Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Greg Lardy and I've got the privilege of serving as a Vice President for Agricultural Affairs. It's my privilege to welcome you to our awards program this afternoon, our 2022 Agriculture and Extension Faculty and Staff Awards Program. It's a privilege to welcome both our in-person audience and our online audience. And we're excited to be able to offer this program in a hybrid fashion after a couple of years of going totally online. This annual event brings us together to celebrate a rich tradition of recognizing the accomplishments of our faculty and staff. There are 51 nominees for our awards this year. Each of our nominees are going to receive a $50 gift card to the NDSU bookstore that may be used in-store online. And each of those 10 award recipients will receive a $1,000 honorarium. We want to say a special thank you to those of you who submitted nominations. We know that this takes time and effort on your part and that effort is much appreciated. We also want to say thank you to those of you that served on our selection committees. Year after year we continue to hear how hard it is to select just one nominee for each of these awards. It's a testament to the outstanding contributions and accomplishments of our faculty and staff. I'd like now to welcome President David Cook to the stage to make a few comments. Thank you, Dr. Lardi. Congratulations to all of you, the nominees and the awardees. It's a pretty prestigious group with a pretty broad and interesting list of achievements and accomplishments and all the great work that you all do. And so I think I wanted to let you know that in my time here since I started in May, a big part of my introduction to NDSU has been to agriculture and the great work that you all do. I think you know the story, right? Dr. Lardi dragged me and others around the state and got the great chance to see a number of the extension centers, the RECs, to really appreciate for me what the 1862 land grant means to North Dakota State, what this university means to the state of North Dakota and the region. And it was an incredible experience and the learning continues kind of every day in lots of different ways. And so I want to say that I appreciate all the great work that you do. People across the state certainly do in terms of all the amazing, you know, research, service and education that goes on. It's incredibly meaningful and as good as it gets, I think genuinely anywhere. And then for those of you who are awardees or even nominees to be identified from I think a pretty prestigious group of folks who are doing great work. I think that's just yet another way of where we all can just say thank you to the great work that you're doing and you all should feel very good about kind of making the list so to speak. So with that, I just want to say congratulations to everyone and for everybody in the room. Thank you and everyone online. Thank you for all that you do for the state and for the university. I and we all really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks President cook for taking time out of your schedule to join us for a few minutes this afternoon. I want to recognize a few other special guests that are with us today. In addition to the parts of my administrative team that you'll hear from and be receiving some of the awards from during the program we also have interim provost Dr David Bertolini with us, along with Jane shoe director of strategic initiatives for the egg experiment station. I now want to welcome Dr rolled one to the stage rolled in his wife Janet have been longtime supporters of this program in fact our donors that support one of the awards for our program this afternoon and so roll it's going to come up and make a few comments about the program itself but also from the perspective of a donor in terms of why he continues to support this program and these awards so please help me in welcoming Dr one to the stage. Just amazing. How fast time goes by. I started here as a student in 1951. And I retired as a professor emeritus and plant science in 1999. And during those years, we taught, and we researched, and we did extension work. And we had a president at that time just this program back goes back down to, you might say, he was the president of this university from 1948 from 1968 to 1987. He was the first president from North Dakota all the other presidents that we had up under them that time had come from the Easter from non land grand schools. And it turns out that Dr lost guard was the first person from North Dakota little town of Hoople. But he was a Aggie con graduate. So he was a NDSU alum. And he really kind of put the word land grant in the right perspective all the other presidents that come from basically non land grant schools but Dr lost guard believed in the motto that we had during our Centennial. It was the land and its people. And so he surrounded himself with people that were from North Dakota his vice president for finance was from Williston his vice president for academic affairs is from Hoople believe it or not. His deed directed extension service was from Watford City and his dean of agriculture. Me was from no North Dakota believe it or not. Anyway, the people responded to this. And the dirty Laura lost guys 10 year. This place grew tremendously in faculty and in buildings. The people responded in such a way that they created what they call the president's ad club.  And this brochure then said the agricultural achievement awards endowment program. And it went on to say. President agriculture club was a sponsor of this basically event the agriculture achievement awards endowment program. The program is designed to help relative return top quality faculty and staff by saying thank you. And by providing recognition and financial awards for outstanding service. Let's visit about my memory. Some of these names you will not remember or know at all. Larsen Yeagie excellence in research. These are farmers. And they were members of the president's ad club and they were very, very much involved in athletics. Eugene doll is a name I think some of you might remember, but he was with the Stiger tractor and amity and Concord and a bobcat. It was his family that designed the or created and built the bobcat from winner. Earl and Dorothy Foster. He was my department chairman for many, many years and they are no longer living that they sponsored the program program for teaching. Then there's myself, Janet and I. We created the excellence in teaching award also. And basically, you know who I am, you know that my wife Janet right over here. So we're still around. The William and Angela Austin excellence advising Laura lost guard just love teaching. And he had an advisee Austin. And so when they had an opportunity this person. I think he was a farmer from Newcastle and I don't know if he's still around or not but that was the reason why he established the award in. The excellence of the extension. That's Dr Myron johnsard. And he was not only the director of the extension service here but he was also the national director of extension service, and he served in Washington DC for many years. This wife Muriel is passed away, but he is here in Fargo living in Bethany 42. The ice girl excellence and extension. Now, a lot of people don't know, but at that time, nearly all the ag producers were just individual persons companies the RF Conkelman company, the Russell Duncan company, interstate seed company. These are all companies that were members of the president's egg club. One of them was a fellow named Clarence Sandy and he was from Grand Forks. And he was really an interesting person he's very critical of agriculture and he was on the ed consultation board a whole bunch of different boards we had. But we all grew because of Charles and Linda Moses he was the manager and owner and manager of interstate seed. In a tremendous sense of humor and he always said, if you can't trust the band name Moses who else can you trust. And then there's a dial Donald and Joe Anderson. You know, one of the things that a person needs to do if you ever get into administration, which is surround yourself with good people because that's going to make you look good and Don Anderson was one of those kind of persons he was my associate dean and director of research and he was a key person working along with Dwayne Bergman and a liaison person to the president's egg club that created a raid a lot of the money so Donna Anderson really did a great job of creating relationships with this group of people. I think in Jody Burgum staff award, all of you I think probably know Rick Burgum you certainly know about Burgum Hall and Catherine Burgum, who was the dean. I think if I remember right, her mother was the first female graduate from NDAC.  I know that our old Greg Lardi was an award winner in 1999 for the excellence and extension or let's give my hand again just for fun. And I'll finish by reading a thank you from a person that represents basically all of you, because there's hundreds of people now since 1997. When this award was first started. And this says, Dear Janet rolled 1012 15. Gosh, it was great seeing both of you. Thank you so very much for your continuing generosity Dr one. These awards are wonderful tradition that has established in the College of Agriculture about 1990 or so 1991 was actually the first one. I think the negotiate the recognition that faculty and staff members receive is worth perhaps as much or more than the monetary value. But when the, when the thank yous and grants congrats are all over the money is really nice too. The College looks forward to these annual awards and thank you again for all of your past help and your continued support of this wonderful tradition. Merry Christmas and happy new year. Sincerely. Dr john ends. Thank you very much. It's a privilege that rolled and Janet could join us this afternoon and normally they are actually in Florida at this time of year but due to the hurricane. They are actually going to spend the winter and pelican rapids at their lake place so if you've never had the privilege of reading rolled and Janet's Christmas letter it's one that you would actually find very inspiring and I, I particularly enjoy it because in each one of them usually has three or four book recommendations of very interesting books that rolled is read over the past year and so role they appreciate you making those comments this afternoon and thank you for your continuing support of our program. Now let's get to the nominees for each award.  The audience has asked to hold your applause until after each set of award nominees has been introduced. At this time I'd like to invite Frank Casey associate director of the North Dakota agricultural experiment station to the podium to introduce the nominees for the research awards. Good afternoon. So when you come up. I'll say the name and then you receive the card. The first research award is the Larson yegi excellence and research award was established to recognize outstanding faculty and research Extension Center principal investigators with 10 or fewer years of service. The recipient must have made a significant research contribution that addresses an applied problem or increases the basic knowledge of the area investigated. Our thanks to the Larson and yegi families for sponsoring this award. Following are the nominees for the Larson yegi excellence and research award. Some are not some is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiological Sciences. Then cat chapara is an assistant agricultural experiment station specialist from Langdon Research Extension Center. That is not here. Okay. Tori Hovick associate professor of the School of Natural Resource Sciences. Audrey Kalyle associate plant pathologist Williston Research Extension Center. Rao associate professor department of plant sciences. Visha Raya maji assistant professor department of agribusiness and applied economics. Rex son assistant professor department of agricultural and biosystems engineering and Allison Ward associate professor department of animal sciences. Let's give the nominees for that Larson yegi excellence and research award a warm round of applause. The second research award the Eugene R. doll excellence and research award was established to recognize outstanding faculty and research Extension Center principal investigators with 11 or more years of service. The recipient must have a distinguished research program and basic or applied sciences that has gained significant recognition in the state region or nation and or internationally. Our thanks to the Eugene R. doll family for sponsoring this award. The following are the nominees for the Eugene R excellence doll excellence and research award. David writer professor School of Natural Resources Sciences. Kendall Swanson animal sciences and Susie Thompson plant sciences. Congratulations to the nominees. I now welcome Dr David Buchanan associate dean for the academic programs in the College of agricultural food systems and natural resources to introduce the nominees for the teaching and advising awards. I'm pleased to introduce the nominees for two teaching awards and one advising award. The Earl and Dorothy Foster excellence in teaching award recognizes outstanding teaching faculty. 10 or fewer years of service in the College of agriculture food systems and natural resources. The award encourages and rewards excellence and teaching all levels and among all disciplines. These must hold a teaching appointment in the college. Our thanks to Earl and Dorothy Foster for sponsoring the award. Following your nominees for the Earl Earl and Dorothy Foster excellence in teaching awards. I'm Dio assistant professor department of plant sciences. Danielle Connery assistant professor of practice department of microbiological sciences. David England senior lecturer department of agribusiness and applied economics. Lauren holds Manhattan associate professor department of animal sciences. I'm a no no assistant professor department of agricultural and biosystems engineering. All the nominees for the Earl and Dorothy Foster excellence in teaching awards. Our next award is the age rolled and Janet learned excellence in teaching award. It recognizes outstanding teaching faculty was 11 or more years of service in the College of agriculture food systems and natural resources. The award encourages and rewards excellence in teaching at all levels and among all disciplines. And nominees must hold a teaching appointment in college. Our thanks to rolled and Janet Lund for sponsoring this award. The following of the nominees for the age rolled and Janet Lund excellence in teaching award. Sean DeKaiser professor school of natural research sciences. I'm a no no assistant instructor department of microbiological sciences. Jeremy Jackson professor department of agribusiness and applied economics. Burton Johnson professor department of plant sciences and Julian associate professor department of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Congratulations all the nominees. The award the William J and Angela and a Austin excellence and advising award recognizes contributions of faculty and staff who demonstrated excellence and advising undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the college and or its students organizations. Our thanks to the William J and Angela and a Austin family for sponsoring this award. Follow your nominees for the William J and Angela and a Austin excellence and advising award. Christopher Christiansen associate professor of practice department of animal sciences. Eric Hansen assistant professor department of agribusiness and applied economics. Matt Olaf senior lecture department of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Rachel Richmond senior lecture department of microbiological sciences. Thank you all the nominees. And I'll welcome Dr Lynette played associate director of NDSU extension introduced to introduce the nominees for the extension awards. Thank you Dr Buchanan, and I'm pleased to introduce the nominees for the two extension awards. The first award the excellence in extension early career award was established to encourage and reward significant accomplishments and excellence and extension educational programs. 10 or fewer years of service to NDSU extension are eligible for this nomination. The following are the nominees for the excellence in extension early career award. Megan Hoffman associate professor for each youth development specialist North Dakota Center for 4h youth development. Tom Peters associate professor extension sugar beet agronomist department of plant sciences. I believe Dr Peters is attending a conference this week. Travis or TJ Prachaska extension crop protection specialist at the North Central Research Extension Center. Let's give the nominees for the excellence and extension early career award a round of applause. The next award the eggs go excellence and extension award was established to encourage and reward significant accomplishments and excellence and extension educational programs. Individuals with 11 or more years of service to NDSU extension are eligible for nomination. Nominees must hold an extension appointment and be in the 2000 job band. Our thanks to eggs go for sponsoring this award. The following are the nominees for the eggs go excellence and extension award. Ellen B. Ellen extension agent word County. Mark Wattell professor extension entomologist in the School of Natural Research Sciences. Kurt Freilich extension agent Stark Billings County. Carrie Helgo extension agent Pemina County. Mark Watt extension soil health specialist at the Langdon Research Extension Center and frame Olson associate professor extension crop economics and the department of agribusiness and applied economics. Congratulations to all of the nominees. And I now welcome Dr lardy back to the stage to introduce the nominees for the staff awards. I'm pleased to introduce then the nominees for the three staff awards the first award the Charles and Linda Moses staff award recognizes significant contributions to the mission of NDSU agricultural affairs. The purpose is to encourage and reward excellence and job performance by professional staff. The nominee must have at least three years of continuous service in a staff position on and on and off campus staff members are eligible. The Charles and Linda Moses for sponsoring this award. Following are the nominees for the Charles and Linda Moses staff award. Jennifer Carney, director of student services, agribusiness and applied economics. Roger Eggeberg software developer agriculture communication. Peter Hawk research scientist department of plant pathology. Chris Holt account coordinator and the issue extension director's office. Scott Hoselton director core laboratory facility department of microbiological sciences. James Hyde research specialist and on school and natural resource sciences. Don Quinn Lynn research specialist department of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Sally man research specialist department of plant sciences. Let's give the nominees for the Charles and Linda Moses staff award a warm round of applause. Our next award, the Donald and Joe Anderson staff award recognizes significant contributions to the mission of NDSU agricultural affairs. The purpose is to encourage and reward excellence and job performance by office support staff. The nominees must have at least three years of continuous service in a staff position on and off campus staff members are eligible. Thanks to Donald and Joe Anderson for sponsoring this award. Following are the nominees for the Donald and Joe Anderson staff award. Julie beats information processing specialist student services coordinator department of agricultural and biosystems engineering. Eric distribution coordinator agriculture communication. murder free administrative assistant Carrington research extension center. Karen Gemning administrative secretary department of plant sciences. Edie Nelson administrative assistant department of agribusiness and applied economics. And Sarah shoe card McGregor administrative assistant Langdon research extension center. Neither those nominees could join us today. Let's give a warm round of applause to all the nominees. Our final award the Rick and Jody Burgum staff award recognizes significant contributions to the mission of NDSU agricultural affairs. The purpose is to encourage and reward excellence and job performance by support staff and technical and paraprofessional crafts trades and or services. The nominees must have at least three years continuous service in a staff position. They are eligible and our thanks to Rick and Jody Burgum for sponsoring this award. Following are the nominees for the Rick and Jody Burgum staff award. Chris Anderson print and copy services production manager agriculture communication. Well, senior accounting specialist department of plant sciences. And I am pannington account technician school of natural research sciences. Let's give a round of applause for nominees. Now we're going to move into presenting the award recipients at this time I'd like to invite Dr Frank Casey to the stage present the research award recipients with a frame certificate and a letter while I announced them. We'll start with the Larson Yaggy excellence and research award, and I'll read a brief snippet from the award nomination that describes this person. This individual has been successful in developing a nationally recognized research program in the northern Great Plains. Since arriving at any issue, they've demonstrated their ability to compete for extramural funding, support graduate students and complete research projects by publishing peer reviewed articles. Congratulations Tori Hobick associate professor of school and natural resource sciences. Next is the Eugene R. doll excellence and research award. This person does a talented scientists who has supported their work with an impressive amount of extramural funding. The recent this researcher has developed a nationally and internationally recognized research program. Congratulations Kendall Swanson professor of animal sciences. Now I'd like to call Dr David Buchanan to the stage present the teaching and advising awards. We'll start with the Earl and Dorothy Foster excellence in teaching award. This faculty member has revolutionized teaching in their own courses, as well as curriculum development in their department programs. Their teaching methods are noted as life changing and ignite a passion for learning in their students. Congratulations Danielle Connery assistant professor of practice department of microbiological sciences. Next is the H rolled and Janet Lund teaching award. Students appreciate this faculty members legendary organization of courses and lifelong skills given to students. This individual is also an outstanding mentor to faculty incorporate this effective teaching style as their own. Congratulations Tom Gustad instructor department of microbiological sciences. Now we'll move to the William J and Angela a Austin excellence and advising award. sought out by students for advising this individual has also started a research project to match curriculum and class recommendations with what employers are were valuing and recent graduates. This individual is integral in managing internships to give students experience in their future careers. Congratulations Eric Hansen assistant professor department of agribusiness and applied economics. Next I'd like to call the net flage to the stage to present the NDSU extension awards. We'll start with the excellence and early career award. This individual has embraced the extension mission of bringing the university to the people. A genuine and caring professional, this individual sparkling personality makes them approachable and their influential programming is respected by all. Congratulations Megan Hoffman associate professor for h and youth development specialist Center for h youth development. Now we'll move to the Exco and excellence and extension award. This individuals programming is known locally statewide nationally and internationally. There is never any question that is that this individual cares about education and is committed to seeing the public understand the material that is presented. Congratulations brain ulcer and associate professor extension propping systems economist department of agribusiness and applied economics. We'll finish the awards program with three staff awards for the first award the Charles and Linda Moses staff award Lynette pledge will remain here as I announced recipient. This individual is dependable creative and has excellent collaborative skills throughout their career this individual has guided in the issue agricultural affairs. Through an era of incredible technological change. Congratulations Roger Eggeberg software developer and communication. Next I invite Dr be cannon to the stage to assist with the second staff award, the Donald and Joe Anderson staff award. This individuals years of passionate dedication to any issues mission of service includes a diverse set of responsibilities. They are willing to work hard and work well with others frequently going above and beyond expectations. Congratulations Myrna Freight administrative assistant Carrington research extension center for a final award the Rick and Jody Burgum staff award, I'll call Frank Casey to the stage. This person anticipates upcoming situations to head off potential problems anticipates opportunities to improve efficiencies and has excellent communication and is willing to collaborate throughout ag affairs in an impactful way. Congratulations Diane Pennington account technician spill a natural resource sciences. Welcome to the close of our awards program this afternoon I want to thank everyone for attending both our in person and online audience special thank you to all of those people that did the work of putting the nominations together. And also thank you to our sponsors want to give a special thank you to our donors that are here in attendance Dr London Janet thank you so much for your efforts and making this possible. I want to thank and congratulate all the nominees for all of the things that you do to contribute to our mission, each and every day. It's a it's a great organization to be part of. And I am privileged to serve as a leader here and work with a great team of people. So thank you for everyone for the work that you do to carry out teaching research and extension programs. Thanks to the great state of North Dakota we appreciate that very much. I also want to give a special thank you to the group of administrative staff that put this program together. Janelle Cammie Aaron thank you so much for all your efforts and all of our comm staff or the work that you do to make this possible to get it out to our zoom audience and all those that are in attendance. Thank you to the virtual audience so thank you. And to our award recipients congratulations thank you. We're really pleased to be able to do this each and every year. I'd invite you to stay afterwards we got plenty of Christmas goodies back there holiday treats. Stay for a little bit of conversation and fellowship as we end the program day. Thanks again for coming.


When he went through basically combat survival training, he remembered talking with an instructor about a tap code that World War II prisoners used and so just by chance he happened to learn about that and when he was taken into captivity he taught it to a couple of the other guys that were there and as they moved around the prisons in Vietnam it spread like wildfire and became a very key lifeline for them to communicate. Just watching him, he got more emotional thinking about how she was while he was in captivity and I'll never forget just very powerful, very emotional. So he started out enlisted and decided he wanted to fly so he got commissioned cross training to F-105's and did a couple of combat tours over Vietnam and it was shortly there after I believe it was his second tour that he was shot down and he was a POW for about seven years so one of the longer remaining POWs over there came home during Operation Homecoming, reunited with his family, his son who he had never met, who was born after he was taken into captivity, his two daughters. It was actually very humbling to speak with him because he does not consider himself a hero. He does not consider himself worthy of being considered an eagle which absolutely just astounds me because he and his wife are both incredible. The things that he kind of talked about, like I said, doing things for the patriotic sense of duty and sense of country, that resonates with me because for a lot of what we do, we've known nothing but war since my peer group commissioned. The optimism particularly in my line of work when we talk about force support and taking care of the people and the families and the airmen, it's important to me that we provide them with some kind of positive view of the air force and that's really what he maintained was, the situation is what you make of it, you can either kind of wallow in it or you can maintain that hope and he definitely did. The fact that he and his wife took us out to lunch and treated us to all these things like we were the ones that were important, I'll never forget that, easily the best moment of ACSC for me.


So pilot projects don't start knowing everything about open collaboration. They start having an interest in open collaboration and a willingness to learn and improve over time. So the process of moving from a pilot project to a confirmed project is not a single snap change. It's an evolution over time. And I think Starling X is a really great example of that as we see them demonstrating more and more of those success factors of open collaboration. So second announcement, the board has also approved Zuol as our second confirmed project. Zuol has been around for a, Zuol has been a central part of OpenStack's infrastructure for a very long time. But it also plays an important role in the whole story of open infrastructure because it makes it possible for unrelated open source projects using completely different build tools and testing workflows to do integrated testing across projects, which is really important for that integration story. So to give us an update, we have the Zuol project lead. Please welcome Jim Blair. Good morning. My name is James Blair. I'm one of the maintainers of the Zuol project, which, as you've heard, is a recently confirmed open infrastructure project under the foundation's CI, CCD, strategic focus area. We've been hard at work over the past six months adding new features to Zuol, but rather than talk about all of them, I'd like to focus on just one today. And it's one that I'm especially proud of because it's changing the way that we develop containerized software. First, you need to know something about Zuol. Zuol is more than continuous integration, and it's more than continuous deployment. It's a project gating system. And the key thing about a project gating system is it allows you to ask, what if? What if we make this change to our source code? What if we upgrade this dependency? What happens to the entire system if this microservice changes? What if our base container image changes? It's a new way of testing and it's a new way of development. It gives developers the freedom to experiment that was previously inconceivable. We call this process speculative execution. And Zuol has been doing it for years with Git. It allows developers to write changes to front-end interfaces, which depend on changes to back-end systems, which in turn rely on changes to underlying libraries. And we can see all of these changes working together before merging a single one to the source code repository. This helps developers work across projects within a team, across teams, or even across organizations. And now we're doing the same thing with containers. Container images are built on layers. And in a stacked image system, the registry is an intermediary between those layers. That means in order for a change in one image to appear and be used in a subsequent image, it first has to be published to the registry. This can lead to images appearing in production with inadequate testing or upstream images breaking downstream consumers. We need to know that changes to our base image are not going to break images that are built on top of it. With Zuol's speculative container images, registries are created as needed to present each test environment a view of the world as if all of the changes to all of the images ahead of it had already been merged and all of those images had already been published to an image registry. These registries are ephemeral. They last only as long as necessary for each test. And each deployment sees the complete future state of the world, including not only its own image, but all of the images that it depends on. This process is invisible to deployment tooling. In a test job, we simply configure the system to use Zuol's registry instead of the production image registry, and it automatically uses either the speculative or the current production image as appropriate. Once these images pass their testing and the developers review the underlying changes, because these registries contain the complete view of the world at that point, it is safe to promote the exact images used in testing into production. And this is a key design point for Zuol. Zuol is designed for you to be able to use your actual production deployment tooling in tests. Our aim is to make testing more like production, not the other way around. Zuol uses Ansible natively, and of course Ansible can drive any deployment system out there. Zuol lets you move fast without fear, because its speculative executions feature allows you to find issues and verify solutions in complex systems before committing a single change to production. If you're interested in learning more about Zuol this week, we have a number of talks scheduled. This is just a few of them. Please check the schedule for more. In particular, I'd like to draw your attention to the birds of a feather session, where if you have any questions about Zuol, we'll be happy to answer them in an informal environment. Thank you.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, student minimum. Dave Vellante, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two sets called theCUBE Canon. We've got the Canon of content. Interviews all day long, out at night with the analysts, briefings, meetups, receptions. Talking to all the executives at Dell Technologies, VMware, and across the industry, Stu Dave. Today is product announcements on the keynotes. Yesterday was the grand vision with Michael Dell and the big reveal on the Microsoft partnership with Satya Nutella. Surprise visit on stage, unveiling new Azure VMware integrations with Dell Technologies. Dell announces the Dell Cloud, which is a little bit of a virtual stream, but they're trying to position this cloud, I guess it's a cloud, if you want to call it, single cloud of glass of Dave, single pane of glass with a variety of other things, unified workspaces of a variety of things. This is Dell trying to be a supplier end to end. This is the pitch from Dell Technologies. And we'll be talking to Michael Dell, also Pat Gelsinger, C-O-V-M, where Dave, were you impressed? Are you shocked? Were you surprised with yesterday's big news and as the product start coming online here? What's your analysis? Yesterday John was all about the big strategic vision, Michael Dell laying out tech for good, and then the linchpin of Dell strategy, which of course is VMware for cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, kind of VMware everywhere. I was surprised that Satya Nutella flew down from Seattle and was here on stage in person, didn't come in from the big screen, so I thought that was pretty impressive. He had the three power players up on stage. Today, of course, it was all about the products. Both Dell and EMC have always been very practical in terms of their engineering. Still, you used to work there. Their R&D is a lot of D. It's sort of incremental product improvements to keep the customers happy, to keep ahead of the competition, to keep the life cycle going. You had like 10 announcements today. I can go through them real quick if you want, but they range from new laptops, to talking about new branding on servers, new storage devices. You had PowerProtect, which is their new rebranded backup and data protection and data managed portfolio, an area where Dell, EMC, has been behind. So, lots of announcements. Another mega-launch tradition, and again, a lot of incremental, but important tactical improvements to the product line. Dave, last year, what we heard from Jeff Clark is they're looking to simplify that portfolio. Back in the EMC days, it was, oh my gosh, look at the breadth of this. Every category, they had two or three offerings, and the stated goal is to simplify that, and that means most categories are going to get one product. It's interesting. You talk about networking just got rebranded with that power branding. I kind of said there's that marketing behind the, if you know what that product is because it's the power brand, they put it out there. So, PowerMax has been there as their tier storage. They had a good update to Unity, to Unity XT. Doesn't have a power name yet, so maybe there's still some dry powder left. In the product portfolio there, but they're making progress going through this because these things don't happen overnight. It's great to spin up the clouds, but in the storage world, customers, they trust, they have the code, they've tested it out, so going to new generations, making that change, does take time, but we're seeing that progress, the tail end of that integration between Dell and EMC on the product side. Stu, what's your analysis of the product so far? I mean, again, like Dave said, it's a slew of announcements. What's resonating, what's popping out, what's boiling up to the surface? Yeah, so look, the area that I spent so much time on, John, that hyper-converged infrastructure, if you look at a lot of the pieces underneath it all, it's VxRail. One of the things we've had a little bit of a challenge squinting through is, oh wait, there's this managed service stack and it's VxRail underneath. Oh wait, I've taken the appliance and I put VCF, oh, that's VxRail, and then I've got this other, it's like, I see three or four solutions and I'm like, is it all just VxRail with a VMware stack on top of it? But how do I package it? What applications live on it? How is it consumed? Managed service, OPEX, CAPEX? So they've got that, a little bit of complexity when VxRail itself is just dirt simple and really there. So they're making progress on the cloud piece. Dell is the leader in hyper-converged. I'll point out, you don't hear anybody talking about Nutanix here, but Dell still has a partnership on the XC core. They're going to sell a lot of Dell servers into Nutanix environment. So I expect you'll still, at the Nutanix show, John, you're going to be at that next week. They're still going to talk about Dell. I'm sure you're talking to Dheeraj. Yes, they made a partnership with HP, but that does not kill the relationship with Nutanix. Just like Microsoft, heck, I'm going to see Satya Nadella on stage at Red Hat Summit next week. And they're like, oh, well VMware and Red Hat, Red Hat's here. Red Hat's a Dell-ready partner. If you want to put OpenShift on top of their stack, they can do that. So hardware and software, everybody's got their pieces, everybody competes a lot, but they partner across the board. IBM Global Services is here. There's so many companies here. Dell's a broad company, deep partnerships. The question I have is, you know, Pat Gelsinger was just on stage saying that this, you know, SDDC will be rebuilding blocks for the future. I said, kudos to them. They've got it on AWS. They've got it announced with Azure. They, we announced it with Google, but that is not necessarily the end state. It's, VMware's a piece of the puzzle. I don't know if VMware will be the leader in multi-cloud management. vCenter was the leader in virtualization management. So how much of that will there? Or do I get on Amazon and then start moving some stuff over? Do I get to Azure and start modernizing my environment so that I don't need to pay VMware? And I don't need virtualization. VMware and Dell are going to containerize everything. So in the future, you know, are they containerware? You know, that's the competition kind of posted that. They are VMware at their core. VMware's central to the strategy. And there's still some work as to go, but they're making some good progress. I want to get your thoughts, guys, on the role VMware is playing here at the show. Normally they're here, usually they're here, but this year it seems to be much more smoother integration of talking points, messaging, product integrations. The show's got a good beat to it. Pretty packed. But the role of VMware, Dave, is to what's your reaction and thoughts? We've seen them dance. Many times, obviously, VMware, Dave, you pointed out yesterday, a big part of the valuation of Dell Technologies. But what's your observation on the presence of VMware here at Dell Technologies World? I mean, I've said many times that this company, and I said this about EMC, it's kind of a boring company without VMware. You put VMware in the mix and some becomes very strategic and very interesting from a lot of standpoint, certainly from a financial standpoint. Remember the class V transaction that took Dell Public was the result of an $11 billion dividend because of VMware. They took VMware's cash and they said, okay, we're going to give nine billion to the shareholders. Without VMware, that wouldn't have happened. As well, the multi-cloud strategy, the underpinning of that multi-cloud strategy is VMware. And what strikes me, John and Stu, is that the cultural change, you had Dell, you had EMC, they said, oh yeah, the companies are compatible. But they're different companies. They maybe had shared kind of goals and values, but they had different cultures. And really in a very short timeframe, Michael Dell and his team have put these two companies together and they have aligned in a big way. I mean, they are basically saying, VMware and Dell, boom, that's how we're going to market. And Pat Wilson, Pat's coming on later today, but I'm sure he'll say, hey, we love NetApp, we love HPE, we love IBM, but it's clear what the preferred partnership is. Dave, when the acquisition happened, there was talk of synergies and you were, oh, where are they going to cut everything? If I look around here, they've got the seven logos of the primary companies. It's Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware. They're one company. Michael Dell will go on calls for any of them. Friends of mine at Pivotal, you talked to Michael quite a bit. He's out there, we talked about it yesterday. Dell and VMware are closer and tighter aligned than EMC and VMware ever were. Now, on the one hand, EMC kept them separate because the growth of virtualization required that. Today, in this cloud environment, it's a different world and it's matured, so VMware's sure they'll still work on HP and IBM and all this other stuff, but Dell leads that move and you said, Dave. John, you're big on culture. This is a founder culture. What's your take on what Michael Dell has accomplished and how does it stand to compare with sort of other great cultural transformations that you've seen? Well, I think HPE is a great example of a culture, that split. Meg Whitman's uncharged that we know what happened there and I think they're hurting. I think they're losing talent and they're not winning in categories across the board like Dell is. I think Michael Dell, the founder-led approach that he's had and because he told us years ago, a few guys remember on here on the record, also privately, that I'm going to take this off the table of EMC, we're going to do all these things, we're going to execute. So he brought his execution mojo and ethos of Dell and become Dell Technologies, do point it out, portfolio of multiple companies under one umbrella and he brought the execution discipline and this was a theme Dave last night at the analyst reception as I was talking to other analysts and talking to some of the execs, both from VMware and Dell Technologies, that the execution performance across the board, both on product integration, which was a weak spot as you know, is getting better. The business performance discipline, we're going to have the CFO on here to talk more about it, they're executing. Howard Elias is going to be on this afternoon, he called this three years ago when we talked about the integration, that they saw synergies, they saw opportunities and they were going to unpack those, they stayed relentless on that. So I think this is a great example of keeping the founders around for all the VC back companies, you're thinking about getting rid of founders, never let a founder leave a company, they bring the vision, they bring also some guts and grit and they bring a perspective and you can put great talent and team around that attract and retain great executives like Michael's done and he's poaching HPE, other companies that pull talent in because they're executing, they pay well, it's a great place to work according to the statistics. So again, this is all because of the founder and if the founder's not around, you have all the fightoms and the politics kick in and then it becomes kind of sideways. So that's kind of what I see other companies that don't have founders around and HPE lost their founders, obviously, and then the culture kind of went a little bit sideways. So they're trying to get back in the game, going back to their roots, we'll see how they do. We don't do that show anymore and again, we don't have a lot of visibility to what HPE's doing but we do know, Dave, that they do not have a lot of the pieces on the board that Dell does. So if you want to have an end-to-end operating model and you're missing key value activities of a end-to-end value chain, that's going to be hard to automate, it's going to be hard to be performant, it's going to be hard to be successful. So I think Dell's showing the playbook of how to be horizontally scalable operationally and offer perspectives and data-driven specialism in any industry and any vertical. Yeah, and Dave, if I can, just on the cultural piece, because it's really interesting, when you talked about EMC, East Coast, hard driving versus VMware, software, Silicon Valley company, while they're working together, a lot of it, I talked to VMware people and they're like, oh, it's great, the Dell force is just selling our stuff. It's not like I'm not having storage shoved down my throat or we have to have our arms twisted. It's the product portfolio that they're selling, the VSAN, NSX, the management software suite, and those pieces, things like SD-WAN, there's some good synergies there. So the product portfolio is a nice fit that just jointly go in a market that they just really line up well together. And Dell's a very different cultural beast than EMC was. Well, again, staying on culture for a moment, what I've discussed with some of the folks that I know out of Hopkins, the narrative early on was, oh, Dell's ruining EMC, tearing it apart when you talk to people today, they said, you know what, it was painful. Dell came in and said, okay, you're going to be accountable, really an accountability culture, but now that they've come out the other side, the narrative is it was the right thing to do. Jeff Clark came in and sort of forced this alignment. That's like no question about it. People, this is a guy who, you know, his calendar's set for the year. People know where he's going to be, what meet he's going to have, what's expected, and they're prepared. And it seems to be taking hold. I mean, a $90 billion company that's growing at 14% in revenues and profitable revenues, that's quite astounding when you think about it. And I think it's a big result of the speed at which Dell has brought in its operating model to the broader EMC and transformed itself. It's quite amazing. Awesome show, guys. We've got clips out there on the hashtag Dell Tech World on Twitter. We've got a lot of videos. We've got two sets here, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Final word on this intro for day two, guys. Thoughts on the show? It's not a boring show. It's a lot of activities, a lot of things. They got an Alienware, Esports Gaming Studio, which I think is totally badass. A lot of kind of cool things here. It's not the glitz and glam that we've seen in other EMC worlds before or Dell worlds, but it's meat and potatoes and it's got a spring to its step here. I feel it's not a, it feels good. That's my takeaway. Well, the big theme is hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. John Rose said as we were leaving the room today that we were early with that multi-cloud. Thanks to everybody else in the industry for hopping on board. The reality is, the first time I heard the sort of hybrid cloud was called private cloud. Chuck Hollis wrote a blog back in the mid to late 2000s. Now, I will make an observation and the customers that I talk to. Multi-cloud has not thus far been a deliberate strategy. In my opinion, it's been the outcropping of multi-vendor, shadow IT, lines of business. And I think the corner office is saying, hold on, we need to rein this in. We need to have a better understanding of what our cloud strategy is. Build a platform that is hybrid and sure multi-cloud to build our digital transformation. We need IT to basically help us build this out to make sure we comply with the corporate edicts. And that's what's happening. It is early days. It's a long way to go. Dave, as you know, I sat right down the hallway from Chuck Hollis when he wrote that piece. And I called up Chuck, I'm like, hey, Chuck, this sure sounds like my next generation virtual data center stuff that I joined the CTO office to work on. He's like, yeah, yeah, new marketing branding.  It's not a cohesive strategy. The management's not there. We're starting to see maturation. Some of the point products developed really fast. When we talk about VMware cloud on AWS, that happened really fast. I heard, if you stop by the VMware booth here at the show, they're showing outposts. And I said, is there a diagram? They said, no, no, I've got customers in production running this. I'm like, hold on, I need to hear about this, outposts in production. But that strategy, as you said, hybrid and multi-cloud, we're starting to get there, starting to pull it together. David Fleurer wrote a phenomenal piece about hybrid cloud taxonomy. We're spending a lot of time on the research side. Really, what does the industry need to do? How should customers think about all of the layers, you know, data and networking and all of these components to help make not just a bunch of pieces, but actually drive innovation and help be better than the sum of its parts. Well, an ironic follow-up on that post, the Chuck Hollis post was called the private cloud and it was all about homogeneity. And now, multi-cloud is everything but homogeneous. Outpost, however, is same hardware, same software, same control plane, same data plane. So, interesting juxtaposition. We'll see, Amazon Outposts. Guys, go to siliconangle.com, wikibond.com, great hybrid cloud, multi-cloud analysis coverage and news. And some of the headlines hitting the net here. Dell Technology makes VMware the lynchpin of hybrid cloud, data centers of service and user strategies from ZDNet. E-week, Dell makes major hybrid cloud push. Obviously, great analysis, guys. Right on the number. Day two, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John-Harrie Davey with the Stu Miniman. We've got two sets. Rebecca Knight, Lisa Martin and more. Stay tuned for more coverage. Day two after the short break.