 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Well, welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE continuing our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls here on theCUBE along with Keith Townsend. And we're joined by Suresh Satya Murthy, who is the vice president of cloud and infrastructure solutions marketing at Dell EMC. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Stav, you're on theCUBE. You bet. All right, so we're about two days in to the show. Here, how's it been going for you? And what are you hearing from customers? It's been fantastic. I've had a few customer meetings since I got here. The amazing thing is the interest in IT transformation and digital transformation. There used to be a time when we do these conferences, the conversation would be around products, right? Like what's new with the products? What's coming up for launch? Now they're talking about transforming their IT. How do they transform their data center with solutions and the products that span server storage data production cloud? It's amazing. I'm seeing that shift of the conversation going from products to transforming your data center. And what's accelerating that? Because to me, that's the kind of conversation or thought process that folks in that community should have been having for some time. But so what's the acceleration now? So we did a third-party study with ESG, where we surveyed about 1,000 executives to find out what is it that they were interested in and what do they think about IT transformation and why it matters to them. Here's what we found out. And these are just a few data points and the full study is available on our website. We found out that they believe that they're going to be three X faster in terms of completion of their IT projects. Twice as likely to meet and exceed their revenue goals and they would have 33% more budget to invest in innovation. And if you think about it, that is spectacular. That is amazing. There used to be a day and age when the only conversation around IT would be how do you reduce cost? Now you're having a conversation about how do you create new business models. So IT has transformed from this backend function to something that is enabling the businesses to build new business models, create new revenue streams, manage customer experience better. And I think that is at the heart of why the conversations have shifted. So let's talk about some technologies. What are some of the resulting technologies or changes in technology? Anything emerging that you like to talk about? The two things that I think is happening now, the first is cloud, the acceptance of hybrid cloud and how the cloud is being leveraged for this transformation. And the second is the use of data through the technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And if you think about those technologies, they aren't really something that has come out of nowhere. It is an extension of a data continuum that we've been having. So the way I look at it is you have creation of data, you have analysis of data, you have machines that learn from data and then using the data to act as the data continuum. We have always had creation of data. It came from traditional applications. Now it's coming from cloud applications as well as endpoints and IoT. So it's increasing the volume of data that is coming in. That has changed how data has been ingested. Storage of data has shifted. It's no longer about scale up architectures. It's about scale out architectures and software-defined architectures. And then there are technologies like Hadoop and Splunk and SAP for which we provide ready solutions for that's going to help you analyze the data. So a natural part of this extension is how do you get those machines to use the data to learn and improve themselves and you train them to go do that. That's where machine learning comes in and it's a critical part of what we want to provide infrastructure for. And the final piece of it is acting on it which is where I see AI play, where you have applications that is substituting for human intelligence and making decisions and acting on that information. So talk to us about the real conversation. It's about making it real where? Yes. The LEMC World 2018 and one of the things, or the theme is making it real. Read a stat yesterday, survey 50% of CIOs believe in the next few years they are going to have an AI project. Yes. You know what? I asked Siri to play a song for me the other day. I asked her five times and had to pick it up and just type it in the solution. AI is all over the place in definition. Correct. As you're having conversations, what are the types of projects and the scope of projects that customers want to engage AI and machine learning to achieve what business outcomes? Yes, so it actually depends by industry but the way I think about it is now as companies look at their application infrastructure, typically large enterprises have probably about 5,000 applications, right? And when the time comes to upgrade the software and upgrade those applications or write new applications for new customer experiences or new business models, they see AI as an integral part of the design point in building those applications. That has never been the case in the past, right? So you have now cloud native applications evolving and I would bet that any cloud native applications that is either customer facing or is going to be critical to the decision making of a business or enterprise is going to have AI built in by default. Now, this would change by industry. So if I'm taking supply chain, for example, Jeff Clark talked about this in his keynote on how Dell EMC is changing supply chain with using machine learning. The other one was customer service and support where we have a product called Pro Assist that uses predictive analytics. The amazing thing is we reduced our time to service the customer 91%. So imagine what AI can bring to those applications that have already existed that are now getting better, faster and more intelligent in terms of servicing our customers and the experience of our customers are going to change as well. Now, it is not just what we provide to our customers in terms of platforms, we are customers of these technologies as well. So we talked about the PowerMax, which was launched this morning. It makes six billion decisions a day. It has built in machine learning and it's helping the storage administrator's job be more easier because the decisions need not be made by humans anymore. It's optimizing by itself. It's amazing how much these softwares are going to evolve with technologies like AI. So I love the fact that six billion decisions are being made for me every day. I can't even decide what I'm having for dinner tonight. So that's- That's a very important decision though, just like that song you wanted to play on Siri. Exactly. Someone ask you about later. But what's really interesting is where the control plane and processing and this activity will take place. A lot of, not just the PowerMax, but a lot of announcements today around FPGAs in servers, up to eight GPUs in a server. Are customers prepared to now manage those environments or are they looking to have that stuff outsourced to a Google or a local Dell EMC partner to lend that expertise? Where is the expertise for all of the TI? We believe that the world is going to be multi-cloud. We have done third party research and surveys where we found that 81% of even our own customer base are going to be multi-cloud. So our intent is to build technologies that is agnostic of where the data resides. You should be able to analyze your data in a public cloud environment, in a private cloud environment, or in hybrid cloud environment. And depending on what sort of security, compliance, requirements you need to meet, you make that choice and we build the technologies for you. A part of what we also do is rather than just provide a compute platform. Yes, we did provide 840 and 940 XA, the PowerEdge servers with these 8 GPUs that's going to help you analyze your data. But we also provide ready solutions for machine learning where compute storage, networking, and the software is packaged in and you buy one box that you plug in to do the analysis as well. And you can also have these applications run on our cloud providers that we partner with to have those done as well. You could build your cloud native applications that use AI on top of the VMware and Pivotal and Dell EMC infrastructure, which Pat Gelsinger from VMware talked about yesterday as well. So it should not matter which cloud the data resides in and where the analysis actually happens. We will be able to provide the infrastructure for you in private, public, or hybrid environments. Yeah, when you're talking about machine learning and you think about all this rich data that's coming in and then processing it, making some analytical evaluation of it through AI, give me an example if you would something that is capable in that chain of events today. It's just maybe 12 months ago, 18 months ago, wouldn't happen, couldn't happen. The example that I just used about PowerMax and the applied machine learning that we have built into the product. We did announce a PowerMax same time here and I was here talking about one of the Vmax versions last year, it didn't have machine learning built into it. Today a storage array that can process decisions by itself without the involvement of a storage administrator make a decision on which media to optimize to get maximum performance of it. And we are just 12 months since last Dell EMC work. So it's a real time example that we have employed within our technologies to see how we can change those and that's going to rapidly accelerate how much involvement humans need to have in these decisions as well. So that brings up an interesting point. Six billion decisions. Those decisions can be made because the processing is extremely close to the data. So super low latency between the two. You guys gave one stage today, the example of, you know what, your alternative vehicle to make the decision right there and not send the decision up to the cloud. I have this theory that we've heard data has gravity but now compute is starting to have that gravity and there is this need that, you know, this specialized eight GPUs, FPGAs, that equipment doesn't exist everywhere but the data needs to get there. What are the conversations you're having with customers about data accessibility and putting the data where the compute is at? Yeah, it depends by industry but the way we look at it, what we are hearing from our customers is to think about their edges as the core, it used to be edge to core to cloud. Now you have an intelligent edge and a distributed core. That's how it has changed over the last two, three years. Intelligent edge because your edges, the devices, the endpoints, the edges are making decisions themselves without having transmit data to the cloud. Just like your autonomous car example, if you are waiting for data to come back from the cloud on whether you have to break the car or not when there's an interference in front of you, that's not going to work, right? So the ability to have intelligent edges is becoming more essential. We keep hearing that from our customers and we want to provide solutions that enable the edges to be smart. And we do with rugged and fanless embedded systems as well as power edge servers for the edges as well. But that doesn't mean all the compute happens at the edge. The cloud is a critical part of where analysis happens and if it is not real time streaming analytics where decisions have to be made at the endpoint, there is a lot of value in analyzing data that you have gathered over the years and using the data to learn from it and make decisions as well. A big chunk of that machine learning happens in the cloud. So I think it's a combination of both. It's not either or. We hear from our customers that they need intelligence in the edge, they need intelligence in the distributed core. And we will have solutions across both of those as well. So let's talk about some of these solutions at the edge. What's the fit and finish? I saw a huge, what is relative in the data center, the new 840, not a big box. At the edge, that's a big box. Can't put that in my car. So what are some of the evolving technologies we'll see at the edge to handle this massive amount of data? So a big chunk of it is going to be, it has to be rugged because the edges can be, you will have temperature variations from minus five degrees to 55 degrees. It has to be fanless because it has to be optimal enough to fit into the size of any object or device that you want to do. And we offer solutions for those as well within our coverage offerings, we have those as well. But what you would also see is we are across our family of businesses with VMware. We are also extending our software capabilities to the edge to gather that information to have compute on the edges as well. And in the core, like you said, we have these larger, more comprehensive coverage servers to compute, to be able to process the data for machine learning as well. Now, how do I manage all of that? Like that? That's a great point. Now, this is where our cloud strategy also comes in. The management of the components used to be on-premise application level with applications that are for specific needs, right? You used to have storage resource management software where their specific design point was to manage your storage resources. That is changing now. So we have SaaS offerings like Cloud IQ, which can manage your environment from anywhere, and it has predictive analytics built into it as well. So your management is actually made easier because it creates a predictive health score that tells you how much involvement you need to have and go fixing the issue. And if you need to be woken up to go fix an issue, it's going to do that on your behalf, right? So that's how it is changing as well. The management is increasingly becoming SaaS-based applications that have intelligence built into it and that connect across your data center it not just manages your storage, it manages your network, it manages your compute, it knows what's happening in your infrastructure and it's informing you on your behalf. Now with all this capability, can you just help Keith make a decision about dinner tonight? I'm thinking, I'm thinking we're talking about one in six billion, certainly we can address that, can't we? We can, we can. And what I would suggest is you can pick any restaurant in Bellagio right by the Bellagio Fountains and you'll have fun. There you go. All right. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate the insights. Thank you for sharing your time. Thank you for having me. We'll be back with more. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018.