theCUBE!

Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference.

Brought to you by Intel.

Now, here's John Furrier...

>> Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angle's theCUBE here on the ground, in Hangzhou, China.

We're here at the Intel Booth as part of our coverage, exclusive coverage of Alibaba Cloud

Conference here in the cloud city.

I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE.

And I'm here with CJ Bruno, who is the Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Global

Accounts of the sales and marketing group at Intel.

That's a mouthful but basically you run a lot of the major accounts, you bring a lot

of value to Intel Supplier to these big clouds.

>> I do, John.

We look after our top 20 or so largest partners and customers around the world.

Amazing like Alibaba, edge to cloud enterprises, deep rich engagements, just an exciting, exciting

time to be in the business with these big customers.

>> And there's no borders to the cloud so its not as easy as saying PC, like people

might think of Intel in the old days.

You guys have these major cloud providers, there's a lot of intel inside so to speak

but that value is enabling a new kind of functionality.

We're hearing it here at the show.

>> You are.

We work together with partners like Ali, in the area of such big artificial intelligence

development, big data analytics and of course, the cloud.

We've been working with them for over 12 years now and you can see the advancements and the

services that they're providing to their customers, not only domestically, here in China but on

a global stage as well.

>> Its interesting, Intel, you've been working with these guys for 12 years, what a journey,

from an entrepreneurial 12 guys in a dorm room, or an apartment for Jackie Ma, that

he talks about all the time, to now the powerhouse.

What's it like, because these guys have an interesting formula going on here.

They're bringing culture and art, with science, kind of sounds like Steve Jobs, technology

meets liberal arts, bringing a cultural aspect.

How far have they come?

Give us some insight into where they've come from and where you think they're going.

>> Its amazing, Jack Ma, yesterday in his keynote, talked about this event eight years

ago.

120 people, John, we're standing amongst 60,000 or so, in this event today, just eight short

years later.

Its amazing what they've been able to do.

They're driving innovation, this is not a copy economy, it's an innovation economy.

They invest, very high-degree of technical acumen.

Willingness to break barriers, try things people have not.

Fail fast and correct.

Take risks.

They're entrepreneurs at heart, they're technologists in their bloodstream and they really invest

to win.

>> You guys are supplying.

We talked to people who talk about Photonics, Deeraj Malik, who's really going deep on these

pathways around.

Some of the Intel innovations, some of it's like wow, mind-blowing.

The other end is just practical stuff, making it easier, faster, simpler to run things.

IoT, their big use case, I mean you can't get any more sexier than looking at a city

cloud that's actually running the city with traffic and all those IoT devices, so what

is the big thing that you guys do for Alibaba?

Talk about that journey because its not one thing, what is it?

What is the magical formula?

>> Sure, of course, first off we deliver, we think, world-class ingredients to their

world-class cloud.

And enable them to deliver amazing services to their customer, at the base level.

But we really work together to solve societal problems.

Look at the precision medical cloud that we announced last April together, John.

Genome sequencing, solving people's cancer problems, in a matter of days, instead of

months.

Just one example of the real use case that we bring these technologies to bear on and

have an amazing influence.

We work on them with the Tenatchi Medical Imaging Competition.

3,000 entrants competing to see who can identify lung cancer quickest, and we have some winners

selected, just this week.

So these things are real, taking this technology, solving real life problems, and business problems,

around the globe.

>> And its not just the big, heaving lifting technology that moves the needle, like you

were mentioning but its also the micro technologies, like FPGA, you guys have got lot of things.

This is like the new Intel, so I'd love to get your thoughts, if you can just take a

moment to share the journey that Intel is on right now because you gave a talk yesterday,

a kind of a keynote, onstage.

What is the Intel journey right now look like?

>> We're transforming ourselves from a PC centric company to a company that runs the

cloud and powers countless numbers, billions and billions of smart-connected devices.

That's a big journey we're on.

We've diversified our business significantly in a five year period, John.

Driving our data-center business, our IoT business, our programmable logic business

as you said, our friends from former Alterra are now two years inside Intel.

Our memory business, our NSG technologies, 3D NAND Optane, driving breakthroughs in SSDs

and of course new technologies that we're exploring, like drones and neuromorphic computing,

making sure we never miss the next big thing.

>> I've been following Intel for 30 years of my career and life, as an initial user-developer

and now in the media.

It's interesting, Intel has never done it alone, it's always been part of the ecosystem.

You have brought a lot of goods to the party, so to speak, in technology, Moore's law and

the list is endless.

Now is an end to end game but you look at 5G for instance, you kind of connect the dots,

put a radio frequency cloud over a city and you got to run the IoT devices like a city

brain, they're showing here.

You got to tie it together with programmable arrays, it's a hardware thing but now the

software guys are doing it.

You've got cloud native with the Linux Foundation, that's DevOps.

You've got data centers that are 10 to one silicon to the edge, this is a wide opportunity,

how do you guys make sense of it to customers?

Because its a complex story.

>> It is John, look, we're the ultimate ingredient supplier.

We're bringing forward technologies in artificial intelligence, in 5G, in VR and AR, areas that

are just autonomous everything.

Autonomous driving in particular.

These are big investment areas we're driving into that require an enormous amount to compute,

storage, networking, connectivity and we're making the investments to make sure we're

critical partners with our customers, in all those huge growth areas.

Making us a big growth company now.

>> I had a great conversation with Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud, he's on

the Technology Steering Committee for Alibaba Group and yesterday they just announced a

15 billion dollar investment over three years for FinTech, across the board IoT, AI, collaborate

with scientists as well as artisans.

This is a big deal.

>> It is John, this is exactly an example of what I mentioned earlier.

These guys invest to win and they have a will to win.

And they want to pioneer and they want to innovate and they put their money where their

mouth is, in that announcement, its pretty exciting.

>> So the cloud serves quite a market, doing really well.

Your global accounts are doing well, certainly in Asia and People's Republic of China, PRC,

as you guys call it, extremely well but now there's a Renaissance in cloud in general,

so we're expecting to see a lot more cloud service providers, maybe not as big as Alibaba

but Alibaba is going to start getting customers that become SaaS companies, that's technically

a cloud service provider if you think about it, if they have an application, how do you

look at that mark?

>> We see what is known as the super seven in the industry, the large folks, both US

based and China based but then we've identified the next 60-70 next wave CSPs that are growing

vibrantly around the globe and there's a long tail of another 120 that we're interacting

with.

You're absolutely on point, an exploding area.

Significant double-digit growth for years to come and just solving, big, big life and

business problems.

>> So at SiliconANGLE also silicon is in the name and Wikibon Research is really big in

China, here, interesting dynamic that's happening here with the data and the software and was

brought up with Dr. Wong about the IoTs, kind of a nuanced point but I want to get it out

for the folks watching that you're going to start to see new compute at the edge because

data is now the currency of the future.

It needs to flow, it's like water but at the edge it can be expensive, low latency that

table stakes that everyone wants to get to.

You're going to see a lot more compute or silicon at the edge of network.

Internet of things coming, your view on that?

>> There's no question John, that's exactly the way we see it.

The time to get the data back to the long-haul data center, is very expensive and very challenging

and requires an absolute redo of the network.

We're moving to compute closer and closer to the data, of course, the cloud remains

a vital, vital part of that but we move that compute capability closer to where the data

is sensed, you can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions and you can implement

those decisions at the edge.

>> CJ, final question for you, obviously Alibaba, big part of their growth strategy is going

outside mainland China, obviously doing very well here, not to knock them there but great

opportunity to go into the global marketplace, specifically North America.

That's going to put more competition, competition was good but it's also going to require more

growth.

How are you helping Alibaba and how does your relationship at Intel expand with Alibaba?

>> We work with Alibaba, not only on the technical front of course but on their go-to-market

plans, on ecosystem development plans and even some business models.

We do that across our entire customer and partner base, John.

We're seeing this explosive growth in cloud and being able to work with our partners on

all four of those fronts; technology development, ecosystem development, business model development,

are obviously a benefit to both of us.

>> Alibaba is going to need some help because you know its competitive, Amazon had a nice

run for a while, Microsoft nibbling at the heels, Google and now Alibaba coming in.

Competition is good.

>> We're proud to call all those innovators our customers and we work hard everyday to

earn their business.

>> Final, final question, this one just popped in my head.

What should folks in America know about this PRC market or China market that they may not

know about?

Obviously they read what they read in the paper.

They see the security hacks, they see the crypto-currency temporarily on hold but blockchain

certainly has a lot of promise, but it's a dynamic market here.

A lot of of opportunities.

What should that audience know about the China market?

>> I think the first thing they should know is that if they haven't come to experience

it themselves they should.

The scale of the opportunity, the scale of the country is like nothing people have ever

seen before.

As I said, the investments they're making-to innovate, to drive an innovation economy is

breakthrough.

You take that scale and that investment and this is a market to be reckoned with.

>> Congratulations on the 12 year run with Alibaba, and now Alibaba Cloud.

Looking really, really, strong, love the culture, got to unique twist; artistry and scientific

cultures coming together, looking good.

>> Absolutely John, thanks for letting us tell our story.

>> CJ Bruno, Group Vice President, General Manager Global Accounts for Intel.

I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, thanks for watching.