customer, the customer's actually deploying the solution on the same environment that it was tested on in the first place. Just give them a lot of confidence that you've done this, you've established high performance the results that they have to get. Absolutely, yeah, because a lot of times when you download software and install it somewhere, a lot of the typical problems that you may run into may just be from nuances or differences in the environment that you're deploying to. So by deploying in the exact same environment that it was built and tested in, it gives you a level of confidence that it's going to perform. So speaking of confidence, how has your confidence changed over the last three days? A lot of announcements from Dell Technologies. We heard, even on the first day, Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya Nadella from Microsoft, a lot of collaboration, a lot of integration as well. Give me your perspectives on that and how you think it will influence the direction that you guys are going. So quite honestly, I'm really excited to see where things are going. I mentioned before, we deliver solutions both in the public cloud and in the private cloud. And so one of the challenges that we face is being able to manage these workloads across these different types of environments. And a lot of the announcements that they've made have been about how they can simplify that process and make it where I can manage workloads and even move workloads across different cloud platforms without having to go build that capability myself. So I'm kind of excited to see where this is all going. What are some of the things personally that you're going to be taking away from this? Personally, for me, I'm going to go back and have some of my technical folks talk a little bit more about what we can do with some of the Dell Technologies Cloud and the VMware Cloud solutions that have been announced. And also with the announcements to VxRail, looking at it really as a foundational component of the Dell Technologies Cloud, which was just announced a couple of days ago, how does that potentially impact the appliance that you've built leveraging that technology? So I think what it does is it gives us the opportunity to integrate that into our broader solution with the different cloud platforms. Since we already leveraged the VxRail technology today, we already leveraged the VMware software stack on top of that, but now what we can do is we can layer on another management layer on top of that that would allow us to look at that across multiple cloud platforms, and that's pretty exciting. And then in terms of market opportunities, what do you think this, how does this open the door even wider for you? As we talked about, you've got a lot of customers, they've been around for a long time, it's a well-established industry who are still using a lot of legacy practices. What you've heard this week, how do you think that kind of kicks the door open for Halibut landmark? That's actually a great question. I mentioned before that initially, most of the customers that were interested in the private cloud solution were in places where we didn't have public cloud, and now we're seeing more customers even where there are public cloud capabilities coming back to the private cloud because of either data privacy concerns or performance concerns or whatever, which we can deliver. But if we can actually manage this across multiple cloud platforms, then that enables you to create a hybrid cloud approach where you could have some workloads in the private cloud and some workloads not in the private cloud and could span out to public cloud for different things. So for example, if you have workloads that are temporary in nature, so you don't have something that's permanent, you want something that you can send it out to public cloud and run a large scenario, some type of simulation on it, get some results back and bring that back, but then use your private cloud environment to actually visualize the results of that. So it creates some really cool opportunities. And the conversations around emerging technologies, AI, machine learning, where are your customers in the upstream oil and gas industry? Where are they with respect to embracing, acknowledging that there's a lot of potential there? I mean, the power of the cloud to harness the power of AI, where are they with some of those emerging technologies? Is it still pretty early? It's something that everybody is looking into right now. So everybody is looking into how can these various digital transformation technologies be leveraged within the oil and gas industry? And there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of places where you can plug it in. For example, there's a lot of physics-based modeling that happens in the petro-technical workflows, but using AI, now you can start doing some AI-based workflows in places where you need a faster solution, such as at the Edge. So at the Edge, where you might need some kind of a result quickly and you don't have time to wait because you have to make a decision at the well, you can now do that with artificial intelligence and you can couple the two together. And speaking of Edge, one of the things that Jeff Clark said yesterday, and I have to say this in a Game of Thrones accent, the Edge is common, but a lot of people have said, to us the last couple of days, the Edge is already here. In the oil and gas industry, there's so much remote. Where are customers in terms of embracing what Dell Technologies is saying, it's Edge Core Cloud? So the Edge is absolutely here, the Edge is real, and everybody has varying levels of sophistication at the Edge today, and that's another place where there's a lot of effort going on to understand what's the best value for what we can do. So there are places where you need a solution that may not be as expensive because of the existing investment that you have. There are places where you may be willing to go out and completely overhaul everything, put something new in. There's also greenfield opportunities where you're building it from scratch and you have opportunities to put things in place. So everybody's looking into the best way to leverage that right now, and that's something that we're working with our customers on. So it's already here, it's not coming. Last question, Andy, for you. How does being a partner with Dell Technologies, how is that enabling your business? How do they help you deliver the solutions that you need to to impact your industry? So we've worked very closely together from the very beginning. From initially co-engineering the solution, Dell would bring resources out, we would work together to optimize the solution to make it work. But even the sales motions, I mean we work together in marketing efforts, we work together in our sales efforts, we have global teams that work together, we have regional teams that work together, and we bring all those groups together for every opportunity to make the best of it and provide a solution that works best for the customer. Sounds like a pretty collaborative relationship with Andy. Thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today and telling us what you're doing at Halliburton Landmark, pretty cool stuff. You're welcome, thanks for having me. Hi, oh, our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching.