Okay,welcome everybody. I'm glad you made it here. Last session for today probably for most of you. Um, I'm going to talk a bit about Flexbot and the theme obviously is back to the future as you might be able to tell. Uh, my name is K or Frank as most people call me and um I'm a systems engineer and now a solution architect for our company Advanced Cineipite from Germany. But we go into details about Germany and advanced later. You've probably read the confidentiality notice a couple of times now and might be able to read it some more tomorrow. And what I'm going to talk about today is um advanced inate because we're a partner. So I get the chance to talk about my company here and about the flexbot uh which is the whole topic of which the whole thing is about. Butbefore we start, where do we come from? Why back to the future? Well, mostly we've been told that flex is legacy that other technologies are now evolving and they are the main thing and the way to go and we don't think so. And I will tell you why. That's why with our own little event at our headquarter, I had a presentation uh which I called back to the future. for this session we could uh join a little competition to win this and it's a great honor to be here as a small German partner and we had to come up with some creative ideas to do that and um the ideas persist until today because they work often I've been told the flex spot is old or legacy mostly by it always fits as it's scalable on every level and it evolves on every level. This work we can. Shall I lip sync it? Wait a minute, Sunville. Are you telling me a built DC infrastructure machine out of a Delorean? If my calculations are correct, when you guys invite Advance Unite to inside, you're going to see some serious But who detects? >> Well, as I said, I love my iconic movies and their ideas. I love my flex pot. >> It's your data, Frank. We have to take care of the future of your data. >> All right, guys. Got to go. See you with the data center infrastructure of the future in the See you in Vegas. >> Okay. I think so. Thing is we just back in New Delorean this and I made my marketing department hanging. So it year after week and made this little video. It's online. You can find it onLinkedIn or Instagram. Just go there. Hopefully later on it'll be um with sound in the whole video if there's a video. And what we talked about was just what I said. Competition told us that flex pad is legacy. Competition told us that other things have to be bought for having an infrastructure of the future. And that's pretty much what we said in this little video. And we or us, that's a company. It's called Advanced Unibite or as we call it short AU. Um we're not Austrian, we're German. Um, and we're buil we've been found in 1994 by our uh still owner and CEO Sentravel. You have seen him in the video. Could have heard him if there was sound. Um, he was Doc. And um, what's very important to him is that we're a company that is still ownerdriven and that is like flat hierarchies and people know each other and can talk to each other. So that's ourmotto for working there. We're based in Germany. In the south of Germany, we have one headquarter, a couple of branches, around 200 employees, and uh our branches are mostly in the south and southwest of Germany. We are a Neta partner for over 20 years now. And um there's 2,000 active controllers or active nodes. That's actually what we have under support and I'll talk about that in just a bit because what we do is uh level one and level two support for Cisco and NetUP. So with our own help desk, our own 24/7 hotline, um we can make uh level one, level two support. And not only that,we help on the line, we're also uh what's now called LSC, life cycle service partner, and we have over 2,000 nodes of NetUP under our own LSC contract. So that's what we have. And with that, we're the biggest LSC partner in Europe and we have one of the largest stock of spare parts of NetUP spare parts in Europe as so to make the flexot complete and uh not only uh having just storage, we're a Cisco partner as well. Um so we do networking and compute with Cisco and we've been nominated Cisco um flexot partner of the year and we're still holding that title. Somuch about AU. What I'm now going to talk about is a little story and um because obviously I love stories. I love Back to the Future. I love other stories. And thebase of each and every story, each and every myth, each and every Disney movie you've ever seen is Joseph Campbell's the hero's journey. So as the hero's journey, it's always a journey within the movie. We have someone, our hero, who starts out in an ordinary world, um, where everything is normal, everything works out pretty much Marty going to Doc's garage playing the guitar. And he gets a call to action. And this call to action has to start on his journey even though he doesn't really want to. And on his journey, he faces some challenges that he has to overcome.He tries to do that. At some point he comes to the low point of the whole story, the abbies where everything seems to fall apart and uh it's not going to work anymore for him. But he gets his stuff together and he goes on. It's called seizing the sword like in the myth and he continues on his journey. And as he continues, he gets a little gift from the goddess that helps him to continue. And normally you see this is a circle and there's upper half and a lower half. The upper half is the known area. The lower half is the unknown area. And he comes back into the known area towards the now ordinary world. But he returns with an Alex here. And this Alex here could be like a real Alex here or wisdom or stuff like that. So why am I telling you that? Because I'm going to talk about AU's journey with the flexbot. We have been quite a not ordinary but a normal data center. um set uh companies selling data center hardware and the only thing that was fixed was netup storage. So besides that we sold some compute we sold some networking uh with our netup storage and that's where we started our ordinary world then we got our call to action that was in 2012 when our netup partners together with their Cisco fellow partners introduced us to the concept of flexut. This call to action kind of worked for us because welooked at the Cisco hardware and said, "All right, that's perfect. That's fitting our NetUP storage. So, we're going to go and sell only Cisco network and Cisco compute from now on." Because we're Netup only company. From there on, we have been a Cisco and NetApp only company. So, we started selling the flex. Of course, we also were facing challenges on our way. Internal challenges were the first that we had to overcome. We had to tell our sales guys and our technicians why we're selling flexot now and why that's better and why it's more fitting for uh our customers. Then we had to go to the customers and tell them why we're now selling flexut and tell them how flexible itwas and how it was fitting each of their needs. So that went pretty well. Customer satisfaction was pretty good. We sold flax pots quite a lot and we came to the Abbis. The Abbis was in this part the competition. So the competition was there and they were telling our customersfirst of all they started telling uh flexput nobody needs that and then they were telling flex but is old. So what they said was HCI is the way to go. You need HCI for data center of the future or you have to go cloud only or cloud first. You don't need on-remise hardware anymore. just forget about flexbot. But we also overcame that abbis. We were seizing our sword and we kept on selling flexbot because we still thought and still think that with a flexot we can fit perfectly into each and every need of the customer in the data center and there we have the data center infrastructure of the future. Fortunately, we also got our gift of the goddess and that was our customers. They were calling us and saying, "Oh, you know what? We now have like different challenges maybe or we're still facing the same challenges. Can you help us out with the flexot infrastructure?" So, we sometimes won back customers or we won new customers with uh our flexot and kept on selling flexot infrastructure. Lastly, we also returned with an Alex Zero because we listened to our customers and were telling us flex is cool. It's super flexible. Itworks for us. It's everything we need. We can do with a flex putt. But you know what? It would be cool if it would be easier to manage something on top. And we said, "All right, "All right, "All right, we here. Let'sfigure something out." And we came up with um Vader. That's stands for virtual automated deployment of hybrid resources. It has absolutely nothing to do that with a popular figure from a movie. Um, but what it ispretty much a self-service portal that sits on top of a flexot um to deploy virtual machines to start them, stop them, take snapshots, reboot them um all with just one website to go to for internal uses or for external user.We have a cloud service where we um offer a compute as a service and we're running our own Vader there. So our customers can just log on just like an AVS service, AWS service or Azure or whatever and they can just there start remote desktops via theVMware protocol VNC or RDP even. So it's just easy to use. You can just put it on top and the whole flex underneath. Um just fits it perfectly. So with this we came full circle and we're back in our ordinary world and we're still selling flexot and we still think that with a flexbot we can just perfectly fit each of our customers uh needs when they come to us and want to buy data center on premise hardware and to bring it together in like three little things. The flex spot we still think is the best infrastructure. We still think that we can meet everybody's needs with it because it evolves. If something new gets out, um, we now hear about like how NetUP storage is evolving, how it gets more secure and you can use it right away because it's still a flex. It's just NetUP storage. Whatever comes out from NetUP, you can just use it right away. It'll be a flex and it can just size to any size. You can have it in your reachable data hubs or you can have it at the edge because you can scale on every level and it's still a flexible. So for us it'll never be legacy because the idea still persists and the hardware underneath and the software evolves. Then of course Vader something that we started to do something that we started to sell on top of Flexbot to make it even more versatile. It's just refining the flexut, using the flex footut as the perfect data center infra infrastructure and afterwards making it even better or easier to use or more usable to more people to the business units and lately of course for us it's advanced uni bite and for our partners our customers as well. Um, we have lots of highly certified technicians within the NetUP field, theCisco field, and we're just the partner for the flex. And with that, those three, you have your happily ever after. Finish that up. Um, just again, it'll never be a legacy in our minds, and it'll be the infrastructure of the future.And I hope you've seen some of the great Flexpot sessions before. Unfortunately, there all have been already in the past two days. One's coming up again. That's the secure one. I heard that myself. I find it really good. And um other than that, thank you for listening and taking the time this evening. And let's stay in contact. [applause]