>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Good morning, welcome to The Cube I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live at day three of the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Very excited to introduce you to our first guest this morning, Michael Harbin, the VP of Pac-12 Networks. Good morning Michael, welcome to the cube. >> Good morning, how are you today? >> Very good, very energized. >> Oh good (laughter) >> Day three. So Michael, tell us about Pac-12 Networks, The content arm of the Pac-12 Conference. >> Sure, we have a six regional sports networks in the western US, and then one national feed, we also have digital properties and some over-the-top services on Twitter and Facebook Live, so we're involved as we can be in all forms of distribution. We're located in San Francisco, the conference itself is over 100 years old; it was 100 last year. The networks launched four years ago, this will be our fifth season coming up in August. We're very proud, very happy of our distribution, and our student athletes, and our partnership schools, and it's a great place. >> So you are the first and only sports media company that is owned by its 12 universities. >> That's right, so the SEC is partnered with ESPN, and the Big 10 Networks are partnered with Fox, so we're on our own, we stand on our own, and we do the best we can with what we have. >> Give us an idea of the genesis of the network. >> It started with the new commissioner, Larry Scott on the Pac-12 side, he came in and had a vision for helping the Pac-12 realize what it could be, as opposed to... Being on the West Coast has its disadvantages; our audience size isn't that big, our games start when the East Coast is going to sleep sometimes, so he wanted to get rid of an East Coast bias that existed in collegiate sports, and really make Pac-12 what it should be. We have the best geography, we have the best schools, we have land in... Tech and entrainment, so we have a lot going for us, and I think he brought those things to the forefront, and helped position Pac-12 in a much stronger position than it had been. In the world of liscencing content, we leapfrogged at the time the rest of the conferences in our deal with ESPN and Fox for our football and basketball games. With the games that weren't sold to Fox and ESPN, commissioner Scott thought to create a media company that we would own and control, and that would distribute the rest of our collegiate and athletic events that we have that are controlled by the Pac-12. >> So you mentioned basketball, football, you do big events, but you also do small events. Give us an idea of what it's like to produce a big event in the fall; a big football event, versus some of the smaller Olympic sports like field hockey? >> Sure. We have our three seasons; fall, winter, and spring, so obviously winter, the mostly indoor sports, but in the fall we kickoff big with our football season, and there's 12 or 13 weeks, and we have a championship game in early December which is a big event. That's one of the reasons the Pac-10 went to the Pac-12; the NCA says if you have 12 football teams, you can have a championship game. >> Okay. >> If you have less than 12, whoever has the best record is the winner, so we added two schools, and we have a champ game; those media rights were sold to Fox and ESPN, so it was a nice deal for us. So we start off with football; those are more traditional productions that everybody's used to. Big 53-foot truck pulls up, we do our production compliment with seven, eight or nine cameras depending on the game, depending on the market, depending on the week, the time of broadcast. We usually get- we choose our games after Fox and ESPN chooses theirs, so sometimes we get good games, sometimes we don't. They're all good; they're all Pac-12 games, so they're all good. But those are very traditional productions that are done in very traditional methodologies that everyone would see. As we start getting into basketball, those two are typical productions, but the volume of basketball games is such that we found a new way to do those games a little bit less expensively than the others. >> So less resources? >> Yeah. And then of course the spring sports where you're into baseball and softball, track and field. Track and field is a very expensive sport to produce because there's a lot going on at any one time. In that way, we've gotten away from video as a means of transmission and done IP transmission, which saved us a lot of money, and as we've got that IP path between our schools and ourselves, we've learned to do new things with it. We're doing content sharing back and forth, advanced production techniques, multiple camera paths that we normally wouldn't have on a production of that size. All of our shows, no matter where they are or what sport they are are produced in surround sound 5.0, so we think we lend a lot to the smaller sports that get smaller audiences, but we think we put a lot of production value to them to do the athletes and the sport justice. >> Talk to us about the underlying technologies that are necessary to support going from video to IP so that you can really open up the types of content and where it's distributed. >> Right, so one of the difficulties- we have around 100 venues in the 12 schools that we have to be able to broadcast from. Depends on the university; at Standford, those soccer and lacrosse fields could be way out. They call the campus 'the farm' for a reason. There's a lot of acreage there to cover. And some of our venues aren't even on campus. UCLA football is at the Rose Bowl, USC is at the Coliseum, so we had to find a way to get away from video which is just a single path and costs a lot. We needed more bidirectional service, we needed something that was secure and had really low latency so that when we did our productions we did the coaches interviews afterwards, it's basically like a phone call. We also provided internet services to the production, which everybody needs internet connectivity. The Chyron people, whomever. The crew itself, just for checking in and their report times and things like that, and we also provide four-digit extension dialing for our in-house phone systems. It's a very efficient and cost-effective way for us to do our production out there, and provide this suite of services that if I was just using a video circuit, I wouldn't have access to unless I paid extra for it. >> So presumably, creating a ton of content, how do you maintain all this content and be able to retrieve things, be able to livestream, have things on demand, that's that underlying archival storage strategy? >> So we produce 850 events throughout a year, and that's just to give you an idea, I think Big 10 and SCC are around 400, 450. We have a lot of volume going on, and we do a very good job, I think, of archiving that, logging those games, adding metadata, as much metadata as we possibly can to it. Including repurposing the closed caption files, we attach that as data, we get articles, stills, whatever we can gather about that particular game, we add it as metadata, and then we archive that. We keep it on very fast, short-term storage in our building on spinning disk, and after it ages, after about the second season, we push it into Amazon Cloud. It goes right into Glacier if it's that old, but immediately when we do a game, we push it up to S3 in Amazon, where we share and monetize our content at that point, and then from there it just goes to Glacier, so we have, we think, a very efficient workflow, it's highly automated, we have a great media management department that does a terrific job with very few people, very scarce resources, they do what I think is one of the best jobs in the industry in terms of saving that content in an effort to monetize it in the future. So if you can find it and search through it and get clips from it, it's going to be that much more valuable for us. >> So one of the prevailing things that we've been hearing all week, and not just here, is the democratization of content. The audience, we're very much empowered, right? As a viewer of anything we want; we're binge-watching, we're streaming, we're time-shifting, we're sharing it on social media. What is the process that Pac-12 Networks goes through to understand your audience as well as you can to deliver them the experience that you think they want? >> We have the data that comes back from our TV Everywhere product, there are OTT platforms that we can gather up and sift through. We've undertaken a fan engagement project to work with our universities about the type of people and who attend their football games, or their sporting events, and a way of better understanding who our audience is and tailoring our program to that. Understanding who they are, what their preferences are, it will help us, I think, to fine-tune the kind of content we put in front of them. Everybody loves a winning team, and you have no problem filling seats or getting an audience when your team is winning, so we understand that; we just want to be better during those times where the team might not be undefeated, so we'd like to get people in there anyway. It's a challenge for us, it really is. >> What about this concept of original content? You're now producing original content. There are three shows? >> Yes. We have some anthology shows; The Drive, and All Access during football and basketball season that give a behind-the-scenes look akin to the HBO shows on the professional side that look at professional sports. We go behind the scenes, and the stories for some of our athletes and some of our teams are quite compelling, and it makes good television. That gets also supported by our shoulder programming for our live events; pre and post-game SportsCenter-type shows that we do, and we try to do live halftimes that are topical for every one of our sports events that are played, so that's a lot of volume, a lot of churn that goes through a small studio in a small facility. We think it helps the live events look better, I mean, live events are what people are tuning in to watch. You can't fast-forward through a sporting event which advertisers just love, you kind of have to consume it in the moment, unless you can keep yourself away from the internet or your phone for a few hours until you get a chance to watch the game. We think being in live sports is a really special place to be, because you can't fast-forward through it. Any support that we give those live events, that's really what the other original content is geared to, is to build interest in those teams and those events, and attract people to them. >> So you have this concept of TV everywhere. Original content, traditional content, how is the cloud helping the Pac-12 Network to really collaborate across all the content, all of the connected fans and wherever they are? >> Sure. Just to make a distinction, we have the TV Everywhere which is the authenticated platforms that our cable providers use, and we have our own digital properties as well that still need to be authenticated, and then there's the over the top platforms like Facebook Live that are everything but the 850 events that go on the air. So behind the scenes, sideline reporters in the locker rooms, whatever else we could produce, pep rallies, that we think could be compelling content for Facebook Live we do. On Twitter, we've licensed out the 851st event and beyond, so we do some very limited productions, but still quality, that gets distributed on Twitter. So that's kind of this thing. TV Everywhere is basically the high-end product, and then these kind of ancillary second-screen experience, whatever you want to call them that don't need to be authenticated, that anybody can pick up and watch. That's how we make that distinction. I'm sorry, what was the second part of that question? >> How does cloud help collaboration? >> So we were really early adopters of producing those streams ourselves, so with Elemental Technologies who is a wonderful vendor and partner of ours, they're now owned by AWS, I point over there, they're somewhere in the building. >> (laughs) >> We're a big early adopter of their technology, we've really tried to strive for a business partnership with our vendors, rather than just a check-writer, check-casher relationship, which doesn't do us well, we don't think. We developed this relationship with them, and they helped us deliver our mezzanine streams to Occami and distribute from there, but we do that encoding in-house on their equipment. Eventually I think we'll move that to the cloud and get it all virtualized, but for right now we run their servers in our house, and they understand that we would like to get it out as quickly as we can as some point, but we're working on emptying our CER as fast we can; I don't want any blinking lights in my CER if I could get there someday, but that's a dream. >> So last question, we just have about thirty seconds left, you're in San Fancisco, >> Yep. >> With a really cool opportunity; sports entertainment technology. When you're looking for young talent who could potentially be swayed by the big Googles of the world and Facebook, what is really unique and cool about working with Pac-12 Network? >> For us, it's a two-edged sword. We love being in San Francisco; it gives us access to young people, a new way of thinking, different technology companies that are more IP/IT centric than TV centric. So we think that gives us a real advantage. The other edge of the sword is that we lose a lot of network engineering especially, systems engineers to the tech companies; they would prefer to work at Uber or LinkedIn, something like that. TV's kind of a dying tech, you have to jazz it up a little bit to gain their interest. >> But it's evolving based on what you're talking about-- It is. It's very much that skillset for being an old-time TV engineer is becoming less and less important than network engineering or systems engineering skillsets; that's what we really look for. If somebody has a Cisco certification, he gets our- or she gets our interest, rather than just 'I've worked in television for 20 years,' because we know which direction we're going in. >> One of the things that you articulate as we wrap things up here is that every company this day and age is a tech company, so we wish you the best of luck. You've said you've been at this show for 30 years >> 30 years. >> I can't even imaging all the things that you've seen. Michael Harbin, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you very much, it was a pleasure being here. >> We want to thank you for watching, we are live from NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for many years, but a first time on the program. Priyanka Sharma, thank you so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, and Priyanka, let's not bury the lead or anything. The reason we're talking to you is the news. You've got a new job, but in an area that you know really well. So we've known you through the cloud native communities for a number of years. We see you at the shows. We see you online. So happy to share with our community you are now the general manager of the CNCF, so congratulations so much on the job. >> Thank you so much. I am so honored to have this opportunity, and I can't wait to work even more closely with the cloud native community than I have already. I mean, as you said, I've been involved for a long time. I actually just saw on my LinkedIn today that 2016 was when my conversation within the CNCF started. I was then working on the OpenTracing Project, which was the third project to join the foundation, and CNCF had started in 2015, so it was all very new. We were in conversations, and it was just such an exciting time, and that just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then with GitLab I served, I actually still serve, until the 31st, on the board. And now this, so I'm very, very excited. >> Yeah, well right. So you're a board member of the CNCF, but Priyanka, if you go back even further, we look at how did CNCF start. It was all around Kubernetes. Where did Kubernetes come from? It came from Google, and when I dug back far enough into your CV I found Google on there, too. So maybe just give us a little bit of your career arc, and what you're involved with for people that don't know you from all these communities and events. >> Sure, absolutely. So my career started at Google in Mountain View, and I was on the business side of things. I worked with AdSense products, and around that same time I had a bit of the entrepreneurial bite, so the bug bit me, and I first joined a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy later on, and then I went off on my own. That was a very interesting time for me, because that was when I truly learned about the power of opensource. One of the products that me and my co-founder were building was an opensource time tracker, and I just saw the momentum on these communities, and that's when the dev tools love started. And then I got involved with Heavybit Industries, which is an accelerator for dev tools. There I met so many companies that were either in the cloud space, or just general other kinds of dev tools, advised a few, ended up joining LightStep, where the founders, them and a few community members were the creators of the OpenTracing standard. Got heavily, heavily involved in that project, jumped into cloud native with that, was a project contributor, organizer, educator, documentarian, all kinds of things, right, for two-plus years, and then GitLab with the board membership, and that's how I saw, actually, the governance side. Until then it had all been the community, the education, that aspect, and then I understood how Chris and Dan had built this amazing foundation that's done so much from the governance perspective. So it's been a long journey and it all feels that it's been coming towards in this awesome new direction. >> Well, yeah. Congratulations to you, and right, CNCF, in their press release I see Dan talked about you've been a speaker, you've been a governing board member, you participate in this, and you're going to help with that next phase, and you teased out a little bit, there's a lot of constituencies in the CNCF. There's a large user participation. We always love talking at KubeCon about the people not only just using the technology, but contributing back, the role of opensource, the large vendor ecosystem, a lot there. So give us your thought as to kind of where the CNCF is today, and where it needs to continue and go in the future. >> Absolutely. So in my opinion the CNCF is a breakout organization. I mean, we're approaching 600 members, of which 142 are end users. So with that number the CNCF is actually the largest, has the largest end user community of all opensource foundations. So tremendous progress has been made, especially from those days back in 2016 when we were the third project being considered. So leaps and bounds, so impressive. And I think... If you think about what's the end user storyline right now, so the CNCF did a survey last year, and so 84% of the people surveyed were using containers in production, and 78% were using Kubernetes in production. Amazing numbers, especially since both are up by about 15, 20% year over year. So this move towards devops, towards cloud native, towards Kubernetes is happening and happening really strong. The project has truly established itself. Kubernetes has won, in my opinion, and that's really good. I think now when it comes to the second wave, it is my perspective that the end user communities and the... Just the momentum that we have right now, we need to build and grow it. We need deeper developer engagement, because if you think about it, there's not just one graduated project in CNCF. There are 10. So Kubernetes being one of them, but there's Prometheus, there's Envoy, Jaeger, et cetera, et cetera. So we have amazing technologies that are all gaining adoption. Being graduated means that they have fast security audits, they have diverse contributors, they have safe, good governance, so as an end user you can feel very secure adopting them, and so we have so much to do to expand on the knowledge of those projects. We have so much to make software just better every day, so that's my one vector in my opinion. The second vector, I would say it has been more opportunistic. As you know, we are all living in a very unprecedented time with a global pandemic. Many of us are sheltering in place. Many are... Generally, life is changed. You are in media. You know this much better than me, I'm sure, that the number of, the amount of digital consumption has just skyrocketed. People are reading that many more articles. I'm watching that many more memes and jokes online, right? And what that means is that more and more companies are reaching that crazy web scale that started this whole cloud native and devops space in the first time, first place with Google and Netflix being D-to-C companies just building out what eventually became cloud native, SRE, that kind of stuff. So in general, online consumption's higher, so more and more companies need to be cloud native to support that kind of traffic. Secondly, even for folks that are not creating content, just a lot of the workflows have to move online. More people will do online banking. More people will do ecommerce. It's just the shift is happening, and for that we, as the foundation, need to be ready to support the end users with education, enablement, certifications, training programs, just to get them across that chasm into a new, even more online-focused reality. >> Yeah, and I say, Priyanka, that tees up one of the ways that most people are familiar with the CNCF is through the event. So KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, really the signature event. Tremendous growth over the last few years. You actually had involvement in a virtual event, the Cloud Native Summit recently. For KubeCon-- >> Yes. >> The European show is announced virtual. We know that there's still some uncertainty when it comes to the North America show. Supposed to be in my backyard here in Boston, so we'd love for it to happen. If it happens-- >> Of course. >> If not, we'll be there virtually or not. Give us a little bit your experience with the Cloud Native Summit, and what's your thinking today? We understand, as you said, a lot of uncertainty as to what goes on. Absolutely, even when physical events come back in the future, we expect this hybrid model to be with us for a long time. >> I definitely hear that. Completely agree that everything is uncertain and things have changed very rapidly for our world, particularly when it comes to events. We're lucky at the CNCF to be working with the LF Events team, which is just best in class, and we are working very hard every day, them, doing a lot of the lion's share of the work of building the best experience we can for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon EU, which, as you said, went virtual. I'm really looking forward to it because what I learned from the Cloud Native Summit Online, which was the event you mentioned that I had hosted in April, is that people are hungry to just engage, to see each other, to communicate however they can in this current time. Today I don't think the technology's at a point where physical events can be overshadowed by virtual, so there's still something very special about seeing someone face-to-face, having a coffee, and having that banter, conversations. But at the same time there are some benefits to online. So as an example, with the Cloud Native Summit, really, it was just me and a few community folks who were sad we didn't get to go to Amsterdam, so we're like, "Let's just get together in a group, "have some fun, talk to some maintainers," that kind of thing. I expected a few hundred, max. Thousands of people showed up, and that was just mind blowing because I was like, "Wait, what?" (chuckling) But it was so awesome because not only were there a lot of people, there were people from just about every part of the globe. So normally you have US, Europe, that kind of focus, and there's the Asia-PAC events that cater to that, but here in that one event where, by the way, we were talking to each other in realtime, there were folks from Asia-PAC, there were folks from Americas, EU, also the African continent, so geo meant nothing anymore. And that was very awesome. People from these different parts of the world were talking, engaging, learning, all at the same time, and I think with over 20,000 people expected at KubeCon EU, with it being virtual, we'll see something similar, and I think that's a big opportunity for us going forward. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. There are some new opportunities, some new challenges. I think back to way back in January I got to attend the GitLab event, and you look at GitLab, a fully remote company, but talking about the benefits of still getting together and doing things online. You think of the developer communities, they're used to working remote and working across different timezones, but there is that need to be able to get together and collaborate, and so we've got some opportunities, we've got some challenges when remote, so I guess, yeah, Priyanka. Give me the final word, things you want to look forward to, things we should be expecting from you and the CNCF team going forward. I guess I'll mention for our audience, I guess, Dan Kohn staying part of Linux Foundation, doing some healthcare things, will still stay a little involved, and Chris Aniszczyk, who's the CTO, still the CTO. I just saw him. Did a great panel for DockerCon with Kelsey Hightower, Michelle Noorali, and Sean Connelly, and all people we know that-- >> Right. >> Often are speaking at KubeCon, too. So many of the faces staying the same. I'm not expecting a big change, but what should we expect going forward? >> That's absolutely correct, Stu. No big changes. My first big priority as I join is, I mean, as you know, coming with the community background, with all this work that we've put into education and learning from each other, my number one goal is going to be to listen and learn in a very diverse set of personas that are part of this whole community. I mean, there's the board, there is the technical oversight committee, there is the project maintainers, there's the contributors, there are the end users, potential developers who could be contributors. There's just so many different types of people all united in our interest and desire to learn more about cloud native. So my number one priority is going to listen and learn, and as I get more and more up to speed I'm very lucky that Chris Aniszczyk, who has built this with Dan, is staying on and is going to be advising me, guiding me, and working with me. Dan as well is actually going to be around to help advise me and also work on some key initiatives, in addition to his big, new thing with public health and the Linux Foundation. You never expect anything average with Dan, so it's going to be amazing. He's done so much for this foundation and brought it to this point, which in my mind, I mean, it's stupendous the amount of work that's happened. It's so cool. So I'm really looking forward to building on this amazing foundation created by Dan and Chris under Jim. I think that what they have done by not only providing a neutral IP zone where people can contribute and use projects safely, they've also created an ecosystem where there is events, there is educational activity, projects can get documentation support, VR support. It's a very holistic view, and that's something, in my opinion, new, at least in the way it's done. So I just want to build upon that, and I think the end user communities will keep growing, will keep educating, will keep working together, and this is a team effort that we are all in together. >> Well, Priyanka, congratulations again. We know your community background and strong community at the CNCF. Looking forward to seeing that both in the virtual events in the near term and back when we have physical events again in the future, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right. Be sure to check out thecube.net. You'll see all the previous events we've done with the CNCF, as well as, as mentioned, we will be helping keep cloud native connected at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, the virtual event in August, as well as the North American event later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (smooth music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi buddy welcome to this special noob digital event where we're focusing in on data ops data ops in Acton with generous support from friends at IBM let me set up the situation here there's a real problem going on in the industry and that's that people are not getting the most out of their data data is plentiful but insights perhaps aren't what's the reason for that well it's really a pretty complicated situation for a lot of organizations there's data silos there's challenges with skill sets and lack of skills there's tons of tools out there sort of a tools brief the data pipeline is not automated the business lines oftentimes don't feel as though they own the data so that creates some real concerns around data quality and a lot of finger-point quality the opportunity here is to really operationalize the data pipeline and infuse AI into that equation and really attack their cost-cutting and revenue generation opportunities that are there in front of you think about this virtually every application this decade is going to be infused with AI if it's not it's not going to be competitive and so we have organized a panel of great practitioners to really dig in to these issues first I want to introduce Victoria Stassi with who's an industry expert in a top at Northwestern you two'll very great to see you again thanks for coming on excellent nice to see you as well and Caitlin Alfre is the director of AI a vai accelerator and also part of the peak data officers organization at IBM who has actually eaten some of it his own practice what a creep let me say it that way Caitlin great to see you again and Steve Lewis good to see you again see vice president director of management associated a bank and Thompson thanks for coming on thanks Dave make speaker alright guys so you heard my authority with in terms of operationalizing getting the most insight hey data is wonderful insights aren't but getting insight in real time is critical in this decade each of you is a sense as to where you are on that journey or Victoria your taste because you're brand new to Northwestern Mutual but you have a lot of deep expertise in in health care and manufacturing financial services but where you see just the general industry climate and we'll talk about the journeys that you are on both personally and professionally so it's all fair sure I think right now right again just me going is you need to have speech insight right so as I experienced going through many organizations are all facing the same challenges today and a lot of those pounds is hard where do my to live is my data trust meaning has a bank curated has been Clinton's visit qualified has a big a lot of that is ready what we see often happen is businesses right they know their KPIs they know their business metrics but they can't find where that data Linda Barragan asked there's abundant data disparity all over the place but it is replicated because it's not well managed it's a lot of what governance in the platform of pools that governance to speak right offer fact it organizations pay is just that piece of it I can tell you where data is I can tell you what's trusted that when you can quickly access information and bring back answers to business questions that is one answer not many answers leaving the business to question what's the right path right which is the correct answer which which way do I go at the executive level that's the biggest challenge where we want the industry to go moving forward right is one breaking that down along that information to be published quickly and to an emailing data virtualization a lot of what you see today is most businesses right it takes time to build out large warehouses at an enterprise level we need to pivot quicker so a lot of what businesses are doing is we're leaning them towards taking advantage of data virtualization allowing them to connect to these data sources right to bring that information back quickly so they don't have to replicate that information across different systems or different applications right and then to be able to provide that those answers back quickly also allowing for seamless access to from the analysts that are running running full speed right try and find the answers as quickly as they find great okay and I want to get into that sort of how news Steve let me go to you one of the things that we talked about earlier was just infusing this this mindset of a data cult and thinking about data as a service so talk a little bit about how you got started what was the starting NICUs through that sure I think the biggest thing for us there is to change that mindset from data being just for reporting or things that have happened in the past to do some insights on us and some data that already existed well we've tried to shift the mentality there is to start to use data and use that into our actual applications so that we're providing those insight in real time through the applications as they're consumed helping with customer experience helping with our personalization and an optimization of our application the way we've started down that path or kind of the journey that we're still on was to get the foundation laid birch so part of that has been making sure we have access to all that data whether it's through virtualization like vic talked about or whether it's through having more of the the data selected in a data like that that where we have all of that foundational data available as opposed to waiting for people to ask for it that's been the biggest culture shift for us is having that availability of data to be ready to be able to provide those insights as opposed to having to make the businesses or the application or asked for that day Oh Kailyn when I first met into pulp andari the idea wobble he paid up there yeah I was asking him okay where does a what's the role of that at CBO and and he mentioned a number of things but two of the things that stood out is you got to understand how data affect the monetization of your company that doesn't mean you know selling the data what role does it play and help cut cost or ink revenue or productivity or no customer service etc the other thing he said was you've got a align with the lines of piss a little sounded good and this is several years ago and IBM took it upon itself Greek its own champagne I was gonna say you know dogfooding whatever but it's not easy just flip a switch and an infuse a I and automate the data pipeline you guys had to go you know some real of pain to get there and you did you were early on you took some arrows and now you're helping your customers better on thin debt but talk about some of the use cases that where you guys have applied this obviously the biggest organization you know one of the biggest in the world the real challenge is they're sure I'm happy today you know we've been on this journey for about four years now so we stood up our first book to get office 2016 and you're right it was all about getting what data strategy offered and executed internally and we want to be very transparent because as you've mentioned you know a lot of challenges possible think differently about the value and so as we wrote that data strategy at that time about coming to enterprise and then we quickly of pivoted to see the real opportunity and value of infusing AI across all of our needs were close to your question on a couple of specific use cases I'd say you know we invested that time getting that platform built and implemented and then we were able to take advantage of that one particular example that I've been really excited about I have a practitioner on my team who's a supply chain expert and a couple of years ago he started building out supply chain solution so that we can better mitigate our risk in the event of a natural disaster like the earthquake hurricane anywhere around the world and be cuz we invest at the time and getting the date of pipelines right getting that all of that were created and cleaned and the quality of it we were able to recently in recent weeks add the really critical Kovach 19 data and deliver that out to our employees internally for their preparation purposes make that available to our nonprofit partners and now we're starting to see our first customers take advantage too with the health and well-being of their employees mine so that's you know an example I think where and I'm seeing a lot of you know my clients I work with they invest in the data and AI readiness and then they're able to take advantage of all of that work work very quickly in an agile fashion just spin up those out well I think one of the keys there who Kaelin is that you know we can talk about that in a covet 19 contact but it's that's gonna carry through that that notion of of business resiliency is it's gonna live on you know in this post pivot world isn't it absolutely I think for all of us the importance of investing in the business continuity and resiliency type work so that we know what to do in the event of either natural disaster or something beyond you know it'll be grounded in that and I think it'll only become more important for us to be able to act quickly and so the investment in those platforms and approach that we're taking and you know I see many of us taking will really be grounded in that resiliency so Vic and Steve I want to dig into this a little bit because you know we use this concept of data op we're stealing from DevOps and there are similarities but there are also differences now let's talk about the data pipeline if you think about the data pipeline as a sort of quasi linear process where you're investing data and you might be using you know tools but whether it's Kafka or you know we have a favorite who will you have and then you're transforming that that data and then you got a you know discovery you got to do some some exploration you got to figure out your metadata catalog and then you're trying to analyze that data to get some insights and then you ultimately you want to operationalize it so you know and and you could come up with your own data pipeline but generally that sort of concept is is I think well accepted there's different roles and unlike DevOps where it might be the same developer who's actually implementing security policies picking it the operations in in data ops there might be different roles and fact very often are there's data science there's may be an IT role there's data engineering there's analysts etc so Vic I wonder if you could you could talk about the challenges in in managing and automating that data pipeline applying data ops and how practitioners can overcome them yeah I would say a perfect example would be a client that I was just recently working for where we actually took a team and we built up a team using agile methodologies that framework right we're rapidly ingesting data and then proving out data's fit for purpose right so often now we talk a lot about big data and that is really where a lot of industries are going they're trying to add an enrichment to their own data sources so what they're doing is they're purchasing these third-party data sets so in doing so right you make that initial purchase but what many companies are doing today is they have no real way to vet that so they'll purchase the information they aren't going to vet it upfront they're going to bring it into an environment there it's going to take them time to understand if the data is of quality or not and by the time they do typically the sales gone and done and they're not going to ask for anything back but we were able to do it the most recent claim was use an instructure data source right bring that and ingest that with modelers using this agile team right and within two weeks we were able to bring the data in from the third-party vendor what we considered rapid prototyping right be able to profile the data understand if the data is of quality or not and then quickly figure out that you know what the data's not so in doing that we were able to then contact the vendor back tell them you know it sorry the data set up to snuff we'd like our money back we're not gonna go forward with it that's enabling businesses to be smarter with what they're doing with 30 new purchases today as many businesses right now um as much as they want to rely on their own data right they actually want to rely on cross the data from third-party sources and that's really what data Ops is allowing us to do it's allowing us to think at a broader a higher level right what to bring the information what structures can we store them in that they don't necessarily have to be modeled because a modeler is great right but if we have to take time to model all the information before we even know we want to use it that's gonna slow the process now and that's slowing the business down the business is looking for us to speed up all of our processes a lot of what we heard in the past raised that IP tends to slow us down and that's where we're trying to change that perception in the industry is no we're actually here to speed you up we have all the tools and technologies to do so and they're only getting better I would say also on data scientists right that's another piece of the pie for us if we can bring the information in and we can quickly catalog it in a metadata and burn it bring in the information in the backend data data assets right and then supply that information back to scientists gone are the days where scientists are going and asking for connections to all these different data sources waiting days for access requests to be approved just to find out that once they figure out how it with them the relationship diagram right the design looks like in that back-end database how to get to it write the code to get to it and then figure out this is not the information I need that Sally next to me right fold me the wrong information that's where the catalog comes in that's where due to absent data governance having that catalog that metadata management platform available to you they can go into a catalog without having to request access to anything quickly and within five minutes they can see the structures what if the tables look like what did the fields look like are these are these the metrics I need to bring back answers to the business that's data apps it's allowing us to speed up all of that information you know taking stuff that took months now down two weeks down two days down two hours so Steve I wonder if you could pick up on that and just help us understand what data means you we talked about earlier in our previous conversation I mentioned it upfront is this notion of you know the demand for for data access is it was through the roof and and you've gone from that to sort of more of a self-service environment where it's not IT owning the data it's really the businesses owning the data but what what is what is all this data op stuff meaning in your world sure I think it's very similar it's it's how do we enable and get access to that clicker showing the right controls showing the right processes and and building that scalability and agility and into all of it so that we're we're doing this at scale it's much more rapidly available we can discover new data separately determine if it's right or or more importantly if it's wrong similar to what what Vic described it's it's how do we enable the business to make those right decisions on whether or not they're going down the right path whether they're not the catalog is a big part of that we've also introduced a lot of frameworks around scale so just the ability to rapidly ingest data and make that available has been a key for us we've also focused on a prototyping environment so that sandbox mentality of how do we rapidly stand those up for users and and still provide some controls but have provide that ability for people to do that that exploration what we're finding is that by providing the platform and and the foundational layers that were we're getting the use cases to sort of evolve and come out of that as opposed to having the use cases prior to then go build things from we're shifting the mentality within the organization to say we don't know what we need yet let's let's start to explore that's kind of that data scientist mentality and culture it more of a way of thinking as opposed to you know an actual project or implement well I think that that cultural aspect is important of course Caitlin you guys are an AI company or at least that you know part of what you do but you know you've you for four decades maybe centuries you've been organized around different things by factoring plant but sales channel or whatever it is but-but-but-but how has the chief data officer organization within IBM been able to transform itself and and really infuse a data culture across the entire company one of the approaches you know we've taken and we talk about sort of the blueprint to drive AI transformation so that we can achieve and deliver these really high value use cases we talked about the data the technology which we've just pressed on with organizational piece of it duration are so important the change management enabling and equipping our data stewards I'll give one a civic example that I've been really excited about when we were building our platform and starting to pull districting structured unstructured pull it in our ADA stewards are spending a lot of time manually tagging and creating business metadata about that data and we identified that that was a real pain point costing us a lot of money valuable resources so we started to automate the metadata and doing that in partnership with our deep learning practitioners and some of the models that they were able to build that capability we pushed out into our contacts our product last year and one of the really exciting things for me to see is our data stewards who be so value exporters and the skills that they bring have reported that you know it's really changed the way they're able to work it's really sped up their process it's enabled them to then move on to higher value to abilities and and business benefits so they're very happy from an organizational you know completion point of view so I think there's ways to identify those use cases particularly for taste you know we drove some significant productivity savings we also really empowered and hold our data stewards we really value to make their job you know easier more efficient and and help them move on to things that they are more you know excited about doing so I think that's that you know another example of approaching taken yes so the cultural piece the people piece is key we talked a little bit about the process I want to get into a little bit into the tech Steve I wonder if you could tell us you know what's it what's the tech we have this bevy of tools I mentioned a number of them upfront you've got different data stores you've got open source pooling you've got IBM tooling what are the critical components of the technology that people should be thinking about tapping in architecture from ingestion perspective we're trying to do a lot of and a Python framework and scaleable ingestion pipe frameworks on the catalog side I think what we've done is gone with IBM PAC which provides a platform for a lot of these tools to stay integrated together so things from the discovery of data sources the cataloging the documentation of those data sources and then all the way through the actual advanced analytics and Python models and our our models and the open source ID combined with the ability to do some data prep and refinery work having that all in an integrated platform was a key to us for us that the rollout and of more of these tools in bulk as opposed to having the point solutions so that's been a big focus area for us and then on the analytic side and the web versus IDE there's a lot of different components you can go into whether it's meal soft whether it's AWS and some of the native functionalities out there you mentioned before Kafka and Anissa streams and different streaming technologies those are all the ones that are kind of in our Ketil box that we're starting to look at so and one of the keys here is we're trying to make decisions in as close to real time as possible as opposed to the business having to wait you know weeks or months and then by the time they get insights it's late and really rearview mirror so Vic your focus you know in your career has been a lot on data data quality governance master data management data from a data quality standpoint as well what are some of the key tools that you're familiar with that you've used that really have enabled you operationalize that data pipeline you know I would say I'm definitely the IBM tools I have the most experience with that also informatica though as well those are to me the two top players IBM definitely has come to the table with a suite right like Steve said cloud pack for data is really a one-stop shop so that's allowing that quick seamless access for business user versus them having to go into some of the previous versions that IBM had rolled out where you're going into different user interfaces right to find your information and that can become clunky it can add the process it can also create almost like a bad taste and if in most people's mouths because they don't want to navigate from system to system to system just to get their information so cloud pack to me definitely brings everything to the table in one in a one-stop shop type of environment in for me also though is working on the same thing and I would tell you that they haven't come up with a solution that really comes close to what IBM is done with cloud pack for data I'd be interested to see if they can bring that on the horizon but really IBM suite of tools allows for profiling follow the analytics write metadata management access to db2 warehouse on cloud those are the tools that I've worked in my past to implement as well as cloud object store to bring all that together to provide that one stop that at Northwestern right we're working right now with belieber I think calibra is a great set it pool are great garments catalog right but that's really what it's truly made for is it's a governance catalog you have to bring some other pieces to the table in order for it to serve up all the cloud pack does today which is the advanced profiling the data virtualization that cloud pack enables today the machine learning at the level where you can actually work with our and Python code and you put our notebooks inside of pack that's some of this the pieces right that are missing in some of the under vent other vendor schools today so one of the things that you're hearing here is the theme of openness others addition we've talked about a lot of tools and not IBM tools all IBM tools there there are many but but people want to use what they want to use so Kaitlin from an IBM perspective what's your commitment the openness number one but also to you know we talked a lot about cloud packs but to simplify the experience for your client well and I thank Stephen Victoria for you know speaking to their experience I really appreciate feedback and part of our approach has been to really take one the challenges that we've had I mentioned some of the capabilities that we brought forward in our cloud platform data product one being you know automating metadata generation and that was something we had to solve for our own data challenges in need so we will continue to source you know our use cases from and grounded from a practitioner perspective of what we're trying to do and solve and build and the approach we've really been taking is co-creation line and that we roll these capability about the product and work with our customers like Stephen light victorious you really solicit feedback to product route our dev teams push that out and just be very open and transparent I mean we want to deliver a seamless experience we want to do it in partnership and continue to solicit feedback and improve and roll out so no I think that will that has been our approach will continue to be and really appreciate the partnerships that we've been able to foster so we don't have a ton of time but I want to go to practitioners on the panel and ask you about key key performance indicators when I think about DevOps one of the things that we're measuring is the elapsed time the deploy applications start finished where we're measuring the amount of rework that has to be done the the quality of the deliverable what are the KPIs Victoria that are indicators of success in operationalizing date the data pipeline well I would definitely say your ability to deliver quickly right so how fast can you deliver is that is that quicker than what you've been able to do in the past right what is the user experience like right so have you been able to measure what what the amount of time was right that users are spending to bring information to the table in the past versus have you been able to reduce that time to delivery right of information business answers to business questions those are the key performance indicators to me that tell you that the suite that we've put in place today right it's providing information quickly I can get my business answers quickly but quicker than I could before and the information is accurate so being able to measure is it quality that I've been giving that I've given back or is this not is it the wrong information and yet I've got to go back to the table and find where I need to gather that from from somewhere else that to me tells us okay you know what the tools we've put in place today my teams are working quicker they're answering the questions they need to accurately that is when we know we're on the right path Steve anything you add to that I think she covered a lot of the people components the around the data quality scoring right for all the different data attributes coming up with a metric around how to measure that and and then showing that trend over time to show that it's getting better the other one that we're doing is just around overall date availability how how much data are we providing to our users and and showing that trend so when I first started you know we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 files that had been brought into the warehouse and and had been published and available in the neighborhood of a couple thousand fields we've grown that into weave we have thousands of cables now available so it's it's been you know hundreds of percent in scale as far as just the availability of that data how much is out there how much is is ready and available for for people to just dig in and put into their their analytics and their models and get those back into the other application so that's another key metric that we're starting to track as well so last question so I said at the top that every application is gonna need to be infused with AI this decade otherwise that application not going to be as competitive as it could be and so for those that are maybe stuck in their journey don't really know where to get started I'll start with with Caitlin and go to Victoria and then and then even bring us home what advice would you give the people that need to get going on this my advice is I think you pull the folks that are either producing or accessing your data and figure out what the rate is between I mentioned some of the data management challenges we were seeing this these processes were taking weeks and prone to error highly manual so part was ripe for AI project so identifying those use cases I think that are really causing you know the most free work and and manual effort you can move really quickly and as you build this platform out you're able to spin those up on an accelerated fashion I think identifying that and figuring out the business impact are able to drive very early on you can get going and start really seeing the value great yeah I would actually say kids I hit it on the head but I would probably add to that right is the first and foremost in my opinion right the importance around this is data governance you need to implement a data governance at an enterprise level many organizations will do it but they'll have silos of governance you really need an interface I did a government's platform that consists of a true framework of an operational model model charters right you have data domain owners data domain stewards data custodians all that needs to be defined and while that may take some work in in the beginning right the payoff down the line is that much more it's it it's allowing your business to truly own the data once they own the data and they take part in classifying the data assets for technologists and for analysts right you can start to eliminate some of the technical debt that most organizations have acquired today they can start to look at what are some of the systems that we can turn off what are some of the systems that we see valium truly build out a capability matrix we can start mapping systems right to capabilities and start to say where do we have wares or redundancy right what can we get rid of that's the first piece of it and then the second piece of it is really leveraging the tools that are out there today the IBM tools some of the other tools out there as well that enable some of the newer next-generation capabilities like unit nai right for example allowing automation for automation which right for all of us means that a lot of the analysts that are in place today they can access the information quicker they can deliver the information accurately like we've been talking about because it's been classified that pre works being done it's never too late to start but once you start that it just really acts as a domino effect to everything else where you start to see everything else fall into place all right thank you and Steve bring us on but advice for your your peers that want to get started sure I think the key for me too is like like those guys have talked about I think all everything they said is valid and accurate thing I would add is is from a starting perspective if you haven't started start right don't don't try to overthink that over plan it it started just do something and and and start the show that progress and value the use cases will come even if you think you're not there yet it's amazing once you have the national components there how some of these things start to come out of the woodwork so so it started it going may have it have that iterative approach to this and an open mindset it's encourage exploration and enablement look your organization in the eye to say why are their silos why do these things like this what are our problem what are the things getting in our way and and focus and tackle those those areas as opposed to trying to put up more rails and more boundaries and kind of encourage that silo mentality really really look at how do you how do you focus on that enablement and then the last comment would just be on scale everything should be focused on scale what you think is a one-time process today you're gonna do it again we've all been there you're gonna do it a thousand times again so prepare for that prepare forever that you're gonna do everything a thousand times and and start to instill that culture within your organization a great advice guys data bringing machine intelligence an AI to really drive insights and scaling with a cloud operating model no matter where that data live it's really great to have have three such knowledgeable practitioners Caitlyn Toria and Steve thanks so much for coming on the cube and helping support this panel all right and thank you for watching everybody now remember this panel was part of the raw material that went into a crowd chat that we hosted on May 27th Crouch at net slash data ops so go check that out this is Dave Volante for the cube thanks for watching [Music]

>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back here to AWS reinvent 2019. Great show going on here in Las Vegas, where the Sands were live here on the Cube. Once again, covering it from wall to wall will be here until late tomorrow afternoon. David John Walls were doing by Joined by David. She coaches who is the vice president of product management for hybrid idea Century Lake. Good to see you, You guys and Brandon sweetie, who's the SPP of worldwide cloud sales at Veum With you be with you. This is gonna be a New England sports segment actually surrounded by ruin. Celtics, >>ESPN in Vegas, >>I remind you, the Washington Nationals are the reigning world. Serious shit. Wait a moment. Wait. Shark forever. A moment in time I got stuff. Let's talk about your relationship between via wearing set free like And what brings you here? A WSB offering. You're putting you guys that run on AWS. >>Maybe Maggie jumping and jumping. So look VM wear a long time player in the infrastructure space. Obviously incredible relationship with AWS. Customers want to transform their operations. They want to move to the cloud way have Vienna, where Claude, on a video B s. We continue to take tremendous ground helping customers build and build more agile infrastructure. Make that happen, Van. Where was built on our partners. Right centrally great partner MSP. And we think about helping customers achieve their business outcomes. Key partners like centrally make it happen. You've been a long term partner and done a lot of great things with us. >>Yeah, and really what? What Central Lincoln VM Where have done? I mean, really, we sort of created the manage private cloud market in the early days of managing the Empire solutions for customers, but really were and where we differentiate in other working with GM wear on AWS is really with elements of our network or the ability to take those kinds of solutions and make sure that they're connected to the right networks and that they're tied in and integrated with the customer's existing enterprise and where they want to go as they start to distribute the workload more widely. Because we run that network, we see a lot of the Internet traffic. We see a lot of threat patterns. We see a lot of things emerged with our cyber security capabilities and manage service is. So we add value there. And because of that history with BM wear and in sort of creating that hosted private cloud environment, there's There's a lot of complexity, friendliness inside of our service offer, where we can manage the inn where we can manage it in a traditional model that is cloud verified. And then you could manage it as it starts to move on to the AWS platform. Because, as we all know, and as even you know, Andy has referenced in different points, there's a just about every kind of workload can go to eight of us. But there are still certain things that can't quite go there. And building a hybrid solution basically puts customers in a position to innovate is what a hybrid solution is all about. >>That kind of moves the needle on some of those harder to move working in the M, where is such an obvious place to start? So you try to preserve that existing customer of'em, where customer experience but at the same time you want to bring the cloud experience. So how How is that evolving? >>Yes, it's a couple things, right? So l Tingley customers, they all want to move to the cloud for all the reasons we want security, agility, governance, et cetera. Right, but fundamentally need help. And so partners, like essentially help figure out which workloads are cloud ready, right? And figure that out and then to you, get to know the customer. Really well, begin the relationships that you have, right, and you can help them figure out which workloads am I gonna move right? And then that leads into more relationships on How do I set up d r. Right? How do I offer other service is through eight of us against those work clothes. >>There's a lot of things where being a manage service's provider for a V M were based platform or being. Amanda's service is provided for an AWS platform. There's a lot of things that you have in common, right? First and foremost is that ability toe run your operations securely. You've got to be secure. You know, you need to be able to maintain that bond of trust you need to be auditable. Your your your operations model needs to be something that transparent to the customer. You need to not just be about migrating workloads to the new and exciting environment, but also helping to transform it and take advantage of whether it's a V M where feature tool or next generation eight of us feature it's will. It's not just my great lift and shift, but then helped to transform what that that downstream, long term platform could do. You certainly want Teoh be in a posture where you're building a sense of intimacy with the customer. You're learning their acronyms. You're learning their business processes. You're building up that bond of trust where you can really be flexible with that customer. That's where the MSP community can also come in, because there's a lot of creative things we can do commercially. Contracting wise binding service's together into broader solutions and service level agreements that can go and give the customer something that they could just get by going teach individual technology platform under themselves >>and their ways >>where the service provider community really chips in. >>I think you're right and we think about helping Dr customers success manage service providers because of those engine relationship with customers. We've had tremendous success of moving those workloads, driving consumption of the service and really driving better business outcomes based on those relationships you have. >>So let's talk about workloads, guys. Course. Remember Paul Maritz when he was running the M word? He said Eddie Eddie Workload. Any application called it a device. He called it a software mainframe and Christian marketing people struck that from the parlance. But that's essentially what's happened pretty much run anything on somewhere. I heard Andy Jassy Kino talking about people helping people get off on mainframes. And so I feel like he's building the cloud mainframe. Any work less? But what kind of workloads are moving today? It's not. Obviously, he acknowledged, some of the hard core stuff's not gonna move. He didn't specify, but it's a lot of that hard core database ol TV transit transaction, high risk stuff. But what is moving today? Where do you see that going? >>Don't talk about some customers. >>Yeah, >>so a lot of joint customers we have that. I think you fall into that category. In fact, tomorrow on Thursday, we're actually leading a panel discussion that really dives into some customers. Success on the AWS platform that Central Lincoln are managed service is practice has been able to help them achieve what's interesting about that We have. We have an example from the public sector. We have an example from manufacturing and from from food and beverage example from the transportation industry and airlines. What's really interesting is that in all those use cases that will be diagramming out tomorrow, where VM Where's part of all of them, right? And sometimes it's because I am. Where is a critical part of their existing infrastructure? And so we're trying to be able to do is design, you know, sort of systems of innovation, systems of engagement that they were running inside of an AWS or broadly distributed AWS architecture. But it still needs network integration, security and activity back to the crown jewels and what's kept in a lot of those workloads that already running on the BM where platform So that's a lot of ways. See that a good deal with regards to your moving your sort of innovative workloads, your engagement workload, some of your digital experience, platforms you were working with an airline that wants to start building up a series of initiatives where they want to be able to sell vacation packages and and be very creative in how they market deliver those pulling through airline sails along the way. They're gonna be designing those digital initiatives in AWS, but they need access to flight flight information, schedule information, logistics information that they keep inside of there there. Bm where environment in the centralized data center. And so they're starting to look at workloads like that. We started to look at the N word cloud on eight of us being whereas it a zit in and of itself as a workload moving up to eight of us. There's a range of these solutions that we're starting to see, but a lot of it is still there, and he had the graphic up. There were still, in the very early days of clouded option. I still see a lot of work loads that are moving AWS theater in that system of engagement. How can I digitally engaged with my customers better? That's where a lot of the innovation is going on, and that's what a lot of the workload that are running in launching our >>I mean, we're seeing tremendous momentum and ultimately take any workload, wailed, moving to the cloud right and do it in an efficient and speedy path. And we've got custom moving thousands of workloads, right? They may decide over time to re factor them, but first and foremost, they could move them. They relocate them to the cloud. They can save a lot of costs. Out of that, they can use the exact same interface or pane of glass in terms. How they manage those work clothes, whether they're on Kramer, off Prem. It gives them tremendous agility. And if they decide over time, they have to re factor some workloads, which can be quite costly. They have that option, but there's no reason they shouldn't move. Every single worker today >>is their eyes, their disadvantage at all. If if you're left with ex workloads that have to stay behind, as opposed to someone who's coming up and getting up and running totally on the cloud and they're enjoying all those efficiencies and capabilities, are you a little bit of a disadvantage because you have to keep some legacy things lingering behind, or how do you eventually close that gap to enjoy the benefits of new technologies. Yeah, >>there's a sort of an old saying that, you know, if you're if you're if you're an enterprise, you know, that means you've had to make a lot of decisions along the way, right? And so presumably those decisions added value. It's your enterprise, or else she wouldn't be in enterprise. So it really comes out, too. Yeah, to those systems of records of those legacy systems way talk about legacy systems >>on Lian I t. Is the word legacy. I know it's a positive. United is the word legacy. A majority of >>your legacy is what the value you built up a lot of that, whether it's airline flight data or scheduling, best practices are critical. Crown jewels kind of data systems are really important. It really comes down to it. You're on enterprise and you're competing against somebody that is born in the cloud. How well integrated is everything. And are you able to take advantage of and pace layer your innovation strategy so that you can work on the cloud where it makes sense. You can still take advantage of all the data and intelligence you build up about your customers >>so talking earlier, You guys, it seems like you guys do you see that? That cloud is ultimately the destination of all these workloads. But, you know, Pac thinking about PacBell Singer, he talked about the laws of physics, the laws of economics and the laws of the land so that he makes the case for the hybrid >>Murphy's Law. >>Yeah, so that makes the case for the hybrid world. And it seems like Amazon. To a certain extent, it's capitulating on that, and it seems like we got a long way to go. So it's almost like the cloud model will go to your data wherever it iss. You guys, I think, helped facilitate that. How do you look at that? >>Yes. I mean, part of that answer is how much data centers are becoming sort of an antiquated model right there. There there is a need for computing and storage in a variety of different locations. Right, And there's that we've been sort of going through these cycles back and forth of you use the term software mainframe and the on the Palmer. It's kind, a model of the original mainframe decentralizing out the client server now centralizing again to the cloud as we see it starting to swing back on the other direction for towards devices that are a lot smarter. Processors that are, you know, finally tuned for whatever Internet of things use case that they're being designed for being able to put business logic a whole lot closer to those devices. The data. So I think that is what one of things that I think that said that one of the BM wears. A couple of years ago, data centers were becoming centers of data. And how are you able to go and work with those centers of data? First off, link them all together, networking lies, secure them all together and then manage them consistently. I think that's one of the things I am has been really great about that sort of control playing data plane separation inside your product design that makes that a whole lot more feet. >>I mean, it is a multi cloud, and it's a hybrid cloud world, and we want to give customers of flexibility and choice to move their workloads wherever they need, right based on different decisions, geographic implications, et cetera, security regimens and mean fundamentally. That's where we give customers a tremendous, tremendous amount of flexibility. >>And bringing the edge complicates >>edge, data center or cloud. >>It's so maybe it's not a swing back, you know, because it really has been a pendulum swing, mainframe, decentralized swing back to the cloud. It feels like it's now this ubiquitous push everywhere. >>Pendulum stops. >>Yeah, >>because there's an equal gravitational pull between the power of both locals >>and compute explodes everywhere. You have storage everywhere. So bring me my question of governance, governance, security in the edicts of the organization. You touched on that. So that becomes another challenge. How do you see that playing out what kind of roles you play solving that problem >>on the idea of data governance? Governance? Yeah. I mean the best way to think about our. In our opinion, the best way to think about data governance is that is really with abstraction. Layers and being ableto have a model driven approach to what you're deploying out into the cloud, and you can go all in with the data model that exists in the attraction layers in the date and the model driven architecture that you can build inside things like AWS cloud formations or inside things like answerable and chef and been puppet, their model, different ways of understanding what your application known state should be on. That's the foundational principle of understanding what your workloads are and how you can actually deliver governance over them. Once you've modelled it on and you then know how to deploy it against a variety different platforms, then you're just a matter of keeping track of what you've modelled, where you've deployed it and inventorying those number of instances and how they scale and how healthy there that certainly, from a workload standpoint, I think governance discipline that you need in terms of the actual data itself. Data governance on where data is getting stored There's a lot of innovation here at the show floor. In terms of software to find storage and storage abstractions, the embers got a great software to find storage capability called the San. We're working with a number of different partners within the core of our network, starting to treat storage as sort of a new kind of virtualized network function, using things like sifts and NFS and I scuzzy as V n F that you can run inside the network we want. We have had an announcement here earlier in the week about our central bank's network storage offer. We're actually starting to make storage and the data policy that allows you to control words replicated and where it's stored. Just part of the network service that you can add is a value add >>or even the metadata get the fastest path to get to it if I need to. If I prefer not to move it, you're starting to see you're talking about multiplied this multi cloud world. It seems like the connections between those clouds are gonna be dictated by that metadata and the intelligence tow. You know what the right path is, >>And I think we want to provide the flexibility to figure out where that data needs to reside. Cross cloud on, Prem off from, and you can just hear from the conversation, David, level of intimacy some of our partners have with customers to work through those decisions. Right, if you're gonna move those workloads effectively and efficiently, is where we get a lot of value for our joint customers. >>I mean, she's pretty fundamental to this notion of digital transformation that's ultimately what we've been talking about. Digital transformation is all about data putting data at the core, being able to access that, get insights from it and monetize, not directly, but understand how data affects the monetization of your business. That's what your customers >>and I think we >>wantto. Besides, I think we want to simplify how you want to spend more time looking up. Your applications are looking down your infrastructure, right? Based on all the jury, are drivers across the different business needs. And again, if we can figure out how to simplify that infrastructure, then people could spend more time on the applications because that's how they drive differentiation in the market, right? And so let's simplify infrastructure, put it where it needs to be. But we're going to give you time back to drive innovation and focus on differentiating yourself. >>You know, it's interesting on the topic of digital transformation reindeer. So right, sort of an interesting little pattern that plays out for those of us that have been in the service of writer community for a little while that a lot of the digital transformation success stories that you see that really get a lot of attention around the public cloud like eight of us. The big major moves into going all in on the public cloud tend to come from companies that went all in on the service provider model 10 years ago, the ones that adopted the idea. I'm just gonna have somebody do this non differentiating thing for me so that I can focus on innovation, are then in a better position to go start moving to the cloud as opposed to companies that have been downward focused on their infrastructure. Building up skill sets, building up knowledge base, building up career, path of people that, actually we're thinking about the technology itself as part of their job description have had a hard time letting go. It sort of the first step of trusting the service provider to do it for you lead you to that second step of being able to just leverage and go all in on the public lab. >>And customers need that help, right? And that's where if we can help activate moving those workloads more quickly, we provide that ability, put more focus on innovation to Dr Outcomes. >>I know you're talking about legacy a little bit ago and that the negative connotation, I think. Tom Brady, Don't you think I wanna run number seven? I haven't had a home smiling Would always do it back with more. We continue our coverage here. Live with the cube, where a w s rivet 2019.

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren. And you are watching theCUBE. We have two sets, three days, here at VMWorld 2019. Our 10th year of the show. And happy to welcome back to our program, two of our theCUBE Alumni. We were at VeeamON earlier this year down in Miami, but sitting to my right is Ratmir Timashev, who is the co-founder and executive vice president of global sales and marketing with Veeam, and joining us also is Danny Allan, who's the vice president of product strategy also at Veeam. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right so, Ratmir, let's start. Veeam has been very transparent as to how the company is doing. You know, there's all this talks about unicorns and crazy evaluations or anything like that? But give us the update on, you know, actual dollars and actually what's happening in your business. >> Ratmir: Absolutely, we're always transparent. So actually, there's this term, unicorn, right? So does it mean one billion in valuation, or one billion in revenue (chuckles)? >> Stu: It is valuation. >> Yeah, I know that. So, Veeam is not unicorn anymore, right? Veeam is one billion in bookings. So, yeah, the major trend in the industry, is that we're moving from perpetual to subscription, because we're moving on-prem to hybrid cloud. And Veeam is actually leading that wave. So where we've been always known to be very customer friendly to do business with, easy to do business with, from the channel, from the customer perspective, and that's the major trend. If the customers are moving to hybrid cloud, we have to move to there, from our business model to a hybrid cloud. So we're changing our business model, to make it very easy for customers. >> Ratmir, that's not an easy adjustment. We've watched some public companies go through a little bit of challenges as you work through, you know there's the financial pieces, there's the sales pieces of that, since... Give us a little bit of the, how that works? You know, you just retrain the sales force and go or-- >> That is awesome, awesome question. That that is awesome point, that it's extremely painful. Extremely painful, and for some company, like everybody says Adobe is the best example of moving from perpetual or traditional business model to a subscription, right. So annual, even monthly subscription. For us it's even ten times more difficult than Adobe, because, we're not only moving from perpetual to subscription. We're moving, we're changing our licensing unit, per socket which is VMware traditional to pure VM or pure workload or pure instance, right. What we call instance, basically means, so it's extremely painful, we have to change how we do business, how we incentivize our sales people, how we incentivize our channel, how we incentivize our customers. But that's inevitable, we're moving to a hybrid cloud where sockets don't exist. Sockets, there are no sockets in the hybrid cloud. There are workloads and data. Data and applications. So we have to change our business model, but we also have to keep our current business model. And it's very difficult in terms of the bookings and revenue, when we give a customer an option to buy this way or that way. Of course they will choose the way that is the less expensive for them, and we're ready to do that. We can absorb that, because we're a private company, and we're approachable and we're fast growing. So we can afford that, unlike some of the public companies or companies that, venture capital finance. >> So how do you make that kind of substantial change to the... I mean changing half your company, really. To change that many structures. How do do you do that without losing the soul of the company? And like Veeam, Veeam is famous for being extremely Veeamy. How do you make all those sorts of changes and still not lose the soul of the company like that? How do you keep that there? >> That's an awesome question, because that's 50% of executive management discussions, are about that questions, right. What made Veeam successful? Core value, what we call, core values, there are family values, there are company core values every company has. So that's the most important. And one of them is, be extremely customer friendly, right. So easy to do business with. That's the number one priority. Revenue, projects, number two, number three, being doing the right things for the customer is number one. That's how we're discussing, and we're introducing a major change on October 1st. >> Ah yes. >> Another major change. We've done this major changes in the last two years, moving to subscription. So we started that move, two, two-and-a-half years ago, by introducing our product for Office 365, backup, when that was available only for, on subscription basis, not perpetual. So we're moving in subscription, to the subscription business model in the the last three years. On October 1st, 2019, in one month, we introducing another major change. We are extremely simplifying our subscription licensing and introducing, what we will call Veeam Universal License. Where you can buy once and move or close everywhere. From physical to VMware to Hyper-V to a double SS, ash or back to VMware and back to physical. I'm joking. (lauging) >> All right, Danny, bring us inside the product. We've watched the maturity, ten years of theCUBE here, Veeam was one of the early big ecosystems success stories, of course it went into Multi-Hypervisor, went into Multicloud. You know Ratmir, just went through all of the changes there. Exciting the VUL I guess we'll call it. >> Ratmir: VUL >> VUL, absolutely. So on the product piece, how's the product keeping in line with all these things. >> So our vision is to be the most trusted provider, backup solutions that enable high data management. So backup is still a core of it and it's the start of everything that we do. But if you look what we've done over the course of this year, it's very much about the cloud. So we added the ability, for example, to tier things into object storage in the hyperscale public cloud and that has been taking off, gang busters into S3 and into Azure Blob storage. And so that's a big part of it. Second part of it, in cloud data management is the ability to recover, if you're sending your data into the cloud, why not recover there? So we've added the ability to recover workloads in Azure, recover workloads in EC2. And lastly of course, once your workloads are in the cloud, then you want to protect it, using cloud-native technology. So we've addressed all of these solutions, and we've been announcing all these exciting things over the course of 2019. >> The product started off as being VM-centrical, VM Only back in the day. And then you've gradually added different capabilities to it as customers demanded, and it was on a pretty regular cadence as well. And you've recently added, added cloud functionality and backups there. What's the next thing, customers are asking for? 'Cause we've got lots of workloads being deployed in edge, we've got lots of people doing things with NoSQL backups, we've got Kubernetes, is mentioned every second breath at this show. So where are you seeing demand for customers that you need to take the product next? So we've heard a lot about Kubernetes obviously, the shows, the containers it's obviously a focus point. But one of the things we demoed yesterday. We actually had a breakout session, is leveraging an API from VMR called the VCR API for IO filtering. So it basically enables you to fork the rights when you're writing down to the storage level, so that you have continuous replication in two environments. And that just highlights the relationship we have with VMware. 80% of our customers are running on VMware. But that's the exciting things that we're innovating on. Things like making availability better. Making the agility and movement between clouds better. Making sure that people can take copies of their data to accelerate their business. These all areas that we are focusing on. >> Yeah, a lot of companies have tried to, multiple times have tried to go away from backup and go into data management. I like that you don't shy away from, ah, yeah we do backup and it's an important workload, and you're not afraid to mention that. Where's some other companies seem to be quite scared of saying, we do backup, 'cause it's not very cool or sexy. Although well, it doesn't have to be cool and sexy to be important. So I like that you actually say that yes we do backup. But we are also able to do some of these other bits and pieces. And it's enabled by that backup. So you know, copy, data management, so we can take copies of things and do this. Where is some of the demand coming around what to do with that data management side of things. I know there's, people are interested in things like, for example, data masking, where you want to take a copy of some data and use it for testing. There's a whole bunch of issue and risks around in doing that. So companies look for assistance from companies like Veeam to do that sort of thing. Is that where you're heading with some of that product? >> It is, there's four big use cases, DevOps is certainly one of them, and we've been talking about Kubernetes, right, which is all about developers and DevOps type development, so that's a big one. And one of the interesting things about that use case is, when you make copies of data, compliance comes into play. If you need to give a copy of the data to the developer, you don't want to give them credit card numbers or health information, so you probably want to mask that out. We have the capability today in Veeam, we call it, Staged Restore, that you could actually open the data in the sandbox to manipulate it, before you give it to the developer. But that's certainly one big use case, and it's highlighted at conferences like this. Another one is security, I spent a decade in security. I get passionate about it, but pentesting or forensics. If you do an invasive test on a production system, you'll bring the system down. And so another use case of the data is, take a copy, give it to the security team to do that test without impacting the production workload. A third one would be, IT operations, patching and updating all the systems. One of the interesting things about Veeam customers. They're far more likely to be on the most recent versions of software, because you can test it easily, by taking a copy. Test the patch, test the update and then roll it forward. And then a forth huge use case that we can not ignore is the GDPR in analytics and compliance. There's just this huge demand right now. And I think there's going to be market places opened in the public cloud, around delegating access to the data, so that they can analyze it and give you more intelligence about it. So GDPR is just a start, right. Were is my personally identifiable information? But I can imagine workload where a market place or an offering, where someone comes in and says, hey, I'll pay you some money and I'll classify your data for you, or I'll archive it smartly for you. And the business doesn't have to that. All they have to do is delegate access to the data, so that they can run some kind of machine learning algorithm on that data. So these are all interesting use cases. I go back, DevOps, security IT operations and analytics, all of those. >> So Ratmir, when I go to the keynote, it did feel like it was Kubernetes world? When I went down the show floor it definitely felt like data protection world. So it's definitely been one of the buzzier conversations the last couple of years at this show. But you look, walk through the floor, whether it be some of the big traditional vendors, lots of brand new start ups, some of the cloud-native players in this space. How do you make sure that Veeam gets the customers, keeps the customers that they have and can keep growing on the momentum that you've been building on? >> That's a great question, Stu. Like Pat Gelsinger mention that, number of applications has grown in the last five years, from 50 million to something like 330 million, and will grow to another almost 800 million in the next five years, by 2024. Veeam is in the right business, Veeam is the leader, Veeam is driving the vision and the strategy, right. Yeah, we have good competition in the form of legacy vendors and emerging vendors, but we have very good position because we own the major part of your hybrid cloud, which is the private cloud. And we're providing a good vision for how the hybrid cloud data management, not just data protection, which just Danny explained, should be done, right. I think we're in a good position and I feel very comfortable for the next five, ten years for Veeam. >> It's a good place to be. I mean feeling confident about the future is... I don't know five to ten years, that's a long way out. I don't know. >> Yeah I agree, I agree, it used to be like that, now you cannot predict more than six moths ahead, right. >> Justin I'm not going to ask him about Simon now, it's-- >> Six months is good yeah, six months maximum, what we can predict-- >> We were asking Michael Dell about the impact of China these days, so there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these day. >> Ratmir: Totally. >> Anything macro economic, you know that, you look at your global footprint. >> No we're traditional global technology company that generates most of the revenue between Europe and North America and we have emerging markets like Asia-Pac and Latin. We're no different than any other global technology company, in terms of the revenue and our investment. The fastest growing region of course is Asia-Pac, but our traditional markets is North America and Europe. >> Hailing from Asia-Pac, I do know the region reasonably well and Veeam is, yeah Veeam is definitely, has a very strong presence there and growing. Australia used to be there, one of our claims to fame, was one of the highest virtualized workload-- >> And Mohai is the cloud adapter. >> Cloud adoption. >> Yes, we like new shiny toys, so adopt it very, very quickly. Do you see any innovation coming out of Asia-Pac, because we use these things so much, and we tend to be on that leading edge. Do you see things coming out of the Asia-Pac teams that notice how customers are using these systems and is that placing demand on Veeam. >> Absolutely, but Danny knows better because he just came back from the Asia-Pacific trip. >> Justin: That's right, you did. >> Yeah, I did, I always say you live in the future, because you're so many hours ahead. But the reality is actually, the adoption of things like Hyper-convergence infrastructure, was far faster in areas like NZ, the adoption of the cloud. And it's because of New Zealand is part of the DAid, Australia is very much associated with taking that. One of the things that we're seeing there is consumption based model. I was just there a few weeks ago and the move to a consumption and subscription based model is far further advanced in other parts of the world. So I go there regularly, mostly because it gives me a good perspective on what the US is going to do two years later, And maybe AMEA three years later. It gives us a good perspective of where the industry is going-- >> It's not to the US it comes to California first then it spreads from there. (lauging) >> Are you saying he's literally using the technology of tomorrow in his today, is what we're saying. >> Maybe me I can make predictions a little bit further ahead there. >> Well you live in the future. >> All right I want to give you the both, just a final word here, VMWorld 2019. >> It's always the best show for us. VMWorld is the, I mean like Danny said, 80% of our customers is VMware, so it's always the best. We've been here for the last 12 years, since 2007. I have so many friends, buddies, love to come here, like to spend three, four days with my best friends, in the industry and just in life. >> I love the perspective here of the Multicloud worlds, so we saw some really interesting things, the moving things across clouds and leveraging Kubernetes and containers. And I think the focus on where the industry is going is very much aligned with Veeam. We also believe that, while it starts with backup up, the exciting thing is what's coming in two, three years. And so we have a close alignment, close relationship. It's been a great conference. >> Danny, Ratmir, thank you so much for the updates as always and yeah, have some fun with some of your friends, in the remaining time that we have. >> We have a party tonight Stu, so Justin too. >> Yeah, I think most people that have been to VMWorld are familiar with the Veeam party, it is famous, definitely. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here, from VMWorld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. We're excited to be here. It's a pretty interesting event. Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. It's kind of like an accelerator, but not really. It's kind of like YCombinator, but not really. It's a little bit different, but it's a community of tech start-ups focusing on sports with a real angle on getting beyond sports. We're excited to have our next guest who's an investor and also a mentor, really part of the program to learn more about it, and she is Gayatri Sarkar, the managing partner from HYPE Capital. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >> Pretty nice, huh? >> Oh, I just love the view. >> So you said before we turned on the cameras... Well, first off, HYPE Capital, what do you guys invest in? What's kind of your focus? >> So HYPE Capital is one of the biggest ecosystem in sports, which is HYPE Sports Innovation. We have 13 accelerators all around the world. We are just launching the world's first Esports accelerator with FC Koeln and SK gaming, one of the biggest gaming company. So we are part of the ecosystem for a pretty long time. And now we have HYPE Capital or VC Fund investing in Europe, Israel, and now in US. >> So you mentioned that being a mentor, as part of this organization, as something special. Think you're the first person we've had on who's been a mentor. What does that mean? What does it mean for you, but also what does it mean for all the portfolio companies? >> Sure. I'm a mentor at multiple accelerators, but being a part of Sports Tech Tokyo, I saw the very inclusive community that is created by them. And the opportunity to look at various portfolio companies and also including our portfolio companies as part of it. One of our portfolio company where we are the lead investors, Fund with Balls, they are part of this. So-- >> What's it called? Fun with Balls? >> Fun with Balls, very interesting name. >> Good name. >> Yeah. (laughing) They're from Germany and they came all the way from Germany to here. So, yeah, I'm very excited because as I said, it's an inclusive community and sports is big. So we are looking at opportunities where deep techs, where it can be translated into various other verticals, but sports can also be one of the use cases. And that's our focus as investors. >> Right. You said your focus is really on AI, machine learning. You have a big data background, a tech background. So when you look at the application of AI in sports, what are some of the things that you get excited about? >> Yeah, so for me, when I'm looking at investments, definitely the diversification of sports portfolio, how can I build my portfolio from Esports gaming, behavioral science in sports to AI, ML, AR opportunities in material science, and various other cases? Coming back to your question, it's like how can I look into the market and see the opportunities that, okay, can I invest in this sector? As I said, what's the next big trend? And that's where I want to invest. Obviously, founder market fit, product market fit, promise market fit because there's the fan engagement experience that you get in sports, not in any other market. The network effect is huge and I think that's what we VCs are very excited in sports. And I think this is, right now, the best time to invest in sports. >> So promise market fit, I've never heard that before. What does that mean when you say promise market fit? >> Interesting question. So promise market fit was coined by Union Square Venture VC Fund. And they think that where there's the network effect, or your engagement with your consumers, with your clients, with your partners, can create a very loyal fan base and I think that's very important. You may see that in other technology sector, but it is completely unparallel when it comes to sports. So I request all the technologies that are actually trying to build their use cases. They should focus on sports because the fan engagement, the loyal experience, they opportunities, you'll not get anywhere else. >> And I think this is the market that I and other investors are looking forward. If deep tech investors and deep tech technologies are coming into this market, we see the sports ecosystem, not to be a trillion-dollar, but a multi-trillion dollar market. >> Right. But it's such a unique experience, though, right? I mean, some people will joke their fans don't necessarily root for the team, they root for the jersey, right? The players come and go. We're here at Oracle Park, which was AT&T Park, which was SBC Park, which was I can't even remember. Pac Bell, I think, as well. So is it reasonable for a regular company that doesn't have this innate, kind of, a connection to a fan base that a lot of sports organizations do that's historical and family-based, and has such deep roots that can survive, maybe, down years, can survive a crappy product, can survive, kind of, the dark days and generally they'll be there when things turn back around. Is that reasonable for a regular company to try to get that relationship with a customer? >> So you asked me one of the most important question in the investor's relationship or investor's life, which is the cyclicality of the industry. And I feel like sports is one industry that has survived the cyclicality of that industry. Because, as you said, a crappy product will not survive. You have to focus on customer service. You have to focus that, okay, even if you have the best product in the world. How can I make my product sticky? I think these are the qualities that we're looking into when we are investing in entrepreneurs. But the idea is that if we are targeting start-ups and opportunities, our focus is that, okay, you may have the world's best product, but the founders should have the ability to understand the market. Okay, there are opportunities. If you look at Facebook, if you look at various other companies, they started with a product, which maybe, okay, friends saw a dating site and they pivoted. So you need to understand the economy. You need to understand the market. And I think that's what we are looking into the entrepreneurs. And as to answering your question, the family offices, they're actually part of this world start-up ecosystems. They're seeing if there's an opportunity, because they're big, they're giant, and they're working with legacy techs like Microsoft, Amazon. It's very difficult for the legacy techs to be agile and move fast. So it's very important for them if they can place themselves at a 45 degree angle with the start-up ecosystem and they can move faster. So that's the opportunity for them in the sports start-up ecosystem. >> All right. Well, Gayatri, thanks for taking a few minutes and hopefully you can find some new investments here-- >> No, thank you so much. >> over the course of the day. >> Thank you so much for your time. >> Absolutely, she's Gayatri, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We are at Oracle Park on the shores of historic McCovey Cove. I got to get together with big John and practice this line. (laughing) Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Camera Crew: Clear. >> Jeff: John Miller. >> Gayatri: Oh, yeah.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that will be successful in the 21st century [Music] being open is really important because it comes with a lot of trust the open-source community now has matured so much and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation [Music] but what's really exciting is the change that we've seen in our teams not only the way they collaborate but the way they operate in the way they work [Music] I think idea is everything ideas can change the way you see things open-source is more than a license it's actually a way of operating [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome Red Hat president and chief executive officer Jim Whitehurst [Music] all right well welcome to day two at the Red Hat summit I'm amazed to see this many people here at 8:30 in the morning given the number of people I saw pretty late last night out and about so thank you for being here and have to give a shout out speaking of power participation that DJ is was Mike Walker who is our global director of open innovation labs so really enjoyed that this morning was great to have him doing that so hey so day one yesterday we had some phenomenal announcements both around Red Hat products and things that we're doing as well as some great partner announcements which we found exciting I hope they were interesting to you and I hope you had a chance to learn a little more about that and enjoy the breakout sessions that we had yesterday so yesterday was a lot about the what with these announcements and partnerships today I wanted to spin this morning talking a little bit more about the how right how do we actually survive and thrive in this digitally transformed world and to some extent the easy parts identifying the problem we all know that we have to be able to move more quickly we all know that we have to be able to react to change faster and we all know that we need to innovate more effectively all right so the problem is easy but how do you actually go about solving that right the problem is that's not a product that you can buy off the shelf right it is a capability that you have to build and certainly it's technology enabled but it's also depends on process culture a whole bunch of things to figure out how we actually do that and the answer is likely to be different in different organizations with different objective functions and different starting points right so this is a challenge that we all need to feel our way to an answer on and so I want to spend some time today talking about what we've seen in the market and how people are working to address that and it's one of the reasons that the summit this year the theme is ideas worth it lorring to take us back on a little history lesson so two years ago here at Moscone the theme of the summit was the power of participation and then I talked a lot about the power of groups of people working together and participating are able to solve problems much more quickly and much more effectively than individuals or even individual organizations working by themselves and some of the largest problems that we face in technology but more broadly in the world will ultimately only be solved if we effectively participate and work together then last year the theme of the summit was the impact of the individual and we took this concept of participation a bit further and we talked about how participation has to be active right it's a this isn't something where you can be passive that you can sit back you have to be involved because the problem in a more participative type community is that there is no road map right you can't sit back and wait for an edict on high or some central planning or some central authority to tell you what to do you have to take initiative you have to get involved right this is a active participation sport now one of the things that I talked about as part of that was that planning was dead and it was kind of a key my I think my keynote was actually titled planning is dead and the concept was that in a world that's less knowable when we're solving problems in a more organic bottom-up way our ability to effectively plan into the future it's much less than it was in the past and this idea that you're gonna be able to plan for success and then build to it it really is being replaced by a more bottom-up participative approach now aside from my whole strategic planning team kind of being up in arms saying what are you saying planning is dead I have multiple times had people say to me well I get that point but I still need to prepare for the future how do I prepare my organization for the future isn't that planning and so I wanted to spend a couple minutes talk a little more detail about what I meant by that but importantly taking our own advice we spent a lot of time this past year looking around at what our customers are doing because what a better place to learn then from large companies and small companies around the world information technology organizations having to work to solve these problems for their organizations and so our ability to learn from each other take the power of participation an individual initiative that people and organizations have taken there are just so many great learnings this year that I want to get a chance to share I also thought rather than listening to me do that that we could actually highlight some of the people who are doing this and so I do want to spend about five minutes kind of contextualizing what we're going to go through over the next hour or so and some of the lessons learned but then we want to share some real-world stories of how organizations are attacking some of these problems under this how do we be successful in a world of constant change in uncertainty so just going back a little bit more to last year talking about planning was dead when I said planning it's kind of a planning writ large and so that's if you think about the way traditional organizations work to solve problems and ultimately execute you start off planning so what's a position you want to get to in X years and whether that's a competitive strategy in a position of competitive advantage or a certain position you want an organizational function to reach you kind of lay out a plan to get there you then typically a senior leaders or a planning team prescribes the sets of activities and the organization structure and the other components required to get there and then ultimately execution is about driving compliance against that plan and you look at you say well that's all logical right we plan for something we then figure out how we're gonna get there we go execute to get there and you know in a traditional world that was easy and still some of this makes sense I don't say throw out all of this but you have to recognize in a more uncertain volatile world where you can be blindsided by orthogonal competitors coming in and you the term uber eyes you have to recognize that you can't always plan or know what the future is and so if you don't well then what replaces the traditional model or certainly how do you augment the traditional model to be successful in a world that you knows ambiguous well what we've heard from customers and what you'll see examples of this through the course of this morning planning is can be replaced by configuring so you can configure for a constant rate of change without necessarily having to know what that change is this idea of prescription of here's the activities people need to perform and let's lay these out very very crisply job descriptions what organizations are going to do can be replaced by a greater degree of enablement right so this idea of how do you enable people with the knowledge and things that they need to be able to make the right decisions and then ultimately this idea of execution as compliance can be replaced by a greater level of engagement of people across the organization to ultimately be able to react at a faster speed to the changes that happen so just double clicking in each of those for a couple minutes so what I mean by configure for constant change so again we don't know exactly what the change is going to be but we know it's going to happen and last year I talked a little bit about a process solution to that problem I called it that you have to try learn modify and what that model try learn modify was for anybody in the app dev space it was basically taking the principles of agile and DevOps and applying those more broadly to business processes in technology organizations and ultimately organizations broadly this idea of you don't have to know what your ultimate destination is but you can try and experiment you can learn from those things and you can move forward and so that I do think in technology organizations we've seen tremendous progress even over the last year as organizations are adopting agile endeavor and so that still continues to be I think a great way for people to to configure their processes for change but this year we've seen some great examples of organizations taking a different tack to that problem and that's literally building modularity into their structures themselves right actually building the idea that change is going to happen into how you're laying out your technology architectures right we've all seen the reverse of that when you build these optimized systems for you know kind of one environment you kind of flip over two years later what was the optimized system it's now called a legacy system that needs to be migrated that's an optimized system that now has to be moved to a new environment because the world has changed so again you'll see a great example of that in a few minutes here on stage next this concept of enabled double-clicking on that a little bit so much of what we've done in technology over the past few years has been around automation how do we actually replace things that people were doing with technology or augmenting what people are doing with technology and that's incredibly important and that's work that can continue to go forward it needs to happen it's not really what I'm talking about here though enablement in this case it's much more around how do you make sure individuals are getting the context they need how are you making sure that they're getting the information they need how are you making sure they're getting the tools they need to make decisions on the spot so it's less about automating what people are doing and more about how can you better enable people with tools and technology now from a leadership perspective that's around making sure people understand the strategy of the company the context in which they're working in making sure you've set the appropriate values etc etc from a technology perspective that's ensuring that you're building the right systems that allow the right information the right tools at the right time to the right people now to some extent even that might not be hard but when the world is constantly changing that gets to be even harder and I think that's one of the reasons we see a lot of traction and open source to solve these problems to use flexible systems to help enterprises be able to enable their people not just in it today but to be flexible going forward and again we'll see some great examples of that and finally engagement so again if execution can't be around driving compliance to a plan because you no longer have this kind of Cris plan well what do leaders do how do organizations operate and so you know I'll broadly use the term engagement several of our customers have used this term and this is really saying well how do you engage your people in real-time to make the right decisions how do you accelerate a pace of cadence how do you operate at a different speed so you can react to change and take advantage of opportunities as they arise and everywhere we look IT is a key enabler of this right in the past IT was often seen as an inhibitor to this because the IT systems move slower than the business might want to move but we are seeing with some of these new technologies that literally IT is becoming the enabler and driving the pace of change back on to the business and you'll again see some great examples of that as well so again rather than listen to me sit here and theoretically talk about these things or refer to what we've seen others doing I thought it'd be much more interesting to bring some of our partners and our customers up here to specifically talk about what they're doing so I'm really excited to have a great group of customers who have agreed to stand in front of 7,500 people or however many here this morning and talk a little bit more about what they're doing so really excited to have them here and really appreciate all them agreeing to be a part of this and so to start I want to start with tee systems we have the CEO of tee systems here and I think this is a great story because they're really two parts to it right because he has two perspectives one is as the CEO of a global company itself having to navigate its way through digital disruption and as a global cloud service provider obviously helping its customers through this same type of change so I'm really thrilled to have a del hasta li join me on stage to talk a little bit about T systems and what they're doing and what we're doing jointly together so Adelle [Music] Jim took to see you Adele thank you for being here you for having me please join me I love to DJ when that fantastic we may have to hire him no more events for events where's well employed he's well employed though here that team do not give him mics activation it's great to have you here really do appreciate it well you're the CEO of a large organization that's going through this disruption in the same way we are I'd love to hear a little bit how for your company you're thinking about you know navigating this change that we're going through great well you know key systems as an ICT service provider we've been around for decades I'm not different to many of our clients we had to change the whole disruption of the cloud and digitization and new skills and new capability and agility it's something we had to face as well so over the last five years and especially in the last three years we invested heavily invested over a billion euros in building new capabilities building new offerings new infrastructures to support our clients so to be very disruptive for us as well and so and then with your customers themselves they're going through this set of change and you're working to help them how are you working to help enable your your customers as they're going through this change well you know all of them you know in this journey of changing the way they run their business leveraging IT much more to drive business results digitization and they're all looking for new skills new ideas they're looking for platforms that take them away from traditional waterfall development that takes a year or a year and a half before they see any results to processes and ways of bringing applications in a week in a month etcetera so it's it's we are part of that journey with them helping them for that and speaking of that I know we're working together and to help our joint customers with that can you talk a little bit more about what we're doing together sure well you know our relationship goes back years and years with with the Enterprise Linux but over the last few years we've invested heavily in OpenShift and OpenStack to build peope as layers to build you know flexible infrastructure for our clients and we've been working with you we tested many different technology in the marketplace and been more successful with Red Hat and the stack there and I'll give you an applique an example several large European car manufacturers who have connected cars now as a given have been accelerating the applications that needed to be in the car and in the past it took them years if not you know scores to get an application into the car and today we're using open shift as the past layer to develop to enable these DevOps for these companies and they bring applications in less than a month and it's a huge change in the dynamics of the competitiveness in the marketplace and we rely on your team and in helping us drive that capability to our clients yeah do you find it fascinating so many of the stories that you hear and that we've talked about with with our customers is this need for speed and this ability to accelerate and enable a greater degree of innovation by simply accelerating what what we're seeing with our customers absolutely with that plus you know the speed is important agility is really critical but doing it securely doing it doing it in a way that is not gonna destabilize the you know the broader ecosystem is really critical and things like GDP are which is a new security standard in Europe is something that a lot of our customers worry about they need help with and we're one of the partners that know what that really is all about and how to navigate within that and use not prevent them from using the new technologies yeah I will say it isn't just the speed of the external but the security and the regulation especially GDR we have spent an hour on that with our board this week there you go he said well thank you so much for being here really to appreciate the work that we're doing together and look forward to continued same here thank you thank you [Applause] we've had a great partnership with tea systems over the years and we've really taken it to the next level and what's really exciting about that is you know we've moved beyond just helping kind of host systems for our customers we really are jointly enabling their success and it's really exciting and we're really excited about what we're able to to jointly accomplish so next i'm really excited that we have our innovation award winners here and we'll have on stage with us our innovation award winners this year our BBVA dnm IAG lasat Lufthansa Technik and UPS and yet they're all working in one for specific technology initiatives that they're doing that really really stand out and are really really exciting you'll have a chance to learn a lot more about those through the course of the event over the next couple of days but in this context what I found fascinating is they were each addressing a different point of this configure enable engage and I thought it would be really great for you all to hear about how they're experimenting and working to solve these problems you know real-time large organizations you know happening now let's start with the video to see what they think about when they think about innovation I define innovation is something that's changing the model changing the way of thinking not just a step change improvement not just making something better but actually taking a look at what already exists and then putting them together in new and exciting lives innovation is about to build something nobody has done before historically we had a statement that business drives technology we flip that equation around an IT is now demonstrating to the business at power of technology innovation desde el punto de vista de la tecnología supone salir de plataform as proprietary as ADA Madero cloud basado an open source it's a possibility the open source que no parameter no sir Kamala and I think way that for me open-source stands for flexibility speed security the community and that contribution from the community is really driving innovation innovation at a pace that I don't think our one individual organization could actually do ourselves right so first I'd like to talk with BBVA I love this story because as you know Financial Services is going through a massive set of transformations and BBVA really is at the leading edge of thinking about how to deploy a hybrid cloud strategy and kind of modular layered architecture to be successful regardless of what happens in the future so with that I'd like to welcome on stage Jose Maria Rosetta from BBVA [Music] thank you for being here and congratulations on your innovation award it's been a pleasure to be here with you it's great to have you hi everybody so Josemaria for those who might not be familiar with BBVA can you give us a little bit of background on your company yeah a brief description BBVA is is a bank as a financial institution with diversified business model and that provides well financial services to more than 73 million of customers in more than 20 countries great and I know we've worked with you for a long time so we appreciate that the partnership with you so I thought I'd start with a really easy question for you how will blockchain you know impact financial services in the next five years I've gotten no idea but if someone knows the answer I've got a job for him for him up a pretty good job indeed you know oh all right well let me go a little easier then so how will the global payments industry change in the next you know four or five years five years well I think you need a a Weezer well I tried to make my best prediction means that in five years just probably will be five years older good answer I like that I always abstract up I hope so I hope so yah-yah-yah hope so good point so you know immediately that's the obvious question you have a massive technology infrastructure is a global bank how do you prepare yourself to enable the organization to be successful when you really don't know what the future is gonna be well global banks and wealth BBBS a global gam Bank a certain component foundations you know today I would like to talk about risk and efficiency so World Bank's deal with risk with the market great the operational reputational risk and so on so risk control is part of all or DNA you know and when you've got millions of customers you know efficiency efficiency is a must so I think there's no problem with all these foundations they problem the problem analyze the problems appears when when banks translate these foundations is valued into technology so risk control or risk management avoid risk usually means by the most expensive proprietary technology in the market you know from one of the biggest software companies in the world you know so probably all of you there are so those people in the room were glad to hear you say that yeah probably my guess the name of those companies around San Francisco most of them and efficiency usually means a savory business unit as every department or country has his own specific needs by a specific solution for them so imagine yourself working in a data center full of silos with many different Hardware operating systems different languages and complex interfaces to communicate among them you know not always documented what really never documented so your life your life in is not easy you know in this scenario are well there's no room for innovation so what's been or or strategy be BES ready to move forward in this new digital world well we've chosen a different approach which is quite simple is to replace all local proprietary system by a global platform based on on open source with three main goals you know the first one is reduce the average transaction cost to one-third the second one is increase or developers productivity five times you know and the third is enable or delete the business be able to deliver solutions of three times faster so you're not quite easy Wow and everything with the same reliability as on security standards as we've got today Wow that is an extraordinary set of objectives and I will say their world on the path of making that successful which is just amazing yeah okay this is a long journey sometimes a tough journey you know to be honest so we decided to partnership with the with the best companies in there in the world and world record we think rate cut is one of these companies so we think or your values and your knowledge is critical for BBVA and well as I mentioned before our collaboration started some time ago you know and just an example in today in BBVA a Spain being one of the biggest banks in in the country you know and using red hat technology of course our firm and fronting architecture you know for mobile and internet channels runs the ninety five percent of our customers request this is approximately 3,000 requests per second and our back in architecture execute 70 millions of business transactions a day this is almost a 50% of total online transactions executed in the country so it's all running yes running I hope so you check for you came on stage it's I'll be flying you know okay good there's no wood up here to knock on it's been a really great partnership it's been a pleasure yeah thank you so much for being here thank you thank you [Applause] I do love that story because again so much of what we talk about when we when we talk about preparing for digital is a processed solution and again things like agile and DevOps and modular izing components of work but this idea of thinking about platforms broadly and how they can run anywhere and actually delivering it delivering at a scale it's just a phenomenal project and experience and in the progress they've made it's a great team so next up we have two organizations that have done an exceptional job of enabling their people with the right information and the tools they need to be successful you know in both of these cases these are organizations who are under constant change and so leveraging the power of open-source to help them build these tools to enable and you'll see it the size and the scale of these in two very very different contexts it's great to see and so I'd like to welcome on stage Oh smart alza' with dnm and David Abraham's with IAG [Music] Oh smart welcome thank you so much for being here Dave great to see you thank you appreciate you being here and congratulations to you both on winning the Innovation Awards thank you so Omar I really found your story fascinating and how you're able to enable your people with data which is just significantly accelerated the pace with which they can make decisions and accelerate your ability to to act could you tell us a little more about the project and then what you're doing Jim and Tina when the muchisimas gracias por ever say interesado pono true projecto [Music] encargado registry controller las entradas a leda's persona por la Frontera argentina yo sé de dos siento treinta siete puestos de contrôle tienen lo largo de la Frontera tanto area the restreamer it EEMA e if looool in dilute ammonia shame or cinta me Jonas the tránsito sacra he trod on in another Fronteras dingus idea idea de la Magneto la cual estamos hablando la Frontera cantina tienen extension the kin same in kilo metros esto es el gada mint a maje or allege Estancia kaeun a poor carretera a la co de mexico con el akka a direction emulation s 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calidad de vida de atras de mettre personas SI y meet our que el delito perform a trois Natura from Dana's Argentine sigue siendo en favor de esto SI temes uno de los países mess Alberto's Allah immigration en Latin America yah hora con una plataforma mas segunda first of all I want to thank you for the interest is played for our project the National migration administration or diem records the entry and exit of people on the Argentine territory it grants residents permits to foreigners who wish to live in our country through 237 entry points land air border sea and river ways Jim dnm registered over 80 million transits throughout last year Argentine borders cover about 15,000 kilometers just our just to give you an idea of the magnitude of our borders this is greater than the distance on a highway between Mexico City and Alaska our department applies the mechanisms that prevent the entry and residents of people involved in crimes like terrorism trafficking of persons weapons drugs and others in 2016 we shifted to a more preventive and predictive paradigm that is how Sam's the system for migration analysis was created with red hats great assistance and support this allowed us to tackle the challenge of integrating multiple and varied issues legal issues police databases national and international security organizations like Interpol API advanced passenger information and PNR passenger name record this involved starting private cloud with OpenShift Rev data virtualization cloud forms and fuse that were the basis to develop Sam and implementing machine learning models and artificial intelligence our analysts consulted a number of systems and other manual files before 2016 4 days for each person entering or leaving the country so this has allowed us to optimize our decisions making them in real time each time Sam is consulted it processes patterns of over two billion data entries Sam's aim is to improve the quality of life of our citizens and visitors making sure that crime doesn't pierce our borders in an environment of analytic evolution and constant improvement in essence Sam contributes toward Argentina being one of the leaders in Latin America in terms of immigration with our new system great thank you and and so Dave tell us a little more about the insurance industry and the challenges in the EU face yeah sure so you know in the insurance industry it's a it's been a bit sort of insulated from a lot of major change in disruption just purely from the fact that it's highly regulated and the cost of so that the barrier to entry is quite high in fact if you think about insurance you know you have to have capital reserves to protect against those major events like floods bush fires and so on but the whole thing is a lot of change there's come in a really rapid pace I'm also in the areas of customer expectations you know customers and now looking and expecting for the same levels of flexibility and convenience that they would experience with more modern and new startups they're expecting out of the older institutions like banks and insurance companies like us so definitely expecting the industry to to be a lot more adaptable and to better meet their needs I think the other aspect of it really is in the data the data area where I think that the donor is now creating a much more significant connection between organizations in a car summers especially when you think about the level of devices that are now enabled and the sheer growth of data that's that that's growing at exponential rates so so that the impact then is that the systems that we used to rely on are the technology we used to rely on to be able to handle that kind of growth no longer keeps up and is able to to you know build for the future so we need to sort of change that so what I G's really doing is transform transforming the organization to become a lot more efficient focus more on customers and and really set ourselves up to be agile and adaptive and so ya know as part of your Innovation Award that the specific set of projects you tied a huge amount of different disparate systems together and with M&A and other you have a lot to do there to you tell us a little more about kind of how you're able to better respond to customer needs by being able to do that yeah no you're right so we've we've we're nearly a hundred year old company that's grown from lots of merger and acquisition and just as a result of that that means that data's been sort of spread out and fragmented across multiple brands and multiple products and so the number one sort of issue and problem that we were hearing was that it was too hard to get access to data and it's highly complicated which is not great from a company from our perspective really because because we are a data company right that's what we do we we collect data about people what they what's important to them what they value and the environment in which they live so that we can understand that risk and better manage and protect those people so what we're doing is we're trying to make and what we have been doing is making data more open and accessible and and by that I mean making data more of easily available for people to use it to make decisions in their day-to-day activity and to do that what we've done is built a single data platform across the group that unifies the data into a single source of truth that we can then build on top of that single views of customers for example that puts the right information into the into the hands of the people that need it the most and so now why does open source play such a big part in doing that I know there are a lot of different solutions that could get you there sure well firstly I think I've been sauce has been k2 these and really it's been key because we've basically started started from scratch to build this this new next-generation data platform based on entirely open-source you know using great components like Kafka and Postgres and airflow and and and and and then fundamentally building on top of red Red Hat OpenStack right to power all that and they give us the flexibility that we need to be able to make things happen much faster for example we were just talking to the pivotal guys earlier this week here and some of the stuff that we're doing they're they're things quite interesting innovative writes even sort of maybe first in the world where we've taken the older sort of appliance and dedicated sort of massive parallel processing unit and ported that over onto red Red Hat OpenStack right which is now giving us a lot more flexibility for scale in a much more efficient way but you're right though that we've come from in the past a more traditional approach to to using vendor based technology right which was good back then when you know technology solutions could last for around 10 years or so on and and that was fine but now that we need to move much faster we've had to rethink that and and so our focus has been on using you know more commoditized open source technology built by communities to give us that adaptability and sort of remove the locking in there any entrenchment of technology so that's really helped us but but I think that the last point that's been really critical to us is is answering that that concern and question about ongoing support and maintenance right so you know in a regular environment the regulator is really concerned about anything that could fundamentally impact business operation and and so the question is always about what happens when something goes wrong who's going to be there to support you which is where the value of the the partnership we have with Red Hat has really come into its own right and what what it's done is is it's actually giving us the best of both worlds a means that we can we can leverage and use and and and you know take some of the technology that's being developed by great communities in the open source way but also partner with a trusted partner in red had to say you know they're going to stand behind that community and provide that support when we needed the most so that's been the kind of the real value out of that partnership okay well I appreciate I love the story it's how do you move quickly leverage the power community but do it in a safe secure way and I love the idea of your literally empowering people with machine learning and AI at the moment when they need it it's just an incredible story so thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] you know again you see in these the the importance of enabling people with data and in an old-world was so much data was created with a system in mind versus data is a separate asset that needs to be available real time to anyone is a theme we hear over and over and over again and so you know really looking at open source solutions that allow that flexibility and keep data from getting locked into proprietary silos you know is a theme that we've I've heard over and over over the past year with many of our customers so I love logistics I'm a geek that way I come from that background in the past and I know that running large complex operations requires flawless execution and that requires great data and we have two great examples today around how to engage own organizations in new and more effective ways in the case of lufthansa technik literally IT became the business so it wasn't enabling the business it became the business offering and importantly went from idea to delivery to customers in a hundred days and so this theme of speed and the importance of speed it's a it's a great story you'll hear more about and then also at UPS UPS again I talked a little earlier about IT used to be kind of the long pole in the tent the thing that was slow moving because of the technology but UPS is showing that IT can actually drive the business and the cadence of business even faster by demonstrating the power and potential of technology to engage in this case hundreds of thousands of people to make decisions real-time in the face of obviously constant change around weather mechanicals and all the different things that can happen in a large logistics operation like that so I'd like to welcome on stage to be us more from Lufthansa Technik and Nick Castillo from ups to be us welcome thank you for being here Nick thank you thank you Jim and congratulations on your Innovation Awards oh thank you it's a great honor so to be us let's start with you can you tell us a little bit more about what a viet are is yeah avatars are a digital platform offering features like aircraft condition analytics reliability management and predictive maintenance and it helps airlines worldwide to digitize and improve their operations so all of the features work and can be used separately or generate even more where you burn combined and finally we decided to set up a viet as an open platform that means that we avoid the whole aviation industry to join the community and develop ideas on our platform and to be as one of things i found really fascinating about this is that you had a mandate to do this at a hundred days and you ultimately delivered on it you tell us a little bit about that i mean nothing in aviation moves that fast yeah that's been a big challenge so in the beginning of our story the Lufthansa bot asked us to develop somehow digital to win of an aircraft within just hundred days and to deliver something of value within 100 days means you cannot spend much time and producing specifications in terms of paper etc so for us it was pretty clear that we should go for an angel approach and immediately start and developing ideas so we put the best experts we know just in one room and let them start to work and on day 2 I think we already had the first scribbles for the UI on day 5 we wrote the first lines of code and we were able to do that because it has been a major advantage for us to already have four technologies taken place it's based on open source and especially rated solutions because we did not have to waste any time setting up the infrastructure and since we wanted to get feedback very fast we were certainly visited an airline from the Lufthansa group already on day 30 and showed them the first results and got a lot of feedback and because from the very beginning customer centricity has been an important aspect for us and changing the direction based on customer feedback has become quite normal for us over time yeah it's an interesting story not only engaging the people internally but be able to engage with a with that with a launch customer like that and get feedback along the way as it's great thing how is it going overall since launch yeah since the launch last year in April we generated much interest in the industry as well from Airlines as from competitors and in the following month we focused on a few Airlines which had been open minded and already advanced in digital activities and we've got a lot of feedback by working with them and we're able to improve our products by developing new features for example we learned that data integration can become quite complex in the industry and therefore we developed a new feature called quick boarding allowing Airlines to integrate into the via table platform within one day using a self-service so and currently we're heading for the next steps beyond predictive maintenance working on process automation and prescriptive prescriptive maintenance because we believe prediction without fulfillment still isn't enough it really is a great example of even once you're out there quickly continuing to innovate change react it's great to see so Nick I mean we all know ups I'm still always blown away by the size and scale of the company and the logistics operations that you run you tell us a little more about the project and what we're doing together yeah sure Jim and you know first of all I think I didn't get the sportcoat memo I think I'm the first one up here today with a sport coat but you know first on you know on behalf of the 430,000 ups was around the world and our just world-class talented team of 5,000 IT professionals I have to tell you we're humbled to be one of this year's red hat Innovation Award recipients so we really appreciate that you know as a global logistics provider we deliver about 20 million packages each day and we've got a portfolio of technologies both operational and customer tech and another customer facing side the power what we call the UPS smart logistics network and I gotta tell you innovations in our DNA technology is at the core of everything we do you know from the ever familiar first and industry mobile platform that a lot of you see when you get delivered a package which we call the diad which believe it or not we delivered in 1992 my choice a data-driven solution that drives over 40 million of our my choice customers I'm whatever you know what this is great he loves logistics he's a my choice customer you could be one too by the way there's a free app in the App Store but it provides unmatched visibility and really controls that last mile delivery experience so now today we're gonna talk about the solution that we're recognized for which is called site which is part of a much greater platform that we call edge which is transforming how our package delivery teams operate providing them real-time insights into our operations you know this allows them to make decisions based on data from 32 disparate data sources and these insights help us to optimize our operations but more importantly they help us improve the delivery experience for our customers just like you Jim you know on the on the back end is Big Data and it's on a large scale our systems are crunching billions of events to render those insights on an easy-to-use mobile platform in real time I got to tell you placing that information in our operators hands makes ups agile and being agile being able to react to changing conditions as you know is the name of the game in logistics now we built edge in our private cloud where Red Hat technologies play a very important role as part of our overage overarching cloud strategy and our migration to agile and DevOps so it's it's amazing it's amazing the size and scale so so you have this technology vision around engaging people in a more effect way those are my word not yours but but I'd be at that's how it certainly feels and so tell us a little more about how that enables the hundreds of thousands people to make better decisions every day yep so you know we're a people company and the edge platform is really the latest in a series of solutions to really empower our people and really power that smart logistics network you know we've been deploying technology believe it or not since we founded the company in 1907 we'll be a hundred and eleven years old this August it's just a phenomenal story now prior to edge and specifically the syphon ishutin firm ation from a number of disparate systems and reports they then need to manually look across these various data sources and and frankly it was inefficient and prone to inaccuracy and it wasn't really real-time at all now edge consumes data as I mentioned earlier from 32 disparate systems it allows our operators to make decisions on staffing equipment the flow of packages through the buildings in real time the ability to give our people on the ground the most up-to-date data allows them to make informed decisions now that's incredibly empowering because not only are they influencing their local operations but frankly they're influencing the entire global network it's truly extraordinary and so why open source and open shift in particular as part of that solution yeah you know so as I mentioned Red Hat and Red Hat technology you know specifically open shift there's really core to our cloud strategy and to our DevOps strategy the tools and environments that we've partnered with Red Hat to put in place truly are foundational and they've fundamentally changed the way we develop and deploy our systems you know I heard Jose talk earlier you know we had complex solutions that used to take 12 to 18 months to develop and deliver to market today we deliver those same solutions same level of complexity in months and even weeks now openshift enables us to container raise our workloads that run in our private cloud during normal operating periods but as we scale our business during our holiday peak season which is a very sure window about five weeks during the year last year as a matter of fact we delivered seven hundred and sixty-two million packages in that small window and our transactions our systems they just spiked dramatically during that period we think that having open shift will allow us in those peak periods to seamlessly move workloads to the public cloud so we can take advantage of burst capacity economically when needed and I have to tell you having this flexibility I think is key because you know ultimately it's going to allow us to react quickly to customer demands when needed dial back capacity when we don't need that capacity and I have to say it's a really great story of UPS and red hat working you together it really is a great story is just amazing again the size and scope but both stories here a lot speed speed speed getting to market quickly being able to try things it's great lessons learned for all of us the importance of being able to operate at a fundamentally different clock speed so thank you all for being here very much appreciated congratulate thank you [Applause] [Music] alright so while it's great to hear from our Innovation Award winners and it should be no surprise that they're leading and experimenting in some really interesting areas its scale so I hope that you got a chance to learn something from these interviews you'll have an opportunity to learn more about them you'll also have an opportunity to vote on the innovator of the year you can do that on the Red Hat summit mobile app or on the Red Hat Innovation Awards homepage you can learn even more about their stories and you'll have a chance to vote and I'll be back tomorrow to announce the the summit winner so next I like to spend a few minutes on talking about how Red Hat is working to catalyze our customers efforts Marko bill Peter our senior vice president of customer experience and engagement and John Alessio our vice president of global services will both describe areas in how we are working to configure our own organization to effectively engage with our customers to use open source to help drive their success so with that I'd like to welcome marquel on stage [Music] good morning good morning thank you Jim so I want to spend a few minutes to talk about how we are configured how we are configured towards your success how we enable internally as well to work towards your success and actually engage as well you know Paul yesterday talked about the open source culture and our open source development net model you know there's a lot of attributes that we have like transparency meritocracy collaboration those are the key of our culture they made RedHat what it is today and what it will be in the future but we also added our passion for customer success to that let me tell you this is kind of the configuration from a cultural perspective let me tell you a little bit on what that means so if you heard the name my organization is customer experience and engagement right in the past we talked a lot about support it's an important part of the Red Hat right and how we are configured we are configured probably very uniquely in the industry we put support together we have product security in there we add a documentation we add a quality engineering into an organization you think there's like wow why are they doing it we're also running actually the IT team for actually the product teams why are we doing that now you can imagine right we want to go through what you see as well right and I'll give you a few examples on how what's coming out of this configuration we invest more and more in testing integration and use cases which you are applying so you can see it between the support team experiencing a lot what you do and actually changing our test structure that makes a lot of sense we are investing more and more testing outside the boundaries so not exactly how things must fall by product management or engineering but also how does it really run in an environment that you operate we run complex setups internally right taking openshift putting in OpenStack using software-defined storage underneath managing it with cloud forms managing it if inside we do that we want to see how that works right we are reshaping documentation console to kind of help you better instead of just documenting features and knobs as in how can how do you want to achieve things now part of this is the configuration that are the big part of the configuration is the voice of the customer to listen to what you say I've been here at Red Hat a few years and one of my passion has always been really hearing from customers how they do it I travel constantly in the world and meet with customers because I want to know what is really going on we use channels like support we use channels like getting from salespeople the interaction from customers we do surveys we do you know we interact with our people to really hear what you do what we also do what maybe not many know and it's also very unique in the industry we have a webpage called you asked reacted we show very transparently you told us this is an area for improvement and it's not just in support it's across the company right build us a better web store build us this we're very transparent about Hades improvements we want to do with you now if you want to be part of the process today go to the feedback zone on the next floor down and talk to my team I might be there as well hit me up we want to hear the feedback this is how we talk about configuration of the organization how we are configured let me go to let me go to another part which is innovation innovation every day and that in my opinion the enable section right we gotta constantly innovate ourselves how do we work with you how do we actually provide better value how do we provide faster responses in support this is what we would I say is is our you know commitment to innovation which is the enabling that Jim talked about and I give you a few examples which I'm really happy and it kind of shows the open source culture at Red Hat our commitment is for innovation I'll give you good example right if you have a few thousand engineers and you empower them you kind of set the business framework as hey this is an area we got to do something you get a lot of good IDs you get a lot of IDs and you got a shape an inter an area that hey this is really something that brings now a few years ago we kind of said or I say is like based on a lot of feedback is we got to get more and more proactive if you customers and so I shaped my team and and I shaped it around how can we be more proactive it started very simple as in like from kbase articles or knowledgebase articles in getting started guys then we started a a tool that we put out called labs you've probably seen them if you're on the technical side really taking small applications out for you to kind of validate is this configured correctly stat configure there was the start then out of that the ideas came and they took different turns and one of the turns that we came out was right at insights that we launched a few years ago and did you see the demo yesterday that in Paul's keynote that they showed how something was broken with one the data centers how it was applied to fix and how has changed this is how innovation really came from the ground up from the support side and turned into something really a being a cornerstone of our strategy and we're keeping it married from the day to day work right you don't want to separate this you want to actually keep that the data that's coming from the support goes in that because that's the power that we saw yesterday in the demo now innovation doesn't stop when you set the challenge so we did the labs we did the insights we just launched a solution engine called solution engine another thing that came out of that challenge is in how do we break complex issues down that it's easier for you to find a solution quicker it's one example but we're also experimenting with AI so insights uses AI as you probably heard yesterday we also use it internally to actually drive faster resolution we did in one case with a a our I bought basically that we get to 25% faster resolution on challenges that you have the beauty for you obviously it's well this is much faster 10% of all our support cases today are supported and assisted by an AI now I'll give you another example of just trying to tell you the innovation that comes out if you configure and enable the team correctly kbase articles are knowledgebase articles we q8 thousands and thousands every year and then I get feedback as and while they're good but they're in English as you can tell my English is perfect so it's not no issue for that but for many of you is maybe like even here even I read it in Japanese so we actually did machine translation because it's too many that we can do manually the using machine translation I can tell it's a funny example two weeks ago I tried it I tried something from English to German I looked at it the German looked really bad I went back but the English was bad so it really translates one to one actually what it does but it's really cool this is innovation that you can apply and the team actually worked on this and really proud on that now the real innovation there is not these tools the real innovation is that you can actually shape it in a way that the innovation comes that you empower the people that's the configure and enable and what I think is all it's important this don't reinvent the plumbing don't start from scratch use systems like containers on open shift to actually build the innovation in a smaller way without reinventing the plumbing you save a lot of issues on security a lot of issues on reinventing the wheel focus on that that's what we do as well if you want to hear more details again go in the second floor now let's talk about the engage that Jim mentioned before what I translate that engage is actually engaging you as a customer towards your success now what does commitment to success really mean and I want to reflect on that on a traditional IT company shows up with you talk the salesperson solution architect works with you consulting implements solution it comes over to support and trust me in a very traditional way the support guy has no clue what actually was sold early on it's what happens right and this is actually I think that red had better that we're not so silent we don't show our internal silos or internal organization that much today we engage in a way it doesn't matter from which team it comes we have a better flow than that you deserve how the sausage is made but we can never forget what was your business objective early on now how is Red Hat different in this and we are very strong in my opinion you might disagree but we are very strong in a virtual accounting right really putting you in the middle and actually having a solution architect work directly with support or consulting involved and driving that together you can also help us in actually really embracing that model if that's also other partners or system integrators integrate put yourself in the middle be around that's how we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the original business problem trust me reducing the hierarchy or getting rid of hierarchy and bureaucracy goes a long way now this is how we configured this is how we engage and this is how we are committed to your success with that I'm going to introduce you to John Alessio that talks more about some of the innovation done with customers thank you [Music] good morning I'm John Alessio I'm the vice president of Global Services and I'm delighted to be with you here today I'd like to talk to you about a couple of things as it relates to what we've been doing since the last summit in the services organization at the core of everything we did it's very similar to what Marco talked to you about our number one priority is driving our customer success with red hat technology and as you see here on the screen we have a number of different offerings and capabilities all the way from training certification open innovation labs consulting really pairing those capabilities together with what you just heard from Marco in the support or cee organization really that's the journey you all go through from the beginning of discovering what your business challenge is all the way through designing those solutions and deploying them with red hat now the highlight like to highlight a few things of what we've been up to over the last year so if I start with the training and certification team they've been very busy over the last year really updating enhancing our curriculum if you haven't stopped by the booth there's a preview for new capability around our learning community which is a new way of learning and really driving that enable meant in the community because 70% of what you need to know you learned from your peers and so it's a very key part of our learning strategy and in fact we take customer satisfaction with our training and certification business very seriously we survey all of our students coming out of training 93% of our students tell us they're better prepared because of red hat training and certification after Weeds they've completed the course we've updated the courses and we've trained well over a hundred and fifty thousand people over the last two years so it's a very very key part of our strategy and that combined with innovation labs and the consulting operation really drive that overall journey now we've been equally busy in enhancing the system of enablement and support for our business partners another very very key initiative is building out the ecosystem we've enhanced our open platform which is online partner enablement network we've added new capability and in fact much of the training and enablement that we do for our internal consultants our deal is delivered through the open platform now what I'm really impressed with and thankful for our partners is how they are consuming and leveraging this material we train and enable for sales for pre-sales and for delivery and we're up over 70% year in year in our partners that are enabled on RedHat technology let's give our business partners a round of applause now one of our offerings Red Hat open innovation labs I'd like to talk a bit more about and take you through a case study open innovation labs was created two years ago it's really there to help you on your journey in adopting open source technology it's an immersive experience where your team will work side-by-side with Red Hatters to really propel your journey forward in adopting open source technology and in fact we've been very busy since the summit in Boston as you'll see coming up on the screen we've completed dozens of engagements leveraging our methods tools and processes for open innovation labs as you can see we've worked with large and small accounts in fact if you remember summit last year we had a European customer easier AG on stage which was a startup and we worked with them at the very beginning of their business to create capabilities in a very short four-week engagement but over the last year we've also worked with very large customers such as Optim and Delta Airlines here in North America as well as Motability operations in the European arena one of the accounts I want to spend a little bit more time on is Heritage Bank heritage Bank is a community owned bank in Toowoomba Australia their challenge was not just on creating new innovative technology but their challenge was also around cultural transformation how to get people to work together across the silos within their organization we worked with them at all levels of the organization to create a new capability the first engagement went so well that they asked us to come in into a second engagement so I'd like to do now is run a video with Peter lock the chief executive officer of Heritage Bank so he can take you through their experience Heritage Bank is one of the country's oldest financial institutions we have to be smarter we have to be more innovative we have to be more agile we had to change we had to find people to help us make that change the Red Hat lab is the only one that truly helps drive that change with a business problem the change within the team is very visible from the start to now we've gone from being separated to very single goal minded seeing people that I only ever seen before in their cubicles in the room made me smile programmers in their thinking I'm now understanding how the whole process fits together the productivity of IT will change and that is good for our business that's really the value that were looking for the Red Hat innovation labs for us were a really great experience I'm not interested in running an organization I'm interested in making a great organization to say I was pleasantly surprised by it is an understatement I was delighted I love the quote I was delighted makes my heart warm every time I see that video you know since we were at summit for those of you who are with us in Boston some of you went on our hardhat tours we've opened three physical facilities here at Red Hat where we can conduct red head open Innovation Lab engagements Singapore London and Boston were all opened within the last physical year and in fact our site in Boston is paired with our world-class executive briefing center as well so if you haven't been there please do check it out I'd like to now talk to you a bit about a very special engagement that we just recently completed we just recently completed an engagement with UNICEF the United Nations Children's Fund and the the purpose behind this engagement was really to help UNICEF create an open-source platform that marries big data with social good the idea is UNICEF needs to be better prepared to respond to emergency situations and as you can imagine emergency situations are by nature unpredictable you can't really plan for them they can happen anytime anywhere and so we worked with them on a project that we called school mapping and the idea was to provide more insights so that when emergency situations arise UNICEF could do a much better job in helping the children in the region and so we leveraged our Red Hat open innovation lab methods tools processes that you've heard about just like we did at Heritage Bank and the other accounts I mentioned but then we also leveraged Red Hat software technologies so we leveraged OpenShift container platform we leveraged ansible automation we helped the client with a more agile development approach so they could have releases much more frequently and continue to update this over time we created a continuous integration continuous deployment pipeline we worked on containers and container in the application etc with that we've been able to provide a platform that is going to allow for their growth to better respond to these emergency situations let's watch a short video on UNICEF mission of UNICEF innovation is to apply technology to the world's most pressing problems facing children data is changing the landscape of what we do at UNICEF this means that we can figure out what's happening now on the ground who it's happening to and actually respond to it in much more of a real-time manner than we used to be able to do we love working with open source communities because of their commitment that we should be doing good for the world we're actually with red hat building a sandbox where universities or other researchers or data scientists can connect and help us with our work if you want to use data for social good there's so many groups out there that really need your help and there's so many ways to get involved [Music] so let's give a very very warm red hat summit welcome to Erica kochi co-founder of unicef innovation well Erica first of all welcome to Red Hat summit thanks for having me here it's our pleasure and thank you for joining us so Erica I've just talked a bit about kind of what we've been up to and Red Hat services over the last year we talked a bit about our open innovation labs and we did this project the school mapping project together our two teams and I thought the audience might find it interesting from your point of view on why the approach we use in innovation labs was such a good fit for the school mapping project yeah it was a great fit for for two reasons the first is values everything that we do at UNICEF innovation we use open source technology and that's for a couple of reasons because we can take it from one place and very easily move it to other countries around the world we work in 190 countries so that's really important for us not to be able to scale things also because it makes sense we can get we can get more communities involved in this and look not just try to do everything by ourselves but look much open much more openly towards the open source communities out there to help us with our work we can't do it alone yeah and then the second thing is methodology you know the labs are really looking at taking this agile approach to prototyping things trying things failing trying again and that's really necessary when you're developing something new and trying to do something new like mapping every school in the world yeah very challenging work think about it 190 countries Wow and so the open source platform really works well and then the the rapid prototyping was really a good fit so I think the audience might find it interesting on how this application and this platform will help children in Latin America so in a lot of countries in Latin America and many countries throughout the world that UNICEF works in are coming out of either decades of conflict or are are subject to natural disasters and not great infrastructure so it's really important to a for us to know where schools are where communities are well where help is needed what's connected what's not and using a overlay of various sources of data from poverty mapping to satellite imagery to other sources we can really figure out what's happening where resources are where they aren't and so we can plan better to respond to emergencies and to and to really invest in areas that are needed that need that investment excellent excellent it's quite powerful what we were able to do in a relatively short eight or nine week engagement that our two teams did together now many of your colleagues in the audience are using open source today looking to expand their use of open source and I thought you might have some recommendations for them on how they kind of go through that journey and expanding their use of open source since your experience at that yeah for us it was it was very much based on what's this gonna cost we have limited resources and what's how is this gonna spread as quickly as possible mm-hmm and so we really asked ourselves those two questions you know about 10 years ago and what we realized is if we are going to be recommending technologies that governments are going to be using it really needs to be open source they need to have control over it yeah and they need to be working with communities not developing it themselves yeah excellent excellent so I got really inspired with what we were doing here in this project it's one of those you know every customer project is really interesting to me this one kind of pulls a little bit at your heartstrings on what the real impact could be here and so I know some of our colleagues here in the audience may want to get involved how can they get involved well there's many ways to get involved with the other UNICEF or other groups out there you can search for our work on github and there are tasks that you can do right now if and if you're looking for to do she's got work for you and if you want sort of a more a longer engagement or a bigger engagement you can check out our website UNICEF stories org and you can look at the areas you might be interested in and contact us we're always open to collaboration excellent well Erica thank you for being with us here today thank you for the great project we worked on together and have a great summer thank you for being give her a round of applause all right well I hope that's been helpful to you to give you a bit of an update on what we've been focused on in global services the message I'll leave with you is our top priority is customer success as you heard through the story from UNICEF from Heritage Bank and others we can help you innovate where you are today I hope you have a great summit and I'll call out Jim Whitehurst thank you John and thank you Erica that's really an inspiring story we have so many great examples of how individuals and organizations are stepping up to transform in the face of digital disruption I'd like to spend my last few minutes with one real-world example that brings a lot of this together and truly with life-saving impact how many times do you think you can solve a problem which is going to allow a clinician to now save the life I think the challenge all of his physicians are dealing with is data overload I probably look at over 100,000 images in a day and that's just gonna get worse what if it was possible for some computer program to look at these images with them and automatically flag images that might deserve better attention Chris on the surface seems pretty simple but underneath Chris has a lot going on in the past year I've seen Chris Foreman community and a space usually dominated by proprietary software I think Chris can change medicine as we know it today [Music] all right with that I'd like to invite on stage dr. Ellen grant from Boston Children's Hospital dr. grant welcome thank you for being here so dr. grant tell me who is Chris Chris does a lot of work for us and I think Chris is making me or has definitely the potential to make me a better doctor Chris helps us take data from our archives in the hospital and port it to wrap the fastback ends like the mass up and cloud to do rapid data processing and provide it back to me in any format on a desktop an iPad or an iPhone so it it basically brings high-end data analysis right to me at the bedside and that's been a barrier that I struggled with years ago to try to break down so that's where we started with Chris is to to break that barrier between research that occurred on a timeline of days to weeks to months to clinical practice which occurs in the timeline of seconds to minutes well one of things I found really fascinating about this story RedHat in case you can't tell we're really passionate about user driven innovation is this is an example of user driven innovation not directly at a technology company but in medicine excuse me can you tell us just a little bit about the genesis of Chris and how I got started yeah Chris got started when I was running a clinical division and I was very frustrated with not having the latest image analysis tools at my fingertips while I was on clinical practice and I would have to on the research so I could go over and you know do line code and do the data analysis but if I'm always over in clinical I kept forgetting how to do those things and I wanted to have all those innovations that my fingertips and not have to remember all the computer science because I'm a physician not like a better scientist so I wanted to build a platform that gave me easy access to that back-end without having to remember all the details and so that's what Chris does for us is brings allowed me to go into the PAC's grab a dataset send it to a computer and back in to do the analysis and bring it back to me without having to worry about where it was or how it got there that's all involved in the in the platform Chris and why not just go to a vendor and ask them to write a piece of software for you to do that yeah we thought about that and we do a lot of technical innovations and we always work with the experts so we wanted to work with if I'm going to be able to say an optical device I'm going to work with the optical engineers or an EM our system I'm going to work with em our engineers so we wanted to work with people who really knew or the plumbers so to speak of the software in industry so we ended up working with the massive point cloud for the platform and the distributed systems in Red Hat as the infrastructure that's starting to support Chris and that's been actually a really incredible journey for us because medical ready medical softwares not typically been a community process and that's something that working with dan from Red Hat we learned a lot about how to participate in an open community and I think our team has grown a lot as a result of that collaboration and I know you we've talked about in the past that getting this data locked into a proprietary system you may not be able to get out there's a real issue can you talk about the importance of open and how that's worked in the process yeah and I think for the medical community and I find this resonates with other physicians as well too is that it's medical data we want to continue to own and we feel very awkward about giving it to industry so we would rather have our data sitting in an open cloud like the mass open cloud where we can have a data consortium that oversees the data governance so that we're not giving our data way to somebody else but have a platform that we can still keep a control of our own data and I think it's going to be the future because we're running of a space in the hospital we generate so much data and it's just going to get worse as I was mentioning and all the systems run faster we get new devices so the amount of data that we have to filter through is just astronomically increasing so we need to have resources to store and compute on such large databases and so thinking about where this could go I mean this is a classic feels like an open-source project it started really really small with a originally modest set of goals and it's just kind of continue to grow and grow and grow it's a lot like if yes leanest torval Linux would be in 1995 you probably wouldn't think it would be where it is now so if you dream with me a little bit where do you think this could possibly go in the next five years ten years what I hope it'll do is allow us to break down the silos within the hospital because to do the best job at what we physicians do not only do we have to talk and collaborate together as individuals we have to take the data each each community develops and be able to bring it together so in other words I need to be able to bring in information from vital monitors from mr scans from optical devices from genetic tests electronic health record and be able to analyze on all that data combined so ideally this would be a platform that breaks down those information barriers in a hospital and also allows us to collaborate across multiple institutions because many disorders you only see a few in each hospital so we really have to work as teams in the medical community to combine our data together and also I'm hoping that and we even have discussions with people in the developing world because they have systems to generate or to got to create data or say for example an M R system they can't create data but they don't have the resources to analyze on it so this would be a portable for them to participate in this growing data analysis world without having to have the infrastructure there and be a portal into our back-end and we could provide the infrastructure to do the data analysis it really is truly amazing to see how it's just continued to grow and grow and expand it really is it's a phenomenal story thank you so much for being here appreciate it thank you [Applause] I really do love that story it's a great example of user driven innovation you know in a different industry than in technology and you know recognizing that a clinicians need for real-time information is very different than a researchers need you know in projects that can last weeks and months and so rather than trying to get an industry to pivot and change it's a great opportunity to use a user driven approach to directly meet those needs so we still have a long way to go we have two more days of the summit and as I said yesterday you know we're not here to give you all the answers we're here to convene the conversation so I hope you will have an opportunity today and tomorrow to meet some new people to share some ideas we're really really excited about what we can all do when we work together so I hope you found today valuable we still have a lot more happening on the main stage as well this afternoon please join us back for the general session it's a really amazing lineup you'll hear from the women and opensource Award winners you'll also hear more about our collab program which is really cool it's getting middle school girls interested in open sourcing coding and so you'll have an opportunity to see some people involved in that you'll also hear from the open source Story speakers and you'll including in that you will see a demo done by a technologist who happens to be 11 years old so really cool you don't want to miss that so I look forward to seeing you then this afternoon thank you [Applause]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE. Covering .NExT's conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Keith Townsend, and this is Nutanix .NEXT conference in New Orleans. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Vijay Luthra, who's the Senior Vice President, global head of technology infrastructure services at Northern Trust. Vijay, great note on the keynote this morning. A lot of cool technologies that you're digging into, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> All right, so luckily it's easy, Northern Trust, understand finance, but tell us a little bit about you know, your organization and kind of give us a high level, what are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing? >> Yep, yep, absolutely. So again, Northern Trust, a global financial services firm, primarily in the asset servicing, asset management, wealth management business. Again, 128 year history, built on some very sound principles around service, integrity, and expertise. Some of the challenges we're facing is around growth. The firm is growing. Revenues are growing at a very, very healthy pace, especially when you compare that to our peers and competitors. And the challenge, number one, is how do we scale the business while managing the overall operating expenses, right? So we want to create some leverage in the business and we want the growth to be healthy growth. So that's challenge number one, and we recently, our CEO recently launched a value for spend program where we grow let's make sure we're spending and we're getting the value for the spend. >> Yeah, Vijay, can you just sketch out for us, you talk about growth and scale. You know, how many locations, how many users, they're emanating that you have to like wrap into this stuff? >> Yeah absolutely, so Northern Trust, about 18,200 employees, I would say 50, 60 plus locations. I would say well distributed across the different regions between US, Asia PAC, and EMEA. Yeah, at high level those are kind of the how we're kind of geographically dispersed. >> Okay great, and cloud. What does that mean to your organization? How does that fit in your role and across the company? >> So cloud, we've been on the cloud journey for several years now. We had a very mature virtualization strategy, which transitioned well into our private cloud strategy. We have enough scale internally where we said if we built an efficient private cloud, which by the way, if you heard on the keynote, was built 100% on converged, hyperconverged technologies. We were actually in the forefront when we adopted these technologies back in 2013, 2014. The goal back then was how do we get efficiencies and scale from the private cloud by leveraging automation, you know converged stacks are highly reliable because, for example, the patching is a lot more well tested by the vendors. So on our journey to the cloud that was essentially the first phase, when we transitioned from virtualization to private clouds, and since then we've actually built more value added layers on top of that. Because the goal is not just to cater to traditional applications that leverage infrastructure as a service, but also to cater to some of the more contemporary cloud native applications that we're building or even some of the containerized workloads. So we've built on top of that with PaaS and KaaS and software-defined components like SDN, and we are closely measuring the outcomes and the benefits. >> So Vijay, let's talk a little bit about that initial investment and decision. Northern Trust, well known for being conservative amongst the most conservative of investment firms. I'm from Chicago so I have an affinity for Northern Trust in general. Back in 2013 there was not as simple to look back it's simple to look back now and say oh yeah, right choice. Easy decision. But 2013 OpenStack was, you know, all the rave, building clouds based on these open source and available technologies was kind of the way to go. What made you guys take a look at hyperconverged and say, you know what, we're going to buck the trend and we're going to go with hyperconverged. Not many of your peers made that choice. >> Yes, that's a great question. So at Northern Trust we are heavily focused on outcome-based investment decisions. So within technology infrastructure our mission is pretty straightforward, which is as we scale infrastructure, how do we continue to reduce total cost of ownership, improve time to market, improve client experience, which is a very essential part of our decision-making process, and while we're doing that, not to lose site of reliability, stability, security. So with that kind of as our guiding principles, as we make major investments we take them through these lenders, and Nutanix hit all of them. So it was fairly straightforward. And again, some of the benefits, as you probably heard on stage, were phenomenal. We were able to increase capacity without increasing staff. We were able to reduce some of our automation, sorry bill teams, significantly. Reliability, stability improved drastically. For example, our virtual desktop infrastructure, the number of incidents, client generated incidents, internal client generated incidents, went down by 80, 90%. So again, to answer your question, outcome driven, have key metrics and measures on what you expect the outcomes to be, and then partner with the right firms to make sure you get the outcomes. >> So as we look at the next phase, you know, infrastructure's a service, you guys seem to have that down, mature virtualization practice, you lay it on top of that infrastructures and service. Now we look into the next phase, KaaS, PaaS type solutions. What are some of the major decision points and what's guiding your decisions? >> So clearly on everybody, all head of infrastructures or any organizations' mind today is how do we build a hybrid cloud strategy that is safe, secure, does not lock you into a specific vendor. It's the right application, the right type of workload, and that's where we're focused on now. We've got a few applications. Nothing that's production client centric is in a public cloud from an IaaS perspective. But we think we've invested in the right components to allow us to now orchestrate safely and securely across multi clouds. So that's what we're focused on now. >> Can you talk a little bit more about containerization? What's the experience like been working with Nutanix for those type of solutions? >> Yeah, so we were early adapters of containers with partnering with Docker built on the Nutanix platform. We've been working with them since the last couple years, and more recently since they announced the Kubernetes integration, we are factoring that into the Docker environment. The goal with containerization is, again, back to kind of those guiding principles, right? Lower costs of ownership, improved time to market, reliability, stability, we see an opportunity to consolidate Linux Windows based workloads because of the efficiencies that containers bring, as well as extend devops like functionality to app teams that might not be looking to refactor in a cloud native PaaS like format. They could take advantage of containers to get a devops like experience. We're enhancing security as we move to containers. There are several things we're doing there. So point being, we're looking at it through kind of the same lenses. >> So you threw out a couple things. I heard devops in there. In your keynote one of the things that you talked about a team going from 45 people (mumbles) to something to 12. Maybe explain a little bit about ops in your company, what happened to all those other 33 people. >> Okay quick questions, two parts. On the infrastructure as a service side, a few years ago we had a build team, mostly contractor driven, where we would use them to build servers, deploy applications, extremely manual. With converged technologies and all the automation that we had deployed, that team is down to 14, 15 people. Because a lot of the work has gone away, and our goal is to continue to fine tune that. So that's infrastructure as a service. Devops wise what we did was we carved out a team of four or five of what Gartner calls versatilists, multiskilled, multidisciplinary resources, senior engineers that focused on building out our devops practice on top of our platform as a service, and that has gone extremely well. You know the team has very successfully onboarded hundreds of microservices as we rearchitect some of our applications. So Vijay, talk us about the decision and the capability of being able to take monolithic applications, that are not going to be refactored and going to containers, there's a lot of debate on whether or not that's worth the trouble. But beyond that debate, talk to us about the importance and the reliance on the capability that Nutanix will be bringing in with ACS 2.0, are you guys looking to deploy that or are you looking to manage Kubernetes and that capability of managing these traditional applications inside of Kubernetes? >> Yeah, so we're a few steps ahead of Nutanix. In one of my conversations with Sunil I was saying man I wish this feature was available six months ago. So we are watching that development very closely. We are very interested in it. But because we have an existing Docker footprint, that's what we're leveraging for Kubernetes for now. >> Great, can you speak about Nutanix, the relationship you have with them, and their ecosystem. Things like secondary storage, you know how do you look at Nutanix as a partner and what do you see the maturity of their ecosystem? Any solutions you'd want to highlight there? >> Yeah, I mean, clearly what Nutanix did to the primary storage market, there's an emerging market on the secondary storage side, and we're working with a couple different companies to help us in that space. But just the Nutanix ecosystem itself, just because we are a few steps ahead and we've got some Nutanix components, we've got some third party components as part of Nutanix, I think the fact that Nutanix is becoming a one-stop shop as you can see with some of the announcements today, from a total cost of ownership perspective it becomes very interesting for someone like myself to say if I took out a few vendors or focused on the Nutanix stack, what does that mean? At what point is it usable? When can we start migrating, and those are the types of things we're going to focus on now. >> So have you gotten into a situation, especially considering that you're at least six months or so ahead of Nutanix when it comes to container orchestration, has the infrastructure gotten in your way at all? Have they done anything, because Nutanix can be opinionated in how they manage infrastructure. As that opinionation, has that opinion rather, gotten in your way as you look to go down your KaaS route? >> No, so far I would say no. I think a lot of their tooling is very intuitive, very easy to use. The engineers, with very minimal training, in fact, some of our engineers that retrained themselves on Nutanix happened over such a small duration and had to do with how simple to use Nutanix stack was. >> One of the lines I love from your presentation, you said you run IP as a business. What advice do you give to your peers out there, learnings you've had, staying a little bit ahead of some of the general marketplace. >> Yeah, I think the key is, back to kind of my initial comment, how do you build scale with an infrastructure? Meaning, how do you take on more workloads, new technologies, while managing your operating expenses tightly? We have essentially done that extremely well over the last few years where we have added to capacity, absorbed a lot of growth, introduced a lot of new technologies while keeping a very close eye on operating expenses. So I would say, if anything, when you run IT as a business, you take into account not just all the net adds, you have a program to consider optimizations. For example, we use a technology that helps us reduce physical VMWare based footprint. It helps us optimize and says here's where you have some debt capacity. You, as leaders and somebody in my position, should be willing and able to take out costs as well while taking on new technologies, I would say that's the key. So you're saying you guys are running IT as a business. What have been some of the KPIs and showing success in that transformation? >> Okay, we closely watch our operating expenses and we measure that as a percentage of total company operating expenses, what percentage are we of that? We closely watch time to market. How soon are we providing environments to ab dev teams. We closely watch stability off the underlying platforms, op time of those platforms. So I think those have direct impact on our internal clients as well as end clients. And then as a business, who are your competitors? >> As Northern Trust? >> No as you run IT as a business? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I would say cloud providers are competitors. But to be honest I shouldn't say that. I mean in a new model I want the team to think about cloud as just another endpoint, and we need to be able to safely and securely deploy the right app in the right cloud kind of the end state that we want to be in. So I wouldn't say they're competitors. I think we as a firm, or any firm should get comfortable with being able to orchestrate and move the right workloads in the right data centers to say. >> All right, Vijay, want to give you the final word. You're out there looking at some of the new technologies. What's exciting you, what's on your wishlist from the vendor community, maybe you can share. Personally I'm very excited about AI in ops. I know people talk about AI in financial services and the other industries. But I think the application of machine learning and AI within data center operations is relevant. And there's many things we're doing in that space in terms of a client facing chatbot that integrates with Link. Or certain add-ons onto Splunk that help you with machine learning and analyzing logs. Or bots that help you classify tickets and put them in the right cues at the right time. So we're looking at how to take advantage of those. Again, to build scale, to lower cost ownership, improve experience, etc., etc., so again, I think that's something I'm personally very, very excited about. >> All right, well Vijay Luthra, really appreciate sharing your story. Great success and look forward to catching up with you-- >> All right thank you. >> In the future. For Keith Townsend I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from New Orleans Convention Center .NEXT, Nutanix's conference 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, break it all down. Stu, this is our ninth year at Dell, EMC, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies World. >> Yeah, I mean Dave, and Old EMC World was one of the first places I met you. I think it was like 2008 or something like that. There was like a little blogger lounge. >> Yeah, this is 15 for you, I think it's 11 or 12 for me. >> Stu: Yeah. >> So it's been quite a run. I mean you remember the early days of this event. It was really a technical show. And I think that's probably why it's had such staying power. Because the roots are embedded in technology, but wow what a long way we've come. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, Dave, theCUBE, oh my god, I can't believe, double set here. We were looking at photos of us shoved in the corner with horrible lighting and no good cameras, and we've got a massive crew here. You're always looking sharp as usual, Dave. >> Thank you Stu. (laughing) >> Yeah, I mean gosh, that first year, I was wearing a vendor polo. (laughing) No hoodies back then. I wear a hoodie some now. But it's interesting for me, especially, since I spent 10 years working at EMC. I've been at Dell World for four or five years, kind of the mash up of those two is the biggest tech merger we've been covering since it was announced. This show has a lot of Dell overtones. So you and I have been that, Dell World was originally that CIO event. You had people like Bill Clinton and Elon Musk up onstage here. At this show we've got people like Walter Isaacson up onstage, I love reading his books, listen to the podcast. >> Dave: Andy McAfee. >> Andy McAfee, who you and I have interviewed a few times, talking about the second machine age, so some of those kind of high-level business issues as opposed to the deep in the portfolio, Dave Donatelli upstage walking through 37 different product announcements. >> So back then did you have hair or was this... >> Yeah, come on Dave, I was, when I started at EMC I was 7 foot tall and had hair. You know, the years of tech beat me down. >> So let's look at this merger, Stu. We go back, we've said, you and I have talked about this a lot. It was inevitable. You had Amazon coming in hard, driving margins of the enterprise down. Something had to happen to HPE, something had to happen to EMC, these infrastructure companies, and we said at the time that what we were going to see is 19% gross margin company married to the 16% gross margins company, come somewhere together in the low 30s gross margin. That's exactly what we've seen. The thing that's a little bit surprising to me is we've seen growth out of Dell. I've seen a lot of growth out of many enterprise infrastructure companies that are large and incumbents. Obviously people like Pure Storage grow very quickly. But at the time the merger we pinned them at slow 70s and they're now $80 billion, and we want to break that down a little bit. But did the growth surprise you? Particularly the client side grew. And the storage side declined multiplicitously. >> Dave, as you've been breaking down and I've been watching you, half of their business is the client side, and when they call out 21 consecutive quarters of growth, well if half the business has grown, that's good. And VMWare, doing well. We just interviewed Pac Elsinger. You know, VMWare's clicking well, integrating with the cloud. There's a lot of change there. Just one quick thing, talk about EMC. For me, one of the saving graces for EMC is they never bought a large services organization. You know, back in the day it was like, oh they were going to buy Accenture. There were some of these things. You look at the companies that have 100,000 services people, they're having to trim down, they're having to spin things out. You know the Dell spin merge, is Dell did spin off per row. So, while there have been some consolidation and some reductions since Dell and EMC have come together, you know, overall they're growing, there's good, there's new areas that they're putting R and D together. >> Just to give our audiences a little sort of overview in case you're not that familiar with what Dell has become, Dell Technologies, I mean, essentially you're looking at an $80 billion business. The core client side and infrastructure of the enterprise side comprised about 69 billion. VMWare's almost 8 billion, and then other, you know RSA, and well, whatever was back then pivotal before the IPO, etc., you know, Dell Financial, etc., was about 3 billion. That gets you to 80 billion. As you said, the client side is about half of the business. It's growing very nicely at about 7% a year, and it's about five and a half, 5.6% operating income. The ISG business, which is the core of, the classic EMC, all the server stuff, all the networking stuff. It's about, let's see 30.7 billion, almost 31 billion. The servers and networking side are growing at 20% a year. The storage is declining quite significantly. Double digits, they're sort of moderating that decline. And it's a higher percentage operating income, as percentage of revenue about 7%. You'd like to see that significantly higher. Now you go to VMWare, right? VMWare is 10% of the company's revenue but it accounts for half of the company's operating cash flow because it's margins, operating margins, are way up, high 20s, low 30s-- >> Yeah, I mean Dave, it was, I remember VM World, I think it was two years ago, I went to Michael, I'm like, "Michael, people think you're going to sell that off." And he was just foaming at the mouth. He's like, "They're stupid, they don't understand math." >> Dave: Well why would he? >> You know VMWare absolutely-- >> I mean, there's a 35% operating margin business, I mean it's a fantastic business. >> Dave, to be honest, everybody watching, is VMWare went through a little bit of a downturn. You know, the show two years ago wasn't great. >> Dave: Okay, right. >> But you know, NSX is now cooking, vSAN's doing great. There's lots of good areas that they have there. And the cloud picture. I mean turn back three years ago, Dave, VMWare was making statements like, when the old bookseller wins we're losing. EMC on their side was kind of trying to play a little bit with public cloud, but it was well understood in the field, public cloud is your enemy. And the market has matured. It understood that companies are figuring out their cloud strategy and their application and data strategy. And it's not a winner take all, zero sum game, everything goes to one of the top three or four public cloud players. >> So I got to ask you, so you feel as though that's sustainable, right? 'Cause I got to say, if I were AWS I would be looking at this saying this awesome. I need to get into the enterprise. I got to deal with the number one enterprise infrastructure player in VMWare in terms of its brand and its presence. I mean half a million customers, I think, is the number. I'm very excited. The flip side of that is the reality is, that deal for VMWare has been a huge tailwind for them. So help us square that circle. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's nuanced and complicated. Because when I talk to service providers, when I talk to the channel partners here with VMWare and with Dell, they're all starting to work more and more with VMWare. So you know, short-term, next two to three years, I think there's a great tailwind for VMWare to get involved here, but my concern is long term that people get on Amazon and they say, this is great and look at all these services and all of these things, maybe I don't need to pay for my server virtualization anymore. Maybe I don't need some of those pieces. What do I need in my data to center, sure I'll continue, but it's slowly declining like you mentioned. Storage is on a bit of a decline overall. So it's death by 1000 cuts. It is that replacement. For me it's always watching that data and that applications. It is tough, like super tough. David Floyer always say migrations, don't do 'em. You're going to go through so much pain, especially things like database migrations. But it is something that's happening. It's going to take the next five to 10 years as we look at these shifts. People are building new apps all the time. That tends to favor the public clouds, and there's so much happening in that space, but you know, the whole Dell family including Pivotal and VMWare, Virtustream, RSA, there are places where they win and still do well because, remember of course, none of these companies, it's not like they have 75% market share. So you know, if you ask Michael Dell, number one thing is he wants to take market share from HPE, and if he continues to take some of their market share it can help offset some of the things that he's losing to the public cloud. >> And well you have to take market share in a market that's not growing that fast. But you know, as we say on theCUBE many times, these disruptions are not binary, right? We still have mainframes for example. In fact, they're helping their tailwind for IBM right now. So you can put forth a scenario where yeah, a lot of these cloud native apps are going to be built in AWS and a lot of VMWare customers are going to do that, but as we often say, organizations can't just take their data and stuff it into the cloud, the public cloud, right? They've got to bring the cloud operating model to their data, to their business. We ask Pat, is it just use case specific, the Amazon Cloud and IBM I guess as well, or is it really bringing that cloud experience. And you know, he definitively said it's both, and I presume you buy that? >> Yeah, and I mean, Dave I listened to Michael DEll's keynote, and he said their goal is to integrate from the edge to the multi-cloud world. There's things that I want to understand this week. You know, I talked to some of my, you know, the real pellor heads here, that do really advanced type of technology. There are sessions here on containers. There's probably people talking about serverless here at the show. So they're looking at those next generation things, especially the VMWare side of the house is there. At the edge, you and I got to hear really the IoT strategy that Dell laid out towards the end of last year. Edge, absolutely huge opportunity, and there is no clear leader today because it's very early here, so how real are some of these opportunities to really expand beyond the traditional market because look, Dell's doing great in servers, that's the core of their business. It's the main driver for a lot of it, and you know, as Michael's happy to say, he said, "You know, hey, the PCs "and laptops are still doing well "two decades after IBM called it the post PC world." >> Thank goodness for client side. I mean that has been the savior here. What do you think, I mean you were at EMC for a number of years. What do you think happened to the storage side? That was a surprise to me because EMC is very rarely, if ever, a lost share in storage. They've either held share or bumped it up, doing acquisitions and so forth. But you had kind of Tucci with his hand at the wheel, doing tuck-in acquisitions, really focused on maintaining that share. Do you think it was just the disruption of the merger? Was it just inevitable that you had just the storage business getting too long in the tooth? What happened? >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, and there are so many things. Everything from the quarter shifted. So you know, it was going to take the end of quarter, which EMC always had a huge hockey stick on, shifted by a month. So some of it it was just financial where it landed up in the quarter, some of the big shifts that are happening in the market. EMC was very early on flash and did well in it, and they've got the VMAX and they've got the XtremeIO, and they're doing well there, but there's lots of competition there. Hyperconverge, once again, Dell and EMC doing great there. But there are some of these macroshifts and clouds eating away at it. So I don't have a single answer. There's so many different pieces. You know, storage has always been a knife fight. One of the things I want to understand this week, Dave, is the old EMC, well, we're going to have nine or 17 different products, and they'll all overlap. You wonder if Dell is, I really expect that Michael Dell, Jeff Clarke are going to streamline that portfolio. Profitability, make sure that they're getting the market share that they need because the old model might have worked in a growing market, but in a flat to slightly negative market it's not going to make much sense. >> And you already said that, I mean you made the point, Michael's keynote, the keynotes generally this morning, no question had Michael's fingerprint on them. That's much more like a Dell World than a traditional EMC World. We had Jeremy and Jonathan coming out on motorcycles and all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, much more staid. I think conservative, sending a message of steady. We're here for you to support your digital transformation. We are your infrastructure partner, so I mean, I think it's clear who's running the company. Alright, Stu, well, looking forward to this week. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, double CUBE sets, check out thecube.net for all the live coverage. Check out siliconangle.com, wikibon.com as well for all the research. We'll be back right after this short break. We're live at Dell Technologies World 2018.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. And many-time Cube guest Xavier Poisson is back. He's the vice president of Cloud28+ and service providers worldwide for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And he's joined by Eugene Viskovic, who is the chief business officer at Veon, a Cloud28+ partner. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back, Xavier, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, hi. >> Hi. So give us the update on Cloud 28. It started out as sort of this focused European effort. It has exploded now globally. What's the update? >> So I don't remember, I don't know if you remember it. It was last year, the same event. We were in London, I believe. And we were saying, "Okay, we are 300. "How many will be next year?" I took that back. It will be 700. We are 700. >> Dave: Wow, congratulations. >> 700 members. We have been expanding in the different geographies. So also in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, but we expanded in North America, in A-Pac, Latin America, and Caribbean. So now we are present in 60 countries. We are proposing 24,000 cloud services, so the catalog has been expanding dramatically. We are offering capabilities, data center capabilities from all partners in 33 countries. And we can offer from 400 data centers already. So average we have 40,000 hits per month on the platform, acquiring members and so on. And, yes, it has been a delight to launch that everywhere. It's really taking off very, very quickly. >> And the basic value proposition, you are essentially enabling cloud partners to create cloud-like business capabilities. >> Yeah, so what we do is, first of all, we enable the partners to get known on the market on this side, to publish all their services built and consume also. So it's not only IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, but also integration services as well because it's a comprehensive value chain. Then, what we do, we're not a marketplace where people go and leave. In the center, they can speak everyday. So they publish articles, full leadership articles around security, big data, manufacturing, and so on and so on. This year, only this year, they have published 600 articles. So when you're a customer, you go to this platform. You can see the offering, but you can see how the vendor is positioning himself around the market, his value-add, and what they are doing. So digital marketing a lot, also for them. We have been increasing the value on the market of many of our partners with social media because we are very good activity in this area, and also lead-generation engine because now we have so much offerings that we can target specific campaigns for our partners in specific geographies and generate a lot of leads on the market. Last, but not least, the market is evolving. We have a lot of partners, so we create platform-connected offerings. Example we have done is a specific cloud-in-a-box for manufacturing for plants where, in six clicks, you can provision from Cloud28+ all your information system for a plant. So this is also the kind of things that we do. >> Great, okay, Eugene, tell us about Veon. Why are you in business? What's your story? >> Okay, yes. Just talk a few minutes about Veon because it's not a very well-known name around the world, and don't be ashamed if you don't know Veon because it still is the seventh largest mobile operator in the world. It's significant. We are, today, around 42,000 employees, over 12 different countries. I have to say, very unusual countries. Not the type of countries you may choose to go for holidays, but it would be a shame because, honestly, some of them are good like, you know, all Eurasia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia. We have also emerging market, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, and one, only one European market, which is Italy with WIND, WIND Three. Which means it's a very large region. We are dealing with 10, more than 10% of the total population of the globe, 235 million customers, which is significant. And within this organization, there is an enterprise division, which I'm leading, which is around 4,500 people dedicated for enterprise and wholesales. Full revenue around $3 billion, just to give you a scale on who we are. Again, not very well-known, but definitely within our footprint we are the number one in this particular region of the world. >> It's sizable, substantial business. >> Eugene: Exactly, yes. >> So what's driving your business today? Obviously mobile is exploding. >> Yes, it's clear we came from the mobile business. We are number one mobile operator in the majority of these countries. We are what we call some fixed business. And since the last two, three years when I joined the organization, we completely reorganized our business model and moving more into the what we call value added services, ICT services. And one of the components, definitely, was to try to find a partner for our cloud proposition. You need to understand that we're in a very emerging market for this type of subject. We are sitting in a very traditional way, you know, how enterprise operating. They own the infrastructure, they own data center, they own the servers, the management platform, and their own people. And they have not yet shifted to this new model, which is to try to outsource some of the infrastructure. And this is where we came into the game as a global provider in order to have enterprise really to operate the shift. There is also another interesting situation is every time we bid a cloud proposition, usually we try to centerize it and have different country. In our part of the world is not possible. We have to set up a cloud platform in every single of our countries for regulatory constraints, which is not very economical, but definitely it's an opportunity for us to lead this market especially with HP Enterprise. >> Well, it allows you to differentiate, as well, from some of the mega-cloud providers that everybody knows, everybody talks about. So is that a primary way in which you compete? >> Oh, completely. It's clear the big players today are not very well-implemented in this part of the world because of this particular constraint, outside of Italy which is a little bit different game. But it's clear in Russia and Eurasia, yes. Today there is a opportunity. We believe that we want to be the single provider within this region operating across different market segments because we're covering from SO up to multinational accounts, even government. And having a set of value propositions we can offer across every single of our countries. >> Xavier, is it common that, amongst the Cloud28+ partners, there's that theme of local presence, of course, but is there also a differential in terms of what the partners will do, the types of work they'll do, customizations? >> Yeah, typically the case of Veon is very specific because they address very specific markets. Some other players will ask different things. But what is very important in the case of Veon is, first of all, to have a ready-to-deploy solution that you can industrialize in different countries. So this is the reason why we played with one of the technology partners of Cloud28+, with Ormuco, who has a cloud-in-a-box solution that can be deployed and managed remotely if needed. But that was fitting the needs of the market. Then, what we need to do is really to engage locally. So, in this particular case, what we're going to do is to engage with the HP organization in order that when we have the needs for our customers to go for cloud computing kind of workloads, we say, "Okay, we have the solution. "We have a partner, a Cloud28+ partner, "who took the decision to go with us, "and we trust each other. "So you, Mr. Customer, you want to do "backup as a service, disaster recovery "as a service, compute, storage as a service, "or security as a service, Veon is there." And the good point is Veon is there on very qualified hardware of HP synergy with a very good solution, which is one of the solution ready for service providers of HPE and operated by a very serious tech operator with the number six on the market, this is Veon. And we go together. So in this particular case, what was interesting was to have a solution that can be deployed everywhere the same with workloads that may fit with the different expectations of the market, engage the HP people to play with and, then, we market and with Cloud28+ we'll amplify their message. We will be able to drive lead generation campaigns. We'll be able to onboard our resellers because one thing I believe is that in this kind of regions, people don't go, as you say, Eugene, directly to the cloud. They continue to go to their resellers and, "What do I need to do?" And here, you know that we have the largest reseller network in the industry. So we will introduce this solution to our resellers in order that when a reseller of HPE is in front of such a case, it can have the mind to say, "Okay, let's engage with Veon." So this is the way we are going to operate. >> So when I think of many of the Akistan countries, I think of natural resources, challenging topography, challenging terrain. How does the physical reality and the industries that typify that region impact the way you're providing cloud services? >> It's clear, we're talking sometime a very, very large geography in terms of country size. When you take only in Russia. >> Mountainous. >> Eleven time zones you have in one single country. And when we operate, yes we have to spread our capability in order to be able to touch every single country, including in some infrastructure. Especially as a carrier, I like to imagine how much we need to pull fiber, cable, across the country and have these different set up of infrastructure, cloud propositions, to make sure we can serve better in term latency especially when we're talking about financial sections and so on, which brings some level of complexity and, as I said earlier, also some level of efficiency in term investment because we are not in a perfect world, especially when we talk about the regulatory constraints, which, yes, we need to find some middle way. How we can have a better, being still competitive, but as sometimes still delivering the expected quality. But you are right. This particular part of the world require a lot of work in term of physical infrastructure and also in our team. Our people are spread across these different countries, and for that reason yes, it's not an easy situation. >> Does it drive, are you likely to see a higher demand? HPE talks about the intelligent edge. Are you likely to see a higher demand for things like the intelligent edge because of the nature of the natural resource industry's petrochemical, et cetera, mountainous regions and a lot of communities that you serve, is that going to be a driver of new services or is it going to be something else? What do you think? >> Well, I think there would be two aspects. The first one, there is, definitely, a requirement driven, very often, by very large, multinational corporations. You'll be surprised how this multinational corporations are covering this part of the world. You have natural resources. All the western industry is present. And because they are present, they need to bring their standard in term of infrastructure they are using within this particular country. That the reason, yes, the demand is coming from there. At the same time, you have the rest of the market in term of large, local businesses where it's clear. They are moving. If you're looking in our part of the world, we are exactly where we were 10 years ago in Europe, in North America, and in Asia. We are really into emerging in face, in adopting this type of infrastructure. It's clear it's going to go much more quicker because, on top of that, enterprises have big pressure to reduce costs, but at the same time not to sacrifice the quality, what they're looking. Which, again, together we're capable and we can demonstrate they can get better for less. And this is a big work, and that's the reason when Xavier was mentioning about working together in each of the countries, this was one of the critical element in choosing with HP Enterprise because I'm a mobile operator and fixed. I'm not yet organized as an ICT services or cloud. It was very important for me, if we wanted to go very quickly to associate a brand with a leading organization like HP. And I have to say, I have tested several times. Every time we say, "Okay, we are in "partnership with HP Enterprise. "We are partnered with Cloud28+." This ring immediately the bell of the enterprise we are meeting, and it's easier for us to move quicker. But, definitely, I think we have a big, big opportunity. Large market to address, but definitely something interesting to go after. >> And it's early days, it's only been two years now, what do you want from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and what are you guys going to deliver? Let's talk road map a little bit. First, from the partner/customer. What are you driving HPE and Xavier to deliver? >> For me there would be three axes in term of development. The first one in term of value proposition. We want to be able, over the next 12, 18 months to be able to offer to the market a full set of propositions, as you mentioned earlier. But Xavier, in term of public, private, hybrid cloud, and moving to different solution, we're talking about security. And, also, we're moving into more vertical market approach. We're talking about IUT where will also be some direction. This is the first ax. The second one, it's in term of countries. We're not going to launch a platform in every single, as I said earlier. We need to do it country by country. We are starting with Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan will come behind, Algeria. Very quickly, over the next 12 months, we are going to launch one by one these different countries. And the last element for us, which is also very key, is market segment. We are organized, as I said, by market segment. SO, small-medium enterprise, large key account, multinational corporation, and government. And each of these segments have different requirements. And we need to customize our approach. This is where where working with HP and Ormuco, we want to have a very customized, bi-market segment from highly customized to off-the-shelf type proposition. But, for me, these would be the three key axes in term of development working with HP Enterprise. >> And Xavier, how does that align with your roadmap? >> Well, you know, it's fully alligned in the sense that, first of all, we are expanding a lot the value prop of Cloud28+ with ISV software vendors. And the problems of telcos and service providers moving to the cloud, that's correct there is ICT branding, and there we can help. But this is the content because one day or another, they will face what the others have been facing, even in these countries, meaning yes is not enough. So if you have a portfolio of applications, verticals, horizontal applications, that they can use to continue to satisfy the demand of the market, so it will be great for them, and we are investing a lot in this order. The other thing is today I believe that we have now reached a maturity on digital marketing with Cloud28+, which is impressive. We had a big event yesterday. I will not give to you the number of impression we had only in four hours. It has been massive. If we take that, we put this at the disposal of this partner in every single country, we will speed them on the market. So these are the two big elements. The third element is what I said about this platform connected solutions because the more we go, the more we see that our outside-in approach with Cloud28+, thinking customers first, is excellent. We need to continue on that. But, as you were mentioning, the move to the edge, we see more and more solutions for energy, for manufacturing, oil and gas, environment, that we need pure hybrid because you cannot put everything into a cloud. And where we are lucky with Veon is that they have the network. So you can imagine, they have their big cloud in a country that they could deploy also some private cloud very, very quickly in specific area within an oil and gas land or I don't know where in energy, mining, or where you have not that. And you cannot, because of latency issues you cannot go directly to the cloud, but you need to handle at the edge, send back to the cloud for analytics or AI or so on, and this will be at the disposal for them. And I believe the combination of the two for that will be for the benefit of the customer. So this is my opinion. >> I completely agree. I think they approach, in term of the partnership, as I said, I think when we're going to deal with very large organizations is going to be very infrastructure-type discussion driven. But when we're going to cool down, it's purely, definitely Sowasis, content. I want to be able to address, for example, the marketing department, how we can help them to understand the behavior of a consumer by using data, big data, you know, analytics. In term of delivery for an organization, using fleet management. In term of manufacturing, using more IUT. But when you look at these different solutions, what is below is a type of infrastructure. Is to have a cloud infrastructure where we can rely on a strong partnership, bringing this solution, and offering to our customer definitely a very cost-effective but also agile, very, you know, able to move with the market demand in a very vertical way, but definitely this is a way we want to work together. >> Excellent. All right, we have to leave it there, gentlemen. Cloud is exploding. Cloud is going to be local. We've talked about this a lot. Hybrid IT, intelligence edge with a local flavor. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations for all the success. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with the Cube, here with my guest host, Justin Warren. Happy to have a returning Cube alum, but in a different role then we had. It's been a few years. Tal Klein, who is the author of The Punch Escrow. >> Au-tor, please. No, I'm just kidding. (laughing) Tal, thanks so much for joining us. It's great for you to be able to find time to hang out with the tech geeks rather than all the Hollywood people that you've been with recently. (laughing) >> You guys are more interesting. (laughing) >> Well thank you for saying that. So last time we interviewed you, you were working for a sizable tech company. You were talking about things like, you know, virtualization, everything like that. Your Twitter handle's VirtualTal. So how does a guy like that become not only an author but an author that's been optioned for a movie, which those of us that, you know, are geeks and everything are looking at, as a matter of fact, Pac Elsiger this morning said, "we are seeing science fiction become science fact." >> That's right. >> Stu: So tell us a little of the journey. >> Yeah, cool, I hope you read the book. (laughing) I don't know, the journey is really about marketing, right? Cause a lot of times when we talk about virtual, like, in fact last time I was on the Cube, we were talking about the idea that desktops could be virtual. Cause back then it was still this, you know, almost hypothetical notion, like could desktops be virtual, and so today, you know, so much of our life is virtual. So much of the things that we do are not actually direct. I was watching this great video by Apple's new augmented reality product, where you sit in the restaurant and you look at it with your iPad, and it's your plate, and you can just shift the menu items, and you see the menu items on your plate in the context of the restaurant and your seat and the person you're sitting across from. So I think the future is now. >> Yeah, it reminds of, you know, the movie Wall-E, the animated one. We're all going to be sitting in chairs with our devices or Ready Player One, you know, very popular sci-fi book that's being done by Speilberg, I believe. >> Yes, yeah, very exciting. >> Tell us a little bit about your book, you know, we talked, when I was younger and used to read a lot of sci-fi, it was like, what stuff had they done 50 years ago that now's reality, and what stuff had they predicted, like, you know, we're going to go away from currency and go digital currency, and it's like we're almost there. But we still don't have flying cars. >> Yeah, we're, I mean, the main problem with flying cars is that we need pilots. And I think actually we're very close to flying cars, cause once we have self-driving vehicles and we no longer need to worry about it being a person behind the joystick, then we're in really good shape. That's really the issue, you know, the problem with flying cars is that we are so incompetent at driving and or flying. That's not our core competency, so let's just put things that do understand how to make those things happen and eliminate us from the equation. >> Everything is a people problem. >> Yeah, so when I wrote the book, Punch Escrow, Punch Escrow, (laughing) when I wrote the book, I really thought about all the things that I read growing up in science fiction, you know, things like teleportation, things like nanotechnology, things like digital currency, you know, how do we make those, how do we present those in a viable way that doesn't seem too science fictiony. Like one of the things I really get when people read the book is it feels really near-future, even though it's set like 100 plus years in the future, all the concepts in it feel very pragmatic or within reach, you know? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, we look at, you know, what things happen in a couple of years and what things take a long time. So artificial intelligence, machine learning, it's not like these are new concepts, you know? I read a great book by, you know, it was Isaacson, The Innovators. You go back to like Aida Lovelace, and the idea of what a machine or computer would be able to do. So 100 years from now, what's real, what's not real? We still all have jobs or something? >> We have jobs but different. Remember, I don't know if you're a historian, but back in the industrial age, there was a whole bunch of people screaming doom and gloom. In fact, if we go way back to the age of the Luddites, who just hated machines of any kind. I think that in general, we don't like, you know, we're scared of change. So I do think a lot of the jobs that exist today are going to be done by machines or code. That doesn't mean the jobs are going away. It means jobs are changing. A lot of the jobs that people have today didn't exist in the industrial age. So I think that we have to accept that we are going to be pragmatic enough to accept the fact that humans will continue to evolve as the infrastructure powering our world evolves, you know? We talk about living in the age of the quantified self, right? There's a whole bunch that we don't understand how to do yet. For example, I can think of a whole industry that tethers my FitBit to my nutrition. You know, like there's so much opportunity that for us to say, oh that's going to be the end of jobs, or the end of innovation or the end of capitalism, is insane. I think this just ushers in a whole new age of opportunity. And that's me, I'm just an optimist that way, you know. >> So the Luddites did famously try to destroy the machines. But the thing is, the Luddites weren't wrong. They did lose their jobs. So what about the people whose jobs are replaced, as you say net new, there's a net new number of jobs. But specific individuals, like people who manufacture cars for example, lose their jobs because a robot can do that job safer and better and faster than a human can do it. So what do we do with those humans? Because how do we get people to have new jobs and retrain themselves? >> I address some of these notions in the book. For example, one of the weird things that we're suffering from is the lack of welders in society today, cause welding has become this weird thing that we don't think we need people for, so people don't really get trained up in it because, you know, machines do a lot of welding but there's actually specialty welding that machines can't do. So I think the people who are really good at the things that they do will continue to have careers. I think their careers will become more niche. Therefore they'll be able to create, to demand a higher wage for it because almost like a carpenter, you know, a specialist carpenter will be able to earn a much higher wage today by having fewer customers who want really custom carpentry versus things that can be carved up by a machine. So I think what we end up seeing is that it's not that those jobs go away. It's they become more specialized. People still want Rolls Royces. People still want McLarens. Those are not done by machines. Those are hand-made, you know? >> That's an interesting point, so the value of something being hand-made becomes, instead of it being a worse product, it's actually- >> Tal: That's a big concept in the book. >> Oh okay, right. >> A big concept in the book is that we place a lot of value on the uniqueness of an object. And that parlays in multiple ways. So one of the examples that I use in the book is the value of a Big Mac actually coming from McDonald's. Like, you can make a Big Mac. We know the recipe for a Big Mac. But there is a weird sort of nacent value to getting a Big Mac from McDonald's. It's something in our brain that clicks that tethers it to an originality. Diamonds, another really good example. Or you know, we know there's synthetic diamonds. We still want the ones that get mined in the cave. Why? We don't know. Right, they're just special. >> Because De Beers still has really good marketing. (laughing) >> So I think there's- >> That's interesting, so the concept of uniqueness, which again comes to scarcity and so on. As an author, someone who is no doubt, signed a lot of his book, that means that that book is unique because it's signed by the author, unlike something which is mass produced and there is hopefully thousands and thousands of copies that you sell. >> Going into this, I actually thought about that a lot. And that's why I've created like multiple editions of the book. So like the first 500 people who pre-ordered it, they get like a special edition of the book that's like stamped and all this kind of stuff. I even used different pens. (laughs) I appreciate that because I'm also a collector. I collect music, I collect books. And you know, so I see those aspects in myself. So I know what I value about them, you know? >> And the crossover between music and books is interesting. So as someone who has a musical background, I know that there's a lot of musicians who'll come out with special editions, and you know, because this is an age where we can download it. You can download the book. Do you think there is something, is there something that is intrinsic to having a physical object in a virtual world? >> I think to our generation, yes. I'm not so sure about millennials, when they grow up. But there are, for example, I'm going to see U2 next week, I'm very lucky to see that. But part of the U2 buying experience, to get access to the presale, you need to be part of their fan club. To be a part of their fan club, you need to get, you get like a whole bunch of limited edition posters, limited edition vinyl, and all this kind of stuff. So there's an experience. It's no longer just about going to see U2 at a concert. There's like the entire package of you being a special U2 fan. And they surround it with uniqueness. It's not necessarily limited, but there's an enhanced experience that can't just be, it's not just about you having a ticket to a single concert. >> Justin: Yeah, okay. >> I'm curious, the genre, if you'd call it, is hard science fiction. >> Yes. >> The challenge with that is, you know, what is an extension of what we're doing, and what is fiction? And people probably poke at that. Have you had any interesting experience, things like that? I mean, I've listened to a lot of stuff like Andy Weir, like let the community give feedback before he created the final The Martian. (laughing) But so yeah, what's it like, cause we can, the geeks can be really harsh. >> Yes, I've learned from my Reddit experience that, so what's really funny about it is the first draft of this novel was hard as nails. It was crazy. And my publisher read it, and it would have made all the hard science fiction guys super happy. My publisher read it, he was like, you've written a really great hard science fiction book, and all five people who read it are going to love it. (laughing) You know, but like, I came here with my buddy Danny. He couldn't even get through the first three pages of it. He's like, he wanted to read it. So part of working through the editorial process is saying, look, I care a lot about the science because one of my deep goals is to write a STEM-oriented book that gets people excited about technology and present the future as not a dystopian place. And so I wanted the science to be there and have a sort of gravity to the narrative. But yeah, it's tough. I worked with a physicist, a biologist, a geneticist, an anthropologist, and a lawyer. (laughs) Just to try to figure out, how do we carve out, you know, what does the future look like, what does the evolution of each individual sciences, we talked about the mosquitoes, right? You know, we're already doing a lot of crazy stuff with mosquitoes. We're modifying them so that the males mate with females that carry the Zika virus, you know, give birth to offspring that never reach maturity. I mean, this is just crazy, it's science fiction. And now that they're working on modifying female mosquitoes into vaccine carriers instead of disease carriers. I mean, this is science fiction, right? Like who believes this stuff? It's crazy. >> Christopher is amazing. >> Yeah, I've loved, there's been a bunch of movies recently that have kind of helped to educate on STEM some, you know, Martian got a lot of people excited, you know, Hidden Figures, the one that I could being my kids that are teenagers now into it and they get excited, oh, science is great. So the movie, how much will you be involved? You know, what can you share about that experience, too, so far? >> It's been, it's very surreal. That's the word is use to describe it, the honest, god's honest truth, I mean. I've been very lucky in that my representation in Hollywood is this rock-solid guy called Howie Sanders. And he's this bigger-than-life Hollywood agent guy. He's hooked me up, we've made a lot of business decisions that we're focused less on the money and more on the team, which is nice to be, like when you're in your 40s and you're more financially settled, you're not in the kind of situation where you might be in your 20s and just going to sign the first deal that people give you. So we really focused on hooking up with like the director, James Bovin is, you know, he's the guy who co-created Flight of the Concords. He did the Muppets movie, you know, Alice Through the Looking Glass. Really professional guy but also really understands the tone of the book, which is like humorous, you know, kind of sarcastic. It's not just about the technology. It's also about the characters. Same thing with the production team. The two producers, Mandeville Productions, I was just talking to Todd Lieberman, and we're talking about just what is augmented reality, like how does it look like on the screen? So I'm not- >> It's not going to look like Blade Runner is what I'm hearing. >> (laughs) I don't know. It's going to look real. I imagine, I don't know, they're going to make whatever movie they're going to make, but their perspective, one of the things we talked about is keeping the movie very grounded. Like you know, one of the big questions they ask first going into it is before we even had any sort of movie discussions is like is this more of like a Looper, Gattica, or District Nine, or is it more like The Fifth Element, you know, I mean, is it like, do you want it to be this sort of grounded movie that feels authentic and real and near future or do you want this to be like completely alien and weird and out of it. And the story is more grounded. So I think a lot, hopefully what we display on the screen will not feel that far away from reality. >> Okay, yeah. >> You do marketing in your day job. >> I do. >> I'm curious as you look at this, kind of the balance of educating, reaching a broad audience, you have passion for STEM, what's your thoughts around that? Is it, I worry there's so much general, like television or things like that, when I see the science stuff, it like makes me groan. Because you know, it's like I don't understand that. >> I am the worst, because I got a security background too, so that's the one I get scrambled on. The war, I mean, like. >> Wait, thank goodness I updated my firewall settings because I saved the world from terrorists. >> Hang on, we're breaking through the first firewall. Now we're through the second firewall. (laughing) Now we're going through the third firewall, like 15 firewalls. And let me upload the virus, like all that stuff. It's difficult for me. I think that, you know, hopefully, there's also a group in Hollywood called the Hollywood Science and Entertainment Exchange. And they're a group of scientists who work with film makers on, you know, reigning things in. And film makers don't usually take all their advice, i.e. Interstellar, (laughing) but you know, I think (laughing) in many cases there's some really good ideas that come to play into it that hopefully bring up, like I think Jarvis for example, in Iron Man or the Avengers is a really cool implementation of what the future of AI systems might be like. And I know they used the Hollywood Science Exchange to figure out how is that going to work? And I think the marketing aspect is, you know, the reason I came up with the idea for this book is because my CEO of a company I used to work for, he had this whole conversation about teleportation, like teleportation was impossible. And he's like, it's not because the science, yes, the science is a problem right now, but we'll get over it. The main issue is that nobody would ever step foot into a device that vaporizes them and then printed them out somewhere else. And I said, well that's great, cause that's a marketing problem. (laughing) >> Yeah, you're dead every time you do it. But it's the same you, I can't tell the difference. >> Well, you say you're dead, I'm saying you're just moving. (laughing) >> Artificial intelligence, you know, kind of a big gap between the hype to where we need to go. What's your thoughts on that space in general? >> I think that we have, it's a great question because I feel like that's a term that gets thrown around a lot, and I think as a result it's becoming watered down. So you've this sort of artificial intelligence that comes with like, you know, Google building an app that can beat the world's best Go player, which is a really, really difficult puzzle. The problem is, that app can do one thing, and that's play Go. You put in it a chess game, and it's like I don't know what's going on. >> It's a very specialized kind of intelligence, yeah. >> Now with Open AI, you know, they just had some pretty interesting implementations where they actually played video games with a real live competition and won. Again, you know, but without the smack talk, which really I think would add a lot. Now you got to get an AI to smack talk. So I think the problem is we haven't figured out a really good way of creating a general purpose AI. And there's a lot of parallels to the evolution of computing in general because if you look at how computers were before we had general purpose operating systems like Unix, every computer was built to do a very, very specific function, and that's kind of what AI is right now. So we're still waiting to have a sort of general purpose AI that can do a lot of specialized activities. >> Even most robots are still very single-purpose today. >> That's the fundamental problem. But you're seeing the Cambridge guys are working on sort of the bipedal robot that can do lots of things. And Siri's getting better, Cortana's getting better, Watson's getting better, but we're not there. We still need to find a really good way of integrating deep knowledge with general purpose conversational AI. Cause that's really what you need to like, Stu, what do you need? Here, let me give it to you, you know? >> Do you draw a distinction between AI that's able to simply sort of react as a fairly complex machine or something that can create new things and add something? >> That's in the book as well. So the fundamental thing that I don't think we get around even in the future is giving computers the ability to actually come up with new ideas. There's actually a career, the main job of the protagonist in the book, his job is a salter. And his job is to salt AI algorithms to introduce entropy so they can come up with new ideas. >> Okay, interesting. >> So based off the sort of chaos theory. >> Like chaos monkey, right? >> Yeah. And that's really what you're trying to do is like, okay, react to things that are happening because you can't just come up with them on their own. There's a whole, I don't want to bore you, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in the book about how that works. >> It's like hand-carving ideas that are then mass produced by machines. >> Yeah, I don't know if you guys are going to have Simon Crosby on here, he's kind of like an expert on that. He was the Dean of Kings College, which is where Turing came from. So he really knows a lot about that. He's got a lot of strong ideas about it. But I learned a lot from him in that regard. There's a lot of like, the snarky spirit of Simon Crosby lives on in my book somewhere. But he's just funny cause he's, coming from that field, he immediately sees a lot of BS right off the bat, whenever anybody's presenting. He's got like the ability to just cut through it. Because he understands what it would actually take to make that happen, you know? So I tried to preserve some of that in the book. >> That is refreshing in the tech industry. >> So Tal, I need to let you, you know, wrap this up. Give us a plug for the book, tell us, when are we going to be able to see this on the big screen? >> I don't know about the big screen, but the Punch Escrow is now available. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere books are sold. It's been optioned by Lionsgate. The director attached to it is James Bovin, production team is Mandeville Productions. I'm very excited about it. Go check it out. It's a pretty quick read, reads like a technothriller. It's not too hard. And it's fun for the whole family. I think one of the coolest things about it is that the feedback I've been getting has been that it really is appealing to everybody. I've got mother-in-laws reading it, you know, it's pretty cool. Initially I sold it, my initial audience is like us, but it's kind of cool, like, Stu will finish the book, he'll give it to, you know, wife, daughter, anything, and they're really digging it. So it's kind of fun. >> Justin: Thanks a lot. >> Tal Klein, really appreciate you coming. Congratulations on the book, we look forward to the movie. Maybe, you know, we'll get the Cube involved down the road. (laughing) >> And we're giving away 75 copies of it here at Lakeside booth, if you guys want to come. >> Tal Klein, author of The Punch Escrow, also CMO of Lakeside, who is here in the thing. But yeah, (laughing) a lot of stuff. Justin and I will be back with more coverage here from VMWorld 2017. You're watching the Cube. (bright music)

>>The cube at big data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors. When disco we make Hadoop invincible and Aptean accelerating big data, 2.0, >>Okay. We're back here, live in Silicon valley. This is big data. It has to be, this is Silicon England, Wiki bonds, the cube coverage of big data in Silicon valley and all around the world covering the strata conference. All the latest news analysis here in Silicon valley, the cube was our flagship program about the events extract the signal from noise. I'm John furrier, the founders of looking angle. So my co-host and co-founder of Wiki bond.org, Dave Volante, uh, George Matthew CEO, altruist on the cube again, back from big data NYC just a few months ago. Um, our two events, um, welcome back. Great to be here. So, um, what fruit is dropped into the blend or the change, the colors of the big data space this this time. So we were in new Yorkers. We saw what happened there. A lot of talk about financial services, you know, big business, Silicon valley Kool-Aid is more about innovation. Partnerships are being formed, channel expansion. Obviously the market's hot growth is still basing. Valuations are high. What's your take on the current state of the market? >>Yeah. Great question. So John, when we see this market today, I remember even a few years ago when I first visited the cave, particularly when it came to a deep world and strata a few years back, it was amazing that we talked about this early innings of a ballgame, right? We said it was like, man, we're probably in the second or third inning of this ball game. And what has progressed particularly this last few years has been how much the actual productionization, the actual industrialization of this activity, particularly from a big data analytics standpoint has merged. And that's amazing, right? And in a short span, two, three years, we're talking about technologies and capabilities that were kind of considered things that you play with. And now these are things that are keeping the lights on and running, you know, major portions of how better decision-making and analytics are done inside of organizations. So I think that industrialization is a big shift forward. In fact, if you've listened to guys like Narendra Mulani who runs most of analytics at Accenture, he'll actually highlight that as one of the key elements of how not only the transformation is occurring among organizations, but even the people that are servicing a large companies today are going through this big shift. And we're right in the middle of it. >>We saw, you mentioned a censure. We look at CSC, but service mesh and the cloud side, you seeing the consulting firms really seeing build-out mandates, not just POC, like let's go and lock down now for the vendors. That means is people looking for reference accounts right now? So to me, I'm kind of seeing the tea leaves say, okay, who's going to knock down the reference accounts and what is that going to look like? You know, how do you go in and say, I'm going to tune up this database against SAP or this against that incumbent legacy vendor with this new scale-out, all these things are on in play. So we're seeing that, that focus of okay, tire kicking is over real growth, real, real referenceable deployments, not, not like a, you know, POC on steroids, like full on game-changing deployments. Do you see that? And, and if you do, what versions of that do you seeing happening and what ending of that is that like the first pitch of the sixth inning? Uh, w what do you, how would you benchmark that? >>Yeah, so I, I would say we're, we're definitely in the fourth or fifth inning of a non ballgame now. And, and there's innings. What we're seeing is I describe this as a new analytic stack that's emerged, right? And that started years ago when particularly the major Hadoop distro vendors started to rethink how data management was effectively being delivered. And once that data management layer started to be re thought, particularly in terms of, you know, what the schema was on read what the ability to do MPP and scale-out was in terms of how much cheaper it is to bring storage and compute closer to data. What's now coming above that stack is, you know, how do I blend data? How do I be able to give solutions to data analysts who can make better decisions off of what's being stored inside of that petabyte scale infrastructure? So we're seeing this new stack emerge where, you know, Cloudera Hortonworks map are kind of that underpinning underlying infrastructure where now our based analytics that revolution provides Altrix for data blending for analytic work, that's in the hands of data analysts, Tableau for visual analysis and dashboarding. Those are basically the solutions that are moving forward as a capability that are package and product. >>Is that the game-changing feature right now, do you think that integration of the stack, or is that the big, game-changer this sheet, >>That's the hardening that's happening as we speak right now, if you think about the industrialization of big data analytics that, you know, as I think of it as the fourth or fifth inning of the ballgame, that hardening that ability to take solutions that either, you know, the Accentures, the KPMGs, the Deloitte of the world deliver to their clients, but also how people build stuff internally, right? They have much better solutions that work out of the box, as opposed to fumbling with, you know, things that aren't, you know, stitched as well together because of the bailing wire and bubblegum that was involved for the last few years. >>I got it. I got to ask you, uh, one of the big trends you saw in certainly in the tech world, you mentioned stacks, and that's the success of Amazon, the cloud. You're seeing integrated stacks being a key part of the, kind of the, kind of the formation of you said hardening of the stack, but the word horizontally scalable is a term that's used in a lot of these open source environments, where you have commodity hardware, you have open source software. So, you know, everything it's horizontally scalable. Now, that's, that's very easy to envision, but thinking about the implementation in an enterprise or a large organization, horizontally scalable is not a no brainer. What's your take on that. And how does that hyperscale infrastructure mindset of scale-out scalable, which is a big benefit of the current infrastructure? How does that fit into, into the big day? >>Well, I think it fits extremely well, right? Because when you look at the capabilities of the last, as we describe it stack, we almost think of it as vertical hardware and software that's factually built up, but right now, for anyone who's building scale in this world, it's all about scale-out and really being able to build that stack on a horizontal basis. So if you look at examples of this, right, say for instance, what a cloud era recently announced with their enterprise hub. And so when you look at that capability of the enterprise data hub, a lot of it is about taking what yarn has become as a resource manager. What HDFS has been ACOM as a scale-out storage infrastructure, what the new plugin engines have merged beyond MapReduce as a capability for engines to come into a deep. And that is a very horizontal description of how you can do scale out, particularly for data management. >>When we built a lot of the work that was announced at strata a few years ago, particularly around how the analytics architecture for Galerie, uh, emerged at Altryx. Now we have hundreds of, of apps, thousands of users in that infrastructure. And when we built that out was actually scaling out on Amazon where the worker nodes and the capability for us to manage workload was very horizontal built out. If you look at servers today of any layer of that stack, it is really about that horizontal. Scale-out less so about throwing more hardware, more, uh, you know, high-end infrastructure at it, but more about how commodity hardware can be leveraged and use up and down that stack very easily. So Georgia, >>I asked you a question, so why is analytics so hard for so many companies? Um, and you've been in this big data, we've been talking to you since the beginning, um, and when's it going to get easier? And what are you guys specifically doing? You know, >>So facilitate that. Sure. So a few things that we've seen to date is that a lot of the analytics work that many people do internal and external to organizations is very rote, hand driven coding, right? And I think that's been one of the biggest challenges because the two end points in analytics have been either you hard code stuff that you push into a, you know, a C plus plus or a Java function, and you push it into database, or you're doing lightweight analytics in Excel. And really there needs to be a middle ground where someone can do effective scale-out and have repeatability in what's been done and ease of use. And what's been done that you don't have to necessarily be a programmer and Java programmer in C plus plus to push an analytic function and database. And you certainly don't have to deal with the limitations of Excel today. >>And really that middle ground is what Altryx serves. We look at it as an opportunity for analysts to start work with a very repeatable re reasonable workflow of how they would build their initial constructs around an analytic function that they would want to deploy. And then the scale-out happens because all of the infrastructure works on that analyst behalf, whether that be the infrastructure on Hadoop, would that be the infrastructure of the scale out of how we would publish an analytic function? Would that be how the visualizations would occur inside of a product like Tableau? And so that, I think Dave is one of the biggest things that needs to shift over where you don't have the only options in front of you for analytics is either Excel or hard coding, a bunch of code in C plus plus, or Java and pushing it in database. Yeah. >>And you correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be building your partnerships and your ecosystem really around driving that solution and, and, and really driving a revolution in the way in which people think about analytics, >>Ease of use. The idea is that ultimately if you can't get data analysts to be able to not only create work, that they can actually self-describe deploy and deliver and deliver success inside of an organization. And scale that out at the petabyte scale information that exists inside of most organizations you fail. And that's the job of folks like ourselves to provide great software. >>Well, you mentioned Tableau, you guys have a strong partnership there, and Christian Chabot, I think has a good vision. And you talked about sort of, you know, the, the, the choices of the spectrum and neither are good. Can you talk a little bit more about that, that, that partnership and the relationship and what you guys are doing together? Yeah. >>Uh, I would say Tableau's our strongest and most strategic partner today. I mean, we were diamond sponsors of their conference. I think I was there at their conference when I was on the cube the time before, and they are diamond sponsors of our conference. So our customers and particular users are one in the same for Tablo. It really becomes a, an experience around how visual analysis and dashboard, and can be very easily delivered by data analysts. And we think of those same users, the same exact people that Tablo works with to be able to do data blending and advanced analytics. And so that's why the two software products, that's why the two companies, that's where our two customer bases are one in the same because of that integrated experience. So, you know, Tableau is basically replacing XL and that's the mission that thereafter. And we feel that anyone who wants to be able to do the first form of data blending, which I would think of as a V lookup in Excel, should look at Altryx as a solution for that one. >>So you mentioned your conference it's inspire, right? It >>Is inspiring was coming up in June, >>June. Yeah. Uh, how many years have you done inspire? >>Inspire is now in its fifth year. And you're gonna bring the >>Cube this year. Yeah. >>That would be great. You guys, yeah, that would be fun. >>You should do it. So talk about the conference a little bit. I don't know much about it, but I mean, I know of it. >>Yeah. It's very centered around business users, particularly data analysts and many organizations that cut across retail, financial services, communications, where companies like Walmart at and T sprint Verizon bring a lot of their underlying data problems, underlying analytic opportunities that they've wrestled with and bring a community together this year. We're expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 600 folks attending. So largely to, uh, figure out how to bring this, this, uh, you know, game forward, really to build out this next rate analytic capability that's emerging for most organizations. And we think that that starts ultimately with data analysts. All right. We think that there are well over two and a half million data analysts that are underserved by the current big data tools that are in this space. And we've just been highly focused on targeting those users. And so far, it's been pretty good at us. >>It's moving, it's obviously moving to the casual user at some levels, but I ended up getting there not soon, but I want to, I want to ask you the role of the cloud and all this, because when you have underneath the hood is a lot of leverage. You mentioned integrates that's when to get your perspective on the data cloud, not data cloud is it's putting data in the cloud, but the role of cloud, the role of dev ops that intersection, but you're seeing dev ops, you know, fueling a lot of that growth, certainly under the hood. Now on the top of the stack, you have the, I guess, this middle layer for lack of a better description, I'm of use old, old metaphor developing. So that's the enablement piece. Ultimately the end game is fully turnkey, data science, personalization, all that's, that's the holy grail. We all know. So how do you see that collision with cloud and the big, the big data? >>Yeah. So cloud is basically become three things for a lot of folks in our space. One is what we talked about, which is scale up and scale out, uh, is something that is much more feasible when you can spin up and spin down infrastructure as needed, particularly on an elastic basis. And so many of us who built our solutions leverage Amazon being one of the most defacto solutions for cloud based deployment, that it just makes it easy to do the scale-out that's necessary. This is the second thing it actually enables us. Uh, and many of our friends and partners to do is to be able to bring a lower cost basis to how infrastructure stood up, right? Because at the end of the day, the challenge for the last generation of analytics and data warehousing that was in this space is your starting conversation is two to $3 million just in infrastructure alone before you even buy software and services. >>And so now if you can rent everything that's involved with the infrastructure and the software is actually working within days, hours of actually starting the effort, as opposed to a 14 month life cycle, it's really compressing the time to success and value that's involved. And so we see almost a similarity to how Salesforce really disrupted the market. 10 years ago, I happened to be at Salesforce when that disruption occurred and the analytics movement that is underway really impacted by cloud. And the ability to scale out in the cloud is really driving an economic basis. That's unheard of with that >>Developer market, that's robust, right? I mean, you have easy kind of turnkey development, right? Tapping >>It is right, because there's a robust, uh, economy that's surrounding the APIs that are now available for cloud services. So it's not even just at the starting point of infrastructure, but there's definite higher level services where all the way to software as industry, >>How much growth. And you'll see in those, in that, as that, that valley of wealth and opportunity that will be created from your costs, not only for the companies involved, but the company's customers, they have top line focus. And then the goal of the movement we've seen with analytics is you seeing the CIO kind of with less of a role, more of the CEO wants to the chief data officer wants most of the top line drivers to be app focused. So you seeing a big shift there. >>Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of the real proponents of the cloud is now the fact that there is an ability for a business analyst business users and the business line to make impacts on how decisions are done faster without the infrastructure underpinnings that were needed inside the four walls in our organization. So the decision maker and the buyer effectively has become to your point, the chief analytics officer, the chief marketing officer, right. Less so that the chief information officer of an organization. And so I think that that is accelerating in a tremendous, uh, pace, right? Because even if you look at the statistics that are out there today, the buying power of the CMO is now outstrip the buying power of the CIO, probably by 1.2 to 1.3 X. Right. And that used to be a whole different calculus that was in front of us before. So I would see that, uh, >>The faster, so yeah, so Natalie just kind of picked this out here real time. So you got it, which we all know, right. I went to the it world for a long time service, little catalog. Self-service, you know, Sarah's already architectures whatever you want to call it, evolve in modern era. That's good. But on the business side, there's still a need for this same kind of cataloguing of tooling platform analytics. So do you agree with that? I mean, do you see that kind of happening that way, where there's still some connection, but it's not a complete dependency. That's kind of what we're kind of rethinking real time you see that happen. >>Yeah. I think it's pretty spot on because when you look at what businesses are doing today, they're selecting software that enables them to be more self-reliant the reason why we have been growing as much among business analysts as we have is we deliver self-reliance software and in some way, uh, that's what tablet does. And so the, the winners in this space are going to be the ones that will really help users get to results faster for self-reliance. And that's, that's really what companies like Altrix Stanford today. >>So I want to ask you a follow up on that CMOs CIO discussion. Um, so given that, that, that CMOs are spending a lot more where's the, who owns the data, is that, is we, we talk, well, I don't know if I asked you this before, but do you see the role of a chief data officer emerging? And is that individual, is that individual part of the marketing organization? Is it part of it? Is it a separate parallel role? What are you, >>One of the things I will tell you is that as I've seen chief analytics and chief data officers emerge, and that is a real category entitled real deal of folks that have real responsibilities in the organization, the one place that's not is in it, which is interesting to see, right? Because oftentimes those individuals are reporting straight to the CEO, uh, or they have very close access to line of business owners, general managers, or the heads of marketing, the heads of sales. So I seeing that shift where wherever that chief data officer is, whether that's reporting to CEOs or line of business managers or general managers of, of, you know, large strategic business units, it's not in the information office, it's not in the CEO's, uh, purview anymore. And that, uh, is kind of telling for how people are thinking about their data, right? Data is becoming much more of an asset and a weapon for how companies grow and build their scale less. So about something that we just have to deal with. >>Yeah. And it's clearly emerging that role in certain industry sectors, you know, clearly financial services, government and healthcare, but slowly, but we have been saying that, >>Yeah, it's going to cross the board. Right. And one of the reasons why I wrote the article at the end of last year, I literally titled it. Uh, analytics is eating the world, is this exact idea, right? Because, uh, you have this, this notion that you no longer are locked down with data and infrastructure kind of holding you back, right? This is now much more in the hands of people who are responsible for making better decisions inside their organizations, using data to drive those decisions. And it doesn't matter the size and shape of the data that it's coming in. >>Yeah. Data is like the F the food that just spilled all over it spilled out from the truck and analytics is on the Pac-Man eating out. Sorry. >>Okay. Final question in this segment is, um, summarize big data SV for us this year, from your perspective, knowing what's going on now, what's the big game changer. What should the folks know who are watching and should take note of which they pay attention to? What's the big story here at this moment. >>There's definite swim lanes that are being created as you can see. I mean, and, and now that the bigger distribution providers, particularly on the Hadoop side of the world have started to call out what they all stand for. Right. You can tell that map are, is definitely about creating a fast, slightly proprietary Hadoop distro for enterprise. You can tell that the folks at cloud era are focusing themselves on enterprise scale and really building out that hub for enterprise scale. And you can tell Horton works is basically embedding, enabling an open source for anyone to be able to take advantage of. And certainly, you know, the previous announcements and some of the recent ones give you an indicator of that. So I see the sense swimlanes forming in that layer. And now what is going to happen is that focus and attention is going to move away from how that layer has evolved into what I would think of as advanced analytics, being able to do the visual analysis and blending of information. That's where the next, uh, you know, battle war turf is going to be in particularly, uh, the strata space. So we're, we're really looking forward to that because it basically puts us in a great position as a company and a market leader in particularly advanced analytics to really serve customers in how this new battleground is emerging. >>Well, we really appreciate you taking the time. You're an awesome guest on the queue biopsy. You know, you have a company that you're running and a great team, and you come and share your great knowledge with our fans and an audience. Appreciate it. Uh, what's next for you this year in the company with some of your goals, let's just share that. >>Yeah. We have a few things that are, we mentioned a person inspired coming up in June. There's a big product release. Most of our product team is actually here and we have a release coming up at the beginning of Q2, which is Altryx nine oh. So that has quite a bit involved in it, including expansion of connectivity, uh, being able to go and introduce a fair degree of modeling capability so that the AR based modeling that we do scales out very well with revolution and Cloudera in mind, as well as being able to package into play analytic apps very quickly from those data analysts in mind. So it's, uh, it's a release. That's been almost a year in the works, and we're very much looking forward to a big launch at the beginning of Q2. >>George, thanks so much. You got inspire coming out. A lot of great success as a growing market, valuations are high, and the good news is this is just the beginning, call it mid innings in the industry, but in the customers, I call the top of the first lot of build-out real deployment, real budgets, real deal, big data. It's going to collide with cloud again, and I'm going to start a load, get a lot of innovation all happening right here. Big data SV all the big data Silicon valley coverage here at the cube. I'm Jennifer with Dave Alonzo. We'll be right back with our next guest. After the short break.