 On the Ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's On the Ground. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle, co-host of theCUBE. We are Joyce Mullin, who's the general manager of IoT and also OEM for Dell Go To Market. Welcome to the On the Ground. Thanks, great to be here. So we are at a special Dell IoT round table, it's kind of on the record but not broadcasted of a combination of press influencers and analyst influencers, discussing in a very candid way, authentically, what is IoT, to share information. What's your walk away? What was happening here? What was the big conversation? Obviously there's hype in IoT, there's reality. People are learning more, it's certainly transformative but what was the general consensus here at the influencer event? You know, so we do these influencer events, we call them the one, five, 10 series because you try to think about exactly what's happening in the short term and what's going to happen in the long term with these industry trends. And I love this because it was really, really fun to hear various perspectives about how much hype is there, how much disillusionment is there around IoT, how much practical advice and opportunity is there and then what are sort of the big issues that are gonna impact us in the short and medium term but then the most exciting part for me and I think you called it, it was sort of the fantasy but I mean, IoT and technology can really solve some of the biggest problems. Got a lot of work to do to make that happen but the opportunity's amazing. I mean, it is intoxicating because I mean, I was kind of commenting across the board, it's fantasy land but it's also, I was called by the moderator, oh, you're bullish on IoT, I don't know if she was tongue in cheek but it is transformative. IoT is definitely transformative, it's so obvious to people in the industry but we're so early and it's still unknown, it's still fertile ground for innovation and yet every business is different and might have a different approach and Andy was saying it depends on what you're doing so explain that dynamic of this IoT. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder of the company that's deploying? Is that the kind of vibe that's going on? Is it early? What's your thoughts? I really think it's about figuring out how to use technology to enable customers to solve problems in a different way, a much more efficient way and I agree with Andy. I think there's not gonna be one use case that's gonna put us over the edge and everybody's gonna say, oh, I love IoT and it's really practical and I know how to implement it. I do think it's gonna be, we'll know we're there, I think as someone in the round table said, when you don't really talk about it anymore, technology and this notion of instrumentation of environments is embedded in everything we do. It's coming, it's just a question of how fast will it come, how effective will it be and how do you manage it and make sure it's secure? You know, one of the things I was talking about with Jeff Frick about is Michael Dell and his, I won't say comeback but his transformation with going private, he's got a spring in his step but this notion of going direct has been the Dell model and if you think about the data business today, everything's about direct now. You go direct with the data, there's no middleman, you could take sensor data so it's a very data-centric equation with IoT. And that's where the value is by the way, I think. It's in the data. You know, I think, so when we talk to customers about this, they're very pragmatic. They're trying to figure out how to reduce their water bill or figuring out how to save energy and that's a very, very good start but I think as this evolves, it's really about what kind of understanding are they developing because they're watching exactly how their solutions being used or how people behave or how the process is unfold. That's gonna be the most valuable element of that. We won't see that for several years but in the short term it's gonna save some money and it's gonna make customers happier. I gotta ask you a question because a little dynamic happened between me and another participant who I respect but we weren't arguing but he made a comment that oh, it's about cost-cutting and I kind of went, kind of hair went up my little spider sense when I'm like no, no, it's not about cost-cutting, it's about enablement and I want to ask you the question because it's important. A lot of people think of cost-cutting and they think of the old data center days of consolidation, cut the budget, do more with less, consolidate the sprawl and that wasn't a growth mindset, that was more of a lower cost. IoT seems to be a growth mindset. Yeah, you can be efficient and save money but it really is the springboard to a growth mindset. Do you agree, can you share some color around that? Yeah, you know it's very interesting because we oftentimes start with a customer and as I said, their idea here is, let me figure out how to reduce my water bill or figure out how to reduce my energy consumption but once they start to see the proof of concept and understand what's available to them they transform pretty quickly into oh my gosh, I can design a much better hotel or I can figure out how to deliver a much better retail experience or yeah, sure, I can make my building more efficient but more importantly, I can make my building better and that's really the excitement, absolutely, absolutely and it's not always obvious at the start, it takes a while to start looking at the data and understand what the art of the possible is. Yeah, we can observe from our data and our research on theCUBE and Wikibon is that these are pioneers in IoT. This is not like it's mature, I mean the people in IoT right now are mavericks, they're making things happen, you talk about GE with planes saving trillions of dollars so talk about that then what are you guys seeing with Dell as you go to market because you're providing services, you're providing hardware and compute, what are some of the things that you're seeing about this new culture, the new generation of the IoT buyer, implementer, architect who's building planning and shipping IoT products? Well, I think they fall into a couple of categories so the first are those very pragmatic people who are trying to figure out how to save money or fix a problem but then there are the dreamers and this is the part I really like how do you figure out how to farm and make sure you manage and build a perfect herd of cows to maximize milk production? These are environments that could never be instrumented before because the costs were too high but now they can be and you can apply that technology, that data and the analytics to things like managing a herd of dairy cows and you can figure out how to increase their production by 25, 30% pretty easily. It's pretty interesting. So those dreamers are innovators but they're not dreaming for dreaming's sake, they're using the data to have a better outcome. Absolutely, they're trying to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their businesses and their results but they're also learning a whole bunch about their environments which is the most exciting part. So I gotta ask you another question here. I wanted to, from Dave Vellante, my co-host, he said, talk about the on-premise cloud dynamic because is cloud required for IoT or can I have a little bit of cloud or no cloud, what's this table stakes? What's the barrier to entry? I want to put my toe in the water if I'm a customer. What is the IoT entry point? How do I get involved? How do I engage with this paradigm? So our philosophy and the work we've done with hundreds of customers in the POC phase is to really start small and look, I don't think you need a cloud. You can have a cloud but it doesn't really matter. I mean, I think you got to start with trying to figure out what problem that you're trying to solve then you figure out what data do you need to collect to solve that problem and then you start to figure out how to do the analytics at the appropriate point in that information supply chain and it's pretty simple to say that you can either do it on the edge and solve all the problems at the edge if it's a small enterprise or if you're trying to aggregate trend data you probably need to pump it back to a data center but you don't need to pump all the data. If you believe any of the analyst information by 2020 there's gonna be between 20 billion and 50 billion connected devices. We're gonna be generating between 200 petabytes and 44 zettabytes, zettabytes, 21 zeros of data. The networks can't actually handle that so we believe there's a bunch of work that has to be done at the edge for really- The edge of the networks. Yeah, that's the key. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, final question. What is the coolest thing that you've seen in IoT that you can share? It could be, I mean, the cow's pretty cool. Don't go there, cause that's really cool. We already got that on the record. Besides the connected cow and the mobile cloud what's the coolest thing that you've seen? Okay, you're gonna think I'm a little bit of a agricultural enthusiast but we are also doing a whole bunch of research on bees. You know, the bee population has dropped by 30%. That's a huge polarization problem. And so we have on top of our limerick lab in Ireland bee hives that are instrumented and we're tracking the behavior of bees, the process, how many bees come and go and we're pushing all that data back to some researchers who are trying to figure out what's going on with the bee population. That's a good use of data. That is an internet of thing. That's actually a human device kind of thing applied to ecosystems. It's the internet of bees, actually. The internet of bees, yeah. Jerry, thank you so much. We are on the ground here at Dell IoT event. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back. Thanks for watching with more interviews. Thanks for watching.