NetApp - The AI Company? - James Whitemore, NetApp CMO Updates CTOA on NetApp AI
Transcript
[Music] wow james i think uh i think my truck is better designed for this road than your car exactly good to meet you nice to see you how are you doing i'm doing really good you have a lovely home well thank you welcome and thanks for making a stop on your road trip you know i'm really looking forward to having the conversation about ai but there's way too much yeah it's a little noise a little noisy let's exactly let's go inside yeah yeah come on in
i think there's some other people who want yeah i think james and keith norby and joseph yeah you haven't been able to tell we're having a really great time it's not just the ashland martin but we're in a beautiful setting in james's basement james start us off with a broad explanation of ai and where netapp sees ai hey it's such a broad topic you know that yeah again right we know that it is an incredibly important topic for our customers regardless of the industry segment and
you really across the board people are looking at various different ai and machine learning and deep learning type of projects what we know is that data is at the heart of it and basically what we really do is help them put that data to work in whatever the application is that is powering those projects they also come to us looking for you know examples of how we've helped other customers in their industry segments or elsewhere looking outside of the basic data and what they need to
do in their businesses their business processes the teams that they need to build lots of conversations about skills and how kind of like uh they need to resource within their organizations to make ai ml projects successful basically so holster let's talk about how to make these projects successful what applications are you seeing ai being successfully used in the field yeah i think again as james said it's a broad topic and i'm gonna really focus on the ones that we as netapp are helping our customers from
a data management perspective uh our focus has been really into the deep learning area where basically there's a lot of data engaged there's a lot of gpus are engaged we have had a very good success in the healthcare industry that has been probably our number one growing industry in the past two years this year we have seen a public sector also growing you know all the automated tasks as well as the predictive maintenance in in the different artilleries etc so healthcare public sector financial industry is
catching up we are also seeing a lot of manufacturing like quality of service automated quality of service also uh becoming top on the surface for ai use cases now keith norman help me out here netapp doesn't sell ai i mean ai when i think of 8i i'm thinking about cpus gpus of course i need super fast storage in order to take advantage of that i see where netapp fits in there but netapp can't tell an ai story by itself no in fact it takes partnership it's
which is one of the key reasons why we've been about the solution and about working with nvidia and the isps and the service delivery partners and it takes it takes a broad ecosystem to put together what is the right thing for a customer and really no one's leading that charge better than nvidia in the industry right now and when you look at what we do in terms of building partnership and solution integrations with nvidia that's the type of thing that we deliver for our customers to
help them really ultimately create time we help them get clarity and and really help increase the speed and adoption of ai based on the fact that they're really waiting just to understand exactly how to apply this to what they're trying to transform their business so going back to you hosa talk to me what are customers really caring about in this conversation when it comes to the applications and to the netapp probably specifically yeah it's a very broad topic keith as you mentioned i mean i have
account managers even within netapp calling me and saying hey can you come and present to my customer he wants to do or she wants to do ai and i'm like what is specific in ai they want to do right that's why you know machine learning is basically um as you have also said a couple of weeks ago that it's it's where we give the data and there are a couple of rules and they learn the patterns where we are really heavily focusing is the deep learning
of ai so ai is the big terminology underneath you've got the machine learning and the deep learning so when we focus on the deep learning aspect is where someone within the house wants to do the training on their own data that's where it becomes really important topic because now you want data you want gpus whereas the typical machine learning it's usually inferencing that where the customers are leveraging when they are doing machine learning and a lot of people do machine learning on laptops cpus and some
of them are gpus but the deep learning is where it gets really exciting and that's where being specialized right and netapp's whole theme is becoming specialized in certain things and that's where we are specialized in the data management of the deep learning aspect of ai so keith talk to me about how netapp is helping to kind of lighten the burden of getting ai infrastructure in their data center or extended in their environment yeah we've done several things to help work together to deliver uh simplicity through
ml ops with different companies not just nvidia with this thing called base command now that they have where we're integrated in a stack that is almost like the charging stations for tesla's you know for ai models for fuel to be able to quote-unquote rent the ferrari right the rent the ai machine and as well as delivering a simplified stack for the channel uh something we call project triad is now called uh netapp ontap ai uh integrated architecture and the list goes on and on you know
the partnerships the guazio and other people help us deliver mlaps you know to deliver simplicity of ease of use depending upon what part of the stack you're trying to tackle so james let's be frank we're in your basement and we didn't come all the way to colorado from seattle to talk just the technical netapp these guys yeah with these guys these these guys these guys are not going to pour me a cool cocktail afterwards let's let's get a little personal personally what has the ai journey
meant for you and when you see it going in the next five to ten years well you know become like personal give many different levels forever if i think about it for us and netapp we're a 30 year old company i think we're more relevant now than we've ever been to our customers because you know ai is a huge topic for them and what i see when our customers come into our briefing centers and i look at the agendas that are being prepared i look at
the questions they come in and ask us to you know help them understand ai and ml is at the heart of it and data is at the heart of it and at the foundation kind of like we typically take them through a process which helps them understand what data assets they have across their organizations very much one of discovery and then integration across kind of like the data center and into their cloud assets is a of those data assets it's a huge thing and we basically
try and help them through a process of understanding what a.i means to them and how they make it happen and then personally let's listen you know we're again in your base yeah i'm saying karaoke regret ai driven car yeah what has how has ai impacted your day-to-day life over the past 18 or so months well uh again you know if i think about it from my personal life kind of like it uh there are so many ways they can like impact particularly health things i struggle
with uh rheumatide arthritis arthritis and i'm like the cures and the treatments are available to me are so much more advanced than they were to my father or my grandfather and i'm at my age when that same point in life my father was basically crippled and done like you know and it's ai and ml which kind of like helps you know people treat me and prevent kind of like my symptoms worsening so that's a huge thing for me from a professional perspective it's a little different
i think my job is really to anticipate the needs of our customers before they ever knew it we have billions of data assets around become like our systems and our people's usage of systems and how we put that to work and predict to them what they need to do next uh with the data themselves with the systems what data can be moved to different places whether it's in pri on-prem in the cloud i mean that predictive element is such it helps us helps me be a
better marketer that's for sure if you want to find out more about netapp in netapp 8i follow the link below if you want to find out more about the cto advisor follow me on the web at ctoadvisor on twitter the ctoadvisor.com floor slash world dash trip not about where we're going because this is the last stop but where we've been talking next cto does
