Okay, welcome back to theCUBE VMworld 2013. We're live in San Francisco. We are on the ground at VMworld 2013. Day three of three days of coverage. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced extracted system of the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, John McCose, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org. Hi everybody, Ramin Sayers here. He's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware's cloud management business. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. So obviously, VMware, big show for you guys. Management is a big conversation here. Moving up the stack has been the theme. So just give folks a sense of what your group does at VMware and then we'll go into some specific questions. Sure, well I mean this has been a multi-year journey for us as we've helped build the customer's foundation around server virtualization, expanding that to the rest of the data center around beyond compute to network and storage. Automation and management become that much more critical to deliver on the promise and premise of the private cloud. So fortunately, we've had the opportunity over the last three and a half, four years to incrementally build out the portfolio of offerings that most of our customers and partners saw debuted here. What are some of the key things right now that updates for the news for you guys that you're announcing at the show here? Sure, well I mean if you looked at some of the things we showed the other day, it's all around how do you enable flexibility and choice but you have the policy governance control. So what we showed the other day with Carl on main stage was how our vCloud automation center as part of the new vCloud 5.5 suite really enables a separation of duties between administrators on the infrastructure side versus developers who are requesting virtual machines with operating systems and improved developer productivity. But beyond that we also announced some new capabilities in core vSphere that take advantage of some of the management capabilities like vSOM which is vSphere with operations manager. Yeah, so talk about the uptake there a little bit. I mean it's relatively new. Your executives talk about it on their earnings call. There's always a lot of discussion about going beyond core vSphere. So talk about the customer reaction and the uptake of it. Sure. So it's fast growing product line in the company right now. Awesome. And fortunately that's primarily because customers need to be able to automate more and more of not just the inside bowels of what's going on in vSphere but also all the peripherals with respect to network and storage. And so the uptake for us has been on two fronts. One has been adoption of the vCloud suite holistically and customers looking to not only build a homogenous based private cloud but a heterogeneous based hybrid cloud. So as we look at the vCloud suite the starting point for a lot of customers is let me get granular control of the vSphere based environment and then I want to be able to bridge out what we call expand out to the hybrid whether it be public or even vCloud hybrid services that we announced. Okay, so when you say holistically you're talking about the whole enchilada of the suite to get all the capabilities. Right? So in addition, I mean you guys have credible renewal rates. I mean your customers are very loyal. Customers oftentimes are doing multi-year renewal engagements, right? So can you talk about that a little bit? You're seeing more and more of that from sort of bespoke little buying patterns to much more of holistic and broader whether it's ELAs or more pieces of the pie. You got rising average ASPs. Talk about that a little bit in terms of customer adoption. Sure, I'll talk more specifically around the management business and then more broadly around VMware. From a management point of view our attach rate to the VCR install base has dramatically grown over the last year and a half. And the first half of this year particularly we've seen a substantial growth as we announced and a lot of our earnings calls. And what's driving that at the end of the day? Well one is more customers are continuing to move from the phase one to two and even three of the kind of maturity life cycle. And so that means they're moving past the 40% adoption. So great example that is VCOps that's really helping manage a vSphere deployment. So our attach rate and penetration rates around that are growing. And in particular you're seeing not only VMware direct reps but also the channel pick that up. So earlier this year we announced solution rewards for our channel partners which they get 30 points rebates. We've done a lot to certify and train them. So both our direct selling and our partners are actually going and helping customers evolve their maturity to go beyond 40% to 60% and ultimately get to the private cloud or the cloud suite. A few years ago John and I were talking and we called management a jump ball. You had a lot of traditional players and sort of a lot of entrenched management of suites, offerings, solutions, whatever you want to call them.  Can you talk about sort of in that context where you are today and what your vision is going forward as a player in that marketplace? Yeah, I mean if you look at IDC for example and they just put out a report, it says VMware is the fastest growing management vendor in the space. And part of that is due to the fact that we have such a big loyal install base and they want to do more with respect to what they're doing already with the server virtualization products, right? And so as they expand out to integrate networking and storage they need manageability, they need consistent way but they need a new way. Not a traditional framework play that takes a long time to get into this dynamic environment, right? So one of the great things is the feedback of the customers whether it be Vmugs or part of the design process, we really intently listen to a lot of our customers and partners and we give them access to a lot of our products and betas and we innovate with them so it's not just VMware building these for them. You got to ask you obviously the landscape question and you have a lot of history in the enterprise software business, I mean probably different companies as well. VMware's got a great brand, we talked to Sanjay Poonan earlier, he came from SAP, he was excited about the opportunity. We didn't really talk much about what it was like before he got there but he's got his running shoes on but you've been around the block on enterprise software management. We all know the history, HP OpenView, systems management, EMC. What's changed now? What is the big thing that you look at from product management to go to market that is a critical difference from the old way to new way? Still a lot of legacy, you've got to bridge the legacy. What's the new open markets that you see and technology that's underneath? Right, great question actually. I think something from a technology perspective was changed is that the dynamic environment simply cannot be managed by those older frameworks. I worked on a lot of them, I built a lot of them and in this new world, the cloud era, you need different types of techniques around machine learning and analytics to understand what's going on deep within the bowels of all the abstraction layers that we're creating. So that starts to separate the pack right there, right? But I think what else is going on is there's a very aggressive and progressive move towards open source, right? Whether that be an open stack or whether it be other open source technologies, we see quite a bit around Puppet or Chef or Assault in the development community as well, right? So what's the biggest change there is open source is enabling developers to be a lot more productive but also it's also enabling them to be more demanding as to what they expect from infrastructure. So therefore the traditional tools and the way delivery models of infrastructure as a service, fun amount needs to be turned upside down, right? And so no longer does IT have that monopoly control when developers are going outside? I've always asked myself that question and I remember when monitoring started hitting the scene in the late 80s with client servers, oh, we had all these networks now from one coax string to hubs and then you got all kinds of great stuff. It's always the infrastructure that drives management. Now we have management paradigms in an ever changing architecture of the operating systems or the networks. So now you got massive architectural changes. People are trying to shoehorn old management techniques into a moving train on the architecture side. So this is not even a done deal. How can you manage something that's not known? So that's kind of like the mindset that we're looking at. So one, do you agree with that? And then what's your commentary around that? What do you do? How do you manage that dilemma? Because you've got clients looking for systems management and monitoring. Yeah, so first of all, I do agree with that. That's part of the reason why I'm here at VMware. I got the opportunity several years ago to come in and ground up, build this technology and business out. And if I didn't believe that, I probably wouldn't be here, right? But more specifically, I think the challenge for customers is that if they try to go about the private cloud or hybrid cloud from a brown field perspective, meaning that they're trying to leverage their old and new, it's very difficult and cumbersome because people in process is just as important as technology. And what we've seen the customers be most successful is where they actually instantiate a new green field private cloud and start to look at new paradigms of networking and storage and management to deliver upon the requirements of development and lines of business. And usually those customers are a lot more successful than the brown field environments where they try to leverage the existing tools and frameworks and processes. And you're an example, you can share with folks that have done that, the name names, but just describe the environment of the green field where they had challenges and kind of stuck in the middle on one hand, you've got the brown field, all stuck in the middle, half pregnant, whatever you want to call it, too. Okay, clean sheet of paper. Yeah, so there's one big bank in the media and central part, they tried for nine months to, in essence, this is exactly similar to a service provider there. Take the network team, the storage team, the compute team, bring them together and create a virtual shared services group, right? It was like the UN, right? And you had to go sell and solicit everyone for nine months, they made no progress. And the reason they made no progress was one group and Sila didn't understand the challenges of the other and there was no single person that was the authority to break decisions. So they ended up parking that and they ended up going with a converge stack and they rolled that in and they brought in a new team. They picked the best and brightest from the compute team, the network team, the storage team, that became the cloud organization, right? And that was a green field cloud in a three and a half month time they were able to consider- So Silo Busters basically, basically get guys who don't even care about the politics of the silos and saying, go. Yeah, go eat class as we say, right? The Silo Busting is very critical as we're busting down the technology silos. We're also very cognizant of the fact that the process and organizational barriers are often the issues that customers need to address, too. I want to come back to something that I said earlier about analytics. A lot of people believe that the sort of traditional policy-based management is dead. That it's too complicated, you need machines to actually make decisions. Humans can't make them fast enough. So that's kind of, it sounds like bromide, but still, this makes some sense. What are your thoughts on that and what are you guys doing in that regard? So we applied that principle quite a bit. If you look at our VC Ops portfolio products and our log insight, it's all about machine learning, behavior analysis technology that starts to understand normal and abnormal behavior of workloads, right? And the reason is because in the traditional infrastructure and data center, a user had to define what they thought a high and low threshold amount would be. But this infrastructure is so dynamic and applications are so dynamic, it's impossible for a user to know the variability and what a workload or infrastructure should act like. So when you have characterization of an application or workload that learns a behavior through different cycles, that can be very informative as to where you provision, deprovision, as well as where operationally you need insight to what's going on in the underlying infrastructure. So I have a heavy investment in machine learning, PhD, analytics folks, constantly building analytics and algorithms into the VC Ops product and also other parts of our ITBM portfolio to help with better improved decision making, whether that's done by human or by providing that insight or automatically, as we say, by the machines and the system itself. Now is that a predominantly organic investment or are there some acquisitions as well involved in that capability, it's both. So we acquired one technology company, it's called Integrion several years ago, right? And we've built upon that. We have a lot of machine learning PhDs. We acquired a set of folks last year with our acquisition of our log insight product as a company that we brought in. But we also added more than quadrupled those teams over the last couple of years. Awesome. We love machine learning. I mean, Dave and I are data junkies and we have our own little analytics system and unsupervised machine learning. And it's interesting as you get more data, it gets smarter, right? So you need the data, right? You can't manage the data. It's Jeff Jonas' puzzle, right, John? Jeff Jonas, guy from IBM, real brilliant scientist, chief scientist, and says piece of the puzzle here or there, you can't really see it, but as the puzzle starts to get bigger and put together you can get more data. So what's interesting is how you make use of the data. Because more data's not necessarily great, right? And as you- How do you act on it, right? Yeah, how do you act on it? And as you heard during the various presentations, the amount of telemetry that's going in and even non-out, outside of IT is just enormous, right? But inside IT, from the hardware platforms all the way up, you're getting inundated with more and more metrics, right, events. The visualization challenge alone is mind boggling. So how do you provide the right insight to the specific metrics or KPIs, you know, at that point in time, is a difficult balance for us? And what sort of UIs do you provide that visibility? We spent several years and we're still fine-tuning it. Right? I mean, expectation maximization like protocols to go in there, figure out, hey, we've seen this pattern before. Yeah. So we're actually starting to use some social principles now. So because machine learning, you know, is good to understand what's good and normal and not normal, but then the user needs to start to vote whether they kind of like it or dislike it, right? Now which users? The end users of the system, of the tool, right? So how, so for example, one of the things we're doing in our release right now is we're asking the user to rate something. Was this helpful or not? So then we can start to better fine-tune the algorithms for that particular use case and scenario that they're managing, right? Crowds or techniques to feed the... Well, using the human intelligence, it's really bouncing humans and machines. You're spot on, that's exactly where we're doing. Yeah, and that's new data too, that's new data. Yeah, so we've actually expanded from the structured data that we've talked about before log in with VC ops to now unstructured data as we saw during the main stage with log insight. So now we can, the beautiful thing is we bring the both together and so with time series structured data with unstructured log data, now we can provide powerful insight to what's going on. What does dynamic ops fit into all of this? It's a very critical control point for us and for customers. Ask more... And what does that sit on the stack? Above or beyond, I mean what does that piece sit on the stack? So logically it sits on top of the VC-VCD stack for it within a homogeneous vSphere environment but also sits on top of any converged stack, sits on top of any roll your own kind of infrastructure and it bridges the release automation process from applications upstream with a component called AppDirector and downstream to provision on a single virtual machine or a set of virtual machines or a virtual data center.  So the final question for you, we're going to break on the segment is I want to just tell folks what's your goals for the year? Obviously you're in a hot area, dynamic networks are changing the game on management, you guys get that, it's a clear vision, no debate there, check the box, now execute, get the hiring and the PhDs, that's smart, get in the big day, use big data for you, little crowdsourcing, little new gesture-based data coming in to complement some of the machine learning. On the business side, what should you do, what's your goal list for the next year, so half a year or so? So obviously we have very ambitious and aggressive vision around software-defined data center and we've debuted some of the announcements here, we logically have another event coming up in Barcelona, we'll be making some more announcements there so for us, my engineering organization, we're heads down, we're pumping out products, right? We have a bunch coming out in the second half and a lot coming out in the first half, so one is just keep innovating at the pace that we're innovating, right? The second is make it simple, right? Management and automation needs to be much simpler in this new world. And so we're rapidly innovating, prototyping new stuff, some of it comes to market, some of it doesn't, and so we're looking at continued integration development with our partners and our customers to help influence that. I do have one more question just popped in my head and as you were saying that, a personal question, you know, you grew up in Silicon Valley, you know innovation, you've seen it right in front of your eyes from the Apple orchards to now the crowded valley that it now is. You know what I'm talking about there, if you grew up here, no, not from the East Coast, so I wasn't there then. It was A4 caught for me. And I should have bought a house when I stood up here. My biggest mistake in five houses.  We were talking this morning with Pat and the team and Sanjay, it's a technical culture. It is. And they say the word cult, I mean I like that word, but it kind of makes, I don't really like that word too much, but it's techniques, innovation is key. And what are some of the, some things you can share about the culture? You know, on a personal note, I must say that in your career, you only have a few opportunities like this that I have here at VMware where you get a ride like this, right? And if you surf, you surf, you understand when you get those, right? And this is just an unbelievable opportunity culture for me to be in. And a lot of the folks are here at VMware. With Pat coming on board, he wholeheartedly believes in this SDC vision. He's doubled down on the management business for me in particular in the group. So we're accelerating a lot of the innovation IP creation.  And if you're not passionate about it, you don't thrive here. Passionate. We love big fans of VMware obviously in Palo Alto, great company and great ride.  Nice separation. That's still the stack that Merit still showed in 2010, still just two companies now attacking it in an ecosystem that's doing great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We'll be right back. Stay with us. Day three, wall-to-wall covers to theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.


Hi again, in this lesson we're going to talk about that how to check if all characters in our string are lowercase in Python programming language. For example, let's make a string, let's call it my string and let's put inside our string some text, for example, this is a text with all lowercase characters, okay? Let's try to check does our string has all lowercase characters. We'll use method lower, that method will check does our string contains all lowercase characters and of course it contains so returning value will be true. What will happen if we will have, for example, exact same string but with one uppercase letter? What will happen if we try to see is our string all with lowercases or not? If we try to check this string we'll see that all characters are not lower because this first letter is uppercase, so returning value will be false. So that's it for this lesson, thanks for watching, see you in the next video, bye-bye.


Studying exposure. Here's how you can analyse this poem. In terms of structure this poem is written in eight stanzas. The first stanza opens by personifying nature as an enemy. Also the ellipsis shows how the wait in the long cold night feels endless for these soldiers. But nothing happens as repeated in stanzas 1, 3, 4 and 8 to show how during the first world war there was sometimes long periods of waiting in between combat. This simile shows that the actual fighting is far away. The main enemy against these soldiers is nature. Ruler 3 is used here to emphasise just how miserable these soldiers are during this war. The simile here is really powerful because it reveals that it's the cold winter, nature that's more deadly to the soldiers than war. The repetition of the words God here shows that the war has gone on for so long that the men have lost all faith in God and this metaphor emphasises how brutal fighting conditions were during the war.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I bring you the latest news surrounding destiny 2 and the July 17th update, which is a big one People but before I'm getting to that guys I want to tell you about my little giveaway I'm giving away everything a month a fully customizable controller to my loyalist of subs to being with the chance of winning drop on a like on this video Only they comment down below and enter the giveaway video gleam link at the top of the video description simple legit And 100% epic. Good luck you sexy bastards Okay, so within the update 1.2.3, which is released on July 17th next month We get some pretty big changes now all this information comes from the bungee weekly update Which not long dropped and you guys can catch that linked within a video description if you do want to read through the entire thing So with the update we get some major changes I'm gonna go through the main things right here right now I'm gonna start with a crucible and this is a crucible playlist updates quit play Increasing player configuration to 66 and updating the playlist description removing supremacist from the pool of available game modes Control updating control windscar to 150 controls arms will initially be neutral clash update clash windscar to 100 Competitive bomb fuse timer in countdown lowered from 40 seconds to 35 seconds General rumble would become a full-time playlist and a lot of people are gonna be happy about that Supremacy will be added to the weekly featured playlist updated to 6v6 and have a windscar of 150 actually enjoy supremacy, but it's a game mode I only want to play here and there so I'd want the option to pick it and play and not have it mixed in with clash and control But that's just my opinion crucible ranks updates players will be able to earn valorant from additional playlist Competitive crucible labs. I am banner and trials of the nine I mean, I'm top rank now because I've run heck out of standard PVP their casual playlist or the quick play playlist as many people say But being able to earn that rank playing I am banner I would have done this ages ago So that's pretty cool And it does make it a lot easier to get to that top rank joining a game in progress will protect your valor win streak for that game If you lose no penalties incurred to your valor win streak if you win valor win streak Increases in competitive players will match using a glory rank This means your opponents will be of a similar rank to you the higher you climb the top of the opponent Well, actually, that's not necessarily the case glory loss streaks will be retuned to be less punishing over time Consecutive losses will decrease the rank points last instead of increasing Streaks will still cap out at five all ranked streaks were no longer set once they hit their cap So that is pretty cool people And that is what we have on the one point two point three updates released on July 17th to the crucible Now we are going to move on people and this is a biggie. This is massive news actually and that is a new power level 400 power weapons now they state the only way to get 400 power armor before forsaken is By participating in the summer solstice events But only way to get 400 power weapons before forsaken is by completing prestige Spire of stars and each of worlds every time you complete all the encounters in a prestige raid layer that week You will be rewarded a 400 power raid weapon This can be any raid weapon from destined to not just a weapons that drop in that raid layer raid armor ornaments Also, each prestige raid layer has its own set of unique armor ornaments master work exotic catalysts Both raid layers have a master work catalyst that can be found only as a rairdrop in the activity And I can confirm that it will be the telesto which will be even the prestige each of worlds And it will be the sleeper simulant within the prestige by the stars And I do believe as well the legend of aqueous catalyst can be found within the prestige of Leviathan And I do believe like great states these will come within that July 17th updates Now what you do bunch of states each week There's a curated weapon suit and the global activity modifier for spiral stars and each of worlds The weapon set and modify will be the same across both activities curated weapon loadouts are based on weapon archetypes So over the summer you might see combinations that require you to recruit also rifles the machine gun sniper rifle or scout rifle hand cannon Rocket launchers loadouts are not locked inside the prestige layer You can bring tons of different guns into a raid layer and swap between them at will as long as the guns meet the required curation for example If you were doing spiral stars and a loadout is also a rifle submachine gun and sniper rifle You might want to use the suicide gene for valve phase one But swap to ghost primers for valve phase two so you can equip Darcy for the boss damage We are shipping three activity modifiers that the raid layers rotate between two of these modifiers are brand new And were built from the ground up by the raid team to work in raids The third is a fan favorite from destiny 2 prism Each of these modifiers is designed to provide guidance with advantages over their enemies when they lean into it The goal of using these modifiers and loadouts is to change the way you engage with prestige raid in each week The first week the modifier and weapon loadout might synergize really well with strategies and armor exotics You've been using for months next week the modifier and weapon loadout might push you to explore the encounter in a different way And use different exotic armors looking at you loonification They state questions we might have is anything happening to the prestige version of the Leviathan raid Nope prestige Leviathan will stay exactly as it is they state this weapon curation and modifier will only apply to the itta of worlds and spiral stars But in 1.2.3 it might be worth going back and playing some more Leviathan prestige to see if colors has a new way to enhance one of your favorite exotic shotguns Like I said people they're legend of accuracy this is our prestige raid layers getting per encounter changes Nope they state when we originally created the raid layers We wanted to focus on making the normal modes of encounters the most complete forms of the experience We believe these modifiers and loadouts will create more variety in your prestige gameplay than small per encounter changes We also believe that their mechanical complexity in destiny 2 raid layers is very high And we want to lean more into the moment to moment sandbox engagement in prestige How many of these prestige raid activities will be active each week? All of them they state do you want to play all three prestige raid activities each week on three different classes for maximum exotic catalyst And 400 power and farming potential Go for it and so people are lost my breath saying that when will the prestige raid layers become available Current plans for both prestige raid layers to be active with modifiers right when the patch goes live Do we feel like this is in line with prestige being a new way to play each week instead of a one-time event? But we are open to feedback on this So that's pretty cool people. I mean I look forward to the prestige raids for sure How about you let me know down below? I do like the idea of three new exotic catalyst to chase as well That's going to be pretty cool Tell us those to leave a stimulant and a legend of aqueous Which if you don't know people that change the catalyst the metal version does this is absolutely ridiculous bigger magazine size and a quicker reload I'm going to feel a fan of the legend of aqueous you will know how beefy this thing is already so them changes They're a must for us fans of that weapon. They really are Okay, so we're going to move on to costs and collections The destiny to forsaken reveal brought a lot to the table on what's coming in september But there are many questions surrounding new features that will be tackling the lead not to launch this week We're hitting a few of the most frequently asked questions about the upcoming collections feature Investment designer Matt McConnell is here to bring the knowledge What items from year one eventually will collections track collections include any weapon rps gold ship sparrow emblem Or shader available in year one of destiny two Is there anything I can dismantle before forsaken launches? If you have an item in your inventory right now, you can safely discard it and retrieve it from the collections in september This does not include consumable.  So I can dismantle any armor I have now clogging up space and in september if I ever want it If I ever want to revisit that gear where again decorate with new shaders I can just pull it out of the collections wall. That's absolutely epic Same goes for weapons gold ship sparrows emblems as well.  I love that I mean, it should have been in the game from day one I think we all can agree on that but still it's a great great addition I look forward to exploring it even deeper carrying on with what they state What items from year two can be required from collections with the addition of random perk rolls to items starting year two We had to make a tough call for collections. We investigated numerous options for gear with random perks fixed collection perks by pack limits reroll mechanics And many others but each of these came with issues that impacted the collections experience in a negative manner Ultimately, we decided to decide the purchase of all year to randomly roll legendary weapons and armor We don't like keeping some items from experiencing the full collections treatment So we're looking at a long-term soul for storing your exact perk rolls in collections How much will it cost to require items at your collections? We're currently working on cost for item acquisition and we'll have more information at a later date We have two main goals when deciding on the acquisition costs The acquisition is in a currency sink. We aren't trying to make you spend all your hard-earned glimmer We just want to make sure the items you find out in the world still have value Players won't have to deal with currency conversions For example, if a shader dismantles into glimmer, it costs glimmer to reacquire If a shade comes from eververse, it will dismantle into bright dust and therefore cost bright dust to reacquire These same goals are true of all collection items Note a lot of you have been asking about the cost of shaders We can say that they will have a cost to require from collections But there will no longer be a cost to apply shaders to gear That is the best news I've ever heard in my life people. What the heck? Here's a quick example Let's say you got that sweet Kallises treasure shader to drop from the raid You'll be able to apply it immediately at no cost If you want that specific shader on all your armor weapons, gold, ship and sparrow You'll need to pay some glimmer to require a handful of copies straight out of your collections So that's pretty good That should have been a way should have worked from the start people if you asked me But again, I'm glad to see it coming with this update Another question they say we might have when we acquire gear from collections What power level will they be? Collection items will come out close to your current power level But will require infusion to be ready for in-game activities This is a delicate balance of making sure collections don't create a leveling exploit While still providing items that are usable right away in most activities So that's pretty cool too and I understand where they're coming from to be honest This game suffers from so many exploits. It's unbelievable So they're just watching their own asses if you ask me Well, yeah guys some amazing changes coming in september with these collections and with the 1.2.3 updates with july 17th Which I cannot wait for people but and that we have come to the end of the video Prestige raid get ground in july 17th for new catalysts should be great people It really should but you've come to the end of the video guys If you enjoyed it leaving a like truly does help me out if you're new around here and enjoy daily destiny videos Be sure to subscribe and hopefully people. I will see you on that next one


Well, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii. Work community does matter, especially in an election here.  I'm just the energy guy. What I'd like to do today, before we get with our guests, is talk a little bit about what my organization, HCAT, is, where it is, what it does, just so you can get a feel for as we go into this discussion with our guests, where I'm coming from in terms of micro grids and things. HCAT is actually a small program. Only five of us in the office. We're down to four right now. We're looking for a secretary, if anybody's interested, but only five of us. And we manage contracts for the Air Force Research Lab, and we do a lot of demonstration projects for the Air Force in not only hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but also micro grids. And right now, it's kind of confuses people. We're part of D-bed. We're part of Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism for the state, and we're a program, but we're totally federally funded. We don't take any tax revenues from the state at all, and we're federally funded 100% by the Air Force to do our projects. But the good news is, all the cool stuff I learn working with the Air Force on hydrogen vehicles and micro grids, I get to bring back to the state of Hawaii and share it with HECO and share it with Hawaii Gas and share with other people, community developers, local business development councils, Chamber of Commerce, Hawaii Blue Planet Hawaii, Blue Planet Research, University of Hawaii. We all share it together to try and make Hawaii a better place in terms of renewable energy. And it's amazing how much synergy we get in that group with non-for-profits and other folks, commercial folks on where we're trying to get to in Hawaii with clean energy. So our micro grid out at HECOM is kind of unique in that it's focused on one part of HECOM Air Force Base or Joint Base Pearl Harbor HECOM with the Hawaii Air National Guard. They have what we call a fighter campus with fifth generation F-22 fighters top of the line Air Force fighters, but it's in a small area and it just is perfectly located along their grid where we actually have two redundant lines so we can actually pull that campus off the main grid and put it back on fairly easily. And we're developing a series of micro grids out there that will show the Air Force they can take all renewable energy and provide energy to their military mission, even if their commercial power goes down. And at first we can cover all the power requirements in that campus, but over a week or two weeks or three weeks or a month or two months or six months, all of a sudden if you don't have enough power there, you're kind of hurting. And we're going to show that even when you get to a real austere time like cloudy days and rainy days and not much sunlight to get your power in, we can keep the critical missions on that base going no matter what indefinitely. 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 a year. That's what we're showing to the Air Force. He goes kind of watching us, other utilities are watching us, other services are watching us, but that's what we're trying to show for the state of Hawaii and the Air Force that it can be done. Why is that important? If you get more than 20 percent ish of intermittent renewables on any grid, the utility has a really, really hard time balancing all that load. So all the things that we've learned about what a utility can absorb, what it can absorb, how much has to be base power, base load power and what can be intermittent. It's really important and a lot of people I've talked to say, oh, the electric companies just make it a big story about how hard it is. And I go, no, it's really, really hard to balance a grid when you have that much intermittent renewable on it. But there's solutions and we're trying to help everybody see those solutions in Hawaii and outside Hawaii. We work with Europe and Asia and everybody else. Now the state energy office, they're also in D-bed, but they're policy people. They help the governor do policy things. We actually have our hands in the in the cake, so to speak, and we actually build things and help design things or put the contracts out to design things that have to do with grids and hydrogen. So a little bit of background there. And to that, my guest today is Michael Markridge from Granite Power, and he's here to talk with me a little bit about some of the things that we've talked about offline and in other forums about what Hawaii could be doing with grid power and with hydrogen and what the future looks like. So Michael, thanks for being on the show. My pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Glad you're here today. And we do have a lot of conversations at lunch and stuff about this. And so tell folks a little bit about yourself and what you do with Granite Power and what you do in the community with like Green New Rebuild, Hawaii. So by training, I'm an economist. And for the last 10 years or so, I've been working in different aspects of renewable energy. And one of my companies that I've been working with is Granite Power, which is an Australian based company. And they do have a organic rank and cycle engine, which is a 19th century way of describing a way to use low energy heat to make power. And the purpose of this is that whenever you have an engine that's producing power, there's always waste heat. Right. And a lot of waste heat. And for the most part, we live with that waste heat as our... We throw it away. We throw it away. And what they did was they developed a system and said, well, let's use this waste heat. And off a typical diesel engine, they could get another 10 percent. So why not use that 10 percent? And then on a big, let's say, a big 10 megawatt system, you get a megawatt, which maybe that's 200 homes. That's you could be powering. And that's all paid for. So we've been... They have a project in the Republic of Samoa right now and using waste heat and several other projects in Australia. And then we've been talking to different people and different clients in Hawaii about doing projects here. There's a lot of opportunities here. And this is like when now everybody's really into cooking and using every part of the cow, every part of the pig, and using all the vegetables we used to throw away. But why throw away energy? Why not use every bit of energy? Right. And we have our changing light bulbs and these other things we're doing. And this is another way. This is saying, look, heat, heat's around us. Why don't we use that heat and make more power out of it? Yeah, the first law of thermodynamics is that energy is neither made nor lost, it just changes form. So it's either heat or it's radiant energy or it's electricity or it's potential energy. You know, wave action energy. I mean, you can have kinetic energy. It just changes from one to another. So heat's just another form of energy that could be turned maybe into electricity if you do it right. And that's what granite power apparently does. That's right, exactly. And they also do geothermal down in Australia because that whole area of the Pacific is on that ring of fire. They're very interested in geothermal. The reason they haven't been doing it in Australia is because in Australia you have to go down very deep to get to geothermal, although it's there. So New Zealand next door might have you. Yeah, and Hawaii is very attractive for geothermal. A lot of people around the world look to Hawaii as a leader of geothermal. Even though right now our geothermal biggest plan is not working, but for the last 22 years, Hawaii's been a world leader in geothermal. In the past 22 years, though, technology's changed quite a bit. And so the geothermal that we have on the big one at Pune Geothermal is not what you'd call cutting-edge technology in the geothermal world. And I think that's actually a good topic for discussion today. A lot of I know in the hydrogen world, technology's changed rapidly and really advanced. And I've actually seen some geothermal companies that have very small footprints, very safe systems, and potentially could be doing some work here without the fear factor that seems to pop up whenever Pune Geothermal's name comes up in the media or something where people are concerned about safety issues and things in their area. So along those lines, the reason Pune Geothermal is down right now is because of the active volcano. The lava's right in their backyard, literally. In fact, it's kind of funny that the lava creeped right up to their boundary line a little over and then stopped. I don't know if it's still moving that way, but it's like somebody sending a message.  I don't know. Maybe that's an indicator. But certainly, the amount of energy coming out of that lava is an exceptionally huge amount of energy that maybe we should be tapping into. And maybe we could be using on the Big Island. Have you done any research to see, like on the Big Island particularly, where there's some other hot spots in the area? Well, actually, there's a number of different places. And the closer you are to where the lava is flowing, that's the better. That's the internet. That's what it is there. That's what you want to be. So there are more opportunities. The question is, is it something that the public there wants to accept and wants to embrace? The alternative to not embracing that is, of course, for base power, you still need fossil fuels. So in some ways, these are all, to certain people, these are all bad choices. Fossil fuels is a bad choice, because it overheats our atmosphere. Maybe our religious or cultural reason is geothermal is bad. But you're always having to weigh, in this modern world, what is your best alternative? Right. Yeah, and my understanding is that Pune Geothermal actually provides between 20% and 30% of the Big Island's energy. How big is 31%? 31% up until, how was that? Until they shut down. And the shutdown is precautionary. They might be able to still operate, but I know that they don't want to be in a risky situation, so they're just shut down now. But 31% is a lot, because that's baseload power. That's not intermittent renewable. So the electric company looks at that as stable power that they can use, that they know how much is coming and all the time they can count on it 24 hours a day, they're shut down, interrupted, and they can count on that. So when you have that kind of base power, along with the Big Island, also has rivers and waterfalls, a lot of them, and they have a lot of hydroelectric power, which the other islands, we really don't capture that as much. I don't know how much we could capture, but when you look at the state's electricity requirements, the neighbor islands are already well ahead of this island, Oahu, on renewable energy, because they have access to more wind power, more solar power, and those baseload powers like geothermal and hydroelectric. So even though Hawaiian Electric here on Oahu is struggling with 20%, 25% intermittent renewables, the neighbor islands have that 20%, 25%, and 50% of other renewables that aren't intermittent. So they're over 50% for the most part. And when it comes to meeting that deadline to be 100% renewable by 2045 that we have here in the state, the neighbor islands are going to be there in a hurry. It's just how are you going to get Oahu up to that level? We don't have enough room for all the solar. We don't have enough room or desire to put windmills. I mean, I had Senator Rivieri on the show here a few months ago, and his constituents are like, you know, we thought the wind power wouldn't be bad, but right now they're pretty much up to their ears and like we're done with wind. It's not really what we expected. And I think it'd be a hard sell to put as much wind up there as we really need to bring power to Oahu. So it's almost like we have to look at the neighbor islands to help with the energy on this island. And how do we do it with a cultural piece and everything else? Because it's not just are we going to upset Madam Pelle. It's why am I making energy for you? What am I getting out of it? Why is the big island going to put up with a big geothermal plant? Or is Maui going to put up with a bunch more windmills and kind of have that in their backyard just so the power can come to Oahu? And that's the kind of things we need to address in the state and make sure that you're right. It's like, has everybody weighing it out? Is it weighing our options and making the right choice? So do you have any insight on maybe how we should be looking at that? Well, I look at, say, what happened in Japan when all of a sudden we had this terrible tragedy with Fukushima. And then Japanese, they shut down those plants, of course. The nuclear power plants. So then they turned actually to geothermal, which was at Tohoku. And so the lesson there is that I think when it needs to be flexible, one needs to look at these different costs and benefits and opportunities. And you look at, for example, Iceland, which uses geothermal.  Yeah, and they've been able to make peace with geothermal. I think geothermal here grew out of kind of a very kind of wild west kind of thing. People were experimenting and trying new things. And you know, there was a public cost to that. And they're kind of in a residential area almost. It's a populated area. And that's where we're all in place to do this kind of. Almost experimental work. We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be right back to talk more with Mr. Markridge on big island, hydrogen, geothermal power, all those good things. Aloha and Richard Concepcion, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech, Hawaii. Aloha. I'm Andrea Gabrieli. The host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m., only on Think Tech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Aloha and welcome back to Stand Energy Man with Michael Markridge from Granite Power on my lunch hour, if I hadn't mentioned that before. Thanks for being here with us. We're talking about the big island and we're talking about some of the energy on the big island, particularly geothermal, which is a hot topic, no pun intended right now, because it is, with new technology, a really safe option as you just mentioned in Japan, they had a lot of nuclear power, and it turns out in, and it was March 11th of 2011 that they had the earthquake and tsunami. I remember that because that's my birthday. And I remember really clearly sitting there watching TV and seeing a tsunami roll in on the news and even the media didn't know what was happening and I go, that's a tsunami. And but it was just a big surge of water moving into a harbor and they didn't get it. But that disaster really woke people up as safe as you think nuclear power is and as cheap as it can be. There's still a big cost to it when things don't go right. And like you mentioned earlier, in Hawaii, if we're gonna make choices, let's make the right choices. So I personally look at the big island and if we do hydrogen and geothermal properly, get buy-in from the community, hopefully make some great, not just jobs, but great careers and maybe great communities as part of the project, it actually could be a really good choice on the big island. What do you think? I wish there was a way that we could communicate with people in Iceland who have this very similar conditions and invite people from Iceland to come to Hawaii and perhaps send people from the big island to visit Iceland just to get that other perspective.  Where is the world going to be in 30 years? What are our children going to experience? What are our grandchildren going to experience as the world keeps heating up and it keeps heating up because of fossil fuels, because we still do need, for base power at this point, significant amounts of fossil fuels. And what if we could use less fossil fuels? What if we had other options? What if we had, for example, hydrogen, which we could make from... And store energy. That's right, geothermal. And so I think that we need to look at the fact that we're all interconnected now. And Iceland is far, far away from here, but actually it's not that far. It's the old butterfly in China flapping his wings is connected to the tornado in Kansas routine. We are connected and people don't appreciate it. I'm fortunate that I've actually been to Iceland probably five or six times as part of my military life. And you're right, it's really incredible. And talk about excess heat energy to use. They've got more heat than they know what to do with. And the whole island, and they're up near, I mean, part of Iceland is in Arctic Circle. They use all the heat for heating all their buildings and making all their electricity and making the power for all their transportation, their public transportation. And you're right, it's pretty remarkable that they have a very small fossil fuel footprint. And most of that's confined to fishing boats and things where they have to, that hasn't been perfected yet, electric transportation on the boats. But you're right, it's a great example, but... And what did they do with that money? Like what they did was they developed high tech industries. They had a kind of a disastrous experience with banking, but other industries came and they developed tourism. There were so many different things that they did. Well, as an economist, and I've asked this of several big economists here, including our own in D-Bed, what would be the implications of taking Hawaii from an energy-importing state to either an energy-neutral state, or, oh my gosh, an energy-exporting state if we could make liquid hydrogen off of the geothermal on the Big Island, supply all the needs in the whole state, and the Big Island could actually export to the mainland, or to Korea, or Japan, or China, or and be selling energy out to another country. What would the implications be economically to our state? So I'd like to go back in time and say that Hawaii already has been a huge energy exporter through the sugar industry, because what is sugar, but... And will, for that matter. Right, right, that's right. And we were the world's leader in sugar for 50 years. You know, maybe, and people thought sugar would last forever, and sugar brought so much wealth into Hawaii, and sugar was maybe the reason that of all the United States territories, Hawaii became most developed, Hawaii was the one of all the territories that was, and Alaska became a state, but it was because of this enormous wealth that came from sugar that made Hawaii so valuable. So if you think, okay, well, if we have something else that we can export that is extremely valuable, yes, I think that you're right. Hawaii would then become, once again, a very wealthy state, and right now we're a wealth of state in the standpoint of we have tourism, we don't think, but the problem is that all of its activity is concentrated in fairly a small percent of the land area in the population, and as a result of this, we have great degree of income inequality that people suffer from in Hawaii, and we become very crowded, and life inexpensive, and for many people, I think life has become less pleasant here than it was. People who can remember even 20 years ago how, that life was very different. But what if we were to say, okay, well, maybe there's a different way of doing this, and if you look at Hawaii's history and you see like every 50 years, there's been a dramatic change, you know, at first, you know, it was provisioning ships, and then it was the whales, and then it was sugar, and then it was tourism, and each time people thought, oh, this is just gonna last forever, right? But then it didn't, something else came along, and maybe the next thing is ready to come along. Yeah, so here's my vision that I see if I could wave my magic hydrogen wand is that we find the right place on the big island to do geothermal safely and properly with all the cultural considerations, all of the buying from the community, give them their piece of the pie up front, their halau, their canoe hale, their community, their housing, their jobs, as the equipment's going in to be built in a safe, clean, good environment, and then we start at scale producing liquid hydrogen, using it to balance the grid throughout the state, maybe even on Maui, when instead of them putting more windmills up, help export some hydrogen power over to Maui and put it in their system with electrolysis on big island, making clean hydrogen from renewable geothermal, exporting that liquid hydrogen to Maui and Oahu, and maybe even Kauai if they need it, to run their grids, and their transportation sector, by the way, because hydrogen, we've already gotten the Toyota Mirai here and their circle open their station. Hydrogen transportation is electric transportation. It's just a different kind of battery and we're trying to electrify our transportation sector. And oh, by the way, if it makes sense and if the community can take it, go up to exporting hydrogen to the mainland or Asia, and maybe even start looking at space travel, because as you and I have talked before, the state is looking at a spaceport on the big island because of the geographic location of Hawaii close to the equator. There's a natural tendency to do that. The lunar astronauts trained in Haleakala, there's a Mars habitat on the big island right now. Blue Planet Research supports that operation under contract from NASA. The big island is poised to be that future looking outer space exploring part of the US that probably no other place can be. And the hydrogen is right there to support liquid rockets and things like that. You know, I think that's really, really interesting because if you look, what are the demands for space travel right now? It's because the pharmaceutical companies want to do research in space because the costs are so much lower. I think the number one most profitable industry in the United States is the pharmaceutical industry. So people don't realize that how many experiments are now being done in space on new drugs because you can hold things out of solution, there's less gravity, there's all the kinds of advantages, it's much less expensive. Even with all of the expensive sending rockets into space with your experiment. The risk, yeah. And it's less expensive. The other is that the enormous and unsatisfied yet demand for high speed data transmission, right? That's also, I mean, that's a tremendous need. And so that's another thing that, if Hawaii was having, I had a space launch program on the big island and we had the hydrogen there to power the rockets, we could start sending rockets into space commercially and satisfying that market. It can employ hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, and it could be the new industry for Hawaii. Yeah. Well, right now it's you and me dreaming, buddy, but I think we can get there. And I think there's a lot of support from the community, and not just the Oahu community, but neighboring communities. I think there's actually a fair amount of support from the legislature. Talked to a fair number of them and they're really supportive. They're looking for, they know that Hawaii's economy is at a tipping point right now and ready for that every 50 year transition. And they've got to do something to help boost our economy. We're only a penstroke away from losing all the army at Schofield or the military will always have a footprint here. I'm convinced, but just losing a bunch of troops at Schofield could have a devastating effect on our economy overall, or losing any of the ships in the shipyard or losing the shipyard, the losing ships in Pearl Harbor, that could happen at the stroke of a pen from the DOD. And then our tourism industry, although we think it's pretty stable, just the volcanic activity misunderstood by people, they stopped coming. Even when 9-11 happened, a lot of tourists didn't want to come because they felt it was imposing during a crushing time for our country and tourism took a big hit then. Yeah, that's true. And I was gonna say that, getting back to space, and we say, okay, well, people, this is a big dream, but I mean, people with lots and lots of resources, more resources than you and I, Amazon. Elon Musk. Elon Musk, they're all developing space capabilities. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think there was a market there. And I was reading about New Mexico, for example, now has a space office because they want to start luring companies to do space research and space launching from New Mexico. So that's another competitive of ours. So people are already thinking in those terms. So we should be too. Well, we'll have you back on the show so we can talk about the space force that President Trump talked about and see when that happens, because I know that would have an impact on, hopefully, if we get into space over here, the potential for doing those operations or some of them out of here, at least monitoring those things. So we'll have to get you back on and update that. Well, we're about out of time on Standard Energy Man this week, and Michael, I'd like to thank you again for being on the show. Oh, thank you. I have to have you back to talk more space stuff. But, yeah, everybody out there, if you have any comments or concerns about the topic today, hey, we'd really like to hear from you. So send a tweet or a message to the studio here, and they'll pass it on to me. I was gonna just say one thing. I think the space industry now is $280 billion, and people are saying that it's gonna be soon a $30 trillion industry. Wow. Okay, well, there you go, right from the economist's mouth. There's a lot of potential there. So give us your thoughts and the Standard Energy Man signing off until next week, Friday. Aloha.


Good afternoon from Vegas, guys and gals. We're so happy that you're with us. This is theCUBE live at AWS re-invent 22. This is our third day of coverage. We started Monday night, so we're counting that. Counting that as day one. Loads of conversations we've had already. We know that you know that because you've been watching. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, great to be here with you with, between somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people. And we're excited for our next conversation. We've got two folks joining us who are new to theCUBE, soon will be alumni. Milan Bat joins us, the president and head of cloud at Hexaware. And Nikhil Date, the director of engineering and application services at Domestic and General. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So Domestic and General or DNG is a customer of Hexaware, but Milan, we want to start with you. Give the audience an overview of Hexaware. What do you do? What's the business model? Yeah, so Hexaware is a technology services company. We are a global partner of AWS and essentially we help customers like Domestic and General accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We like to think of ourselves as a billion dollar startup. And like Amazon, it is always day one at Hexaware. And I look forward to the conversation, but any company in the world that is looking at a cloud led digital transformation, they have to put Hexaware on the consideration list. Because not only do we work with a lot of customers, analysts like Gartner, they have rated us as a visionary in helping customers become digitally enabled, bring better customer experience to their end customers. Excellent. Well, we're glad to feature Hexaware on the program. Nikhil, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to the audience about Domestic and General. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? Sure. Thank you. We are 110 year old business, right? I mean, we started ensuring sheep in Australia, if you believe it, which is quite an origin story. But at the moment, the primary business is keeping our customers world running. So what do I mean by that? We protect in warranty and out of warranty care for domestic appliances, TVs, boilers, refrigerators, washing machines, that kind of thing. But we are also a B2B company in the sense that you might think you're getting a warranty from some of our biggest customers, like Whirlpool or Bosch Siemens or Samsung, but actually it's D&G at the back trying to administer that for you. So we are in 13 countries, just launched in the US last year, but big plans. So is there really interesting because we all have appliances and we can relate, especially pre or post pandemic, how difficult it is to get service. So you're kind of like, in a way you've got to build a digital platform, like Uber connecting drivers and passengers, right? And so you've got the supply of individuals who know how to fix stuff, right? And you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer. So was that the genesis of this digital transformation? Can you talk about those business drivers? It was actually, and it's a fantastic point because trying to become a platform business is what this journey has been all about for us, right? I think we are a pioneer in what we consider the subscription model.  And importantly, you can actually buy our product to pay in installments at the point something breaks down. So it's not just something that you buy at the point of sale or at the point you try to register. You can buy it at any time. And the goal really is to have warranty in a box that you can take anywhere in the world. So it's a great point. Digital transformation is what it's a lot of. And there is a real lack right now of qualified technicians. Is there anything within the platform to incent those individuals to participate in your business? So our, and this is what we consider a multi-tier approach. I think at the moment, the service that we offer is largely top tier, right? So we will get you an engineer that is certified by the manufacturer with parts that are with the manufacturer warranty. And it's a no fix, no fee model. So we guarantee either to repair or replace the appliance. So that's the model. But you're right. I think in the future stage would be, why wouldn't we want to have anybody who's got the right skills to come in and work off the platform? Absolutely right.  You've been there for not quite two years. What drew you to the organization and where were they in their digital transformation journey? Because I always think legacy companies, this is a big challenge. It's a cultural challenge to really transform but companies these days have no choice. Again, a fantastic point, right? I think some of the 110 year old business, right? And some of the tech you would be forgiven for thinking it's that old. But the assets that we had are our people, right? Who are really passionate about the business. And I think what we had to do is to find a partner that can upskill the tech, but also upskill the people at the same time and upskill the delivery model, right? So we were a very traditional left to right, waterfall, you know, plan it first, big upfront planning and then deliver kind of organization. And by working with a partner such as Hexaware and embracing cloud because our first now go-to will be a SaaS or a cloud provider. And doing that was the mess, massive agenda that drew me to the company. But I think what is also fair is digitization or digitalization is a misunderstood and often abused term, right? Because for the most part when companies start, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but for the most part when companies start on this journey, they take a journey that works in the brick-and-mortar world and we were a contact center business and just try to move it to the digital journey, right? And that's, it's not a great customer experience. I'll give you an example, right? Now, if you call our agent and say, I'm trying to register an appliance, they will tell you where to look for the serial number. But if you're on a digital channel, you don't know where to look. There's nobody who can help you. The model number. Who remembers the model number of the washing machine they bought, right? I mean, it's stuff like that, which would feel, for a digital native, my son, for example, would think, how can you even ask a customer for that? But it's that change in the model. That's what this is all about. Yeah, it's like when you get the, what's your account number? I have no idea what my account number is. So when did this whole project start? How was HexAware involved? And where did HexAware start? How did you sort of gauge what the requirement was? Take us through that little... Sure. So, you know, when Nikhil and the rest of the management team came in, they came up with a competitive process where, you know, and it is refreshing to remember, I think they've stuck true to their vision. They were very clear that they were not looking for someone who can just digitize their paper processes, but who can help them completely reimagine, you know, what the new process will look like, what the new experience would look like. And, you know, remember, they were running this process at the height of the pandemic. So we couldn't meet anybody in person. We did everything virtual. Yeah. And we were using cloud technology. But, you know, the way they ran the process, they wanted to make sure that a provider brings in a mix of experience and engineering expertise. And that's really hard to find. But equally importantly, you remember those culture sessions that we did? They figured out some very creative ways of making sure that there is a cultural fit.  So, you know, there are these little things to make sure that there is a match and people can actually work. Relationship building, too. The relationship building. It's hard to do in a virtual environment, but it was a competitive process. They looked at us in terms of engineering, you know, experience, our ability to transcend, change, and run. And, you know, really focus and align to keep their objectives first, right? Work as a true partnership. Yeah. Do you agree? No, I would agree. And I think, you know, one of the biggest goals here was to make sure that this is not an arm's length, vendor relationship, right? This is an extension of our team. So these are our people, you know, for the people that work on DNG, you know, they work in the DNG way, you know, and that means that they can also challenge us, which is quite refreshing, right? People stopping and saying, why are you asking me to do this? It's, you know, it's very refreshing, I think, you know, to work with a partner that is sold on the vision and committed to helping you achieve success. Well, that synergy creates that flywheel. And like you said, at DNG, Hux where we're a team, we're working together. Nikhil, share with us some of the significant business outcomes that Hux Aware Services and AWS are helping the company to achieve, because there's some big numbers there. Indeed, yeah.  So one of the key challenges is every client wants their own stamp, right?  And a journey for customer Y will have to do the same. When you try to stretch this to a technology problem, though, it means that, you know, we were trying to be too many things for too many people and that slowed things down and increased complexity. So from our point of view, you know, when we started with the digital journey or in the middle of the digital journey, we thought we need to have a library of reusable components. We need white labeling, right? So there was a root and branch re-engineering of the digital proposition to allow us to serve multiple clients with the same underlying technology. And that has meant that, you know, in some cases we are going to market, you know, two, three times faster than what we were. Costs, obviously, you know, 50% cheaper.  So, you know, that, from my point of view, that's the big benefit. And would you agree that you are still only in the first quarter of a football game? Absolutely. Right? I think a lot of ambitious plans, so, you know, this is just the beginning. And the way they have built the organization, the way they have driven the culture change, you know, I'm very hopeful for great things to come and really, you know. Paying a picture of the tech, I'm interested in the architecture, and I'm really interested in the data component and how that's affected your business.  But, you know, it's from a, you know, from a go forward point of view, what we really want is to allow clients to self serve, right? Not have to, you know, because at the moment the only service we can offer is what I call the white glove, right? Which means, you know, somebody has to sit down with us, have a discussion on the requirements, but people should be able to self serve, you know, look at the catalog of what it is we can do for them, and go for it. Data is a very interesting point, right? Because not only are there, you know, geography restrictions on where customer data can go to, obviously payments and PCI compliance is an issue. But last but not least, you know, some of this data is very unique to what the clients want to own and manage. And you know, if you are a typical homeowner, you will have appliance from all kinds of manufacturers, right? Many of whom would be our customers, but how much data we can share, because we recognize you as a person, but how much data we can share, there are restrictions.  So, you know, but you're absolutely right in terms of, but again, the potential for where the data can be mined because, you know, the engineer also has to be local to where you live, you know, you can't come from a hundred miles away. So, you know, the ability to use data to, you know, not just transform our business, but our client's business is phenomenal, you know. Do you actually have a mainframe? Yes, we do. Yeah. Adam Salipsky wants to move it into the cloud. Yeah. Okay. They have every possible technology that you can think of. I mean, 100 year old business evolved over a period of time and, you know, if I could add, you know, what has been really impressive about the decision making at DNG is that they have adopted cloud in the right way, right? So, they are one of the few customers who have surely taken AWS well architected to heart. They have taken things like, you know, take the right workloads to the cloud and no way to do the right remediations before you take the rest of the workloads to the cloud. They've used native services available on AWS from an app's perspective as well as a data perspective. So, that's sort of a little bit more color on the technology and architecture.  Is that? That's the vision, yes. The idea is to get there and, you know, if we assemble what I call, you know, out of the box solutions in a clever way, then that becomes the platform that you can replicate success on. And at the moment, our business needs what I call boots on the ground. When we are a true platform business, you should be able to operate without having, you know, any presence in country if the partner is leveraging the, you know, leveraging the platform to do what's next. Gee, I'm curious. Milan, you said that one of the great things that DNG has done is really adopt a cloud in the right way. Do you, Nikhil, think of cloud-first or cloud-right approach? Because you've got a mainframe, so I'm just wondering if it's more what's right for cloud versus everything cloud-first. Correct, I mean, I actually, you know, or we actually tend to start even two steps before that, right? I think it's really whether we need to buy or whether we need to build, right? And if we need to buy, then, you know, how easily would that thing that has been bought fit into what is a very complex architecture? As Milan said, right, I mean, any technology you can imagine, we probably have it. But we want to simplify it, right? And this is a journey, so which means that, you know, we start with, can a SaaS product do it? And then, we also want to go wherever we are building, then it has to be on the cloud. It has to be designed for scaling. It has to be designed to be in multiple geographies, multiple countries, with the relevant data protection baked in. So, you know, that's the decision-thinking process, you know, that the goal is to not, I mean, we had a, you know, we had a project started 18 months ago that wanted to buy more tin, but we put a stop to that, right? And saying that, you know, come on, you can't have that, not in this day and age, you know, when the cloud can pretty much do everything that you need. Do you think of DNG, and this is a question for you, we're almost out of time, but I'm just curious, I'm looking at your website, DNG, the experts who repair and replace the household products everyone relies on. Do you think about it as a repair company? Do you think about it as a tech company that delivers these repair services? It's a, I mean, this is the conversation we have in our teams all the time, right? That when our vision is successful, we will become a tech business.  No, but we're getting there, I think, you know, that's the plan. You're on the journey. Yeah. Awesome stuff. Last question for each of you, a little bit different. Milan, question for you, you have a billboard or a bumper sticker, whichever, or maybe a sticker for your laptop, and it's about Hexaware, and you want to really convey in a compelling, but really short way, why are we so great? What would that sticker say? Awesome. Like I said, at the beginning, if you are thinking about a digital transformation, if you are a company that has been around for a long time, you've got to think of us, you know, as a partner. So that's what I would say, because, you know, the purpose of our company is creating smiles through a combination of great people and technology. So that's what we live for, and you know, brought a smile to me when Nikhil said that our customers love us, and somewhere we have a small role to play in that. I love that. Nikhil, I'm going to ask the same question, I'm going to ask you a different one, but I would love to, I mean, we talked a lot about DNG and the incredible business transformation that you've been on. What's that bumper sticker for DNG? What is that bumper sticker for DNG? Oh yeah, okay. We want to keep your world running, right? I mean, you know, from our point of view, you know, you rely on the appliances to keep your home running, and we want you to rely on us to make sure your world keeps running. You know, that's what this is all about. It has to be slick.  I love it. Awesome, guys. Thank you, Milan, Nikhil. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. Thanks guys. Great partnership. Hex Aware's first time on theCUBE.  We appreciate your insights sharing the story. It's a really compelling story. Thank you. Thank you for all the support Nikhil. Of course. All right. Thank you. For our guest and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.