On this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, sponsored by Intel, I am joined by Rebecca Weekly, Vice President, General Manager, and Senior Principal Engineer of Hyperscale Strategy and Execution at Intel Corporation for conversation around system and software advances for cloud at scale.We also explored her keynote presentation from Intel InnovatiON 2021.
Live from Intel InnovatiON: Elevate Your Cloud With Rebecca Weekly
In our conversation we discussed the following:
- Challenges that developers face across the cloud ecosystem
- An exploration into the way hyperscalers need to evolve their thinking about the cloud
- Why security is more important than ever
- The key priorities as we seek to improve reliability and performance
- What Intel’s ESG initiative looks like
As always it was a great conversation and one you don’t want to miss. If you want to learn more about Intel’s cloud initiatives you can visit their website. Be sure to check out the complete episode below.
Watch my interview with Rebecca here (and subscribe to our YouTube channel if you’ve not yet done so)
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another addition of the Futurum Tech Podcast, Webcast and Futurum Tech TV. Excited to have you join. This episode is going to be brought to you in partnership with Intel. And the focus is going to be on the Intel ON event or Intel InnovatiON event and the opportunity that I just had to learn about elevating your cloud with Rebecca Weekly and Rebecca in case you don’t remember, has joined me on the show before. She’s great, has a ton of knowledge, really animated personality, and I’m going to hit her up on all kinds of topics related to the growth in cloud, security, reliability, performance, trends, maybe even talk a little ESG. So I look forward to that very much and I’ll have her join just a minute. Now, before I do, I do need to do a quick disclaimer. The Futurum Tech podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. I will be talking to executives at publicly traded companies. Please do not take anything I say as investment advice. Rebecca Weekly, welcome to the Futurum Tech webcast. How are you?
Rebecca Weekly: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Daniel Newman: It is. It’s good to see you again. It’s good to have you back on the show, we had a lot of fun last time. I intend to have a lot of fun this time. So I’ve been a busy day for you just finishing up this Intel ON event, which has been months in the making. I’ve seen it all over the web. It’s exciting. You guys have had so many big moments throughout this year from Pat Gelsinger, joining a CEO to IDM, IDF and ON, and so many things. You must be really excited.
Rebecca Weekly: I think all of us are really excited to have Pat, back in the chair and leading the company to its next chapter.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely, yeah. I’ve talked to Pat many times throughout the year, really enjoyed. He’s got such a great personality. He’s so passionate. It just comes right through every time he talks. It’s very hard to not like the odds for Intel going forward when you hear Pat, because, just so much confidence in the plan, the strategy. And of course, you can sense that it was always in his heart, even when he went on to run VMware and other places that Intel was always really in his heart.
So it’s a really exciting story. I want to talk a little bit about your story though, too. But before we do that, I like to thank everybody, who has listened to every episode that I’ve ever done and they remember every guest I’ve ever had. And since you have been on the show, I’m sure some people that watch it will remember, but not everybody will. And, we’re hoping to get lots of new people to come along and check out the show. So Rebecca, give everybody the quick introduction, your work at Intel, and then tell everybody about that guitar back there that’s in your office.
Rebecca Weekly: Well, I am Rebecca Weekly. I work for Intel. Obviously, I run the Hyperscale Strategy and Execution Team, and it is the team that’s laser focused on making sure our largest hyperscalers across the world have access to the best technology. We work on software optimization and priming and everything really to help them be successful with our products, whatever the products might be within Intel’s portfolio. So I get to work with the best and the brightest, and I love it. And I also am a moderately, okay, guitar player. I’m more of a singer, but I do like to accompany myself with basic rhythm.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. I was a classically trained pianist. I grew up behind the keys. I took about 20 years off, but then I got a nice piano and now I’m back to playing and I realize I should have stayed with it because some of it comes back the natural rhythm, but it’s hard to appreciate all that work and then let it go. But anyways, music, I always find there’s a great connection between tech and music. There’s so many people in tech that have tied in music. I don’t know what it is, but we’ll have to do another show. We’ll talk about that. Probably not this one though.
So let’s talk about ON. It was a great event. I had the chance to sit in on your keynote and your presentation and your focus was on elevating the cloud, elevating your cloud. And so let’s start at the top because I always like the macro trends, secular trends. You kicked off with this four challenges for the ecosystems. I found this really compelling. Share with everybody, what you are seeing as these four challenges, why they’re so important for developers and enterprises in the near future and beyond as they develop their Enterprise IT Cloud Strategy.
Rebecca Weekly: Awesome. Yes, so we started out with four myself, who did our TI together and really the first is security, right? Security is foundational. We are at a point where, the estimated cybercrime costs to the world by 2025 is upwards of $10.5 trillion. It’s massive. And as more people are coming to the cloud, as more people are considering it as an architecture, we are seeing an increasing set of regulatory requirements, threats inside and outside organizations. It is a major problem to be able to really be secure in your cloud environment. So not just having, some security theater, but truly something that is really hardened to actually support end users and in the control of end users. So we spend a lot of time on that in the presentation.
The second area is in reliability. So something we have observed through many, many years of working in this domain space, most the evolution has been from mainframe, right? Where reliability is huge. As we brought mainframes into X86 into standard servers, we have a huge focus on reliability, availability, serviceability, right? RAS features, across our fleet and working in hyperscale, you see a whole new world. It’s no longer a single user on a server, it’s multi-tenant, there’s noisy neighbor effects, there’s downtime that needs to happen for security patches. There’s all sorts of different things that have to be addressed and you’re in the clock.
So people have a paradigm of always on, it’s not like with your cell phone where you’re willing to do a reboot and people are sort of used to be midnight, it’s fine. That can happen. And when I wake up in the morning, I’ll have to log back in, so we really have a very different set of requirements to operate in the cloud environment. And we’ve been working very hard to bring that paradigm sort of into currency so that you can have an always uptime cloud that actually is secure and well serviced.
The third area we really delve into is performance. And, there’s so much about performance and I take it as a personal point of pride by the way that we put performance third, because, I don’t believe we can afford to focus on performance alone. If you don’t have availability, if you don’t have up time, if you don’t have security, it’s great to be performant, but you’re not going to actually be able to service end users in any effective fashion in a cloud environment. So they have to go hand in hand, you need all three to be really successful.
And then the last area that we delve into is sustainability, right? And, really the aggressiveness of reducing our electrons in this world and what we’re trying to do at all phases of embodied carbon, split 1, 2, and 3, but also how much end use affect the amount of energy that it is consumed in the code they write. And it’s an aspect of thought process maybe as a software developer, that folks haven’t thought about very much, but there’s a cool tool, we put out called PowerTOP, in the open source ecosystem that helps you kind of understand what your processes are that are consuming a ton of power and ways in which you’d be able to edit them, modify them so that you can be a little bit more efficient in how you’re using your computation.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. That’s a strong subset of topical trends and it’ll give us plenty of material to go with Rebecca, but, security, reliability, performance, sustainability, all really critical and interesting, you mentioned the mainframe in there because I think about that, those were kind of the words that were always used when someone was describing why a certain mainframe would… So it’s really kind of sounds like you’re almost making this pivot from making the cloud as robust and reliable, but yet having all that flexibility that people always want. And I think that’s been a bit of the holy grail, especially in some of these highly regulated industries where, they want that flexible performance that you can get in cloud, but it just hasn’t really worked yet at scale because of the dependence on things like reliability, security that you need, something like a mainframe form. We’ll talk about all those things throughout this presentation.
Before though, I mentioned the elevate, another term you used though, Rebecca was unlocking. Unlocking the potential and, I’ll say it to me, I liked it because I could sense how excited you were. I would also say, unlocking the cloud sounds a little cliche, but when you backed it up, then I’m like, all right, that’s salient. You get it. We’re at a bit of a, more of a maturity stage. Now we are only at like a quarter of workloads, plus or minus that have fully migrated to the cloud. But, I think the thinking of cloud has, evolved a lot. Things like hybrid and multi have become much more everyday vernacular. What did you really mean? Talk a little more, because, from how you described it, when you said unlocking the potential, what are people not unlocking right now that you’re seeing as an opportunity?
Rebecca Weekly: I would just even start at utilization. You hit on a point in your question on, where we are in the journey, how many of workloads have really come to the cloud and the different personas, that somebody who’s looking at a disaster recovery strategy or a business continuity plan has a really different approach to their cloud strategy than a more in the cloud digital service provider who is literally running everything in a microservices framework and has been trying to work to build and optimize that flow as much as possible. So I really think it depends entirely on how you think about your cloud, your cloud journey, who you are, and how you’re going to approach it. But, we have definitely hit a point in the cloud I would argue. And I’d love to get your perspective on it, where we are seeing increasing segmentation, we are seeing increasing requirements that are diverging from one another and that’s typical in any maturing market.
So we need to look at how we are finding issues, whether it’s reliability, security, or performance across the entire system. So that is hardware to software, ISA to API, or is that API, but, it’s also the reliability of a hard drive or SSD or how much you can actually effectively access data, how quickly you can access data from your networking card into an ingestion flow with security across any of these. So really we take a systems approach. I think that’s one of the benefits, for me as a kid in candy store, I love being in Intel because of everything we have in that portfolio. And we get to look across and we get to drive standards that allow you to have a more observable cloud, a more consistent telemetry strategy across components, a more consistent security strategy across components so that you can actually optimize across the flow. And then this big commitment, really to the open source ecosystem from a software perspective, so that developers can make a commitment that their work, their code will run anywhere.
And that’s really what we really try to focus on in this multi-cloud environment, is we are going to help you through open source software optimizations and great tools to unlock everything you can do in your hardware, regardless of whether it’s a CPU or networking card.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny you say that. I tend to use the word ubiquity a lot and it’s a little bit of a buzzy word, but it really is though, what most CIOs, board governance… It’s like, no one’s sitting there being like, this is where I want the PC to be, or this is where I want the CPU to be, or this is where we need the GPU to be placed. They’re just saying, this is the insight I want to be able to get instantly in the right hands, or this is the customer experience that I’m expecting that somebody’s going to be able to have on their mobile device when they’re walking through this shopping center, or this is the file that I want our attorneys to be able to quickly grab access to in the courtroom, right off their device with seamless, no latency.
No one’s saying like, where does that workload need to be placed? And so when you talk about unlocking, we’ve almost pivoted to a business first thinking with technology more than ever before. And IT really does have to live within that business driven environment where it’s like, this is what the business needs. How do we deliver it? Do we need to separate storage and networking workloads? And, do we need to put accelerators on certain workloads to provide AI, and it really comes down to thinking more that way than ever before.
Rebecca Weekly: Yeah. Transforming end user experiences, right? How that is what the cloud has become in this world, or at least that’s what they aspire to be. And I think that’s what everybody is looking to have as they come to a public cloud strategy or a private cloud, hybrid cloud scenario. So really how can we help? How can we help provide enough seamless insight to what you are accomplishing so that your time to revenue is faster and that may involve any combination of private, public, hybrid to actually drive your future to your business results.
Daniel Newman: In the almost words of the infamous Jerry Maguire, help us, help you, right? Help us help you, close, right? I didn’t quote them verbatim, so I’m allowed to do that. All right. So let’s make the pivot here to security. You started there. And in fact, even when you went through your four things, I could kind of sense your passion because you kind of went through four and it was like security, I’m going to talk about for two thirds of the time. And then I’ll talk about the other three things. But you really did lean hard on this. And, obviously for Intel, this is an area that the company is very focused on. Every company in tech has had a hiccup here and there. Intel has learned from some challenges and is building on that and hardening, building more confidence in the global deployment.
And so you talked about not just security, but you talked about data protection, you talked about something I’m very passionate about, which is computing, even talked about cryptography. So these are all hot topics as I see it. It’s funny because I’m still a little surprised that, you talked about cloud, I’m still surprised we spend as much time as we do having to explain to people that security is important. And I always kind of tongue-in-cheek have said, it’s almost been a boardroom decision of what’s more expensive a breach or actually proactively fixing it. And I think we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve realized it’s exponentially more expensive to have something happen. So you need to preinvest, but in your eyes and through the lens of the presentation you gave, why is security more important than ever?
Rebecca Weekly: Well, we talked a little bit about the user journeys, right? And the different kind of users who are coming to the cloud and how much that is shifting. I think maybe one of the reasons why it’s become a more important conversation is that the technology’s gotten better, right? So there’s always a tipping point because I think you really hit it. The tradeoff of, can I afford to have this breach, which has such an implication to my overall brand, or can we just let it fly because it’s expensive or I’m having troubles with my supply chain or whatever, right? And for years the tradeoffs to, pardon your server, whether it was a root of trust or the path for attestation for your firmware or whatever was so painful, so divergent, right? Such a heterogeneity in the ecosystem of options to address supply chain, let alone, data protection and confidential computing and everything else that we’re trying to drive across ecosystem that, okay, maybe I’m not going to worry too much about it.
So now I think we’ve hit this place where the size of the enclave that we can protect with something like a TEE, Trusted Execution Environment, like SGX in data transitions and transformations from a web server perspective that allows us to kind of say, why not, as opposed to like, Hmm, do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? Why wouldn’t you? If you can do 400 gigabits crypto in line while you’re operating, why wouldn’t you do that, and make sure that your cloud experience was better? So I think it is that combination of being able to have, server class performance and security features, the intersection of new markets coming to cloud environments and again, I keep saying cloud as if it’s always the public cloud, but I really don’t mean it as a public cloud.
It’s any cloud. And in fact, most of the customers that we work with, their intranet is quite a lot more traffic than their internet. And so doing security just north, south out to an end user insufficient. They have to do internal security because of bad actors or challenges that might happen from an internal perspective, as well as just the nature of internal processing that has to occur to give data, to end users and to keep data private for end users. So there’s so much that has happened in the ecosystem and in the performance characteristics of what we can do that I think that has led to this inevitable everything’s coming together and we still have work to do. I don’t want to pretend that we’ve done everything, but with SGX we’ve brought in Platform Firmware Resilience, which is really trying to correct and detect any kind of firmware attacks that might occur on the system. There’s multi key, total memory encryption, which is really about protecting against physical attacks.
So we really tried to harden the foundation and then we’re going all the way up to the application layer with solutions like SGX. And, we talked obviously in the TI about [inaudible] which is enabling privacy, preserving solutions, machine learning, possibly we talked about a good example. I thought it was a good example of using a common open source framework, TensorFlow for AI and running that with to be able to have privacy preserving machine learning. And so, again, as we continue on this effort on this journey and more people are coming to the cloud with regulatory, or even just data sovereignty concerns, this is where we’re going to be able to bring a huge amount of performance and security into the market.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. I think what can’t exist are sacrifices between these things and the opportunity to deliver on both performance and security and reliability, which I kind of think are all interdependent. But, I do think there’s been times where we’ve sacrificed entirely too much to get what we think is the right amount of performance, because we’re always thinking about go, go, go, but being a little more on the defense or proactively defending, right? Sometimes the best defense is good offense. There’s a bunch of different ways analogies and I’m an athlete. So I always find a way to layer at least one good sports analogy into every podcast. So there you go. It’s done check that box, we’ll keep moving. So you mentioned in your kind of earlier remarks, you talked about performance and kind of having a pride in not mentioning it as number one.
And obviously that could be reflected upon as a sort of way that Intel is saying, Hey, we’ve got a bigger story, because my market sentiment is look, there are certain AI accelerators that might perform higher. There might be a general CPU that’s single core or multi-thread and I’m just saying across the board, you may not lead every category anymore and I’m talking about on a skew by skew basis. Some companies have gone performance crazy. Ecosystem has been seemingly to me more what Intel’s gone crazy on. Say we have the customers, we have the diversity, we have the depth, the products, the solutions. So, and you said that it was kind of, it didn’t go over me. I caught it. I’m like, all right. Talk about that because obviously performance tends like, it’s like you go into the car dealership.
You’re like, oh, I want the cool racing car, but it’s not practical. It doesn’t have any storage space. You can’t see it, the kids in the back. So yeah, if you’re like alone or have a race track in your yard, that might be fun. But it point is, there’s kind of an analogy here. It’s amalgamation of all these different things. So now that you’ve got security accounted for at least largely, and you’re going to continue developing, talk about what are the priorities for reliability and performance, because obviously you don’t need everything to be a Lamborghini. You need some things to perform, to meet what the workload needs.
Rebecca Weekly: Yeah. I just want to highlight they go together. So we’ve spent a ton of time within the ecosystem trying to understand real workload performance. We’ve partnered with Cornell with many different customers across the board. Obviously, Brendan Gregg joined us, on the TI to talk about his experiences as one of the, I would argue foremost Performance Engineers in the world. But when we really look at it, it’s the experience of running in a multi-tenant environment is completely different than the experience of running on a bare metals server. You have noisy neighbors, you have contention, you have a million things that can occur in a live situation. And almost every benchmark we have. So I struggle with performance because it’s what we talked about earlier. It’s what an end user experiences. It’s how they transform their time to revenue.
And if the paradigm through which you have to do that has all sorts of things that are not captured by the benchmark that you use to assess your decision for that instance, you’re not actually going to understand your time to revenue. So we’ve been working a lot in the ecosystem on this concept of active benchmarks. We’ve put out a bunch of tools that are built around Linux perf. It’s one of the best tools to actually understand performance characterization and the open source perf, that we talked about and demoed it. And we’re increasingly investing in micro architectural enhancements to be able to give more insight into what’s actively happening on the processor as it’s running so that you can optimize the workload mix dynamically to get the best performance for what is actually happening in the real world.
So we really try to take a detailed perspective on reality and have that concept that an observed cloud is a performance cloud, as opposed to if we just lay on benchmark and it doesn’t actually correlate to anything real. And I would very much encourage you to listen to Brendan’s section because, you had already did, but you’re listeners, because he really does get into that and get into what happens in a real world, cloud microservices based environment, and the fact that whatever we predict [inaudible] numbers, we’re wrong. So there’s a huge amount of work that’s happening. And I would argue dynamic interesting, PhD worthy work that’s happening in that domain, but reliability is kind of this often forgotten.
I still remember when I was getting into this industry, somebody saying to me, Rebecca, thus CPU is the last thing that fails, don’t worry about it, like what we have the immigration that will help us make sure anything that’s happening, it’s not going to be your problem. It’s going to be the [inaudible] or it’s going to be the hard drive or whatever that causes problems. Well, fast forward, a couple of decades. And we are seeing at hyperscale all sorts of interesting challenges. Even something that is statistically, so insignificant when you’re operating at hyperscale shows up.
So we are working to put into open source fleet monitoring tools to understand the wherein that’s happening all on your CPUs and other components over time. We’ve worked very hard to give more predictive analytics tools into the ecosystem so that they can understand not just the CPU, but the adjacent components on the system to understand, oh, something’s acting a little hanky and we’re really working with a software ecosystem to get into that next phase of design for failure, assume chaos, assume bad things will happen. And there’s great projects that we have going on with, trying to ensure we can update fleet without downtime so that you can make sure you have the latest security patches, but you don’t have the pain point of draining your server, migrating users downtime in the cloud. So all of those come together to reduce the annual interrupt rates, but also enable end users to have the most performant experience in any cloud environment, internal or external that they’re leveraging.
Daniel Newman: Yeah as I see, it’s all about performance to workload. If you have the right performance to the right workload, it’s going to deliver exactly what you need and you don’t always need that. It just has to be able to be measured and identified based upon what specifically you’re trying to do. And I think we spend a lot of time, I don’t get very excited about benchmarks as an analyst. I know there are people that do, I can be impressed sometimes if one particular product sweeps like 10 and you’re like, all right, they’re onto something good. They’re doing something well. But I do think it’s those practical implementations. It’s like understanding all the material in your history class, but then failing the test. You have to do both. You have to understand the material and do well on the test or else it doesn’t matter.
So performance in a sort of guardrail environment of a specific workload, versus we’ve got this deployed at 10,000 works stations around the world and people are pounded on this thing. Now what it doesn’t work as well as you said. So we just spend a lot of time talking about this and every chip company loves that stuff. I personally think, the practical real world employment of these technologies to me is way better benchmark of hearing how things are going. And of course, that’s something Intel’s always been very focused on with software and ecosystem and partnerships.
Let’s do like a little lightning round. You got a lock here. So I’ve got about five minutes that I can go here and I want to touch base on a customer story. And I want to ask you about sort of a more thematic, your fourth challenge. So I’m going to start with the customer story. You guys talked a little bit about Netflix, everyone’s always interested in these [inaudible] companies, what’s going on with Intel and Netflix? How are you guys working together to deliver on this demand for security, reliability, performance, scale, et cetera?
Rebecca Weekly: Yeah. Well, Brendan-
Daniel Newman: Lightning, right?
Rebecca Weekly: Yeah, lightning.
Brendan, obviously talked a lot about his new methodology. It’s not totally new, but his methodology for performance analysis, which is CPU Flame Graphs. And, they sound cool because they are cool and I highly recommend you check them out, but he uses a bunch of different tools that are really exposed through platform monitoring units. And we make those available. I already mentioned Linux perf, that we work with, but Intel’s VTune allows you to see not just what’s happening with the CPU, but across sort of every adjacent component. And he goes through there and shows kind of microservices, all the different ways in which some instructions are taking less than 1% of the time. And they’re really not, the overhead and then where there’s massive overhead happening in the ecosystem or in this processor for this particular situation.
And really trying to understand, is it Back-End-Bound, it’s Front-End Bound, and these methodologies this is how we’re trying to raise the cloud, unlock the potential, right? To go back to our title here, really it’s about helping understand the things you are doing, your actual workloads, and then be able to optimize your infrastructure, whatever it is, to be able to get the best performance.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s a big one. And of course, I just want to be able to watch, Squid Game or whatever. So, I wanted it to work. I want it to come up fast. Obviously, a lot of that is going to be the user’s network, not Netflix’s network, but as we all saw, when it’s certain social network did go down for a prolonged period of time, it can create a whole lot of attention on a company. And, that kind of moment though proves that nobody is above continuing resiliency and reliability and building out. So let’s finish on a good note. So ESG, sustainability, such a big topic, and you had that in your challenge. I love the fact that Intel wants to be more sustainable.
I call it table stakes. Actually, at a conference recently listened to Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. And he actually talked about how he used to kind of think it was just jibber-jabber and wasn’t legit. And he’s absolutely come around to believing that having a story, a passion, a purpose with your ESG is table stakes. You have to have it. And then of course executing it well could be a differentiation for getting talent, for building products, getting customer loyalty. Talk about Intel, you’re thinking about sustainability from both your announcements that you did in your keynote, and then also just anything overall you want to share.
Rebecca Weekly: Absolutely. Well, Intel has these Corporate RISE Goals, that we’ve had for, I think at least four years that we’ve been steadily working towards to just make this entire industry more sustainable, more inclusive, more friendly towards how we want to show up as a global citizen. And I’m very proud of that work. But when I look at the corporate responsibility work, it’s a 20 plus year journey that we’ve been on, around regulatory compliance and sustainability is just the next step of that process in my mind. So, electricity is not infinite. We cannot continue at the rates that we’ve been growing our footprint in the data center space, regardless of who is, if you read Gartner or IDC or any of the different entities making report out here, somewhere between 20% and 30% of the total electricity consumption by 2030, will be in the ICT space, predominantly data centers.
So we don’t have a choice. We as an industry have to improve that. And it’s fascinating because there really aren’t great standards in this domain. There’s not great standards for reporting. There’s not great standards for the operational aspects of data centers. Even when you look at it, it’s telling you the utilization of a data center and it’s general consumption metrics, but it’s not telling you how much of that is from, well, some sort of an effective renewable source or not. It’s not really telling you about how utilized it is. It’s just telling you the power that’s coming in and how much general compute can be accessed and run out of that. So we have a lot of work to do in terms of reporting in terms of getting to a net neutral carbon footprint in the overall supply chain and in how we manage and operate data centers and put out standards in that position.
So we’re working in every single one of those areas, right? We’re working in our supply chain, we’re working to set standards, we’re working to give better insights into the embodied carbon that in our products, working on everything. We’ve always worked on conflict, free minerals since the eighties, everything that we can do to show up better in our ecosystem and demand more from our competitors and our partners so that we can have a world that, our kids grow up in that we’re proud of. So I’m personally very passionate about it.
Daniel Newman: No, it’s great. And it’s been good to watch. Partners of years, like Google made some big announcements that their recent Cloud Next, about adding more visibility. Because some of it’s about awareness, right? More visibility in their control planes about where would be the optimized workload for minimizing power consumption, right? How do we have a greener footprint? So a lot of the hyperscalers are taking roles. You see software companies like ServiceNow and others, Microsoft, doing more or building into their platforms. So there is some hope. And like I said that stuff to me though, was so much better than the greenwashing. Because that’s real pragmatic. That’s actionable, like, okay, I can right now decide which compute resource I want to deploy globally based upon, which helps us meet our sustainability goals. And then I can create a dashboard that actually tells me how we’re doing.
That’s where I think you start to make progress, is when you can measure it. What is measured improves is I think some, strategy people like to say, so I love that you’re thinking of about it, but what I like even more is starting to see how your partners and companies in your ecosystem and of course you guys are going to really step up, get behind this and help people to identify are we meeting the goals required to make this change, to get behind ESG goals and hopefully like you said, make our planet a better place for at least my three children, hopefully theirs, and yours and all of those of our friends and loved ones. And of course everyone else we share the planet with. So Rebecca, great job on your presentation at Intel ON. As always love hearing from you. And I have a feeling you’re going to be back sometimes. So I’ll just say this isn’t a goodbye. It’s just goodbye for now.
Well, there you have it, Rebecca Weekly with Intel, what a very fun, energetic conversation. A lot of announcements, the company is clearly trying to articulate its continued strategy to help companies really meet the requirements of the future. And of course, to get the most out of their cloud. In my opinion, a very, very compelling presentation. And of course this conversation was one that I hope all of you had the chance to listen to from start to finish for this episode of the Futurum Tech podcast, webcast and Futurum Tech TV that we did in partnership with Intel. Thank you to Intel. I want to thank you all for tuning in. Hit that subscribe button. We’d love to have you back for all of our episodes and of course, feel free to follow me or follow us across all the social networks, because we’re always talking about what’s going on in technology. All that information will be in the show notes, but for this episode, time to say goodbye, we’ll see you later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
