This is the State of the Frontend. I'm David Wong. I'm at Eatings. And this is Brian Wald at Brian Wald. One of us has a much more easy-to-remember handle. I'll let you figure out which one that is. We work for Aquia as evidenced by the shirts, and we are both frontend developers by training, if not by our everyday-to-day experiences. And we'll go in a little bit about that later. Just as a show of hands, who here saw us talk at Austin? Who saw my brain as full? Okay, great. So this recap section is totally useful. We didn't know if we were going to go over old things. We have three sections to our talk today. We have yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And we'll talk first about yesterday. And some of this is going to recap what we talked about in our previous talk, but it'll be good to follow along. So last time on My Brain Is Full, which was the talk that Brian and I gave, we talked about how frontend has changed a lot. I don't think anybody here can deny that of all the facets of practice that we discuss about at DrupalCon, frontend is the one that's undergone the most amount of changes in the shortest amount of time, Drupal8 change is notwithstanding. And actually, even taking into account Drupal8, frontend has probably changed more than any other practice within the Drupal Aegis. In that time, Drupal itself hasn't changed very much. Frontend has changed. We'll talk about this in a little bit here, but the frontend developer experience, starting from 2006 or 2007 or so to the frontend experience of 2014, is a dramatically different enterprise, whereas Drupal is still pretty much Drupal. You're entering things into forms, you're hook-altering things and that sort of thing. And more importantly than that, as frontend has changed and Drupal hasn't, we haven't been very good at predicting things. We've laid our bets pretty heavily in some places and those bets have paid off in, say, JQuery. And then we've also had really long bike sheds and discussions about things like BAM or O-O-Z-S-S, or other things where we might not have fallen on the right side of history. And it's not even so much about predicting as it is. When Drupal7 was released, for instance, we had a very set way of doing things, and so things were kind of baked into the CMS in that manner. So what we expected to see in Drupal7 changed dramatically as we got throughout the lifecycle of where we are in Drupal7 now, which is at the horizon of Drupal8 being released. So this is a slide we used in our last session. And essentially what we're talking about here is you can't see the very bottom, oh, you can, is some dates there. And what this is talking about is the lifecycle of Drupal versus the lifecycle of front-end technologies. So when we first launched Drupal7 blueprint grid system, 960 grid system, things like Kufon, which is managing your fonts and so forth, we're kind of the normal. And then as we progressed throughout the time, that changed, but Drupal is still exactly the same. So if you look at that first part of that, as I was talking about, those were what we expected when we started Drupal7. And then we go to the next part, and this is not what we expected when we started with Drupal7. So we have a lot of conflicting pieces of information coming to this. So we have to kind of retrofit what we're using on the front-end to move it into Drupal so that we can do the things that people are expecting in 2014 from their websites to perform. The gist of this being that front-end's moving way faster than Drupal, right? I don't think anybody here would say, Drupal Core Development happens at such a clip. I can't keep up. Maybe you can reasonably say that in the last month or so, but you can't historically. Drupal is geologic time compared to the speed at which front-end technologies have moved.  There are things on the front-end space that move so much faster that iterate and operate and come into and fall out of fashion faster than Drupal itself can ever keep up with. And this includes things like contributed modules as well. And lastly, the one thing that we covered that was really important, and I think everybody here would agree, is front-end is a thing, like a thing thing, right? Front-end isn't... Front-end is its own practice. Front-end is a discrete skill set.  You know, front-end is a distinct practice with its own skill set, tools, and best practices that are robust and as solid as any other facet of Drupal development. And this is what... It can't be undersold. This is one of those things where, you know, front-end developers and Drupal, you know, the alliance has been not very, you know, very easy at times, and equal footing is definitely a thing. And ultimately, the reality is that when it comes to the requirements of the web and the kind of technology that's driving Drupal technology forward, it's the front-end that's pushing it. It's not the back-end. Front-end is pushing Drupal forward, not the other way around. So today, not literally today, but, you know, today. You know, after those benighted days that we just spoke of. Play it again, Frank. Okay, so Frank Camaro. Does anybody here know who Frank Camaro is? There is a designer, formerly the New York Times and other August institutions, who is rather opinionated and writes blog posts, and we cited a blog post from our previous talk. I actually asked for a response for him regarding that, and this is what he wrote. Quote, We need to do a better job of describing the connective tissue of making things for the web. Everyone is describing the one little piece they've created, but don't explain, or even reference, the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together. This is, in my mind, just a symptom of the web stack being so deep. The more interconnected and complex a system becomes, the more difficult it is to tease apart. You have to see the progress while it's happening to decipher it. So if you're like me and missed out on a couple years, you only see the tangle of Christmas lights. Frank Camaro on designer news in July 2014. I have to preface this every time I quote Frank Camaro. Frank Camaro is under the age of 35, so he's not an old-timer. He's not somebody who's, you know, lost his way. He's somebody our age doing the same things we're doing, you know, having the same struggles that we're describing. So welcome to the new normal, the post-responsive world. I wanted to put up an even more graphic and destroyed landscape, but I don't want to think responsive is a bad thing. It just sort of cleared the table and set new rules, and I think we're still picking up the pieces of what it means to have our sort of precious ideals you know, pre-responsive, you know, be so utterly destroyed and reset. So the table stakes to the new front-end game. Responsive, right? Responsive. Responsive is a thing now. Responsive design isn't... It's expected. It's expected, exactly. These are all things that are expected now. They're expected to do responsive, expected to manage devices that have touch.   You're, you know, taking into consideration how the JavaScript libraries work together. All of these things, you know, you're doing a lot more engineering than what was a part of, you know, the yesterday of front-end. As I just said, JavaScript is cool again.  Everything runs based off of, you know, everything's running in the DOM now. We're not doing everything from the server side. We can do a lot of things just straight with the JavaScript injected into the site, which is another reason why it's not playing super well with Drupal, because that's not how it was built to be made. So go ahead. Multiple frameworks are everything. I think it's everybody here has played with at least one framework in the Drupal. Does anybody here make a Drupal site without a single framework, CSS, JavaScript, or otherwise on it? Okay, there we go. For the video audience next week, that was zero people. Everybody uses a CSS framework of some kind. Multiple CSS frameworks. People use multiple JavaScript frameworks if necessary. You have CSS frameworks on top of CSS frameworks.  There's multiple pieces that have to be assembled. This gives us lots of powerful new toys. We have a lot of power at our disposal now. More power than we ever had before with all the capabilities that we have. But there's two sides to this. So good news, everybody. As a front-end, as a designer and a front-ender, you have almost no limits. So, for example, this is Huijink.com. I'm not, this is not, when I'm getting paid by them, they just had a very trendy site. Scroll-jacking, flat colors.  They have embedded media. You know, they have a hamburger menu. I mean, who doesn't love the hamburger menu? You know, this is everything 2014 design and bodies, right? Flat colors. Boom. And so the bad news is that designer and front-ender have almost no limits. The exact same problem. For example, let's take a look at this Microsoft site. Same idea, but this is what I would consider design for design's sake. You know, if I were to interview these developers, they'd probably say, well, that's because I could. And not because, you know, we're using these tools in the right way. So there's two sides to the coin, and that's part of the piece of, you know, where we come in as conductors and orchestrating these things. So as designers, now we design and design dynamically along so many more facets than before. It's not simply opening up Photoshop anymore and drawing something. You have interaction design, you have to consider it. Personalization design, application design, multi-device design. It's so many more axes than were previously considered normal. So for developers, there's been an explosion of tools to help us meet this. And so, you know, they recognize that, and it catches up to us. It's this idea that, you know, we're always chasing something here. So for example, some of this says that automation, testing, performance, leveraging new features, managing the browser in context, writing less code, DRY, which is you're probably all familiar with. Do not repeat yourself. Keeping up to the pace with the checks and modularity so that you can swap things in and out. You know, using front-ends that are not Drupal-facing, not using the template system, you know, quote-unquote, headless Drupal, for instance, and building repeatable units for functionality. So, spoiler alert. Lucky for you, there are sessions on all of these topics. Let's kick it back a little more. So, all of these on testing, on automation, on performance, on new features for browsers and in languages, managing your browser's context, and things like writing less code, keeping your pieces of check. I think there's two sessions on layouts, non-Drupal front-ends. There's, I think, three sessions on non-Drupal front-ends. And then John Albon here in the front row is talking about web components that is packaging up functionality in a more meta way than we've ever done before. There are sessions on the front-end track and also a little beyond the front-end track as well that everybody should go see because these are the new normal for a Drupal developer and you should be up-to-date on these things. Because we say so. No. So, as expectations and capabilities have grown for your website, your web app, your application practices emerge to meet them. So, these things are coming out of the ether. These aren't things that have just magically sprung up for no good reason whatsoever. It's because people wanted to do something new. They wanted to be able to fill in functionality they didn't have before. They wanted to have tools to make these things easier. The goal of these techniques and these practices is to make your life easier, to make it possible, not to make your life harder, even though they might do that as a side effect. So, this is a quick tip, though. Many, if not all of these practices are outside of Drupal. Your CSS frameworks? Drupal doesn't care. Your JavaScript frameworks? Drupal doesn't care. All of these things. The modern front-ender skill sets are mostly non-Drupal centric. The things that you have to know as a front-ender concern themselves mostly outside of Drupal and Drupal is sort of a secondary, if not tertiary concern to you. Which is, I think, kind of ironic, given that we're giving the first talk in the front-end of the reality that we face. And going off of that, the complexities aren't always just about building. It's not always about having a hard time managing your grunt tasks or whatever it may be that you're doing for your website. These are also business concerns as well. Take, for example, when you built the site in 2008, 2009, you could be very predictive. You could make really, really educated guess on how long it's going to take you to build the front-end of that. You know, a lot of times we're seeing budgets go way over and beyond what you expected because there's just a lot of components that you just can't take into consideration. You know, when you're getting into a lot of different devices, way that things are interaction patterns that haven't been thought about when you get into an iPhone or an Android device, for instance, and become very complex. And the other side of that is that when you do actually scope something relatively accurate to what it takes to do in the front-end now, you have another problem, and that's that clients say, well, I used to be able to build a website, you know, the front-end, the design piece of it, the front-end piece of it only took, you know, 70 hours. Why is it taking 400 now? What's changed? I don't get that. And so they don't understand that how fast this has changed means that it's a lot more complex and there's a lot more that we have to manage. You can't just make a site mobile. So tomorrow. And not literally tomorrow, but the figurative tomorrow. So we came out in the 90s where, you know, this was your, this is web design. This is web development, right? Shove it into a table, make the table as complex as you need to, boom, it's done. A lot of people still do it this way. And this is what you were designing for. These are your targets. You had a funky PC or a Mac. You had these two browsers, and you had these two viewports, maybe even just one of them to concern yourself with. So now, this is more likely what you're dealing with in this project now. These are all the things that you have to take into consideration. You have to consider, you know, ten different devices, five browsers at least, a ton of viewpoints. Not only, you know, when it's just looking at it, but also if they rotate it into portrait or landscape, mobile view is what happens when somebody uses touch. How are all those things taking into consideration? Those are much bigger problems to be solving than we used to be solving in development of these websites. So, you know, it's not going to be that way. That list is never going to grow shorter. It's never going to grow shorter. It's only going to get bigger. Like, there is no unwinding the clock and going back to the 90s. So where does this take us? So the front end will always be chasing the next big thing. I mean, that's a... But, you know, this concept of us chasing things is not something that's going to go away and it's not something that's particularly new. That we just pulled from the keynote of the iWatch release, and this is just a sort snippet of this, but I'd like to play it for you. For example, if you take a gesture like pinch to zoom... Let's try that again. Over here. It covers the content. Oh, did you just... Well, it only plays if you play on the big one. For example, if you take a gesture like pinch to zoom, it covers the content. It obstructs your view. It just doesn't work. So... And so we placed extra functionality in a mechanism that's been on the watch for decades. It's this dial. It's called a crown. And on the Apple Watch, it's called a digital crown. The digital crown includes infrared LEDs and photos... This is not supposed to stop. So... The idea here... Hold on. Let me get back to a little bit of a difficulty here. Don't you, Apple? So who's ready to build some dial-based front-end? Right? This idea that... Oh, yeah, we figured it out now. Oh, you know, phones. We got it. We've got phones down. We've got tablets down. Oh, great. Now we have to create for a watch. And it's not just a smaller device. It has this dial. And this is an interface that we hadn't considered before. So this is what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about building my comfortably held mastery of responsive front-end. So... And we are kind of, you know... This is sort of a point that we're making that's a little ridiculous, but it's not, either. Because... It's the reality. I mean, new devices come out. New techniques come out. New design patterns come out. And you have to respond to that. And you have to be able to meet the needs that you may be designing for an interface on a watch. It's very possible. So here it is. So the goal. This is, you know, what we wanted to talk to you guys about here today. And the goal is to be truly device-independent design and development. For example, Headless Drupal, that is such a popular trend right now. API-driven Drupal, which is the same idea, which is essentially being able to normalize your content, normalize how things are displayed, and letting the device make the decisions and design pattern for that device. It doesn't always have to be, you know, starting with the mobile or starting with web and then making it work on every other device. You know, that kind of technique, as you've seen, as we've... as everything is getting more complex, as there's more devices, as there's more browsers, as there's more screen resolutions, is never going to work. And you're always... It's gonna be becoming more complex to manage. So this isn't something that just front-enders are working with. And it's unfortunate that Jeff Eaton isn't here. Has anybody seen Jeff Eaton talk about the battle of the body field or his content strategy talks? Has anybody... Okay. Has anybody seen the Karen McGrain talk from DrupalCon two years ago about content strategy? And so similar ideas exist outside the front-end world, and in the content strategy world as well, that the idea that we're writing, designing, publishing, and developing for a set number of contexts is a fool's errand. And that we're going to be...  The idea that we can just, you know, pick... Oh, we'll just add today's device to the list of devices that we support and drop this other one off the list when it becomes deprecated is a fool's errand. Like, that's never going to be a winning strategy. That's always going to be just piling on more work for you, building fragile sites that only kind of work or target specific devices. I mean, who remembers the days of ActiveX, right? You know, like that kind of idea, specifically targeting contexts and devices is not going to win. And in the end, what we need is something that's much more ecumenical, something that's much less device-centric, that's much less context-centric, the content that you can display anywhere, the site that you can view on any device, the design that accommodates tons and tons of contexts irrelevant of whether it's a privileged one or not. That's the goal. It's a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of a unicorn, but, you know, there's nothing wrong in setting the sites high. And so this idea of chasing, this idea of always being one step behind it in technology is not a new one, and it's not something that's going to go anywhere either. For example, I have a video here from a lecture in 1969 with the philosopher Ellen Watts, who was talking to the IBM engineers about the problem of this exact problem. He's talking about the problem that technology is moving so fast that you'll never keep up. You'll never keep up with it. And so I'll just play you a quick piece of that. And this is when he's talking about managing catalogs, which is, you know, a little different context, but it's the same idea. Let's get on. And it's exactly the same in almost any other field. There's an information explosion, like a population explosion. How on Earth are you going to scan information? Yes, of course you can get computers to help you in this direction. But by Parkinson's law, the sooner you become more efficient in doing this, the more the thing is going to develop so that you will have to have more efficient computers still to assimilate all the information. You'll be ahead. But only for a short time. So, what did you do last time to make this? Just click on the outside. So you see this is the problem of the sort of... Alan Watts mounting us from the grave. All right. Maybe. What did you do? This is what we get for implementing all the technology. Using a JavaScript library to manage your slideshow. Ambitious front-end developers reveal we'll fail you. So the operative quote here, you'll be ahead but only for a short time. And that's really kind of what front-end development is these days, right? You catch up, you catch up, you catch up and you kind of get ahead and you discover this library that fixes things for you and like, bam, I've got this touch thing solved, right? Or I've got this CSS library. I finally have this breakpoint thing nailed, right? Or that. But it's only for a short time. None of that's permanent. They're called hacks for a reason. I mean, these things, the things that we do to Drupal do the things that we needed to do are, you know, shims. They're little wedges that we shove into Drupal to make it work the way that we want it to work, because it's moving so slowly. And to continue to develop a practice around that is foolish. And Brian and I have been talking about this a lot lately and you can't build forever on top of hacks. Like, there has to be a better way than this. Yeah. And so, you know, essentially here what we wanted to get to at this point is we wanted to talk about, we wanted to, since this is one of the beginning sessions of the Front End Track, we wanted to challenge you guys. We wanted to talk with you guys about, you know, stepping outside of your professional work day and thinking in terms of what you're doing right now with CSS and SAS and your front-end technologies is this sustainable? And if not, if you agree with us that this is not sustainable, what are some better ways of handling this? You know, what we brought up last Drupal con about how this Drupal and that turned into such a big thing is because I think everyone, it's kind of on the tip of everyone's tongue that we can't keep going on this way the way that we're developing right now and we need to take a step back and think about how we can manage content, how we can have a CMS that manages content on the front-end in a seamless way that is sustainable and maintainable as well. So... Let me jump ahead a bit here. So this is kind of our challenge. So we don't have pat answers and as we get to go first, we're not expected to have pat answers, but we do have a challenge for you and it's as much a challenge for ourselves as it is for everybody else who's attending this room. Design isn't how it looks and the front-end isn't just how it's styled. So if you come to this session expecting to talk about designing things better or how to style things better, we have a greater challenge for you and that's to learn something new this week that's beyond that. Think bigger than making things pretty. Think bigger than a new tool that you can add to your front-end toolbox. Think bigger, learn something, contribute your voice to the conversations here. The front-end in Drupal 8 is extremely fluid right now that is yet to be done and there's a lot of voices that have not yet been heard and there's a lot of sessions that are going to be talking about the things that are available to you and what we'd like for you, for those of you who are interested and are still sticking around on Thursday, is to come back and reconvene on Thursday at 2.15 p.m. and talk to us about what you've learned and talk to us about what you've taken away from your sessions and talked about the things that have challenged you in your conversation.  Start to build the strategy. That's my goals. I want us to sit down and say, let's think of a strategy as we move into Drupal 8. We have a lot better templating system in Drupal 8. But that's not the end all be all. Managing our JavaScript libraries become easier, all of those things. What I want to know is where are we going to go from there? That's how we manage the today. So, I think at that point, we have a thank you slide. And our handle is as well. He's Brian Wald. I'm Brian Wald and you can... I'm David Wong, talking about that if you'd like. We were told that we must be rated. And so this slide is courtesy of DrupalCon's Stephanie Amsterdam. So, yeah, I think at this point we do have a fair amount of time. It would be good to talk to you guys and if you have questions, please let us know. I don't know if there's a mic for this room, but if anybody wants to... We'll take hands. There's probably a mic. Hands and or just open, I'll cry. Really, no questions. Done. Wow, that was easy. All right, Lewis, yes, hi. So, Lewis asked if there's any existing outside tools for front-end. Do you envision any of them coming into DrupalCore or into Contrib? Yeah, I see a lot of things going into Contrib in Core. There's already been... So those who haven't looked at Drupal8 very recently, Modernizers in Core, Backbone is in Core, weirdly enough. There are a number of projects that are already in Core, but I don't know if adding more things into Core is the way to go. Well, it also... One of the better pieces I think about is that we've removed things in the sense that we don't have the dependency of jQuery, for instance, on the front-end anymore. You'll find that out if you start to load a theme and try to write some jQuery without loading the library. You won't be able to do that anymore. So I think that's actually the better direction is being a little bit more agnostic, but making it simple for people to add in what they need at that right time to do that. John. John asked... So we made the point in DrupalCon Austin to know everything there is to know about Drupal's front-end systems, the entire breadth of everything available to us. Oh, front-end practice. Abstract front-end practice in general. I kind of feel that's still true. I think part of the problem is that you're not only expected to know all of front-end practice, you're also expected to know all the weirdness of Drupal as well, and that's already two brains worth of things. You have to be a really, really proficient front-end developer.  And it's kind of true.  And I don't think that's a reasonable proposition to make and I think Drupal 8 does make step strides in the right direction towards making it less dependent on knowing that drupaliness, I'm not certain it goes far enough. You know, I... You know, so in conversations with others, you know, one of the things that's always come up is, like, why do front-end developers leave Drupal, right?   And there's something to be said of that being our competition. You know, like, as developers, that's really the competition that we are measuring Drupal against. Like, what... how easy is it to build... You know, it's easy to build Drupal sites for these following reasons, but from the front-end, how do we measure up against this alternative system? All other merits aside, you know, taken away.  How easy is it to, quote-unquote, theme a site in Angular versus Drupal? And I think for... If you hit a certain proficiency level, the scales tip in the opposite direction against Drupal than with. Any more questions? So on over there?  Oh, my favorite... we're Brian. Me? Favorite tools and frameworks today? In Drupal or just in general? In general. Well, I think that there's... I personally like to run everything on Node and run an Angular front-end, but that's because I work on the Angular project, so I'm a little bit biased. But I think that, you know, some of the really cool things that excite me about where front-end is going is actually some of the tools that are just managing all of these libraries and managing all of these tasks, for instance, grunt, right? You know, running grunt or ant are one of those methods for compiling and doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you, so you're not constantly managing those things over and over again.  So when you get into situations where you're running an Angular app and then all of a sudden you, you know, some other developer comes in and wants to strip that out, you can make those kind of modular changes easily that way. Please. This is a great example of how you can manage your web components and polyfills or decrease complexity of the front-end. John, who is sitting in the first row, is giving a talk on web components. Sorry. Preston's. Preston is doing a session on web components and John's doing one design components. Brian and I are a big fan of components, like in the lowercase c sense, breaking up manageable chunks of things, breaking up the front-end of things in front-end. You can argue it's maturity in the Drupal space, but, you know, the general, the wind is blowing in that direction. You know, if we were... Yeah, as much yes as I can. I might look foolish a year from now, but we'll say yes for now. Sure.  Well, you laugh, but that's the same thing that people are doing at Drupal 8 now, too. You need to add these things in here, and then in a year, that's not going to be relevant anymore. So that's why I'm a big fan of making it available to swap those things out as you need them, rather than forcing something down them. Any other questions? Oh, please. Yeah. If we had to place bets on what might not be smart to have put into Drupal 8. Well, I mean, if you are someone who was of the mindset that, you know, headless Drupal and content API driven Drupal, I think that would be anything on the front end, right? Because if you have a template system like Twig, right, which we are as much improved over the original with the PHP template system that we're using right now, that system still isn't going to be sufficient for headless necessarily. I mean, it serves a better purpose and that you can take the content out of the site and be able to display that in the template system, but forcing any template system inside the CMS is going to make that a harder issue.  That doesn't work for people either. So I think that when you're working with a Drupal where you're catering to such a large audience, you have to knowingly make some decisions that you're like, right, this is the best thing that we've got right now, so let's go with that. And maybe that's not going to be the best decision later, but you can say that about anything. Hindsight's 20-20. I do think that what we have chosen to go in there makes a lot of sense. So I think that what we're going to do with the CMS libraries or however you want to manage that is a lot more maintainable than it was before. So those types of things I think are steps in the right direction. What's the state of external libraries in Drupal 8? Is Teo in the room? Is Teo Beata? No, he's not. I couldn't tell you as of the last two weeks. I don't know if that's changed about JavaScript. He's giving a core conversation of JavaScript in Drupal 8 core later this week. That would be a great question to ask him. Or not. He goes by not. Anybody else? Was your hand up over on the side somewhere? No? Okay. I don't think so. Would it be a good idea to put SAS into Drupal core? Who said no? Yeah, though. So that doesn't compile on the server side and things along those lines. I don't think that you can force those types of ideas onto a platform that runs that way. I think that that would be a step in the wrong direction in the same way. I think that forcing jQuery to run would be the wrong step as well. We've seen with the jQuery update that there's multiple ways to compile SAS. That's true. Yeah. So John said that there's multiple ways to compile SAS. You can compile it verbose, debugging, the way that SAS live. Or then what libraries do you have to run Compass? Are you going to force those types of things? Or are you going to run Scotch? I'm not going to force those types of things. I'm not going to force those types of things. I'm going to force those types of things as well. If you're going to go down the SAS route what else would you add? That's not always enough anyway. None is probably better than one in that case. Any more questions? Sorry. Anybody else going once? Great. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.


Don't leave me, because maybe I won't get to see you again It hurts me to think that this could be good by my old friend Assalamu Alaikum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh And Imam Hussein TV, welcome to Sowash University Which will be hosting the annual Imam Hussein conference Now the Imam Hussein conference happens every year And it's a conference where prestige and esteemed guests Come and speak on behalf of the Shia community And to promote the name of Imam Hussein The conference is open to all Muslim and non-Muslims And it's held in a western methodology But a very very academic approach To promote the name of Imam Hussein And to promote the struggle of Imam Hussein And most importantly to promote the name of Imam Hussein And his mission for humanity In Karbala we see heavenly traits such as truth, bravery, loyalty, social justice, love coming through And these tell us that when we call for reform The reform must be towards the direction of goodness and good Assalamu Alaikum, my name is Jawad Al Haari, I'm from London And the annual Imam Hussein conference here in London It's an annual event, Alhamdulillah This year's event has been a massive success We have been graced with the presence of very esteemed characters We had beautiful lectures and talks from Jafar Baraka We had a talk from Dr. Ehab, very academic talk Personally my favorite aspect of today was the presentation by VR Karbala Virtual reality Karbala Really really good project and initiative and inshallah we can support it I think these kind of conferences are very important Because it gives us an opportunity to bring our non-Muslim friends To a conference to learn about Imam Hussein It's all good in the year doing 10, 15 nights of Majalis for us Shia But we need to accommodate to non-Muslims The two types of mourning, the type of mourning where you commemorate And the type of mourning where you spread the message And I think this equates to the former Where we can get people from a non-Shia Or even non-Muslim background to be actively involved In spreading the message of Imam Hussein, may Allah accept The little deeds that we do in his name and his honor My name is Neil Nasser I'm here representing Hussein London The food drive coordination team Hussein is a global entity that aims to help people in need Here in London we're helping the homeless people To distribute people of London Every week we're in Charon Cross And we're serving the needs of the homeless people Around about 200 people Every single week we're feeding them Alhamdulillah today's event was amazing There was a great range of speakers that came along I learned a lot about Imam Hussein About Shiaism, some beautiful poetry And some beautiful recitation Imam Hussein is my inspiration because In his footsteps I try to work He stood for oppression And he stood for the needy people of his time He freed slaves He gives me inspiration when I look around the streets of London I see people that are oppressed right in front of me Am I to ignore them or am I to help them Imam Ali alaihi salam said never look down on somebody Unless you're willing to pick them up It's extremely important to have a Western touch About Imam Hussein because Generally what I do is I engage with people that are non-Muslims People of different sects and different faiths And believers, general public that are walking past Every single week seeing what we're doing And we're liaising with these people To tell them the beautiful elements of Islam The beautiful elements of the Imam And what he stood for It's not like one morning If John wakes up He'll find a pair of limbs It's not like one morning Muhammad would start to hear A one morning Husna San Hassan Will come back to life To embrace his mother We saw this opportunity Of telling about our project We are Karbala And it fitted perfectly with the conference Since it's about Imam Hussein alaihi salam We are Karbala is basically about Reviving the tragedy of Karbala And allowing users to relive The tragedy of Karbala by using Our virtual reality glasses to travel Back in time and experience In seeing Imam Hussein alaihi salam As the person was present On the battle of Karbala Well I think the conference was very good It's my first time attending here I flow from Denmark to here this morning And Alhamdulillah it's very good By the organizers So we are blessed to be here today And it is not just a simple conference It is a conference An academic conference Which gives you some other thoughts About Imam Hussein alaihi salam Salam alaikum My name is Faten Adil Ismail I am the central London ambassador For the Imam Hussein blood donation campaign That works in partnership With the Islamic community society And NHS blood and transfusion So Imam Hussein Is the main inspiration behind Our campaign And the previous from the name of our campaign Is the Imam Hussein blood donation campaign We draw inspiration from his sacrifice Who he gave up his life And his blood And in the same way we can do so In our very own Society at the moment that we are living in We can donate our blood To help the thousands of lives That are in need of blood Everyday in hospitals Or car accidents Major operations And we can do so selflessly And also at no harm to ourselves In fact this is something that we can do And our blood rejuvenates itself So inshallah we are all inspired By Imam Hussein alaihi salam To hear your story I'm helpless wishing I could save your life But you give me courage To face the demons that I have inside To take me higher Away from desire And I spent ten nights angry I'm praying for peace But I don't want to sleep And when I close my eyes Karbala your land is in my mind And I can't stop these tears No I won't ease tonight One of the terms the Quran uses To describe how the process Of Tabligh should be done Is inshallah al-Rahman al-Raheem Wa ma alayna indan bala Al-Mubin chapter 36 verse 17 And we are not responsible For other than clear notification Now in the Arabic language The strongest method to emphasise on one side Is to exempt it and then give an exemption We're here at the end of the Imam Hussein conference The conference was an amazing experience Where we had loads of different people From different backgrounds From spoken word to PhD doctors Giving lectures to human activists To even normal speakers People who talk on TED Talks All here to promote the name of Imam Hussein And to promote the message The mission of peace, love and humanitarianism All here in London Most inshallah Imam Hussein TV No I won't ease tonight It's firing my heart won't die And even in my dreams I'll hear the cry I see bodies laying side by side Children, peace tonight It's firing my heart won't die And even in my dreams


So, it's magic. I'm a Bambi. It's magic. All right. Tell us about your song, the one you just performed. So, Asali, the song came about in a very funny way. She performed in a club, in a school. I'm a Bishite. And I buy drinks. So, I drink and I drink. I drink and I drink. I drink and I drink. I'm a club singer, but I drink and I drink. So, I drink and I drink. So, there's a chick who is seated somewhere. And she's a Bishite. She's a Bishite. She's a Bishite. She's a Bishite. She's a Bishite. She's a Bishite. So, I'll tell you later, the next night, I was performing somewhere else. I see the same person with the same crew. So, I was just drinking. I've seen you somewhere before. What would you do if someone came and saw you spinning? Would you like to buy me a drink? Why are you not romantic? Why are you like this? I did too. Okay, cut it. So I asked her like, so why are you here? She was like, She was like, That's something that she does. She does it for a living. So she goes out and meets guys. Like Finesse is the guy of the cash. I would buy her a drink. I would go home. Maybe she would come to the theatre. What would you like to explain to her? I would like to see her drink. Oh, okay. Do you want to continue? Yeah, continue. So she was like, You might judge me, But see me Pekyango. It's actually a lot of girls who do this. So, Later on when she took a journey to Kirei, Like something hit me. Maybe the song will start a conversation around what's going on. Because it's something that's happening and people know about it. So, Guys come to the studio, You can chill here, 12 hours later, And play the guitar. 12 hours later? What happened in 12 hours? Who? It will be caught up. Okay. But I don't want to drink. I don't want to drink. It's okay, But before we do that, What you want us to do, I want to ask you a question. Do you imagine If you were in the river, Would you do the same thing? If you were in the river, Do you have a dream? Do you have a home? Do you want to share it? Ben, I don't want to defend myself. I don't want to drink. Okay. I don't want to drink. You know what? I want to be anti-war. Okay. Okay. Would you like to tell your fans something? Also give us your social media handles. So, Like, Just support Kenyan content, Because guys are doing really good stuff around here. The videos, The audios that guys are checking, It's so dope. You can find me on social media at Wangzi, Double Z, Double I, Just everywhere, just search me up. And link me up to Pata Music, Killapali iTunes, Spotify, Just search for the music type. And you're good sir? So, Basically, Music for Gas Air Music K on Insta. Also, Facebook, Gas, YouTube, Gaston. Thank you so very much. Thanks for coming to the show. Would you like to bless us as we get out of here? But before you do that, Set out to email me. I want to dance, I want to dance, I want to dance, I want to dance, I want to dance, I want to dance, I want to dance, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Thank you so much. Thank you for entering your project. Sorry, I take it all back. Don't go away. Come on guys, take it away. A short freestyle and then Gus kills the rest of the performance. Okay, okay, so. Okay, it's a sour. If you wanna be a friend, you might wanna hold my hand and Just a little motivation, a little conversation Why do you always pretend? But now you're waking up till the morning light There's fire, fire in your eyes girl Make me wanna feel the touch of your love now It's too late, I said you're beautiful Beautiful, beautiful girl Yeah, try to come here quickly to join me I tried guys, I tried It's Christmas If you wanna be a friend, buy me a sandwich But I don't wanna be a friend, I do not call his name in vain But he's a friend But you're done


at SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the ceiling from the noise, and we are digging into Dell world because all the hottest trends are happening. Can the infrastructure level, at the application level, at the mobility level, and everything in between for the enterprise, the consumerization of IT. It's exciting to dig in, and I'm John Furrier, again, John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Darius Samarian, who's the Vice President and General Manager of Dell's Enterprise Systems and Solutions Group, new group at Dell, really designed to go after the converged infrastructure, market opportunity, which we were the first to define that, and in size that, it's huge. It's about a $400 billion TAM, so Dell is responding to that organizationally. Darius, welcome. Thank you, good to see you again. Good to see you again. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, we saw you this June at the Dell Storage Forum. In Boston, yeah. At the time, you were the networking guy. I was. Now you've been promoted, congratulations. Marius Haas is in. We know Marius from his days at HP, and even before that. So you guys are really going after this converged infrastructure play. Talk about the organizational change and what drove that. Yeah, very much so. Pleasure to be here all the time, John and Dave as well. If you think about what we've done over the last three to five years, the whole idea of arguably spending $12 billion worth of acquisitions is allow us to accumulate the necessary technology assets and people capabilities to finally be able to culminate into what we can call system and solutions, orientation for Dell next generation. The reason why I was a logical perhaps candidate to do this is that I came from the networking editors where by definition, converging for structures become very much the next conversation with our customers. And so the formation of this new business unit called enterprise system and solutions should be seen as a, call it a P&L that sits on top of our server storage and networking because the combination of the three plus of course system management and plus the collaboration with our software group can give a set of capabilities that before was not available to us. And right now by formalizing this, we can actually talk to our customers even more straightforward and being able to have a conversation around what really matters which is the application, the private cloud and the infrastructure being built much more integrated, much more converged than ever before. So Dari, I want to ask you, this is really an important topic to us because it was one of our coverage areas, big data and now software-led infrastructure. So Wikibon put out the first groundbreaking research around what we're calling software-led infrastructure which is a way for us as we've been doing the research to modernize the definition of converged infrastructure. So one thing that we've observed the customers that you guys are serving as well as your competition is, converged infrastructure was defined many years ago. So a lot's changed in the past just three years, okay? So as you guys are transforming the messages, obviously that you're going after this modern infrastructure as Michael Dell kind of responded to my question yesterday around modern, I wanted to drill on that and that was a word he used and we use that as well. So we have this notion of software-led infrastructure. So share with us within Dell because it really is a nice architecture. Obviously server stores networking, they all have to work together and software plays on top of it. But software-led infrastructure, talk about this modern definition from your standpoint. Obviously we have a report, you go to wikibon.org, you find that, but this modernization trend is happening. IT and CIOs are all looking at their infrastructure. They are looking at cloud. They are looking at software to be differentiated. And obviously this margin expansion in there too for the people who are providing those durable goods. Sure, sure. No, very much so. In a way the definition of a modern data center starts first with recognizing that the real value that customers want to get out of a data center is the running of the applications. And you can run applications either on a very confined basis and fine tune your hardware and your software system management for those. Or you can actually go and create a private cloud where you have a method to be able to take advantage of multiple applications sitting on top of a private cloud. I will argue that the advent of a modern data center was really triggered by virtualizing the whole data center itself, the whole server stuff. And what is being happening is right now that the virtualization applied to servers when it catches on as we are doing collectively in the industry to the storage and the network side creates an interesting way to disintermediate in a way the underlying hardware and the application sits on top. And our job as a solution provider is to be able to provide the best possible optimized infrastructure that allows to have a virtualization way to sit on top but all at the benefit of the applications that the customer wants to put on display. And a key topic is around how do you work with a customer to actually recognize that they are typically in brown field environments and they don't start from scratch. And we have developed a whole set of methodologies with our professional services group to be able to actually move the customers from the legacy applications into a private cloud based data center and our technology efforts helps in doing that in a much more economical fast. So what you're saying here, the old way was infrastructure application had middleware, I was kind of the old model, monolithic in servers. That's cool, but with this new way virtualization really is enabling this new kind of software layer, if you will. Okay, so that being said, talk about what that means. Okay, so we see the hottest trend out there is software defined networking. You know, VMware, bot, and Acira, there's all kinds of conversation around hypervisor, agnostic, so the virtualization in particular, and what does all this mean? What does software defined networking mean? What does software defined data center? And what is that trend? Is it just virtualization or is it other software playing with the sandbox? Fantastic question, in fact, the word virtualization and the whole phenomena virtualization, I will argue is only the trigger that makes all of this possible. So let's dissect a bit more about the notion of what a software defined data center, for the matter, a software defined networking is all about. I will argue that the value to a customer is about how dynamically the network and infrastructure can be customized to the needs of an application. So if you think about the essence of software defined networking, the way we are going about it is to say that the application has certain networking needs. It could be bandwidth requirements, it could be quality of service, it could be security requirements, it could be opening VPN tunnels, whatever it is, our ability is to actually profile the application, use a controller in between to be able to dispatch the instructions to the underlying network so that the application can have the most optimal network for the operation the application needs. If you do this across both the network, the storage, and the server, now you have an opportunity to program your data center in a real-time, as real-time basis as you can, given the needs of the application that sits on top. That makes sense. So you made the Force 10 acquisition some other smaller tuck-ins. Do you have all the pieces now to compete in this marketplace? Well, you never hold the pieces because by definition, technologies continue to move. But I will argue that we have a lot of the pieces that were required to go to the next wave of system and solutions. The whole idea for us to have about Force 10 as an example, it was an absolutely stepping stone to have enough critical mass of data center networking. And our ability to have built a very powerful blade-based switch that now connects to a very powerful top of rack, and it goes to the distributed core, you'll argue it is the most economical and the most elegant way to build a data center. Without that piece, I will still be immersed in a way of other networking vendors to be part of the overall solution. But even gale technologies that were actually acquired just on November 16, and we closed, it was an absolutely necessary step to be able to provide a workload orchestration on top of the iPervisor and to be able to do conversion infrastructure management. So if you think about this right now, the 12G servers that we've been all along, the progress we made with the storage site and all the progress we made on the Force 10 for the data center and the gale acquisition, now you have the building blocks, the elements for a conversion infrastructure proposition that we're going to put a lot of imposition. Now, one of the, John mentioned our report on software-led infrastructure.  That's really nothing new. I mean, people have been thinking about that. Certainly Google's been doing it for a decade, but the key is the metadata management. You've got this metadata locked in all these silos. What's Dell's software strategy with regard to allowing what you said, that dynamic reaction to customer needs? No, very much so. In fact, you saw yesterday in the Q&A session that even John Swains and Michael Dell had where John spoke very specifically about the ability to correlate events and correlate data across multiple areas of your software stack. Imagine if you can have a slowing down of a CRM application being correlated to the fact that there is a particular switch not being functioning anymore. Now you have a complete visibility of your data center and you'll be able to actually move around and being able to even proactively look for the optimization of the data center and that is only possible when you have quest on one side, when you have identity management capabilities on the other side and you have security and et cetera coming together. So the correlation of the trends and the correlation of the data in the data center is allows for an optimal, ongoing applications running on the other side. Machine is managing that. Machine managing that as opposed to the human being managing it by all means. So Dario, let's get back to the application. I want to kind of drill on that because obviously the application explosion is a real trend and everyone's seeing it at many levels. One is the agile ability of DevOps. I mean you guys are doing a lot of work in DevOps which means essentially there's more applications, more diverse applications being developed faster and deployed faster. All that's great stuff and we cover that. But what that means is a couple of things. So I want you to ask a question about three things. So there's been some innovations and some areas of improvement that people are working on. One, flash. Flash has enabled architectures to be different, caching layers both on the sand side and on the storage side and also on the server side. So I want you to talk about what flash means to the enterprise. Two, the networking side. Obviously networking has been a bottleneck around IO latency and dealing with provisioning of apps especially within a virtualized environment. And three, with the applications being so promiscuous in this consumerization experience, is the security holes everywhere. So three things. Flash, the networking bottlenecks being overcome from whether it's automation, configuration, and all that and then security. How do they all play in? So can you talk about all three? Yeah, let's try. These are big topics as we all know, right? I'll get 30 minutes of that panel. We could spend 30 minutes on this. We could spend probably hours on this topic. Let's think of flash as a way to arguably revolutionize how data becomes available to the application in a real-time basis. Meaning that if you think about, there is really the optimal way to distribute on a tier basis the data. And you can say, when do I put it off-premise? When do I have it in-premise? When do I have it close to a Nardisk? How do I have it close to a flash, close to a memory? Well, that is the storage subsystem, but all of this transformation and having a flash-based system is primarily to make available to the application, the data, as fast and as locally as possible and making sure, therefore, the infrastructure continues to pay attention to what the application is. So in other words, I would put the flash revolution in a way that would be possible. That's the acceleration of data, which plays well with the tax. It's the acceleration of the data and I call it the locality of the data, whereby the application would have access to the data at the right time, at the right place, and making sure that there is minimal latency and minimal, so to speak, delays for the data access. So would you say that's table stakes in the future? I would certainly think it's table stakes in the future for the simple reason that the application is going to become more and more demanding, more and more data is going to be there, and therefore, connecting it off between what the application is and what the data is, is going to become much more stable stakes in architecture as well. Yeah, we agree. I'm sure you do. But you know, it's good that you guys are on that because that's where, that's a bottleneck, but it's acceleration at the same time. So- It's very much so. But that's part of your core strategy. Flash in there. Very much part of the core strategy to have a whole set of advancements on the storage subsystems we put together for the active infrastructure. The second topic that we discussed for a year was network and this notion of bottlenecks. I think that with advent of 10 gig at the server level, and then 40 gig becoming more and more for the fabric itself, I think we've seen very good advancements whereby the optimization of the east-west traffic, whereby virtual machine stuff, virtual machine way more than going in and out to the data center has brought up this new architecture that you can call distributed core. You can call- This is software, this is the software-defined- This is both the architecture to which you have a spine and leaf on why you actually scale the edge of the network that is a physical side of it. And of course we work with the usual suspect on the silicon, you know, merchant side, you know, the Broadcom, the Intel and so forth. But equally important is the software that powers this scaling of the backbone of the data center network. We're working on that. Provisioning automation. All of those elements, i.e. the wiring up front for 10 gig going to 40 and being able to scale, the ability to actually provision it quickly so a switch can be provisioned as easily as a server, the ability to actually have automation kicking in so you can actually have open flow standards and as the end, that's the whole changes and evolution that we have in becoming a virtual network. The third area was around security. Well clearly, you know, none of this, you will argue, can be to the satisfaction of a CFO, a CIO and a CEO, you know, without having enough elements of security to be able to protect both from a liability point of view, but even more importantly, the applications having to have, you know, both the infrastructure security side as well as the end user being protected for the episode on the internet. And thanks to acquisitions that we made like in SonicWall, in SecureWorks, not only we have the architectural element with SonicWall, but we also have the monitoring element with SecureWorks where we can actually help our customers put together data centers or end offices, branches and so forth and protect both from the outside threats coming from the internet, but also securing a virtualized data center for the modern data center. So that's the core of the edge. That is exactly- That's what Marius was talking about yesterday. It is the core and the edge and he is the end user and the applications. All of these are the elements of a security architecture that we can bring to our customers now. Darius, I want to ask you about the organization. We started off talking about this new organization and now my contention has always been that you got to get the organization right, not only on the vendor side, but also the users. And I saw this was VCE. They didn't have the organization right. IBM itself didn't have the organization right. They just put Andy Monchon in charge. I would say Dell realizing you've got to have a leader across these server storage and networking areas to integrate these. Now, so that's good. Nice, good move, smart move. How does it work?  You got to be careful about double counting and I know you guys don't do that. So can you talk about that a little bit? This is my first question and I want to talk about the implications for customer organizations. It's a great question because you're absolutely right. If you don't get the organization right, all of these might be in generation and kind of waste of time. Think of this as the following way. There are two ways to make new products or new capabilities. One is a short-term ability to bring together what we got. The fact that we have a fantastic proposition on a data center, the fact that we have a fantastic regime on storage and servers, you want to take advantage of that and you can call that an integration job at the beginning. My number one job to start with is to actually bring those together and work with the other general managers and to put those in a way that are pre-integrated, pre-validated and easy to deploy and easy to consume from the customer. Job number one. Organization I think is structured that way and have an opportunity to sit at the table as in a way you can call it the chairman of a architected set of conversation with our peers. But then the opportunity is as we evolve is to actually have focused investments for new form factors and new architectures. They may not come logically by just summing up these three areas but that's to be done from scratch. My charter with this newly formed enterprise system and solution is to do both. Integrate best that we have today because the customer already likes the proposition but also go after organically and inorganically of the new integrated systems that actually may have to be developed and funded in a separate base. Okay, so you measure that but now the revenue flows into the individual groups. Revenue flows actually in two ways. First, I want to make sure that we can motivate our sales individuals and we can work with our customers and measure the units of pre-integrated systems. So very much the PNL that is a integrated system and solutions will measure both the pre-integrated system as a unit of revenue as well as the reference architectures. And then behind the scenes we do the accounting translations so I can have a correlation between the revenue that goes into network and the APEX spend on networking. But we don't want to have that accounting on the back end to be on the way or now we put together a solution for the customer. So this is very much not what I call a shadow PNL but a real PNL because it creates the right conversations and the right mechanism of execution even downstream with the field and with the channel. But real PNL in the sense that you can allocate investments according to the opportunity. That's exactly. Okay, so now what about the customers? Now the customers aren't organized. Generally, most customers aren't organized to exploit converged infrastructure. They still got storage, server and networking people. Actually some of your customers might be. Because the smaller customers might be in the better position. What's your handle on that? Very much so. I think what we notice on the customer base that first of all there is a big variety of customers. All the way to perhaps the most sophisticated, global 500, all the way to the mid-market and even small business. So having recognized the level of profiles of a customer what we typically notice is this. The most successful way for a customer to modernize the data center to bring converged infrastructure is when they come with the predisposition of changing their organization or boundaries entirely. When you have somebody that leads within the customer side a virtualization project or a data center project. Typically that individual, that executive that most likely reports directly to the CIO and reports very much higher up will be able to actually transform the company within because then you don't have so to speak the political infights between the networking admin and the storage or the server admin is somewhat odd. So we notice that the maximum success for us to go in and speak about systems, solutions and converged infrastructure is when we find the frame of mind on the customer that says I'm ready to also redefine the vision of labor on how my IT admins actually come together. Now you've talked about both pre-integrated systems and reference architecture. So you offer the spectrum because there's always pressure in the channel to unbundle, I want to use somebody else's servers or somebody else's storage. You allow that. We allow that for a very simple reason. You know, there are two kinds of realities here that we never could never neglect. Number one, every customer is somewhat different. Yes, our objective on a pre-integrated system is to tap into the 80% commonality and say, look, we've seen many like you and although you have a bit of a difference why we take advantage of our experience and our knowledge that we accumulate by talking to a lot of customers that you can call it is a pre-integrated system. But we also know that a customer may say, look, I really spend enough money with somebody else's to do our storage subsystem. Or I want to make sure that I preserve some switching from an alternative networking vendor. We don't want to neglect the opportunity that we can evolve with a customer. So reference architecture allows for the recognition of other components. So this does not become a forklift for the customer. It becomes an evolution. And therefore you can go all the way to a pre-integrated system if you like or all the way to evolution of reference architectures to have the customer journey coming along with us. Now, why the new branding from VSTART to active systems? VSTART's still around. But what was behind that? What was behind it is, in a way, the recognition that this is going to become and it still is a huge emphasis for them moving forward. We pick the word active as a label, in a way, to bring together a bunch of properties around the flexibility of it. The ability to actually make your hardware and infrastructure alive for the application. What we didn't want to do is to be bounded for some form of legacy. And therefore the word active infrastructure, active solutions, active system, active system manager is a whole concerted effort to bring together all the pieces of the puzzle. And therefore moving forward, active infrastructure is the umbrella marketing. But then downstream, we'll activate this as we put together the solutions for the sales, for the channels. We'll see us doing marketing around this. And therefore it is an opportunity, frankly, to bring together a number of pieces that together before we were not being as aligned as right now. And you see us doing a lot of, you know, VSTART stays. VSTART stays, but it will be evolved so that it becomes an active system as well. Into the umbrella. And the primary element is that when you have an active system manager, now the underlying, so to speak, you know, existing products that we have become part of the family. And the customer can be future proof from an investment point of view that says, I bought VSTART, why don't you bring me along on the active infrastructure, whatever position you do that by allowing them to adopt an active system manager and now they become all active systems. Dario, I want to ask you my final question. I know we're getting up on time here, but obviously a very important area for customers right now is this reconstruction of the data center. When I say reconstruction, I mean, it's a build out. And on the consumer side, you say you're in the Dell ventures and the consumer side's kind of, you know, thinning out the bubble burst, so to speak, in a way, good bubble, but there's a real boom in the enterprise right now. Venture capitals investing in flash startups, SDN, software to find anything is getting a lot of traction. It's obvious people are seeing this transformation is real. Even though we're looking at a financial cliff in 19 days with the here in the US and abroad, there's real work being done. So I want to ask you, how are you marketing this group and what's your main horse that you're riding into the customers? Is it software led? Is it software defined? Is it just converged infrastructure? It's kind of an old definition. Is that working? Is it big data? How are you going to your customers and what are you positioning? What's your core positioning? Is it software to find data center? No, the leading conversation with our customers starts at a higher level, to be honest. It starts at understanding what do you want to do? If you want to create, let's say, a collaborative environment and the customer has hundreds or even dozens of users. How do you put together, let's say, a Microsoft collaboration suite as an example? And so the conversation starts either at the application workload and what do you want to do with it all the way from moving from a legacy to modernization and bringing in the underlying converging infrastructure solutions or even a private cloud as a way to solve that kind of problem. All typically starts from a different point of view and says, I know I'm going to run a lot of applications and want to modernize my data centers because I want to spend less consumption, higher density, simpler operations. And therefore the second way to start a conversation is through a private cloud conversation and bringing converging infrastructure and pre-graded system under that, call it slipstream of conversations. So typically the customer doesn't ask us, tell me more about software to find networking or tell me more about software to find data center. We talk about it as a way to demonstrate that there are properties around it typically is the application of the private cloud that drives the conversation. I'll ask a different question. Obviously converge infrastructure is kind of an old definition. It's kind of played in the mind of the customer. Yeah, they're all been investing and now you have this big push for top line growth and bottom line reductions of being more efficient. So efficiency, which is doing more with less and making it all work, but also with apps are driving revenue. So the revenue focus. So is it like we're dels differentiating itself by saying we're betting on cloud. We're also betting on, is it just converge infrastructure? What's the core positioning that, when you go to the customer, who dels better because of... The core positioning with the customer we have right now is this. The customer is in different stages, depending on geography, depending on size, depending on the legacies applications of the transformation of the team for structure. And they all know that because they read the papers, they talk to their neighbors, they talk to their mentors or whatever, that there is an opportunity to save money, do it better and so forth. So our always starting point with the customer is, we want to be in the private cloud, converging infrastructure, giving you the building blocks of what it takes to go from legacy to modern. And I would not suggest that converging infrastructure actually is a gone phenomenon. I would argue that- It's changing. It is evolving. It is changing and it's evolving to the point that right now we can actually do the next click, so to speak, of converging infrastructure, where you bring together even a tighter level of power efficiency, it's a tighter level of operations and therefore a higher level for the application. Our conversation starts with, what do you want to get done? Can we actually make sure that we can help you with a professional services engagement if you like to, a consultative approach and that drives typically either data center conversations, security conversations, and user bring your own devices conversations. That is what we are both training our sales force and also trying to efficient ourselves. Okay, so basically power efficiency, accelerated data access to the apps, automation and scale with software and virtualization and application performance. All of those are the ingredients for the customer to see a quantifiable value in transforming the legacy environments to the new ones, John. Yeah, awesome. Well, I think that's what we'll be drilling on this week. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. This modern discussion, very relevant. Customers want to know what that means. They obviously, they're not throwing out converging. It's just changing. They all have to buy servers, storage and networking.  It's just how that's changing with virtualization. I really appreciate your conversation here. Very relevant. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. Thank you. The video news business believed the internet was a fact. The science has settled. We all know the internet is here to stay. Bubbles and busts come and go, but the industry deserves a news.


Now we are going to look at a couple of really, really popular scales which you can improvise over a chord. So what happens is a chord will be part of a scale. It will end up always being a subset of a scale. So you don't just have to play three notes when you are faced with a three note chord. So you can play a scale in which the chord is a subset of or the three notes of the chord will be contained in that scale. So a very common scale which is sort of like an anything goes scale over pretty much any chord will be the major pentatonic. Pentatonic as the word suggests means five, five notes. So we build it as B flat, C, D, F, G, B flat. From the scale degree front, one, two, three, five, six octave, of course the octave is not counted. We just play it to complete that's octave, sixth, five, three, two, one, in terms of swaras. So again remember our rhythm, so we are trying to use that same rhythm and try to build a phrase using the major pentatonic scale and the melody which we have come up with is something like this. Which is B flat, D, F, G, D, F, G, F, D, C, B flat, G, B flat, D, F. So let's divide that and when you are playing the melody like I said earlier since the melody is constructed around a rhythmic sentence, try to divide your melody as well as you practice.  So to me it really feels like a conversation or a nice sentence. Here is another melody which I have composed using a major pentatonic scale but let's hear it on the trumpet, that's kind of fun. So we have looked at the major pentatonic scale, another really awesome scale which I would highly recommend you guys to check out is the Mixolydian scale. It's a beautiful scale which is like the major scale with a flat in seventh. That is A flat with respect to B flat major or with respect to C major, it's B flat which is the flat seven. So let's build the scale again, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, perfect, 4, 5, perfect, 5, major sixth dominant or flat in seven or minor seventh octave, okay. So remember, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, para, para. So you are getting that rhythm over the Mixolydian. The melody which I have come up with is pa, pa, para, para, para. Play that on the piano, pa, para, para, para. Quite easy, right? So let's just hear that on another instrument, the trumpet and I've also come up with another melody which you should also work on on the Mixolydian which involves some higher notes. And before we hear this on the trumpet, it would be awesome if you head over to our Patreon channel where all of this information is presented with a lot of downloadable material, a lot of backing tracks and of course all my handwritten notes which you could read, download and watch while we are learning or even after the lessons learnt.


I became hijabi in sixth grade and it was like my choice and since like I was in middle school like I've had a lot of people say stuff to me and I'm still in eighth grade like I'm still in middle school and I've had like several situations especially with like boys and like I've been like touched like they touch my hijab and like they like send messages around like about me and the school does nothing about it and like I've gone multiple times and like I don't know what to do first let me make this easy on you and grant you justice and all the injustice that you are going through my advice number one is to get your family involved it is absolutely not okay for that to happen I have seen with my own eyes when I was in those grades of hijabs being snatched off the hairs of girls and it is absolutely not okay to have that and you should not have to deal with this alone get your support system in there talk to your family get your family in there there are advocates out there and specifically if this is happening and nothing is happening get care involved care is a very good resource so if the school isn't doing anything get them involved get more people involved and may Allah make it easy on you I know it is not it's not easy at all I've seen it I've been in that situation and just keep keep keep standing tall and keep asking Allah Allah is the most just he will surely find a way


Going on everyone Sam here late in sports cards for one box a 22 23 Bowman University Inception hobby for Landon H. Good luck here Landon. See what we got in here for you, buddy Bowman University Inception stuff's been hot stuff's been very hot Big fans so far from what I've seen great checklist obviously some of the biggest names in Sports right now. We've got a mark Mitchell nice one there for it the Frick a duke cool on here is gonna be a Ernest Uday, Jr. 35 of 50 on the three-color patch for Kansas player worn on that one Ernest Uday, Jr. On the gold RPA Forward to get yeah, Kansas. That's right. Jeff Sims base base auto for Nebraska Jeff Sims We've got base phyllid Jacobic Chris Murray Kiki rice and Spencer Sanders That'll do it for your break there Landon. Thanks again for the sport buddy. Get him right out to


So in July of 1918, the Germans have conducted three attacks, two of which had achieved spectacular results, but they're also losing men. So Ferdinand Foch, looking at the situation, is recognizing that despite their significant territorial gains, the Germans are no closer to winning a strategic victory on the Western Front. And what Foch is starting to do is he's looking for a place where the Allies can go on the offensive. Ludendorff's objective during the spring offensives had been to separate the British from the French, push them off of the European continent, and isolate the French. So Ludendorff's idea is to attack the British again. He wants to pull all Allied reserves, particularly French reserves, away from the British sector. So he is going to determine that another attack in the same vicinity of where the Blucher assault had been conducted is the way to do this. So Ludendorff designs a plan for an offensive targeted at capturing the French city of Reims, the idea of being attacking on both sides of Reims and essentially encircling the city and then capturing it. At the same time, Foch consults with the Ten, Hague, and with Pershing, and believes that the Germans are going to make another attack, and he wants to blunt the German attack and then immediately counterattack. And the most enticing area is the Marne salient. And so he along with the Ten and the French commanders are going to plan an operation for a major assault against the Marne salient. A general idea is going to be whether a German offensive and then launch a lightning strike against the shoulder of the salient near the French city of Soissons. The idea being that if you could punch into the shoulder and cut the logistical lines into the salient, then it would dislodge the entire German position. So the main assault is going to be on the western edge of the salient. Both sides now have a plan, now it's just a position of waiting. Now unfortunately for the Germans, on 15 July, hours before the German offensive was set to begin, an Allied patrol had captured several German prisoners, including the German officer. The officer had orders designating when the offensive was to begin. That information was quickly relayed up the chain of command and the Allies prepared to launch an anticipatory artillery strike against the Germans before they began their offensive, and in fact this is what they do. About 15 minutes before the German offensive was set to go off, while the German ground forces were gathering in their staging area, the Allies launched a massive artillery barrage, killing many Germans, disrupting much of the German organization, and indicating clearly that the Germans did not have the element of surprise. However, as is so often the case, plans are in motion and it's too late to alter them at this point. So at the set time, the German batteries commence firing on the Allied lines. So not only have the Germans lost the element of surprise, but they're also facing the Allies who have arranged their forces in a much more sophisticated way. The French by this point have understood the concept of a defense in depth and they're going to utilize that on a large section of their frontage. This enables them to bear the initial brunt of the enemy attack and then stop it and push it back. So the Germans are going to launch their assault on 15 July and they're going to have limited success to the east of Reims. To the west of Reims, they're going to fight a very, very difficult drawn out battle against the French and American forces right there, the most significant of which is going to be the fight against the American 3rd Division in the Sermon Valley. But the Americans in the French are going to hold and succeed in providing Foch what he needs which is that initial stoppage of the Germans which allows Foch to launch his counter attack. It is going to begin on 18 July. It is tremendously successful to the north near Soisone, the American 1st Division, American 2nd Division and French 10th Moroccan Division are going to drive into the German lines advancing as many as 5 to 10 kilometers over three days, effectively bringing the German logistical system under threat of artillery barrage which does exactly what Foch had wanted which was to force the Germans to begin withdrawing from the Marne salient. The attack is not so successful that it completely surrounds the German forces within the salient but it does batter the Germans to a degree that they now have to withdraw. In the process of doing this, the 1st and 2nd Division suffer a tremendous number of casualties. They are going to be rendered combat ineffective for at least a month. They will not go back into action until early to mid-September. The Americans are still having problems with coordinating infantry and artillery and armor so combined warfare, but they're learning. Several days after the initial attack on 18 July, Allied forces all along the salient begin a general offensive and over the next roughly two weeks the Germans are going to conduct a fighting withdrawal from the edges of the salient. They are going to pull back to a series of defensive lines that they have established trying to hold off the advancing Allies. By early August the Germans have withdrawn all the way to the Veil River. The Americans and the French have followed them and most significantly the Americans take up position near the small French town of Femme. At this point the salient has effectively been reduced and the Allies have seized the strategic initiative. About a week after the attack, Fosch pulls together the Allied commanders in chief for a conference. What Fosch wants to do is conduct operations that reduce the other salients to improve Allied logistics and will allow them to have a better position on the line to launch a series of massive assaults on their own to theoretically win the war. With the reduction of the Marne salient already underway, there is another salient up near the Belgian town of Ypres, just south of it in the British zone. There is also a large salient near the city of Amiens. These will be reduced by the British in coordination with the Belgians and the French. To the east there is a large salient surrounding the town of Somme-Mihile, just south of Verdun. This task is going to go to the Americans. Pershing has been negotiating with Fosch over the course of the summer to create an independent American army. With the battle experience that American divisions are gaining, Fosch now agrees that the time is right to go ahead and form an American army. Because most American training and logistical networks are located in Lorraine, this makes Somme-Mihile an ideal location for an assault by the American army. Pershing acting upon his agreement with Fosch is going to call for the formation of the American First Army, which will come together formally on 10 August. So with the Germans reeling after the loss of the Marne salient and the significant casualties that the Allies have inflicted upon them, they have effectively ceded the strategic initiative to the Allies. And Fosch is more than willing to take up that initiative and go on the offensive all along the western front. He is going to coordinate an assault by not only a Franco-American force on the Marne salient, but he's planning an American attack at Somme-Mihile and a British attack near Amiens. So now we start to see, finally after four years, that the Allies are going to be conducting operations in a coordinated manner. Denying the Germans the ability to deal with one assault individually before turning to another. Now the Germans are going to have to defend everywhere. This series of events is going to set the stage for what won't be known as the Second Battle of the Marne.