(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music plays) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MWC '23, my name is Dave Vellante. Just left a meeting with the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, to meet with Jeetu Patel, who's our Executive Vice President and General Manager of security and collaboration at Cisco. Good to see you. >> You never leave a meeting with Chuck Robbins to meet with Jeetu Patel. >> Well, I did. >> That's a bad idea. >> Walked right out. I said, hey, I got an interview to do, right? So, and I'm excited about this. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> So, I mean you run such an important part of the business. I mean, obviously the collaboration business but also security. So many changes going on in the security market. Maybe we could start there. I mean, there hasn't been a ton of security talk here Jeetu, because I think it's almost assumed. It was 45 minutes into the keynote yesterday before anybody even mentioned security. >> Huh. >> Right? And so, but it's the most important topic in the enterprise IT world. And obviously is important here. So why is it you think that it's not the first topic that people mention. >> You know, it's a complicated subject area and it's intimidating. And actually that's one of the things that the industry screwed up on. Where we need to simplify security so it actually gets to be relatable for every person on the planet. But, if you think about what's happening in security, it's not just important for business it's critical infrastructure that if you had a breach, you know lives are cost now. Because hospitals could go down, your water supply could go down, your electricity could go down. And so it's one of these things that we have to take pretty seriously. And, it's 51% of all breaches happen because of negligence, not because of malicious intent. >> It's that low. Interesting. I always- >> Someone else told me the same thing, that they though it'd be higher, yeah. >> I always say bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. >> Every single time. >> You can't beat it. But, you know, it's funny- >> Jeetu: Every single time. >> Back, the earlier part of last decade, you could see that security was becoming a board level issue. It became, it was on the agenda every quarter. And, I remember doing some research at the time, and I asked, I was interviewing Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary, and I asked him, yeah, but we're getting attacked but don't we have the best offense? Can't we have the best technology? He said, yeah but we have so much critical infrastructure the risks to United States are higher. So we have to be careful about how we use security as an offensive weapon, you know? And now you're seeing the future of war involves security and what's going on in Ukraine. It's a whole different ballgame. >> It is, and the scales always tip towards the adversary, not towards the defender, because you have to be right every single time. They have to be right once. >> Yeah. And, to the other point, about bad user behavior. It's going now beyond the board level, to it's everybody's responsibility. >> That's right. >> And everybody's sort of aware of it, everybody's been hacked. And, that's where it being such a complicated topic is problematic. >> It is, and it's actually, what got us this far will not get us to where we need to get to if we don't simplify security radically. You know? The experience has to be almost invisible. And what used to be the case was sophistication had to get to a certain level, for efficacy to go up. But now, that sophistication has turned to complexity. And there's an inverse relationship between complexity and efficacy. So the simpler you make security, the more effective it gets. And so I'll give you an example. We have this great kind of innovation we've done around passwordless, right? Everyone hates passwords. You shouldn't have passwords in 2023. But, when you get to passwordless security, not only do you reduce a whole lot of friction for the user, you actually make the system safer. And that's what you need to do, is you have to make it simpler while making it more effective. And, I think that's what the future is going to hold. >> Yeah, and CISOs tell me that they're, you know zero trust before the pandemic was like, yeah, yeah zero trust. And now it's like a mandate. >> Yeah. >> Every CISO you talk to says, yes we're implementing a zero trust architecture. And a big part of that is that, if they can confirm zero trust, they can get to market a lot faster with revenue generating or critical projects. And many projects as we know are being pushed back, >> Yeah. >> you know? 'Cause of the macro. But, projects that drive revenue and value they want to accelerate, and a zero trust confirmation allows people to rubber stamp it and go faster. >> And the whole concept of zero trust is least privileged access, right? But what we want to make sure that we get to is continuous assessment of least privileged access, not just a one time at login. >> Dave: 'Cause things change so frequently. >> So, for example, if you happen to be someone that's logged into the system and now you start doing some anomalous behavior that doesn't sound like Dave, we want to be able to intercept, not just do it at the time that you're authenticating Dave to come in. >> So you guys got a good business. I mentioned the macro before. >> Yeah. >> The big theme is consolidating redundant vendors. So a company with a portfolio like Cisco's obviously has an advantage there. You know, you guys had great earnings. Palo Alto is another company that can consolidate. Tom Gillis, great pickup. Guy's amazing, you know? >> Love Tom. >> Great respect. Just had a little webinar session with him, where he was geeking out with the analyst and so- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Learned a lot there. Now you guys have some news, at the event event with Mercedes? >> We do. >> Take us through that, and I want to get your take on hybrid work and what's happening there. But what's going on with Mercedes? >> Yeah so look, it all actually stems from the hybrid work story, which is the future is going to be hybrid, people are going to work in mixed mode. Sometimes you'll be in the office, sometimes at home, sometimes somewhere in the middle. One of the places that people are working more and more from is their cars. And connected cars are getting to be a reality. And in fact, cars sometimes become an extension of your home office. And many a times I have found myself in a parking lot, because I didn't have enough time to get home and I was in a parking lot taking a conference call. And so we've made that section easier, because we have now partnered with Mercedes. And they aren't the first partner, but they're a very important partner where we are going to have Webex available, through the connected car, natively in Mercedes. >> Ah, okay. So I could take a call, I can do it all the time. I find good service, pull over, got to take the meeting. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to be driving. I got to concentrate. >> That's right. >> You know, or sometimes, I'll have the picture on and it's not good. >> That's right. >> Okay, so it'll be through the console, and all through the internet? >> It'll be through the console. And many people ask me like, how's safety going to work over that? Because you don't want to do video calls while you're driving. Exactly right. So when you're driving, the video automatically turns off. And you'll have audio going on, just like a conference call. But the moment you stop and put it in park, you can have video turned on. >> Now, of course the whole hybrid work trend, we, seems like a long time ago but it doesn't, you know? And it's really changed the security dynamic as well, didn't it? >> It has, it has. >> I mean, immediately you had to go protect new endpoints. And those changes, I felt at the time, were permanent. And I think it's still the case, but there's an equilibrium now happening. People as they come back to the office, you see a number of companies are mandating back to work. Maybe the central offices, or the headquarters, were underfunded. So what's going on out there in terms of that balance? >> Well firstly, there's no unanimous consensus on the way that the future is going to be, except that it's going to be hybrid. And the reason I say that is some companies mandate two days a week, some companies mandate five days a week, some companies don't mandate at all. Some companies are completely remote. But whatever way you go, you want to make sure that regardless of where you're working from, people can have an inclusive experience. You know? And, when they have that experience, you want to be able to work from a managed device or an unmanaged device, from a corporate network or from a Starbucks, from on the road or stationary. And whenever you do any of those things, we want to make sure that security is always handled, and you don't have to worry about that. And so the way that we say it is the company that created the VPN, which is Cisco, is the one that's going to kill it. Because what we'll do is we'll make it simple enough so that you don't, you as a user, never have to worry about what connection you're going to use to dial in to what app. You will have one, seamless way to dial into any application, public application, private application, or directly to the internet. >> Yeah, I got a love, hate with my VPN. I mean, it's protecting me, but it's in the way a lot. >> It's going to be simple as ever. >> Do you have kids? >> I do, I have a 12 year old daughter. >> Okay, so not quite high school age yet. She will be shortly. >> No, but she's already, I'm not looking forward to high school days, because she has a very, very strong sense of debate and she wins 90% of the arguments. >> So when my kids were that age, I've got four kids, but the local high school banned Wikipedia, they can't use Wikipedia for research. Many colleges, I presume high schools as well, they're banning Chat GPT, can't use it. Now at the same time, I saw recently on Medium a Wharton school professor said he's mandating Chat GPT to teach his students how to prompt in progressively more sophisticated prompts, because the future is interacting with machines. You know, they say in five years we're all going to be interacting in some way, shape, or form with AI. Maybe we already are. What's the intersection between AI and security? >> So a couple very, very consequential things. So firstly on Chat GPT, the next generation skill is going to be to learn how to go out and have the right questions to ask, which is the prompt revolution that we see going on right now. But if you think about what's happening in security, and there's a few areas which are, firstly 3,500 hundred vendors in this space. On average, most companies have 50 to 70 vendors in security. Not a single vendor owns more than 10% of the market. You take out a couple vendors, no one owns more than 5%. Highly fractured market. That's a problem. Because it's untenable for companies to go out and manage 70 policy engines. And going out and making sure that there's no contention. So as you move forward, one of the things that Chat GPT will be really good for is it's fundamentally going to change user experiences, for how software gets built. Because rather than it being point and click, it's going to be I'm going to provide an instruction and it's going to tell me what to do in natural language. Imagine Dave, when you joined a company if someone said, hey give Dave all the permissions that he needs as a direct report to Chuck. And instantly you would get all of the permissions. And it would actually show up in a screen that says, do you approve? And if you hit approve, you're done. The interfaces of the future will get more natural language kind of dominated. The other area that you'll see is the sophistication of attacks and the surface area of attacks is increasing quite exponentially. And we no longer can handle this with human scale. You have to handle it in machine scale. So detecting breaches, making sure that you can effectively and quickly respond in real time to the breaches, and remediate those breaches, is all going to happen through AI and machine learning. >> So, I agree. I mean, just like Amazon turned the data center into an API, I think we're now going to be interfacing with technology through human language. >> That's right. >> I mean I think it's a really interesting point you're making. Now, from a security standpoint as well, I mean, the state of the art today in my email is be careful, this person's outside your organization. I'm like, yeah I know. So it's a good warning sign, but it's really not automated in any way. So two part question. One is, can AI help? You know, with the phishing, obviously it can, but the bad guys have AI too. >> Yeah. >> And they're probably going to be smarter than I am about using it. >> Yeah, and by the way, Talos is our kind of threat detection and response >> Yes. >> kind of engine. And, they had a great kind of piece that came out recently where they talked about this, where Chat GPT, there is going to be more sophistication of the folks that are the bad actors, the adversaries in using Chat GPT to have more sophisticated phishing attacks. But today it's not something that is fundamentally something that we can't handle just yet. But you still need to do the basic hygiene. That's more important. Over time, what you will see is attacks will get more bespoke. And in order, they'll get more sophisticated. And, you will need to have better mechanisms to know that this was actually not a human being writing that to you, but it was actually a machine pretending to be a human being writing something to you. And that you'll have to be more clever about it. >> Oh interesting. >> And so, you will see attacks get more bespoke and we'll have to get smarter and smarter about it. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you before we close is you're right on. I mean you take the top security vendors and they got a single digit market share. And it's like it's untenable for organizations, just far too many tools. We have a partner at ETR, they do quarterly survey research and one of the things they do is survey emerging technology companies. And when we look at in the security sector just the number of emerging technology companies that are focused on cybersecurity is as many as there are out there already. And so, there's got to be consolidation. Maybe that's through M & A. I mean, what do you think happens? Are company's going to go out of business? There's going to be a lot of M & A? You've seen a lot of companies go private. You know, the big PE companies are sucking up all these security companies and may be ready to spit 'em out and go back public. How do you see the landscape? You guys are obviously an inquisitive company. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think there will be a little bit of everything. But the biggest change that you'll see is a shift that's going to happen with an integrated platform, rather than point solution vendors. So what's going to happen is the market's going to consolidate towards very few, less than a half a dozen, integrated platforms. We believe Cisco is going to be one. Microsoft will be one. There'll be others over there. But these, this platform will essentially be able to provide a unified kind of policy engine across a multitude of different services to protect multiple different entities within the organization. And, what we found is that platform will also be something that'll provide, through APIs, the ability for third parties to be able to get their technology incorporated in, and their telemetry ingested. So we certainly intend to do that. We don't believe, we are not arrogant enough to think that every single new innovation will be built by us. When there's someone else who has built that, we want to make sure that we can ingest that telemetry as well, because the real enemy is not the competitor. The real enemy is the adversary. And we all have to get together, so that we can keep humanity safe. >> Do you think there's been enough collaboration in the industry? I mean- >> Jeetu: Not nearly enough. >> We've seen companies, security companies try to monetize private data before, instead of maybe sharing it with competitors. And so I think the industry can do better there. >> Well I think the industry can do better. And we have this concept called the security poverty line. And the security poverty line is the companies that fall below the security poverty line don't have either the influence or the resources or the know how to keep themselves safe. And when they go unsafe, everyone else that communicates with them also gets that exposure. So it is in our collective interest for all of us to make sure that we come together. And, even if Palo Alto might be a competitor of ours, we want to make sure that we invite them to say, let's make sure that we can actually exchange telemetry between our companies. And we'll continue to do that with as many companies that are out there, because actually that's better for the market, that's better for the world. >> The enemy of the enemy is my friend, kind of thing. >> That's right. >> Now, as it relates to, because you're right. I mean I, I see companies coming up, oh, we do IOT security. I'm like, okay, but what about cloud security? Do you that too? Oh no, that's somebody else. But, so that's another stove pipe. >> That's a huge, huge advantage of coming with someone like Cisco. Because we actually have the entire spectrum, and the broadest portfolio in the industry of anyone else. From the user, to the device, to the network, to the applications, we provide the entire end-to-end story for security, which then has the least amount of cracks that you can actually go out and penetrate through. The biggest challenges that happen in security is you've got way too many policy engines with way too much contention between the policies from these different systems. And eventually there's a collision course. Whereas with us, you've actually got a broad portfolio that operates as one platform. >> We were talking about the cloud guys earlier. You mentioned Microsoft. They're obviously a big competitor in the security space. >> Jeetu: But also a great partner. >> So that's right. To my opinion, the cloud has been awesome as a first line of defense if you will. But the shared responsibility model it's different for each cloud, right? So, do you feel that those guys are working together or will work together to actually improve? 'Cause I don't see that yet. >> Yeah so if you think about, this is where we feel like we have a structural advantage in this, because what does a company like Cisco become in the future? I think as the world goes multicloud and hybrid cloud, what'll end up happening is there needs to be a way, today all the CSPs provide everything from storage to computer network, to security, in their own stack. If we can abstract networking and security above them, so that we can acquire and steer any and all traffic with our service providers and steer it to any of those CSPs, and make sure that the security policy transcends those clouds, you would actually be able to have the public cloud economics without the public cloud lock-in. >> That's what we call super cloud Jeetu. It's securing the super cloud. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Really appreciate you coming on our editorial program. >> Such a pleasure. >> All right, great to see you again. >> Cheers. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We'll be back, right after this short break from MWC '23 live, in the Fira, in Barcelona. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

(gentle music) >> Announcer: "theCube's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) (logo whooshing) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to "theCube's" coverage of day one, MWC23 live from Barcelona, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've got some great conversations so far This is the biggest, most packed show I've been to in years. About 80,000 people here so far. >> Yeah, down from its peak of 108, but still pretty good. You know, a lot of folks from China come to this show, but with the COVID situation in China, that's impacted the attendance, but still quite amazing. >> Amazing for sure. We're going to be talking about trends and mobility, and all sorts of great things. We have a couple of guests joining us for the first time on "theCUBE." Please welcome Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala or Sri, chief product officer at Ivanti. And Dave Shepherd, VP Ivanti. Guys, welcome to "theCUBE." Great to have you here. >> Thank you. >> So, day one of the conference, Sri, we'll go to you first. Talk about some of the trends that you're seeing in mobility. Obviously, the conference renamed from Mobile World Congress to MWC mobility being part of it, but what are some of the big trends? >> It's interesting, right? I mean, I was catching up with Dave. The first thing is from the keynotes, it took 45 minutes to talk about security. I mean, it's quite interesting when you look at the shore floor. We're talking about Edge, we're talking about 5G, the whole evolution. And there's also the concept of are we going into the Cloud? Are we coming back from the Cloud, back to the Edge? They're really two different things. Edge is all decentralized while you recompute. And one thing I observed here is they're talking about near real-time reality. When you look at automobiles, when you look at medical, when you look at robotics, you can't have things processed in the Cloud. It'll be too late. Because you got to make millisecond-based stations. That's a big trend for me. When I look at staff... Okay, the compute it takes to process in the Cloud versus what needs to happen on-prem, on device, is going to revolutionize the way we think about mobility. >> Revolutionize. David, what are some of the things that you're saying? Do you concur? >> Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, just reading some of the press recently, they're predicting 22 billion IoT devices by 2024. Everything Sri just talked about there. It's growing exponentially. You know, problems we have today are a snapshot. We're probably in the slowest place we are today. Everything's just going to get faster and faster and faster. So it's a, yeah, 100% concur with that. >> You know, Sri, on your point, so Jose Maria Alvarez, the CEO of Telefonica, said there are three pillars of the future of telco, low latency, programmable networks, and Cloud and Edge. So, as to your point, Cloud and low latency haven't gone hand in hand. But the Cloud guys are saying, "All right, we're going to bring the Cloud to the Edge." That's sort of an interesting dynamic. We're going to bypass them. We heard somebody, another speaker say, "You know, Cloud can't do it alone." You know? (chuckles) And so, it's like these worlds need each other in a way, don't they? >> Definitely right. So that's a fantastic way to look at it. The Cloud guys can say, "We're going to come closer to where the computer is." And if you really take a look at it with data localization, where are we going to put the Cloud in, right? I mean, so the data sovereignty becomes a very interesting thing. The localization becomes a very interesting thing. And when it comes to security, it gets completely different. I mean, we talked about moving everything to a centralized compute, really have massive processing, and give you the addition back wherever you are. Whereas when you're localized, I have to process everything within the local environment. So there's already a conflict right there. How are we going to address that? >> Yeah. So another statement, I think, it was the CEO of Ericsson, he was kind of talking about how the OTT guys have heard, "We can't let that happen again. And we're going to find new ways to charge for the network." Basically, he's talking about monetizing the API access. But I'm interested in what you're hearing from customers, right? 'Cause our mindset is, what value you're going to give to customers that they're going to pay for, versus, "I got this data I'm going to charge developers for." But what are you hearing from customers? >> It's amazing, Dave, the way you're looking at it, right? So if we take a look at what we were used to perpetual, and we said we're going to move to a subscription, right? I mean, everybody talks about subscription economy. Telcos on the other hand, had subscription economy for a long time, right? They were always based on usage, right? It's a usage economy. But today, we are basically realizing on compute. We haven't even started charging for compute. If you go to AWS, go to Azure, go to GCP, they still don't quite charge you for actual compute, right? It's kind of, they're still leaning on it. So think about API-based, we're going to break the bank. What people don't realize is, we do millions of API calls for any high transaction environment. A consumer can't afford that. What people don't realize is... I don't know how you're going to monetize. Even if you charge a cent a call, that is still going to be hundreds and thousands of dollars a day. And that's where, if you look at what you call low-code no-code motion? You see a plethora of companies being built on that. They're saying, "Hey, you don't have to write code. I'll give you authentication as a service. What that means is, Every single time you call my API to authenticate a user, I'm going to charge you." So just imagine how many times we authenticate on a single day. You're talking a few dozen times. And if I have to pay every single time I authenticate... >> Real friction in the marketplace, David. >> Yeah, and I tell you what. It's a big topic, right? And it's a topic that we haven't had to deal with at the Edge before, and we hear it probably daily really, complexity. The complexity's growing all the time. That means that we need to start to get insight, visibility. You know? I think a part of... Something that came out of the EU actually this week, stated, you know, there's a cyber attack every 11 seconds. That's fast, right? 2016, that was 40 seconds. So actually that speed I talked about earlier, everything Sri says that's coming down to the Edge, we want to embrace the Edge and that is the way we're going to move. But customers are mindful of the complexity that's involved in that. And that, you know, lens thought to how are we going to deal with those complexities. >> I was just going to ask you, how are you planning to deal with those complexities? You mentioned one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. That's down considerably from just a few years ago. Ransomware is a household word. It's no longer, "Are we going to get attacked?" It's when, it's to what extent, it's how much. So how is Ivanti helping customers deal with some of the complexities, and the changes in the security landscape? >> Yeah. Shall I start on that one first? Yeah, look, we want to give all our customers and perspective customers full visibility of their environment. You know, devices that are attached to the environment. Where are they? What are they doing? How often are we going to look for those devices? Not only when we find those devices. What applications are they running? Are those applications secure? How are we going to manage those applications moving forward? And overall, wrapping it round, what kind of service are we going to do? What processes are we going to put in place? To Sri's point, the low-code no-code angle. How do we build processes that protect our organization? But probably a point where I'll pass to Sri in a moment is how do we add a level of automation to that? How do we add a level of intelligence that doesn't always require a human to be fixing or remediating a problem? >> To Sri, you mentioned... You're right, the keynote, it took 45 minutes before it even mentioned security. And I suppose it's because they've historically, had this hardened stack. Everything's controlled and it's a safe environment. And now that's changing. So what would you add? >> You know, great point, right? If you look at telcos, they're used to a perimeter-based network. >> Yep. >> I mean, that's what we are. Boxed, we knew our perimeter. Today, our perimeter is extended to our home, everywhere work, right? >> Yeah- >> We don't have a definition of a perimeter. Your browser is the new perimeter. And a good example, segueing to that, what we have seen is horizontal-based security. What we haven't seen is verticalization, especially in mobile. We haven't seen vertical mobile security solutions, right? Yes, you hear a little bit about automobile, you hear a little bit about healthcare, but what we haven't seen is, what about food sector? What about the frontline in food? What about supply chain? What security are we really doing? And I'll give you a simple example. You brought up ransomware. Last night, Dole was attacked with ransomware. We have seen the beef producer colonial pipeline. Now, if we have seen agritech being hit, what does it mean? We are starting to hit humanity. If you can't really put food on the table, you're starting to really disrupt the supply chain, right? In a massive way. So you got to start thinking about that. Why is Dole related to mobility? Think about that. They don't carry service and computers. What they carry is mobile devices. that's where the supply chain works. And then that's where you have to start thinking about it. And the evolution of ransomware, rather than a single-trick pony, you see them using multiple vulnerabilities. And Pegasus was the best example. Spyware across all politicians, right? And CEOs. It is six or seven vulnerabilities put together that actually was constructed to do an attack. >> Yeah. How does AI kind of change this? Where does it fit in? The attackers are going to have AI, but we could use AI to defend. But attackers are always ahead, right? (chuckles) So what's your... Do you have a point of view on that? 'Cause everybody's crazy about ChatGPT, right? The banks have all banned it. Certain universities in the United States have banned it. Another one's forcing his students to learn how to use ChatGPT to prompt it. It's all over the place. You have a point of view on this? >> So definitely, Dave, it's a great point. First, we all have to have our own generative AI. I mean, I look at it as your digital assistant, right? So when you had calculators, you can't function without a calculator today. It's not harmful. It's not going to take you away from doing multiplication, right? So we'll still teach arithmetic in school. You'll still use your calculator. So to me, AI will become an integral part. That's one beautiful thing I've seen on the short floor. Every little thing there is a AI-based solution I've seen, right? So ChatGPT is well played from multiple perspective. I would rather up level it and say, generated AI is the way to go. So there are three things. There is human intense triaging, where humans keep doing easy work, minimal work. You can use ML and AI to do that. There is human designing that you need to do. That's when you need to use AI. >> But, I would say this, in the Enterprise, that the quality of the AI has to be better than what we've seen so far out of ChatGPT, even though I love ChatGPT, it's amazing. But what we've seen from being... It's got to be... Is it true that... Don't you think it has to be cleaner, more accurate? It can't make up stuff. If I'm going to be automating my network with AI. >> I'll answer that question. It comes down to three fundamentals. The reason ChatGPT is giving addresses, it's not trained on the latest data. So for any AI and ML method, you got to look at three things. It's your data, it's your domain expertise, who is training it, and your data model. In ChatGPT, it's older data, it's biased to the people that trained it, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> And then, the data model is it's going to spit out what it's trained on. That's a precursor of any GPT, right? It's pre-trained transformation. >> So if we narrow that, right? Train it better for the specific use case, that AI has huge potential. >> You flip that to what the Enterprise customers talk about to us is, insight is invaluable. >> Right. >> But then too much insight too quickly all the time means we go remediation crazy. So we haven't got enough humans to be fixing all the problems. Sri's point with the ChatGPT data, some of that data we are looking at there could be old. So we're trying to triage something that may still be an issue, but it might have been superseded by something else as well. So that's my overriding when I'm talking to customers and we talk ChatGPT, it's in the news all the time. It's very topical. >> It's fun. >> It is. I even said to my 13-year-old son yesterday, your homework's out a date. 'Cause I knew he was doing some summary stuff on ChatGPT. So a little wind up that's out of date just to make that emphasis around the model. And that's where we, with our Neurons platform Ivanti, that's what we want to give the customers all the time, which is the real-time snapshot. So they can make a priority or a decision based on what that information is telling them. >> And we've kind of learned, I think, over the last couple of years, that access to real-time data, real-time AI, is no longer nice to have. It's a massive competitive advantage for organizations, but it's going to enable the on-demand, everything that we expect in our consumer lives, in our business lives. This is going to be table stakes for organizations, I think, in every industry going forward. >> Yeah. >> But assumes 5G, right? Is going to actually happen and somebody's going to- >> Going to absolutely. >> Somebody's going to make some money off it at some point. When are they going to make money off of 5G, do you think? (all laughing) >> No. And then you asked a very good question, Dave. I want to answer that question. Will bad guys use AI? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Offensive AI is a very big thing. We have to pay attention to it. It's got to create an asymmetric war. If you look at the president of the United States, he said, "If somebody's going to attack us on cyber, we are going to retaliate." For the first time, US is willing to launch a cyber war. What that really means is, we're going to use AI for offensive reasons as well. And we as citizens have to pay attention to that. And that's where I'm worried about, right? AI bias, whether it's data, or domain expertise, or algorithmic bias, is going to be a big thing. And offensive AI is something everybody have to pay attention to. >> To your point, Sri, earlier about critical infrastructure getting hacked, I had this conversation with Dr. Robert Gates several years ago, and I said, "Yeah, but don't we have the best offensive, you know, technology in cyber?" And he said, "Yeah, but we got the most to lose too." >> Yeah, 100%. >> We're the wealthiest nation of the United States. The wealthiest is. So you got to be careful. But to your point, the president of the United States saying, "We'll retaliate," right? Not necessarily start the war, but who started it? >> But that's the thing, right? Attribution is the hardest part. And then you talked about a very interesting thing, rich nations, right? There's emerging nations. There are nations left behind. One thing I've seen on the show floor today is, digital inequality. Digital poverty is a big thing. While we have this amazing technology, 90% of the world doesn't have access to this. >> Right. >> What we have done is we have created an inequality across, and especially in mobility and cyber, if this technology doesn't reach to the last mile, which is emerging nations, I think we are creating a crater back again and putting societies a few miles back. >> And at much greater risk. >> 100%, right? >> Yeah. >> Because those are the guys. In cyber, all you need is a laptop and a brain to attack. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> If I don't have it, that's where the civil war is going to start again. >> Yeah. What are some of the things in our last minute or so, guys, David, we'll start with you and then Sri go to you, that you're looking forward to at this MWC? The theme is velocity. We're talking about so much transformation and evolution in the telecom industry. What are you excited to hear and learn in the next couple of days? >> Just getting a complete picture. One is actually being out after the last couple of years, so you learn a lot. But just walking around and seeing, from my perspective, some vendor names that I haven't seen before, but seeing what they're doing and bringing to the market. But I think goes back to the point made earlier around APIs and integration. Everybody's talking about how can we kind of do this together in a way. So integrations, those smart things is what I'm kind of looking for as well, and how we plug into that as well. >> Excellent, and Sri? >> So for us, there is a lot to offer, right? So while I'm enjoying what I'm seeing here, I'm seeing at an opportunity. We have an amazing portfolio of what we can do. We are into mobile device management. We are the last (indistinct) company. When people find problems, somebody has to go remediators. We are the world's largest patch management company. And what I'm finding is, yes, all these people are embedding software, pumping it like nobody's business. As you find one ability, somebody has to go fix them, and we want to be the (indistinct) company. We had the last smile. And I find an amazing opportunity, not only we can do device management, but do mobile threat defense and give them a risk prioritization on what needs to be remediated, and manage all that in our ITSM. So I look at this as an amazing, amazing opportunity. >> Right. >> Which is exponential than what I've seen before. >> So last question then. Speaking of opportunities, Sri, for you, what are some of the things that customers can go to? Obviously, you guys talk to customers all the time. In terms of learning what Ivanti is going to enable them to do, to take advantage of these opportunities. Any webinars, any events coming up that we want people to know about? >> Absolutely, ivanti.com is the best place to go because we keep everything there. Of course, "theCUBE" interview. >> Of course. >> You should definitely watch that. (all laughing) No. So we have quite a few industry events we do. And especially there's a lot of learning. And we just raised the ransomware report that actually talks about ransomware from a global index perspective. So one thing what we have done is, rather than just looking at vulnerabilities, we showed them the weaknesses that led to the vulnerabilities, and how attackers are using them. And we even talked about DHS, how behind they are in disseminating the information and how it's actually being used by nation states. >> Wow. >> And we did cover mobility as a part of that as well. So there's a quite a bit we did in our report and it actually came out very well. >> I have to check that out. Ransomware is such a fascinating topic. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, sharing what's going on at Ivanti, the changes that you're seeing in mobile, and the opportunities that are there for your customers. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you >> Thank you. >> Yes. Thanks, guys. >> Thanks, guys. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live from MWC23 in Barcelona. As you know, "theCUBE" is the leader in live tech coverage. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

hi everybody welcome back to re invent 2022. this is thecube's exclusive coverage we're here at the satellite set it's up on the fifth floor of the Venetian Conference Center and this is part of the global startup program the AWS startup showcase series that we've been running all through last year and and into this year with AWS and featuring some of its its Global Partners Ed wallson series the CEO of chaos search many times Cube Alum and Kevin Miller there's also a cube Alum vice president GM of S3 at AWS guys good to see you again yeah great to see you Dave hi Kevin this is we call this our Super Bowl so this must be like your I don't know uh World Cup it's a pretty big event yeah it's the World Cup for sure yeah so a lot of S3 talk you know I mean that's what got us all started in 2006 so absolutely what's new in S3 yeah it's been a great show we've had a number of really interesting launches over the last few weeks and a few at the show as well so you know we've been really focused on helping customers that are running Mass scale data Lakes including you know whether it's structured or unstructured data we actually announced just a few just an hour ago I think it was a new capability to give customers cross-account access points for sharing data securely with other parts of the organization and that's something that we'd heard from customers is as they are growing and have more data sets and they're looking to to get more out of their data they are increasingly looking to enable multiple teams across their businesses to access those data sets securely and that's what we provide with cross-count access points we also launched yesterday our multi-region access point failover capabilities and so again this is where customers have data sets and they're using multiple regions for certain critical workloads they're now able to to use that to fail to control the failover between different regions in AWS and then one other launch I would just highlight is some improvements we made to storage lens which is our really a very novel and you need capability to help customers really understand what storage they have where who's accessing it when it's being accessed and we added a bunch of new metrics storage lens has been pretty exciting for a lot of customers in fact we looked at the data and saw that customers who have adopted storage lens typically within six months they saved more than six times what they had invested in turning storage lens on and certainly in this environment right now we have a lot of customers who are it's pretty top of mind they're looking for ways to optimize their their costs in the cloud and take some of those savings and be able to reinvest them in new innovation so pretty exciting with the storage lens launch I think what's interesting about S3 is that you know pre-cloud Object Store was this kind of a niche right and then of course you guys announced you know S3 in 2006 as I said and okay great you know cheap and deep storage simple get put now the conversations about how to enable value from from data absolutely analytics and it's just a whole new world and Ed you've talked many times I love the term yeah we built chaos search on the on the shoulders of giants right and so the under underlying that is S3 but the value that you can build on top of that has been key and I don't think we've talked about his shoulders and Giants but we've talked about how we literally you know we have a big Vision right so hard to kind of solve the challenge to analytics at scale we really focus on the you know the you know Big Data coming environment get analytics so we talk about the on the shoulders Giants obviously Isaac Newton's you know metaphor of I learned from everything before and we layer on top so really when you talk about all the things come from S3 like I just smile because like we picked it up naturally we went all in an S3 and this is where I think you're going Dave but everyone is so let's just cut the chase like so any of the data platforms you're using S3 is what you're building but we did it a little bit differently so at first people using a cold storage like you said and then they ETL it up into a different platforms for analytics of different sorts now people are using it closer they're doing caching layers and cashing out and they're that's where but that's where the attributes of a scale or reliability are what we did is we actually make S3 a database so literally we have no persistence outside that three and that kind of comes in so it's working really well with clients because most of the thing is we pick up all these attributes of scale reliability and it shows up in the clients environments and so when you launch all these new scalable things we just see it like our clients constantly comment like one of our biggest customers fintech in uh Europe they go to Black Friday again black Friday's not one days and they lose scale from what is it 58 terabytes a day and they're going up to 187 terabytes a day and we don't Flinch they say how do you do that well we built our platform on S3 as long as you can stream it to S3 so they're saying I can't overrun S3 and it's a natural play so it's it's really nice that but we take out those attributes but same thing that's why we're able to you know help clients get you know really you know Equifax is a good example maybe they're able to consolidate 12 their divisions on one platform we couldn't have done that without the scale and the performance of what you can get S3 but also they saved 90 I'm able to do that but that's really because the only persistence is S3 and what you guys are delivering but and then we really for focus on shoulders Giants we're doing on top of that innovating on top of your platforms and bringing that out so things like you know we have a unique data representation that makes it easy to ingest this data because it's kind of coming at you four v's of big data we allow you to do that make it performant on s3h so now you're doing hot analytics on S3 as if it's just a native database in memory but there's no memory SSC caching and then multi-model once you get it there don't move it leverage it in place so you know elasticsearch access you know Cabana grafana access or SQL access with your tools so we're seeing that constantly but we always talk about on the shoulders of giants but even this week I get comments from our customers like how did you do that and most of it is because we built on top of what you guys provided so it's really working out pretty well and you know we talk a lot about digital transformation of course we had the pleasure sitting down with Adam solipski prior John Furrier flew to Seattle sits down his annual one-on-one with the AWS CEO which is kind of cool yeah it was it's good it's like study for the test you know and uh and so but but one of the interesting things he said was you know we're one of our challenges going forward is is how do we go Beyond digital transformation into business transformation like okay well that's that's interesting I was talking to a customer today AWS customer and obviously others because they're 100 year old company and they're basically their business was they call them like the Uber for for servicing appliances when your Appliance breaks you got to get a person to serve it a service if it's out of warranty you know these guys do that so they got to basically have a you know a network of technicians yeah and they gotta deal with the customers no phone right so they had a completely you know that was a business transformation right they're becoming you know everybody says they're coming a software company but they're building it of course yeah right on the cloud so wonder if you guys could each talk about what's what you're seeing in terms of changing not only in the sort of I.T and the digital transformation but also the business transformation yeah I know I I 100 agree that I think business transformation is probably that one of the top themes I'm hearing from customers of all sizes right now even in this environment I think customers are looking for what can I do to drive top line or you know improve bottom line or just improve my customer experience and really you know sort of have that effect where I'm helping customers get more done and you know it is it is very tricky because to do that successfully the customers that are doing that successfully I think are really getting into the lines of businesses and figuring out you know it's probably a different skill set possibly a different culture different norms and practices and process and so it's it's a lot more than just a like you said a lot more than just the technology involved but when it you know we sort of liquidate it down into the data that's where absolutely we see that as a critical function for lines of businesses to become more comfortable first off knowing what data sets they have what data they they could access but possibly aren't today and then starting to tap into those data sources and then as as that progresses figuring out how to share and collaborate with data sets across a company to you know to correlate across those data sets and and drive more insights and then as all that's being done of course it's important to measure the results and be able to really see is this what what effect is this having and proving that effect and certainly I've seen plenty of customers be able to show you know this is a percentage increase in top or bottom line and uh so that pattern is playing out a lot and actually a lot of how we think about where we're going with S3 is related to how do we make it easier for customers to to do everything that I just described to have to understand what data they have to make it accessible and you know it's great to have such a great ecosystem of partners that are then building on top of that and innovating to help customers connect really directly with the businesses that they're running and driving those insights well and customers are hours today one of the things I loved that Adam said he said where Amazon is strategically very very patient but tactically we're really impatient and the customers out there like how are you going to help me increase Revenue how are you going to help me cut costs you know we were talking about how off off camera how you know software can actually help do that yeah it's deflationary I love the quote right so software's deflationary as costs come up how do you go drive it also free up the team and you nail it it's like okay everyone wants to save money but they're not putting off these projects in fact the digital transformation or the business it's actually moving forward but they're getting a little bit bigger but everyone's looking for creative ways to look at their architecture and it becomes larger larger we talked about a couple of those examples but like even like uh things like observability they want to give this tool set this data to all the developers all their sres same data to all the security team and then to do that they need to find a way an architect should do that scale and save money simultaneously so we see constantly people who are pairing us up with some of these larger firms like uh or like keep your data dog keep your Splunk use us to reduce the cost that one and one is actually cheaper than what you have but then they use it either to save money we're saving 50 to 80 hard dollars but more importantly to free up your team from the toil and then they they turn around and make that budget neutral and then allowed to get the same tools to more people across the org because they're sometimes constrained of getting the access to everyone explain that a little bit more let's say I got a Splunk or data dog I'm sifting through you know logs how exactly do you help so it's pretty simple I'll use dad dog example so let's say using data dog preservability so it's just your developers your sres managing environments all these platforms are really good at being a monitoring alerting type of tool what they're not necessarily great at is keeping the data for longer periods like the log data the bigger data that's where we're strong what you see is like a data dog let's say you're using it for a minister for to keep 30 days of logs which is not enough like let's say you're running environment you're finding that performance issue you kind of want to look to last quarter in last month in or maybe last Black Friday so 30 days is not enough but will charge you two eighty two dollars and eighty cents a gigabyte don't focus on just 280 and then if you just turn the knob and keep seven days but keep two years of data on us which is on S3 it goes down to 22 cents plus our list price of 80 cents goes to a dollar two compared to 280. so here's the thing what they're able to do is just turn a knob get more data we do an integration so you can go right from data dog or grafana directly into our platform so the user doesn't see it but they save money A lot of times they don't just save the money now they use that to go fund and get data dog to a lot more people make sense so it's a creativity they're looking at it and they're looking at tools we see the same thing with a grafana if you look at the whole grafana play which is hey you can't put it in one place but put Prometheus for metrics or traces we fit well with logs but they're using that to bring down their costs because a lot of this data just really bogs down these applications the alerting monitoring are good at small data they're not good at the big data which is what we're really good at and then the one and one is actually less than you paid for the one so it and it works pretty well so things are really unpredictable right now in the economy you know during the pandemic we've sort of lockdown and then the stock market went crazy we're like okay it's going to end it's going to end and then it looked like it was going to end and then it you know but last year it reinvented just just in that sweet spot before Omicron so we we tucked it in which which was awesome right it was a great great event we really really missed one physical reinvent you know which was very rare so that's cool but I've called it the slingshot economy it feels like you know you're driving down the highway and you got to hit the brakes and then all of a sudden you're going okay we're through it Oh no you're gonna hit the brakes again yeah so it's very very hard to predict and I was listening to jassy this morning he was talking about yeah consumers they're still spending but what they're doing is they're they're shopping for more features they might be you know buying a TV that's less expensive you know more value for the money so okay so hopefully the consumer spending will get us out of this but you don't really know you know and I don't yeah you know we don't seem to have the algorithms we've never been through something like this before so what are you guys seeing in terms of customer Behavior given that uncertainty well one thing I would highlight that I think particularly going back to what we were just talking about as far as business and digital transformation I think some customers are still appreciating the fact that where you know yesterday you may have had to to buy some Capital put out some capital and commit to something for a large upfront expenditure is that you know today the value of being able to experiment and scale up and then most importantly scale down and dynamically based on is the experiment working out am I seeing real value from it and doing that on a time scale of a day or a week or a few months that is so important right now because again it gets to I am looking for a ways to innovate and to drive Top Line growth but I I can't commit to a multi-year sort of uh set of costs to to do that so and I think plenty of customers are finding that even a few months of experimentation gives them some really valuable insight as far as is this going to be successful or not and so I think that again just of course with S3 and storage from day one we've been elastic pay for what you use if you're not using the storage you don't get charged for it and I think that particularly right now having the applications and the rest of the ecosystem around the storage and the data be able to scale up and scale down is is just ever more important and when people see that like typically they're looking to do more with it so if they find you usually find these little Department projects but they see a way to actually move faster and save money I think it is a mix of those two they're looking to expand it which can be a nightmare for sales Cycles because they take longer but people are looking well why don't you leverage this and go across division so we do see people trying to leverage it because they're still I don't think digital transformation is slowing down but a lot more to be honest a lot more approvals at this point for everything it is you know Adam and another great quote in his in his keynote he said if you want to save money the Cloud's a place to do it absolutely and I read an article recently and I was looking through and I said this is the first time you know AWS has ever seen a downturn because the cloud was too early back then I'm like you weren't paying attention in 2008 because that was the first major inflection point for cloud adoption where CFO said okay stop the capex we're going to Opex and you saw the cloud take off and then 2010 started this you know amazing cycle that we really haven't seen anything like it where they were doubling down in Investments and they were real hardcore investment it wasn't like 1998 99 was all just going out the door for no clear reason yeah so that Foundation is now in place and I think it makes a lot of sense and it could be here for for a while where people are saying Hey I want to optimize and I'm going to do that on the cloud yeah no I mean I've obviously I certainly agree with Adam's quote I think really that's been in aws's DNA from from day one right is that ability to scale costs with with the actual consumption and paying for what you use and I think that you know certainly moments like now are ones that can really motivate change in an organization in a way that might not have been as palatable when it just it didn't feel like it was as necessary yeah all right we got to go give you a last word uh I think it's been a great event I love all your announcements I think this is wonderful uh it's been a great show I love uh in fact how many people are here at reinvent north of 50 000. yeah I mean I feel like it was it's as big if not bigger than 2019. people have said ah 2019 was a record when you count out all the professors I don't know it feels it feels as big if not bigger so there's great energy yeah it's quite amazing and uh and we're thrilled to be part of it guys thanks for coming on thecube again really appreciate it face to face all right thank you for watching this is Dave vellante for the cube your leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage we'll be right back foreign

(bright upbeat music) >> Now welcome back to theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22, or of course in the Venetian here in Las Vegas. It's Wednesday day, I guess two and a half of the show. Things are going really well here and we're going to move our attention now to banking and tech like so many other verticals that financial industry making huge moves with their digital plays. And we're going to talk about that with a couple of guys that know what that is all about. Ken Meyer, chief Information and Experience Officer at Truist. Ken, good to see you, sir. >> Good to have me. Thank you very much. >> It is. And Gys Hyman, who is a principal at Deloitte the lead though for a converge prosperity we'll explain that in just a second. Hi, it's good to see you as well. >> Nice, yeah. Awesome having me. >> Right, so jump in on that for a converge prosperity so we understand what the product is and or what the opportunity is for what Deloitte brought to market for what folks like Truist are putting into practice. >> Yeah, so converge prosperity is really our focus where we building solutions production reduced solutions for the financial services industry. So if you think about the demand on the bank side right now is they want to launch new products, new services those innovative products and services that they want to take to market. And they also want to modernize, a lot of their sort of legacy infrastructure and modernize some of the components within their architecture. So we, together with AWS actually, are co-investing sort of in a multi-year strategy where we're saying, let's build these solutions that we can take to market that can sort of help these banks be more agile, launch products faster to market and also help address the modernization journey for the banks. And that's really sitting within the converged prosperity business unit within Deloitte. >> And Ken, for you, what was the attraction or what is the attraction in terms of that kind of an offering? >> Well, I think when you think about the banking journey to the Cloud, a lot of folks look on the channel experiences and they've leveraged Cloud to create differentiated experiences that are just... They couldn't build before with the speed of the scale and everything else. But, the challenges that many banks have is once you get below that layer there's a lot of legacy type technology that lives in the product offerings that we all offer. So, the idea of these folks or others that are trying to make that a little bit easier to kind of connect that front end to that backend all with the true modern stack is something that's differentiated. >> Yeah, if I hear pulling this big old weight along with me right? >> That's right. >> I've got all this old stuff but I still have to use some of the old stuff. >> Well, and some of the old stuff works, right? It runs. So, why would you want to mess up anything that's running? And so even that if these folks and others can find ways to start breaking it into more modular pieces so we can consume things differently than we've done before versus take that big old elephant on every time, it's a differentiator. >> So what's the trick then in making sure that what is new is working with what is old? Because what is new these days, obviously you know, faster, sleek, or, I mean, we go on and on as opposed to what you were working with in Legacy. So what's the trick there, Gys in making sure that you're doing the right match up? >> It's part of the approach. I mean, you can either do a big bang approach which is sort of lengthy and high risk for the bank which is obviously we don't see a lot of appetite in the banks to take the big bang approach or the large transformational approach. And then the approach that we sort of take to this is to say, and that we're seeing that success in the market is around more a phased approach which we call on the edge, is really to say, how can we launch something on the side, and take that to market really quick to show the benefit to the business and demonstrate success. And at the same time have a really sort of modular architecture that you can say, you don't have to have this monolith solution that you need to plug or replace your existing one. That you can really sort of componentize that and say which are the components that we want to start replacing in a phased approach, with these new next generation technologies, which, yeah. >> The part that he mentioned there at the end on module architecture is a 100% the key, right? I mean, architecture matters probably now more than ever. When you're trying to stitch all these things to together and you can find ways to make it a little bit more seamless versus some of the monoliths that we've dealt with in the past, it's extremely helpful. >> So, give us some examples here for what your experience has been then. >> Yeah... >> 'I mean, you are as I see you're the experience officer, so, (all laughing) >> We'll leave that one alone, (all laughing loudly) but now, I mean I think some of the on the edge stuff that Gys has been talking about, we're a large bank, we have subsidiaries we have a subsidiary, which is our national lending platform and LightStream as an example. And we decided to say, Hey let's really learn from what we could do with a more modern core banking platform. And we ultimately stood that up in production and we're close to going generally available but we've got production accounts on modern core platforms that we're learning every day from. And it's not just the learning on the tech side, that tech side might be the easy part, to be honest. The change in this technology and the different technologies that are available it really is impacting how we run our operations. So moving from batch processing which has always been how banks operate to this concept of real time processing, that's a big step. And not only does it change in the operations and how we service our clients but now you got to think about compliance, right? And legal and all of the the risk elements, >> 'security changing. >> Security, all that. It's all a part of that change. So you could say that the tech is really hard and it's difficult and we got to look at the architecture but at the end of the day, it's about bringing the entire organization back to the table to say how do we do this different? And how do we create a better experience and create new value for our clients through the technology. >> All right, can you gimme an example though? I mean, about some... What's going to be the biggest change you think then? >> I think operationally is the biggest change, in my opinion. I mean, when you start thinking about the way in which we've worked for years around this concept of batch processing, so, you know, yes, you make a deposit at your branch and that's really nice and we might credit you and you do the memo post but it doesn't clear until the night runs and you finish your batch process, at 3:00 AM and then all your downstream systems run and all of that. And even the concept of collecting checks, right? And thinking about all the item processing aspects of that when you start talking about real time and it immediately you make your deposit and immediately balances your general ledger and it clears and it's all right there at that point in time, all of those processes go away, right? The batch processes change the way in which all the downstream impacts for reporting and analytics and all of those things, it all changes. And so that can be really scary, but it also can be really exciting when you think about creating new products and new services that are truly real time and changing the way in which we operate with our clients. >> So scary and exciting, right? A couple of moods or situations that maybe some folks in banking don't want to be in, right? I don't like scary. I want here... >> Well change is scary for a lot of people right? But there's an evolution in this space. >> Gys, what are you seeing with your experiences in terms of... >> 'i think that it also creates opportunity to sort of (clears throat) to lay the foundation of how do you coexist between the old world and the new world? And these modern technologies really allow you to sort of, put a event driven platform in place to say, understand that the banking world is fairly batch driven right now as Ken's comment and also the broader banking ecosystem is still batch driven but it allows us to put a platform in place to say how do we coexist with that batch environment and the real time environment? And the other thing that the banks are trying to do is they're trying to work with a number of sort of the fintechs out there in the market, these leading fintechs that are offering new products and services that they can embed into their offering and then offer as a service to their customers at the end of the day. But doing that with existing banking technology is difficult because it's not as modular, it's not as open. These next generation technologies and certainly the solution that we building with AWS is really sort of that power strip or that fabric layer where we are allowing fintechs to plug in easier into that ecosystem and into the bank's ecosystem as well. >> Yeah, I think with Goldman Sachs is that what I read is that one that comes to mind about repurposing and making it available to their client base. >> They certainly building a platform model where they're bringing other ecosystem partners into their platform and then they're offering out as business services to their customers. >> So, Ken how do you get buy in on this? I mean, because, it sure looks good on paper, right? But when it comes to time actually execute and implement, you need, you know, buy in for more than just your slice of the business, right? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different elements that come into getting that buy in and kind of making that leap and starting to experiment. One is our clients, right? So our clients are demanding new products, new services they don't expect things like maintenance windows and other, like they want what they want when they want it. So if you're listening to your clients and they want more product innovation and they want everything available when they need it that's clear. Cloud and security, we've... Everything that we've ever done when it comes to moving workloads or building experiences with the Cloud has been by continuing to increase our security posture. So we can create a more secure environment and a more available environment because we've have deployments that are spanning different regions and they're continuously available, and the automation and the speed in which we can go to market. I mean, when you can create a new product and launch a new product in weeks versus months or years in the past with all of the complexity and create simplicity while also using modern capabilities to create intelligent experiences, that's a game changer. And it's hard to argue with it but I think the other part of it that's a reality is that we're facing a really interesting time where there's not a whole lot of COBAL programmers laying around these days. And so at some point there's going to be a workforce issue. >> Skills gap. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. So looking at it with through your Deloitte lens, then I mean, that's a very real threat, right? Is it not to all of a sudden, not a regression but certainly a delay in progress, (chuckles) how do we overcome that as far as training and skills and whatever? >> We believe that this on the edge approach also, the other benefit to the bank is it allows the benefit to sort of test and learn a little bit with these new technologies. These new Cloud native, Cloud based technologies are very different, you know, different skill set that you need in the design side and the build side and also in the maintain and operate side. But it allows the bank to sort of take more of a phased approach and sort of get the training wheels around the skills, get comfortable around how these different platforms work, and how do you slowly sort of phase that into the organization, which makes a big difference. >> So what's the training part of that then? I mean, what does that look like? >> It's training at the engineering level to say there are a new set of tools. You know if you think about the Cloud the infrastructure layer, those technologies are very different from, servicing the on-prem technologies that the banks are used to servicing. So that's certainly at the engineering level there's a difference in training, but there's also a different training required at how do you configure and work with these new next generation, core platforms, which opens up a whole set of opportunities of what are the types of financial services products that the banks can take to market, but they work very differently than your sort of your traditional more monolithic technologies. And then I think the bigger area, as Ken mentioned is on the servicing side, the bank has now got a say we are now introducing a new solution together with an old solution, and how do we coexist and how do we create a servicing layer for the customer to have that sort of consistent experience across all the new but also your middle office and your back office and your front office, people have got to work on this platform and how do you not give them a broken experience in the... >> 'well, and your clients don't care about what your black end platforms look like. >> All right. That's right. >> So you want to be able to, it's kind of it's do it on the device, right? It doesn't matter what if it's a hundred years old or if it's 10 days old, it doesn't matter. >> Right, right. You talked about the modular configurations, right? Are some more critical than others? I mean, not knowing what that looks like or have you been able to give feedback on the converged prosperity side, say, you know, fine tune... >> 'i give a lot of feedback. >> Okay, (all laughing loudly). >> We won't do his review right now. >> All right, all right, good. All right, so let's not do... >> 'no, I think that we've done a lot of learning together throughout all of these processes because before they had this really fancy converge prosperity thing we were just working together, right? And we've been able to learn along the way and there's some learnings that are great for us and there's other things that they can tailor for a broader set of clients, which is great. I mean that's what the partnerships about is continuing to learn together and Gys and his team have been phenomenal partners. As we think about being very, very intentional about how we launch products on these new platforms we give a lot of feedback on, Hey these are areas that might be really important for you to think about as you look to build out your side of the platform. And some of those things we might consume some of those things we might not, and that's okay. But for us it's about truly partnering and doing that test and learn and trying to learn about how does this impact all of the downstream stuff because it's not just about technology, although we like to think it is every once in a while this is about clients. And so you got to continue to put them in the front and then similarly, our teammates that we have because they're servicing those clients on the front lines every day. >> Yeah, they'll tell you if it's working. >> 'they will tell you. >> 'you'll know right away. >> Absolutely. >> See what kind of use we have going on here and... >> 'a 100%. >> And if something's broken or not. Just real quick about the relationship going forward then, like you've launched converged prosperity, right? It's been out in the marketplace less than a year, but you got it up and running, things are going well. When you hear feedback like this from Ken and others what kind of fine tunings going on in here with you? And then from your side of the equation too what do you want more of? What do you want to see more of here in 2023? >> Yeah, I mean we work with sort of the non-traditional banks out there. So we work with FinTech that want to launch banking offerings. So there are a lot of lessons that we learn from them in terms of what are the features and capabilities that they're looking for. We work with some of the larger banks that are saying, we want to be more modular in terms of how we consume the banking suite solution. We don't want to take sort of an end-to-end proposition. We really want to take selective components of that banking suite solution and embed it into our existing or new infrastructure. And I think the lessons for us is really just around what are the new customer capabilities that their customers are looking for that we should be building for in our platform. I think the other thing that you need to look at is these next generation core banking platforms they are like any new software business they are growing, they are learning and they are maturing. So you are also looking for customers that have the appetite to grow with some of those and whose product roadmap aligns with those vendors out there. So, I guess for us, it's important to work with partners that are willing to work with us and walk that journey. But we also feel that these technologies and solutions are really.... Banks are moving past design, past thinking, they are really now thinking about how do we start implementing and making it real and how do we take that initial use case sort of to market out there. >> Yeah, I would say, if I simplify what Gys and team have done they've taken modernization of commodity services, right? So, banks don't want to just go out and build commodities all the time, right? That's not how we're going to differentiate. So we need to be thinking about what are the different ways that we can create a competitive advantage against everybody else who has, a lot of different and similar products and service offerings. So, if we can continue to look and help influence roadmaps and also consume some of those types of services that are truly commoditized, and we can go focus on the modernization of the areas that are the biggest possible competitive advantages for us then there's a lot of value in that type of value problem. >> I know we didn't have time for this, but do you have a pick by the way, in the national championship in college football? >> I'm a dog. >> I know you are, (laughing loudly). >> I'm a dog. >> How about them dogs? >> How about them dogs? >> All right, thanks for the time guys. >> Thanks much. >> Really do appreciate it much. Really great session. Talking about banking and what's going on at the bottom really is AWS, driving things and making it happen. All right, you've been watching the Cube, of course. The leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage of Cuban here in Motor City, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be joined for this segment by my co-host Lisa Martin. Lisa, how you doing? Good. >>We are, we've had such great energy for three days, especially on a Friday. Yeah, that's challenging to do for a tech conference. Go all week, push through the end of day Friday. But we're here, We're excited. We have a great conversation coming up. Absolutely. A little of our alumni is back with us. Love it. We have a great conversation about learning. >>There's been a lot of learning this week, and I cannot wait to hear what these folks have to say. Please welcome Tom and Victoria from Cast by Beam. You guys are swag up very well. You've got the Fanny pack. You've got the vest. You even were nice enough to give me a Carhartt Beanie. Carhartt being a Michigan company, we've had so much love for Detroit and, and locally sourced swag here. I've never seen that before. How has the week been for you? >>The week has been amazing, as you can say by my voice probably. >>So the mic helps. Don't worry. You're good. >>Yeah, so, So we've been talking to tons and tons of people, obviously some vendors, partners of ours. That was great seeing all those people face to face again, because in the past years we haven't really been able to meet up with those people. But then of course, also a lot of end users and most importantly, we've met a lot of people that wanted to learn Kubernetes, that came here to learn Kubernetes, and we've been able to help them. So feel very satisfied about that. >>When we were at VMware explorer, Tom, you were on the program with us, just, I guess that was a couple of months ago. I'm listening track. So many events are coming up. >>Time is a loop. It's >>Okay. It really is. You, you teased some new things coming from a learning perspective. What is going on there? >>All right. So I'm happy that you link back to VMware explorer there because Yeah, I was so excited to talk about it, but I couldn't, and it was frustrating. I knew it was coming up. That was was gonna be awesome. So just before Cuban, we launched Cube Campus, which is the rebrand of learning dot cast io. And Victoria is the great mind behind all of this, but what the gist of it, and then I'll let Victoria talk a little bit. The gist of Cube Campus is this all started as a small webpage in our own domain to bring some hands on lab online and let people use them. But we saw so many people who were interested in those labs that we thought, okay, we have to make this its own community, and this should not be a branded community or a company branded community. >>This needs to be its own thing because people, they like to be in just a community environment without the brand from the company being there. So we made it completely independent. It's a Cube campus, it's still a hundred percent free and it's still the That's right. Only platform where you actually learn Kubernetes with hands on labs. We have 14 labs today. We've been creating one per month and we have a lot of people on there. The most exciting part this week is that we had our first learning day, but before we go there, I suggest we let Victoria talk a little bit about that user experience of Cube Campus. >>Oh, absolutely. So Cube Campus is, and Tom mentioned it's a one year old platform, and we rebranded it specifically to welcome more and, you know, embrace this Kubernetes space total as one year anniversary. We have over 11,000 students and they've been taking labs Wow. Over 7,000. Yes. Labs taken. And per each user, if you actually count approximation, it's over three labs, three point 29. And I believe we're growing as per user if you look at the numbers. So it's a huge success and it's very easy to use overall. If you look at this, it's a number one free Kubernetes learning platform. So for you user journey for your Kubernetes journey, if you start from scratch, don't be afraid. That's we, we got, we got it all. We got you back. >>It's so important and, and I'm sure most of our audience knows this, but the, the number one challenge according to Gartner, according to everyone with Kubernetes, is the complexity. Especially when you're getting harder. I think it's incredibly awesome that you've decided to do this. 11,000 students. I just wanna settle on that. I mean, in your first year is really impressive. How did this become, and I'm sure this was a conversation you two probably had. How did this become a priority for CAST and by Beam? >>I have to go back for that. To the last virtual only Cuban where we were lucky enough to have set up a campaign. It was actually, we had an artist that was doing caricatures in a Zoom room, and it gave us an opportunity to actually talk to people because the challenge back in the days was that everything virtual, it's very hard to talk to people. Every single conversation we had with people asking them, Why are you at cu com virtual was to learn Kubernetes every single conversation. Yeah. And so that was, that is one data point. The other data point is we had one lab to, to use our software, and that was extremely popular. So as a team, we decided we should make more labs and not just about our product, but also about Kubernetes. So that initial page that I talked about that we built, we had three labs at launch. >>One was to learn install Kubernetes. One was to build a first application on Kubernetes, and then a third one was to learn how to back up and restore your application. So there was still a little bit of promoting our technology in there, but pretty soon we decided, okay, this has to become even more. So we added storage, we added security and, and a lot more labs. So today, 14 labs, and we're still adding one every month. The next step for the labs is going to be to involve other partners and have them bring their technologies in the lab. So that's our user base can actually learn more about Kubernetes related technologies and then hopefully with links to open source tools or free software tools. And it's, it's gonna continue to be a, a learning experience for Kubernetes. I >>Love how this seems to be, have been born out of the pandemic in terms of the inability to, to connect with customers, end users, to really understand what their challenges are, how do we help you best? But you saw the demand organically and built this, and then in, in the first year, not only 11,000 as Victoria mentioned, 11,000 users, but you've almost quadrupled the number of labs that you have on the platform in such a short time period. But you did hands on lab here, which I know was a major success. Talk to us about that and what, what surprised you about Yeah, the appetite to learn that's >>Here. Yeah. So actually I'm glad that you relay this back to the pandemic because yes, it was all online because it was still the, the tail end of the pandemic, but then for this event we're like, okay, it's time to do this in person. This is the next step, right? So we organized our first learning day as a co-located event. We were hoping to get 60 people together in a room. We did two labs, a rookie and a pro. So we said two times 30 people. That's our goal because it's really, it's competitive here with the collocated events. It's difficult >>Bringing people lots going on. >>And why don't I, why don't I let Victoria talk about the success of that learning day, because it was big part also her help for that. >>You know, our main goal is to meet expectations and actually see the challenges of our end user. So we actually, it also goes back to what we started doing research. We saw the pain points and yes, it's absolutely reflecting, reflecting on how we deal with this and what we see. And people very appreciative and they love platform because it's not only prerequisites, but also hands on lab practice. So, and it's free again, it's applied, which is great. Yes. So we thought about the user experience, user flow, also based, you know, the product when it's successful and you see the result. And that's where we, can you say the numbers? So our expectation was 60 >>People. You're kinda, you I feel like a suspense is starting killing. How many people came? >>We had over 350 people in our room. Whoa. >>Wow. Wow. >>And small disclaimer, we had a little bit of a technical issue in the beginning because of the success. There was a wireless problem in the hotel amongst others. Oh geez. So we were getting a little bit nervous because we were delayed 20 minutes. Nobody left that, that's, I was standing at the door while people were solving the issues and I was like, Okay, now people are gonna walk out. Right. Nobody left. Kind >>Of gives me >>Ose bump wearing that. We had a little reception afterwards and I talked to people, sorry about the, the disruption that we had under like, no, we, we are so happy that you're doing this. This was such a great experience. Castin also threw party later this week at the party. We had people come up to us like, I was at your learning day and this was so good. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm gonna take the rest of the classes online now. They love it. Really? >>Yeah. We had our instructors leading the program as well, so if they had any questions, it was also address immediately. So it was a, it was amazing event actually. I'm really grateful for people to come actually unappreciated. >>But now your boss knows how you can blow out metrics though. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gonna >>Raise Victoria. >>Very good point. It's a very >>Good point. I can >>Tell. It's, it's actually, it's very tough to, for me personally, to analyze where the success came from. Because first of all, the team did an amazing job at setting the whole thing up. There was food and drinks for everybody, and it was really a very nice location in a hotel nearby. We made it a colocated event and we saw a lot of people register through the Cuban registration website. But we've done colocated events before and you typically see a very high no-show rate. And this was not the case right now. The a lot of, I mean the, the no-show was actually very low. Obviously we did our own campaign to our own database. Right. But it's hard to say like, we have a lot of people all over the world and how many people are actually gonna be in Detroit. Yeah. One element that also helped, I'm actually very proud of that, One of the people on our team, Thomas Keenan, he reached out to the local universities. Yes. And he invited students to come to learning day as well. I don't think it was very full with students. It was a good chunk of them. So there was a lot of people from here, but it was a good mix. And that way, I mean, we're giving back a little bit to the universities versus students. >>Absolutely. Much. >>I need to, >>There's a lot of love for Detroit this week. I'm all about it. >>It's amazing. But, but from a STEM perspective, that's huge. We're reaching down into that community and really giving them the opportunity to >>Learn. Well, and what a gateway for Castin. I mean, I can easily say, I mean, you are the number, we haven't really talked about casting at all, but before we do, what are those pins in front of you? >>So this is a physical pain. These are physical pins that we gave away for different programs. So people who took labs, for example, rookie level, they would get this p it's a rookie. >>Yes. I'm gonna hold this up just so they can do a little close shot on if you want. Yeah. >>And this is PR for, it's a, it's a next level program. So we have a program actually for IS to beginners inter intermediate and then pro. So three, three different levels. And this one is for Helman. It's actually from previous. >>No, Helmsman is someone who has taken the first three labs, right? >>Yes, it is. But we actually had it already before. So this one is, yeah, this one is, So we built two new labs for this event and it was very, very great, you know, to, to have a ready absolutely new before this event. So we launched the whole website, the whole platform with new labs, additional labs, and >>Before an event, honestly. Yeah. >>Yeah. We also had such >>Your expression just said it all. Exactly. >>You're a vacation and your future. I >>Hope so. >>We've had a couple of rough freaks. Yeah. This is part of it. Yeah. So, but about those labs. So in the classroom we had two, right? We had the, the, the rookie and the pro. And like I said, we wanted an audience for both. Most people stayed for both. And there were people at the venue one hour before we started because they did not want to miss it. Right. And what that chose to me is that even though Cuban has been around for a long time, and people have been coming back to this, there is a huge audience that considers themselves still very early on in their Kubernetes journey and wants to take and, and is not too proud to go to a rookie class for Kubernetes. So for us, that was like, okay, we're doing the right thing because yeah, with the website as well, more rookie users will keep, keep coming. And the big goal for us is just to accelerate their Kubernetes journey. Right. There's a lot of platforms out there. One platform I like as well is called the tech world with nana, she has a lot of instructional for >>You. Oh, she's a wonderful YouTuber. >>She, she's, yeah, her following is amazing. But what we add to this is the hands on part. Right? And, and there's a lot of auto resources as well where you have like papers and books and everything. We try to add those as well, but we feel that you can only learn it by doing it. And that is what we offer. >>Absolutely. Totally. Something like >>Kubernetes, and it sounds like you're demystifying it. You talked about one of the biggest things that everyone talks about with respect to Kubernetes adoption and some of the barriers is the complexity. But it sounds to me like at the, we talked about the demand being there for the hands on labs, the the cube campus.io, but also the fact that people were waiting an hour early, they're recognizing it's okay to raise, go. I don't really understand this. Yeah. In fact, another thing that I heard speaking of, of the rookies is that about 60% of the attendees at this year's cube con are Yeah, we heard that >>Out new. >>Yeah. So maybe that's smell a lot of those rookies showed up saying, >>Well, so even >>These guys are gonna help us really demystify and start learning this at a pace that works for me as an individual. >>There's some crazy macro data to support this. Just to echo this. So 85% of enterprise companies are about to start making this transition in leveraging Kubernetes. That means there's only 15% of a very healthy, substantial market that has adopted the technology at scale. You are teaching that group of people. Let's talk about casting a little bit. Number one, Kubernetes backup, 900% growth recently. How, how are we managing that? What's next for you, you guys? >>Yeah, so growth last year was amazing. Yeah. This year we're seeing very good numbers as well. I think part of the explanation is because people are going into production, you cannot sell back up to a company that is not in production with their right. With their applications. Right? So what we are starting to see is people are finally going into production with their Kubernetes applications and are realizing we have to back this up. The other trend that we're seeing is, I think still in LA last year we were having a lot of stateless first estate full conversations. Remember containers were created for stateless applications. That's no longer the case. Absolutely. But now the acceptance is there. We're not having those. Oh. But we're stateless conversations because everybody runs at least a database with some user data or application data, whatever. So all Kubernetes applications need to be backed up. Absolutely. And we're the number one product for that. >>And you guys just had recently had a new release. Yes. Talk to us a little bit about that before we wrap. It's new in the platform and, and also what gives you, what gives cast. And by being that competitive advantage in this new release, >>The competitive advantage is really simple. Our solution was built for Kubernetes. With Kubernetes. There are other products. >>Talk about dog fooding. Yeah. Yeah. >>That's great. Exactly. Yeah. And you know what, one of our successes at the show is also because we're using Kubernetes to build our application. People love to come to our booth to talk to our engineers, who we always bring to the show because they, they have so much experience to share. That also helps us with ems, by the way, to, to, to build those labs, Right? You need to have the, the experience. So the big competitive advantage is really that we're Kubernetes native. And then to talk about 5.5, I was going like, what was the other part of the question? So yeah, we had 5.5 launched also during the show. So it was really a busy week. The big focus for five five was simplicity. To make it even easier to use our product. We really want people to, to find it easy. We, we were using, we were using new helm charts and, and, and things like that. The second part of the launch was to do even more partner integrations. Because if you look at the space, this cloud native space, it's, you can also attest to that with, with Cube campus, when you build an application, you need so many different tools, right? And we are trying to integrate with all of those tools in the most easy and most efficient way so that it becomes easy for our customers to use our technology in their Kubernetes stack. >>I love it. Tom Victoria, one final question for you before we wrap up. You mentioned that you have a fantastic team. I can tell just from the energy you two have. That's probably the truth. You also mentioned that you bring the party everywhere you go. Where are we all going after this? Where's the party tonight? Yeah. >>Well, let's first go to a ballgame tonight. >>The party's on the court. I love it. Go Pistons. >>And, and then we'll end up somewhere downtown in a, in a good club, I guess. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see how the show down with the hawks goes. I hope you guys make it to the game. Tom Victoria, thank you so much for being here. We're excited about what you're doing. Lisa, always a joy sharing the stage with you. My love. And to all of you who are watching, thank you so much for tuning into the cube. We are wrapping up here with one segment left in Detroit, Michigan. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thanks for being here.

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode four of the ongoing series covering the exciting hot startups from the AWS ecosystem. Here we're talking about cybersecurity in this episode. I'm your host, John Furrier here we're excited to have CUBE alumni who's back Snehal Antani who's the CEO and co-founder of Horizon3.ai talking about exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities with autonomous pen testing. Snehal, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back. >> Likewise, John. I think it's been about five years since you and I were on the stage together. And I've missed it, but I'm glad to see you again. >> Well, before we get into the showcase about your new startup, that's extremely successful, amazing margins, great product. You have a unique journey. We talked about this prior to you doing the journey, but you have a great story. You left the startup world to go into the startup, like world of self defense, public defense, NSA. What group did you go to in the public sector became a private partner. >> My background, I'm a software engineer by education and trade. I started my career at IBM. I was a CIO at GE Capital, and I think we met once when I was there and I became the CTO of Splunk. And we spent a lot of time together when I was at Splunk. And at the end of 2017, I decided to take a break from industry and really kind of solve problems that I cared deeply about and solve problems that mattered. So I left industry and joined the US Special Operations Community and spent about four years in US Special Operations, where I grew more personally and professionally than in anything I'd ever done in my career. And exited that time, met my co-founder in special ops. And then as he retired from the air force, we started Horizon3. >> So there's really, I want to bring that up one, 'cause it's fascinating that not a lot of people in Silicon Valley and tech would do that. So thanks for the service. And I know everyone who's out there in the public sector knows that this is a really important time for the tactical edge in our military, a lot of things going on around the world. So thanks for the service and a great journey. But there's a storyline with the company you're running now that you started. I know you get the jacket on there. I noticed get a little military vibe to it. Cybersecurity, I mean, every company's on their own now. They have to build their own militia. There is no government supporting companies anymore. There's no militia. No one's on the shores of our country defending the citizens and the companies, they got to offend for themselves. So every company has to have their own military. >> In many ways, you don't see anti-aircraft rocket launchers on top of the JP Morgan building in New York City because they rely on the government for air defense. But in cyber it's very different. Every company is on their own to defend for themselves. And what's interesting is this blend. If you look at the Ukraine, Russia war, as an example, a thousand companies have decided to withdraw from the Russian economy and those thousand companies we should expect to be in the ire of the Russian government and their proxies at some point. And so it's not just those companies, but their suppliers, their distributors. And it's no longer about cyber attack for extortion through ransomware, but rather cyber attack for punishment and retaliation for leaving. Those companies are on their own to defend themselves. There's no government that is dedicated to supporting them. So yeah, the reality is that cybersecurity, it's the burden of the organization. And also your attack surface has expanded to not just be your footprint, but if an adversary wants to punish you for leaving their economy, they can get, if you're in agriculture, they could disrupt your ability to farm or they could get all your fruit to spoil at the border 'cause they disrupted your distributors and so on. So I think the entire world is going to change over the next 18 to 24 months. And I think this idea of cybersecurity is going to become truly a national problem and a problem that breaks down any corporate barriers that we see in previously. >> What are some of the things that inspired you to start this company? And I loved your approach of thinking about the customer, your customer, as defending themselves in context to threats, really leaning into it, being ready and able to defend. Horizon3 has a lot of that kind of military thinking for the good of the company. What's the motivation? Why this company? Why now? What's the value proposition? >> So there's two parts to why the company and why now. The first part was what my observation, when I left industry realm or my military background is watching "Jack Ryan" and "Tropic Thunder" and I didn't come from the military world. And so when I entered the special operations community, step one was to keep my mouth shut, learn, listen, and really observe and understand what made that community so impressive. And obviously the people and it's not about them being fast runners or great shooters or awesome swimmers, but rather there are learn-it-alls that can solve any problem as a team under pressure, which is the exact culture you want to have in any startup, early stage companies are learn-it-alls that can solve any problem under pressure as a team. So I had this immediate advantage when we started Horizon3, where a third of Horizon3 employees came from that special operations community. So one is this awesome talent. But the second part that, I remember this quote from a special operations commander that said we use live rounds in training because if we used fake rounds or rubber bullets, everyone would act like metal of honor winners. And the whole idea there is you train like you fight, you build that muscle memory for crisis and response and so on upfront. So when you're in the thick of it, you already know how to react. And this aligns to a pain I had in industry. I had no idea I was secure until the bad guy showed up. I had no idea if I was fixing the right vulnerabilities, logging the right data in Splunk, or if my CrowdStrike EDR platform was configured correctly, I had to wait for the bad guys to show up. I didn't know if my people knew how to respond to an incident. So what I wanted to do was proactively verify my security posture, proactively harden my systems. I needed to do that by continuously pen testing myself or continuously testing my security posture. And there just wasn't any way to do that where an IT admin or a network engineer could in three clicks have the power of a 20 year pen testing expert. And that was really what we set out to do, not build a autonomous pen testing platform for security people, build it so that anybody can quickly test their security posture and then use the output to fix problems that truly matter. >> So the value preposition, if I get this right is, there's a lot of companies out there doing pen tests. And I know I hate pen tests. They're like, cause you do DevOps, it changes you got to do another pen test. So it makes sense to do autonomous pen testing. So congratulations on seeing that that's obvious to that, but a lot of other have consulting tied to it. Which seems like you need to train someone and you guys taking a different approach. >> Yeah, we actually, as a company have zero consulting, zero professional services. And the whole idea is that build a true software as a service offering where an intern, in fact, we've got a video of a nine year old that in three clicks can run pen tests against themselves. And because of that, you can wire pen tests into your DevOps tool chain. You can run multiple pen tests today. In fact, I've got customers running 40, 50 pen tests a month against their organization. And that what that does is completely lowers the barrier of entry for being able to verify your posture. If you have consulting on average, when I was a CIO, it was at least a three month lead time to schedule consultants to show up and then they'd show up, they'd embarrass the security team, they'd make everyone look bad, 'cause they're going to get in, leave behind a report. And that report was almost identical to what they found last year because the older that report, the one the date itself gets stale, the context changes and so on. And then eventually you just don't even bother fixing it. Or if you fix a problem, you don't have the skills to verify that has been fixed. So I think that consulting led model was acceptable when you viewed security as a compliance checkbox, where once a year was sufficient to meet your like PCI requirements. But if you're really operating with a wartime mindset and you actually need to harden and secure your environment, you've got to be running pen test regularly against your organization from different perspectives, inside, outside, from the cloud, from work, from home environments and everything in between. >> So for the CISOs out there, for the CSOs and the CXOs, what's the pitch to them because I see your jacket that says Horizon3 AI, trust but verify. But this trust is, but is canceled out, just as verify. What's the product that you guys are offering the service. Describe what it is and why they should look at it. >> Yeah, sure. So one, when I back when I was the CIO, don't tell me we're secure in PowerPoint. Show me we're secure right now. Show me we're secure again tomorrow. And then show me we're secure again next week because my environment is constantly changing and the adversary always has a vote and they're always evolving. And this whole idea of show me we're secure. Don't trust that your security tools are working, verify that they can detect and respond and stifle an attack and then verify tomorrow, verify next week. That's the big mind shift. Now what we do is-- >> John: How do they respond to that by the way? Like they don't believe you at first or what's the story. >> I think, there's actually a very bifurcated response. There are still a decent chunk of CIOs and CSOs that have a security is a compliance checkbox mindset. So my attitude with them is I'm not going to convince you. You believe it's a checkbox. I'll just wait for you to get breached and sell to your replacement, 'cause you'll get fired. And in the meantime, I spend all my energy with those that actually care about proactively securing and hardening their environments. >> That's true. People do get fired. Can you give an example of what you're saying about this environment being ready, proving that you're secure today, tomorrow and a few weeks out. Give me an example. >> Of, yeah, I'll give you actually a customer example. There was a healthcare organization and they had about 5,000 hosts in their environment and they did everything right. They had Fortinet as their EDR platform. They had user behavior analytics in place that they had purchased and tuned. And when they ran a pen test self-service, our product node zero immediately started to discover every host on the network. It then fingerprinted all those hosts and found it was able to get code execution on three machines. So it got code execution, dumped credentials, laterally maneuvered, and became a domain administrator, which in IT, if an attacker becomes a domain admin, they've got keys to the kingdom. So at first the question was, how did the node zero pen test become domain admin? How'd they get code execution, Fortinet should have detected and stopped it. Well, it turned out Fortinet was misconfigured on three boxes out of 5,000. And these guys had no idea and it's just automation that went wrong and so on. And now they would've only known they had misconfigured their EDR platform on three hosts if the attacker had showed up. The second question though was, why didn't they catch the lateral movement? Which all their marketing brochures say they're supposed to catch. And it turned out that that customer purchased the wrong Fortinet modules. One again, they had no idea. They thought they were doing the right thing. So don't trust just installing your tools is good enough. You've got to exercise and verify them. We've got tons of stories from patches that didn't actually apply to being able to find the AWS admin credentials on a local file system. And then using that to log in and take over the cloud. In fact, I gave this talk at Black Hat on war stories from running 10,000 pen tests. And that's just the reality is, you don't know that these tools and processes are working for you until the bad guys have shown. >> The velocities there. You can accelerate through logs, you know from the days you've been there. This is now the threat. Being, I won't say lazy, but just not careful or just not thinking. >> Well, I'll do an example. We have a lot of customers that are Horizon3 customers and Splunk customers. And what you'll see their behavior is, is they'll have Horizon3 up on one screen. And every single attacker command executed with its timestamp is up on that screen. And then look at Splunk and say, hey, we were able to dump vCenter credentials from VMware products at this time on this host, what did Splunk see or what didn't they see? Why were no logs generated? And it turns out that they had some logging blind spots. So what they'll actually do is run us to almost like stimulate the defensive tools and then see what did the tools catch? What did they miss? What are those blind spots and how do they fix it. >> So your price called node zero. You mentioned that. Is that specifically a suite, a tool, a platform. How do people consume and engage with you guys? >> So the way that we work, the whole product is designed to be self-service. So once again, while we have a sales team, the whole intent is you don't need to have to talk to a sales rep to start using the product, you can log in right now, go to Horizon3.ai, you can run a trial log in with your Google ID, your LinkedIn ID, start running pen test against your home or against your network against this organization right now, without talking to anybody. The whole idea is self-service, run a pen test in three clicks and give you the power of that 20 year pen testing expert. And then what'll happen is node zero will execute and then it'll provide to you a full report of here are all of the different paths or attack paths or sequences where we are able to become an admin in your environment. And then for every attack path, here is the path or the kill chain, the proof of exploitation for every step along the way. Here's exactly what you've got to do to fix it. And then once you've fixed it, here's how you verify that you've truly fixed the problem. And this whole aha moment is run us to find problems. You fix them, rerun us to verify that the problem has been fixed. >> Talk about the company, how many people do you have and get some stats? >> Yeah, so we started writing code in January of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. And then about 10 months later at the end of 2020, we launched the first version of the product. We've been in the market for now about two and a half years total from start of the company till present. We've got 130 employees. We've got more customers than we do employees, which is really cool. And instead our customers shift from running one pen test a year to 40, 50 pen test. >> John: And it's full SaaS. >> The whole product is full SaaS. So no consulting, no pro serve. You run as often as you-- >> Who's downloading, who's buying the product. >> What's amazing is, we have customers in almost every section or sector now. So we're not overly rotated towards like healthcare or financial services. We've got state and local education or K through 12 education, state and local government, a number of healthcare companies, financial services, manufacturing. We've got organizations that large enterprises. >> John: Security's diverse. >> It's very diverse. >> I mean, ransomware must be a big driver. I mean, is that something that you're seeing a lot. >> It is. And the thing about ransomware is, if you peel back the outcome of ransomware, which is extortion, at the end of the day, what ransomware organizations or criminals or APTs will do is they'll find out who all your employees are online. They will then figure out if you've got 7,000 employees, all it takes is one of them to have a bad password. And then attackers are going to credential spray to find that one person with a bad password or whose Netflix password that's on the dark web is also their same password to log in here, 'cause most people reuse. And then from there they're going to most likely in your organization, the domain user, when you log in, like you probably have local admin on your laptop. If you're a windows machine and I've got local admin on your laptop, I'm going to be able to dump credentials, get the admin credentials and then start to laterally maneuver. Attackers don't have to hack in using zero days like you see in the movies, often they're logging in with valid user IDs and passwords that they've found and collected from somewhere else. And then they make that, they maneuver by making a low plus a low equal a high. And the other thing in financial services, we spend all of our time fixing critical vulnerabilities, attackers know that. So they've adapted to finding ways to chain together, low priority vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and dangerous defaults to become admin. So while we've over rotated towards just fixing the highs and the criticals attackers have adapted. And once again they have a vote, they're always evolving their tactics. >> And how do you prevent that from happening? >> So we actually apply those same tactics. Rarely do we actually need a CVE to compromise your environment. We will harvest credentials, just like an attacker. We will find misconfigurations and dangerous defaults, just like an attacker. We will combine those together. We'll make use of exploitable vulnerabilities as appropriate and use that to compromise your environment. So the tactics that, in many ways we've built a digital weapon and the tactics we apply are the exact same tactics that are applied by the adversary. >> So you guys basically simulate hacking. >> We actually do the hacking. Simulate means there's a fakeness to it. >> So you guys do hack. >> We actually compromise. >> Like sneakers the movie, those sneakers movie for the old folks like me. >> And in fact that was my inspiration. I've had this idea for over a decade now, which is I want to be able to look at anything that laptop, this Wi-Fi network, gear in hospital or a truck driving by and know, I can figure out how to gain initial access, rip that environment apart and be able to opponent. >> Okay, Chuck, he's not allowed in the studio anymore. (laughs) No, seriously. Some people are exposed. I mean, some companies don't have anything. But there's always passwords or so most people have that argument. Well, there's nothing to protect here. Not a lot of sensitive data. How do you respond to that? Do you see that being kind of putting the head in the sand or? >> Yeah, it's actually, it's less, there's not sensitive data, but more we've installed or applied multifactor authentication, attackers can't get in now. Well MFA only applies or does not apply to lower level protocols. So I can find a user ID password, log in through SMB, which isn't protected by multifactor authentication and still upon your environment. So unfortunately I think as a security industry, we've become very good at giving a false sense of security to organizations. >> John: Compliance drives that behavior. >> Compliance drives that. And what we need. Back to don't tell me we're secure, show me, we've got to, I think, change that to a trust but verify, but get rid of the trust piece of it, just to verify. >> Okay, we got a lot of CISOs and CSOs watching this showcase, looking at the hot startups, what's the message to the executives there. Do they want to become more leaning in more hawkish if you will, to use the military term on security? I mean, I heard one CISO say, security first then compliance 'cause compliance can make you complacent and then you're unsecure at that point. >> I actually say that. I agree. One definitely security is different and more important than being compliant. I think there's another emerging concept, which is I'd rather be defensible than secure. What I mean by that is security is a point in time state. I am secure right now. I may not be secure tomorrow 'cause something's changed. But if I'm defensible, then what I have is that muscle memory to detect, respondent and stifle an attack. And that's what's more important. Can I detect you? How long did it take me to detect you? Can I stifle you from achieving your objective? How long did it take me to stifle you? What did you use to get in to gain access? How long did that sit in my environment? How long did it take me to fix it? So on and so forth. But I think it's being defensible and being able to rapidly adapt to changing tactics by the adversary is more important. >> This is the evolution of how the red line never moved. You got the adversaries in our networks and our banks. Now they hang out and they wait. So everyone thinks they're secure. But when they start getting hacked, they're not really in a position to defend, the alarms go off. Where's the playbook. Team springs into action. I mean, you kind of get the visual there, but this is really the issue being defensible means having your own essentially military for your company. >> Being defensible, I think has two pieces. One is you've got to have this culture and process in place of training like you fight because you want to build that incident response muscle memory ahead of time. You don't want to have to learn how to respond to an incident in the middle of the incident. So that is that proactively verifying your posture and continuous pen testing is critical there. The second part is the actual fundamentals in place so you can detect and stifle as appropriate. And also being able to do that. When you are continuously verifying your posture, you need to verify your entire posture, not just your test systems, which is what most people do. But you have to be able to safely pen test your production systems, your cloud environments, your perimeter. You've got to assume that the bad guys are going to get in, once they're in, what can they do? So don't just say that my perimeter's secure and I'm good to go. It's the soft squishy center that attackers are going to get into. And from there, can you detect them and can you stop them? >> Snehal, take me through the use. You got to be sold on this, I love this topic. Alright, pen test. Is it, what am I buying? Just pen test as a service. You mentioned dark web. Are you actually buying credentials online on behalf of the customer? What is the product? What am I buying if I'm the CISO from Horizon3? What's the service? What's the product, be specific. >> So very specifically and one just principles. The first principle is when I was a buyer, I hated being nickled and dimed buyer vendors, which was, I had to buy 15 different modules in order to achieve an objective. Just give me one line item, make it super easy to buy and don't nickel and dime me. Because I've spent time as a buyer that very much has permeated throughout the company. So there is a single skew from Horizon3. It is an annual subscription based on how big your environment is. And it is inclusive of on-prem internal pen tests, external pen tests, cloud attacks, work from home attacks, our ability to harvest credentials from the dark web and from open source sources. Being able to crack those credentials, compromise. All of that is included as a singles skew. All you get as a CISO is a singles skew, annual subscription, and you can run as many pen tests as you want. Some customers still stick to, maybe one pen test a quarter, but most customers shift when they realize there's no limit, we don't nickel and dime. They can run 10, 20, 30, 40 a month. >> Well, it's not nickel and dime in the sense that, it's more like dollars and hundreds because they know what to expect if it's classic cloud consumption. They kind of know what their environment, can people try it. Let's just say I have a huge environment, I have a cloud, I have an on-premise private cloud. Can I dabble and set parameters around pricing? >> Yes you can. So one is you can dabble and set perimeter around scope, which is like manufacturing does this, do not touch the production line that's on at the moment. We've got a hospital that says every time they run a pen test, any machine that's actually connected to a patient must be excluded. So you can actually set the parameters for what's in scope and what's out of scope up front, most again we're designed to be safe to run against production so you can set the parameters for scope. You can set the parameters for cost if you want. But our recommendation is I'd rather figure out what you can afford and let you test everything in your environment than try to squeeze every penny from you by only making you buy what can afford as a smaller-- >> So the variable ratio, if you will is, how much they spend is the size of their environment and usage. >> Just size of the environment. >> So it could be a big ticket item for a CISO then. >> It could, if you're really large, but for the most part-- >> What's large? >> I mean, if you were Walmart, well, let me back up. What I heard is global 10 companies spend anywhere from 50 to a hundred million dollars a year on security testing. So they're already spending a ton of money, but they're spending it on consultants that show up maybe a couple of times a year. They don't have, humans can't scale to test a million hosts in your environment. And so you're already spending that money, spend a fraction of that and use us and run as much as you want. And that's really what it comes down to. >> John: All right. So what's the response from customers? >> What's really interesting is there are three use cases. The first is that SOC manager that is using us to verify that their security tools are actually working. So their Splunk environment is logging the right data. It's integrating properly with CrowdStrike, it's integrating properly with their active directory services and their password policies. So the SOC manager is using us to verify the effectiveness of their security controls. The second use case is the IT director that is using us to proactively harden their systems. Did they install VMware correctly? Did they install their Cisco gear correctly? Are they patching right? And then the third are for the companies that are lucky to have their own internal pen test and red teams where they use us like a force multiplier. So if you've got 10 people on your red team and you still have a million IPs or hosts in your environment, you still don't have enough people for that coverage. So they'll use us to do recon at scale and attack at scale and let the humans focus on the really juicy hard stuff that humans are successful at. >> Love the product. Again, I'm trying to think about how I engage on the test. Is there pilots? Is there a demo version? >> There's a free trials. So we do 30 day free trials. The output can actually be used to meet your SOC 2 requirements. So in many ways you can just use us to get a free SOC 2 pen test report right now, if you want. Go to the website, log in for a free trial, you can log into your Google ID or your LinkedIn ID, run a pen test against your organization and use that to answer your PCI segmentation test requirements, your SOC 2 requirements, but you will be hooked. You will want to run us more often. And you'll get a Horizon3 tattoo. >> The first hits free as they say in the drug business. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so you're seeing that kind of response then, trial converts. >> It's exactly. In fact, we have a very well defined aha moment, which is you run us to find, you fix, you run us to verify, we have 100% technical win rate when our customers hit a find, fix, verify cycle, then it's about budget and urgency. But 100% technical win rate because of that aha moment, 'cause people realize, holy crap, I don't have to wait six months to verify that my problems have actually been fixed. I can just come in, click, verify, rerun the entire pen test or rerun a very specific part of it on what I just patched my environment. >> Congratulations, great stuff. You're here part of the AWS Startup Showcase. So I have to ask, what's the relationship with AWS, you're on their cloud. What kind of actions going on there? Is there secret sauce on there? What's going on? >> So one is we are AWS customers ourselves, our brains command and control infrastructure. All of our analytics are all running on AWS. It's amazing, when we run a pen test, we are able to use AWS and we'll spin up a virtual private cloud just for that pen test. It's completely ephemeral, it's all Lambda functions and graph analytics and other techniques. When the pen test ends, you can delete, there's a single use Docker container that gets deleted from your environment so you have nothing on-prem to deal with and the entire virtual private cloud tears itself down. So at any given moment, if we're running 50 pen tests or a hundred pen tests, self-service, there's a hundred virtual private clouds being managed in AWS that are spinning up, running and tearing down. It's an absolutely amazing underlying platform for us to make use of. Two is that many customers that have hybrid environments. So they've got a cloud infrastructure, an Office 365 infrastructure and an on-prem infrastructure. We are a single attack platform that can test all of that together. No one else can do it. And so the AWS customers that are especially AWS hybrid customers are the ones that we do really well targeting. >> Got it. And that's awesome. And that's the benefit of cloud? >> Absolutely. And the AWS marketplace. What's absolutely amazing is the competitive advantage being part of the marketplace has for us, because the simple thing is my customers, if they already have dedicated cloud spend, they can use their approved cloud spend to pay for Horizon3 through the marketplace. So you don't have to, if you already have that budget dedicated, you can use that through the marketplace. The other is you've already got the vendor processes in place, you can purchase through your existing AWS account. So what I love about the AWS company is one, the infrastructure we use for our own pen test, two, the marketplace, and then three, the customers that span that hybrid cloud environment. That's right in our strike zone. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations. And thanks for being part of the showcase and I'm sure your product is going to do very, very well. It's very built for what people want. Self-service get in, get the value quickly. >> No agents to install, no consultants to hire. safe to run against production. It's what I wanted. >> Great to see you and congratulations and what a great story. And we're going to keep following you. Thanks for coming on. >> Snehal: Phenomenal. Thank you, John. >> This is the AWS Startup Showcase. I'm John John Furrier, your host. This is season two, episode four on cybersecurity. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and John furrier live on the floor at VMware Explorer, 2022. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage on the cube. But you know that cuz you've been here the whole time. We're pleased to welcome up. First timer to the cubes we saw is here. The CEO and founder of ZDA. Saed welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me >>Talk to me a little bit about what ZDA does in edge. >>Sure. So ZDA is a company purely focused in edge computing. I started a company about five years ago, go after edge. So what we do is we help customers with orchestrating their edge, helping them to deploy secure monitor application services and devices at the edge. >>What's the business model for you guys. We get that out there. So the targeting the edge, which is everything from telco to whatever. Yeah. What's the business model. Yeah. >>Maybe before we go there, let's talk about edge itself. Cuz edge is complex. There's a lot of companies. I call 'em lens company nowadays, if you're not a cloud company, you're probably an edge company at this point. So we are focusing something called the distributed edge. So distributed edge. When you start putting tiny servers in environments like factory floors, solar farms, wind farms, even inside machines or well sites, et cetera. And a question that people always ask me, like why, why would you want to put, you know, servers there on servers supposed to be in a data center in the cloud? And the answer to the question actually is data gravity. So traditionally wherever the data gets created is where your applications live. But as we're connecting more and more devices to the edge of the network, we basically customers now are required to push the applications to the edge cause they can't go all the data to the cloud. So basically that's where we focus on people call it the far edge as well. You know, that's the term we've heard in the past as well. And what we do in our business model is provide customers a, a software as a service solution where they can basically deploy and monitor these applications at these highly distributed environments. >>Data, gravity comes up a lot and I want you to take a minute to explain the definition as it is today. And people have used that term, you know, with big data, going back to 2010 leads when we covering the Hadoop wave, which ended up becoming, you know, data, data, bricks, and snowflake now, but, but a lots changed, but what does it mean to be data gravity? It means that staying local, it's just what specifically describe and, and define what data gravity is. >>Yeah. So for me, data gravity is where you need to process the data, right? It's where the data usually gets created. So if you think about a web app, where does the data get created? Where people click on buttons, they, they interface with it. They, they upload content to it, et cetera. So that's where the data gravity therefore is therefore that's where you do your analytics. That's where you do your visualization processing, machine learning and all of those pieces. So it's really where that data gets created is where the data gravity in my view says, >>What are some of the challenges that data and opportunities that data gravity presents to customers? >>Well, obviously I think every enterprise in this day is trying to take data and make it a competitive advantage, right? Like faster decisions, better decisions, outcompete your competition by, you know, being first with a product or being first with a product with the future, et cetera. So, so I think, you know, if you're not a data driven enterprise by now, then I think the future may be a little bit bleak. >>Okay. So you're targeting the market distributed edge business model, SAS technology, secret sauce. What's that piece. >>Yeah. So that's, that's what the interesting part comes in. I think, you know, if you kind of look at the data center in the cloud, we've had these virtualization and orchestration stacks create, I mean, we're here in VMware Explorer. And as an example, what we basically, what we saw is that the edge is so unique and so different than what we've seen in the data center, in the cloud that we needed to build a complete brand new purpose-built illustration and virtualization solution. So that's really what we, we set off to do. So there's two components that we do. One end is we built a purpose-built edge operating system for the edge and we actually open sourced it. And the reason we opensource it, we said, Hey, you know, edge is so diverse. You know, depending on the environment you're running in a machine or in a vehicle or in a well site, you have different hardware, different networks, different applications you need to enable. >>And we will never be able to support all of them ourselves. As a matter of fact, we actually think there's a need for standardization at the edge. We need to kind of cut through all these silos that have been created traditionally from the embedded way of thinking. So we created basically an open source project in the Linux foundation in LFS, which is a sister organization through the CNCF it's called project Eve. And the idea is to create the Android of the edge, basically what Android became for mobile computing, an a common operating system. So you build one app. You can run in any phone in the world that runs Android, build an architecture. You build one app. You can run in any Eve powered node in the world, >>So distributed edge and you get the tech here, get the secret sauce. We'll get more into that in a second, but I wanna just tie one kick quick point and get your clarification on edge is becoming much more about the physical side too. I mean, absolutely. So when you talk about Android, you're making the reference of a phone. I get that's metaphor to what you're doing at the edge, wind farms, factories, alarms, light bulbs, buildings. I mean, that's what you're talking about, right? Yes. We're getting down to that very, >>Very physical, dark distributed locations. >>We're gonna come back to the CISO CSO. We're gonna come back to the CISO versus CSO question because is the CISO or CIO or who runs that anyway? So that's true. What's the important thing that's happening because that sounds like old OT world, like yes. Operating technology, not it information technology, is it a complete reset of those worlds or is it a collision? >>It's a great question. So what we're seeing is first of all, there is already compute in these environments, industrial PCs of existed well beyond, you know, an industrial automation has been done for many, many decades. The point is that that stuff has been done. Collect data has been collected, but never connected, right? So with edge computing, we're connecting now this data from an industrial machine and industrial process to the cloud, right? And one of the problems is it's data that comes of that industrial process too much to upload to the cloud. So I gotta analyze, analyze it locally. So one of the, the things we saw early on in edge is there's a lot of brownfield. Most of our customers today actually have applications running on windows and they would love to make in Linux and containers and Kubernetes, but it took them 20, 30 years to build those apps. And they basically are the money makers of the enterprise. So they are in a, in a transitionary phase and they need something that can take them from the brown to the Greenfield. So to your point, you gotta support all of these types of unique brownfield applications. >>So you're, you're saying I don't really care if this is a customer, how you get the data, you wanna start new start fresh. That's cool. But if you wanna take your old data, you'll >>Take that. Yeah. You don't wanna rebuild the whole machine. You're >>Just, they can life cycle it out on their own timetable. Yeah. >>So we had to learn, first of all, how do we take and lift and shift windows based industrial application and make it run at the edge on, on our architecture. Right? And then the second step is how do we then Sen off that data that this application is generating and do we fuse it with cloud native capability? Like, >>So your cloud, so your staff is your open source that you're giving to the Linux foundation as part of that Eve project that's available to everybody. So they can, they can look at the code, which is great by the way. Yeah. So people wanna do that. Yeah. Your self source, I'm assuming, is your hardened version with support? >>Well, we took what we took, what the open source companies did, opensource companies traditionally have sold, you know, basically a support model around the open source. We actually saw another problem. Customers has like, okay, now I have this node running and I can, you know, do this data analytics, but what if I have 15 or 20,000 of these node? And they're all around the world in remote locations on satellite links or wireless connectivity, how do I orchestrate them? So we actually build an orchestration service for these nodes running this open source >>Software. So that's a key secret sauce right there. >>That is the business model that taking open store and a lot. >>And you're taking your own code that you have. Okay. Got it. Cool. And then the customer's customer piece is, is key. So that's the final piece, I guess who's using it. >>Yeah. Well, and, >>And, and one of the business outcomes that they're achieving. Oh >>Yeah. Well, so maybe start with that first. I mean, we are deployed in customers in all and gas, for instance, helping them with the transition to renewable energy, right? So basically we, we have customers for instance, that deploy us in the, how they drill Wells is one use case and doing that better, faster, and cheaper and, and less environmental impacting. But we also have customers that use us in wind farms. We have, and solar farms, like we, one of the leading solar energy companies in the world is using us to bring down the cost of power by predicting failures ahead of time, for >>Instance. And when you're working with customers to create the optimal solution at the distributed edge, who are you working with in, within an organization? Yeah. >>It's usually a mix of OT and it people. Okay. So the OT people typically they're >>Arm wrestling, well, or they're getting along, actually, >>I think they're getting along very well. Okay, good. But they also agree that they have to have swim lanes. The it folks, obviously their job is to make sure, you know, everything is secure. Everything is according to the compliance it's, it's, you know, the, the best TCO on the infrastructure, those type of things, the OT guy, they, they, or girl, they care about the application. They care about the services. They care about the support new business. So how can you create a model that too can coexist? And if you do that, they get along really well. >>You know, we had an event called Supercloud and@theurlsupercloud.world, if you're watching check it out, it's our version of what we think multicloud will merge into including edge cuz edge is just another node in the, in the, in the network. As far as we're concerned, hybrid is the steady state. That's distributed computing on premise, private cloud, public cloud. We know what that looks like. People love that things are happening. Edge is like a whole nother new area. That's blossoming and with disruption, yeah. There's a lot of existing market and incumbents that need to be disrupted. And there's also a new capabilities that are coming that we don't yet see. So we're seeing it with the super cloud idea that these new kinds of clouds are emerging. Like there could be an edge cloud. Yeah. Why isn't there a security cloud, whereas the financial services cloud, whereas the insurance cloud, whereas the, so these become super clouds where the CapEx could be done by the Amazon, whatnot you've been following them is edge cloud. Can you make that a cloud? Is that what you guys are trying to do? And if so, what does that look like? Cause we we're adding a new track to our super cloud site. I mentioned on edge specifically, we're trying to figure out you and if you share your opinion, it'd be great. Can the E can edge clouds exist and be run by companies? Yeah. Or is that what you guys are trying to do? >>I, I, I mean, I think first of all, there is no edge without cloud, right? So when I meet any customer who says, Hey, we're gonna do edge without cloud. Then I'm like, you're probably not gonna do edge computing. Right. And, and the way we built the company and the way we think about it, it's about extending the cloud experience all the way into these embedded distributed environments. That's really, I think what customers are looking for, cuz customers love the simplicity of the cloud. They love the ease of use agility, all of that greatness. And they're like, Hey, I want that. But not in a, you know, in an Amazon or Azure data center. I want that in my factories. I want that in my wealth sites, in my vehicles. And that's really what I think the future >>Is gonna. And how long have you guys been around? What's the, what's the history of the company because you might actually be that cloud. Yeah. And are you on AWS or Azure? You're building your own. What's the, >>Yeah. Yeah. So >>Take it through the, the architecture because yeah, yeah, sure. You're a modern startup. I mean you gotta, and the edges you're going after you gotta be geared up. Yeah. To win that. Yeah. >>So, so the company's about five years old. So we, when we started focusing on edge, people didn't necessarily talk as much about edge. We kind of identified the it's like, you know, how do you find a black hole in, in the universe? Cuz you can't see it, but you sort of look around that's why you in it. And so we were like looking at it, like there's something gonna happen here at the edge of the network, because everybody's saying we're connecting these vice upload the data to the cloud's never gonna work. My background is networking. I worked at companies like Juniper and Ericsson ran several products there. So I know how the internet networks have built. And it was very Evan to me. It's not gonna be possible. My co-founders come from open source companies like pivotal and Cloudera. My auto co-founder was a, an engineer at sun Microsystems built the first network stack in the solar is operating system. So a lot of experience that kind of came together to build this. >>Yeah. Cloudera is a big day. That's where the cube started by the way. Yeah. >>Yeah. So, so we, we, we have, I think a good view on the stack, the cloud stack and therefore a good view of what the ed stack needs to look like. And then I think, you know, to answer your other question, our orchestration service runs in the cloud. We have, we actually are multi-cloud company. So we offer customers choice where they want to orchestrate the node from the nodes themself, never sit in a data center. They always highly embedded. We have customers are putting machines or inside these factory lines, et cetera. Are >>You running your SAS on Amazon web services or which >>Cloud we're running it on several clouds, including Amazon, all of, pretty much the cloud. So some customers say, Hey, I'd prefer to be on the Amazon set. And others customers say, I wanna be on Azure set. >>And you leverage their CapEx on that side. Yes. On behalf of yeah. >>Yeah. We, yes. Yes. But the majority of the customer data and, and all the data that the nodes process, the customer send it to their clouds. They don't send it to us. We don't get a copy of the camera feed analytics or the machine data. We actually decouple those though. So basically the, the team production data go straight to the customer's cloud and that's why they love us. >>And they choose that they can control their own desktop. >>Yeah. So we separate the management plane from the data plane at the edge. Yeah. >>That's a good call >>Actually. Yeah. That was another very important part of the architecture early on. Cause customers don't want us to see their, you know, highly confidential production data and we don't wanna have it either. So >>We had a great chat with Chris Wolf who works with kit culvert about control plane, data, plane. So that seems to be the trend data, plane customers want full yeah. Management of that. Yeah. Control plane. Maybe give multiple >>Versions. Yeah. Yeah. So our cloud consumption what the data we stories about the apps, their behavior, the networking, the security, all of that. That's what we store in our cloud. And then customers can access that and monitor. But the actual machine that I go somewhere else >>Here we are at VMware. Explore. Talk a little bit about the VMware relationship. You just had some big news the other day. >>Yeah. So two days ago we actually made a big announcement with VMware. So we signed an OEM agreement with VMware. So we're part now of VMware's edge compute stack. So VMware customers, as they start using the recently announced edge compute stack 2.0, that was announced here. Basically it's powered by Edda technology. So it's a really exciting partnership as part of this, we actually building integrations with the VMware organization products. So that's basically now extending to more, you know, other groups inside VMware. >>So what's the value in it for VMware customers. >>Yeah. So I think the, the, the benefit of, of VMware customers, I think cus VMware customers want that multi-cloud multi edge orchestration experience. So they wanna be able to deploy workloads in the cloud. They wanna deploy the workloads in the data center. And of course also at the edge. So by us integrating in that vision customers now can have that unified experience from cloud to edge and anywhere in between. >>What's the big vision that you see happening at the edge. I mean, a lot of the VMware customers here, they're classic it that have evolved into ops now, dev ops. Now you've got second data ops coming. The edge is gonna right around the corner for them. They're dealing with it now, probably just kicking the tires, towing the water kind of thing. Where do you see the vision going? Cuz now, no matter what happens with VMware, the Broadcom, this wave is still here. You got AWS, got Azure, got Google cloud, you got Oracle, Alibaba internationally. And the cloud native surges here. How do you see that disrupting the existing edge? Because let's face it the O some of those OT players, a little bit old and antiquated, a little bit outdated. I mean, I was talking to a telco person. They, they puked the word open source. I mean, these people are so dogmatic on, on their architecture. Yeah. They're gonna get disrupted. It's a matter of time. Yeah. Where's the new guard come in. How do you see the configuration changing in the landscape? Because some people will cross over to the right side of the street here. Yeah. Some won't yeah. Open circle. Dominate cloud native will be key. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, I think, again, let's, let's take an example of a vertical that's heavily disrupted now as the automotive market, right? The, so look at Tesla and look at all these companies, they built, they built software first cars, right? Software, first delivery of capabilities and everything else. And the, and the incumbents. They have only two options, right? Either they try to respond by adopting open source cloud, native technologies. Like the, these new entrants have done and really, you know, compete with them at that level, or they can become commodity. Right. So, and I think that's the customers we're seeing the smart customers go like, we need to compete with these guys. We need to figure out how to take this technology in. And they need partners like us and partners like VMware for them. >>Do you see customers becoming cloud super cloud players? If they continue to keep leveraging the CapEx of the clouds and focus all their operational capital on top line revenue, generating activities. >>Yeah. I, so I think the CapEx model of the cloud is a great benefit of the cloud, but I think that is not, what's the longer term future of the cloud. I think the op the cloud operating model is the future. Like the agility, the ability imagine embedded software that, you know, you do an over the year update to fix a bug, but it's very hard to make a, an embedded device smarter over time. And then imagine if you can run cloud native software, you can roll out every two weeks new features and make that thing smarter, intelligent, and continue to help you in your business. That I think is what cloud did ultimately. And I think that is what really these customers are gonna need at their edge. >>Well, we talked about the value within it for customers with the VMware partnership, but what are some of your expectations? Obviously, this is a pretty powerful partnership for you guys. Yeah. What are some of the things that you're expecting that this is gonna drive? Yeah, >>So we, we, we have always operated at the more OT layer, distributed organizations in retail, energy, industrial automotive. Those are the verticals we, so we've developed. I think a lot of experience there, what, what we're seeing as we talk to those customers is they obviously have it organizations and the it organizations, Hey, that's great. You're looking at its computing, but how do we tie this into the existing investments we made with VMware? And how do we kind of take that also to this new environment? And I think that's the expectation I have is that I think we will be able to, to talk to the it folks and say, Hey, you can actually talk to the OT person. And both of you will speak the same language. You probably will both standardize on the same architecture and you'll be together deploying and enabling this new agility at the edge. >>What are some of the next things coming up for ZDA and the team? >>Well, so we've had a really amazing few quarters. We just close a series B round. So we've raised the companies raised over 55 million so far, we're growing very rapidly. We opened up no new international offices. I would say the, the early customers that we started deploying, wait a while back, they're now going into mass scale deployment. So we have now deployments underway in, you know, the 10 to hundred thousands of nodes at certain customers and in amazing environments. And so, so for us, it's continuing to prove the product in more and more verticals. Our, our product is really built for the largest of the largest. So, you know, for the size of the company, we are, we have a high concentration of fortune 500 global 500 customers, and some of them even invested in our rounds recently. So we we've been really, you know, honored with that support. Well, congratulations. Good stuff, edges popping. All right. Thank you. >>Thank you so much for joining us, talking about what you're doing in distributed edge. What's in it for customers, the VMware partnership, and by the way, congratulations on >>That too. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you. Thank >>You. All right. Nice to meet you as well for our guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22, John and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's three day coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We have been here as I said for three days. Dave, we have had an amazing three days. The energy, the momentum, the number of people still here speaks volumes for- >> Yeah, I was just saying, you look back, theCUBE, when it started, early days was a big part of the Hadoop ecosystem. You know Cloudera kind of got it started, the whole big data movement, it was awesome energy, and that whole ecosystem has been, I think, just hoovered into the Snowflake ecosystem. They've taken over as the data company, the data cloud, I mean, that was Cloudera, it could have been Cloudera, and now they didn't, they missed it, it was a variety of factors, but Snowflake has nailed it. And now it's theirs to lose. Benoit talked about that on our previous segment, how he knew that technically Hadoop was too complex, and was going to fail, and they didn't know it was going to do this. They were going to turn their company into what we see here. But the event itself, Lisa, is almost 10,000 people, the right people, people are doing business, we've had a number of people tell us that they're booking deals. That's why people come to face-to-face shows, right? That's the criticism of virtual. It takes too long to close business. Salespeople want to be belly-to-belly. And this is a belly-to belly-show. >> It absolutely is. When you and I were trying to get into the keynote on Tuesday, we finally got in standing room only, multiple overflow rooms, and we're even hearing that, so this is day four of the summit for them, there are still queues to get into breakout sessions. The momentum, but the appetite for this flywheel, and what they're creating, but also they're involving this massively growing ecosystem in its evolution. It's that synergy was really very much heard, and echoed throughout pretty much all of our segments the last couple days. >> Yeah, it was amazing actually. So we like to go, we want to be in the front row in the keynotes, we're taking notes, we always do that. Sometimes we listen remotely, but when you listen remotely, you miss some things. When you're there, you can see the executives, you can feel their energy, you can chit chat to them on the side, be seen, whatever. And it was crazy, we couldn't get in. So we had to do our thing, and sneak our way in, and "Hey, we're media." "Oh yeah, come on in." And then no, they were taking us to a breakout room. We had to sneak in a side door, got like the last two seats, and wow, I'm glad we were in there because it gave us a better sense. When you're in the remote watching rooms you just can't get a sense of the energy. That's why I like to be there, I know you do too. And then to your point about ecosystem. So we've said many times that what Snowflake is developing is what we call supercloud. It's not just a SaaS, it's not just a cloud database, it's a new layer that they're creating. And so what are the attributes of that layer? Well, it hides the underlying complexity of the underlying primitives of the cloud. We've said that ad nauseam, and it adds new value on top. Well, what's that value that they're adding? Well, they're adding value of being able to share data, collaborate, have data that's governed, and secure, globally. And now the other hallmark of a cloud company is ecosystem. And so they're building that ecosystem much more rapidly than we saw at ServiceNow, which is Slootman's previous company. And the key to me is they've launched an application development platform, essentially a super PaaS, so that you can develop applications on top of the data cloud. And we're hearing tons about monetization. Duh, you could actually make money with data. You can package data into data products, and data services, or feed data products and services, and actually sell that in a cloud, in a supercloud. That's exactly what's happening here. So that's critical. I think my one question mark if I had to lay one out, is the other hallmark of a cloud is startup, startups come into that cloud. And I think we're seeing that, maybe not at the pace that AWS did, it's a little different. Snowflake are, they're whale hunters. They're after big companies. But it looks to me like they're relying on the ecosystem to be the startup innovators. That's the important thing about cloud, cloud brings scale. It definitely brings lower cost 'cause you're eliminating all this undifferentiated labor, but it also brings innovation through startups. So unlike AWS, who sold the startups directly, and startups built businesses on AWS, and by paying AWS, it's a little bit indirect, but it's actually happening where startups in the ecosystem are building products on the data cloud, and that ultimately is going to drive value for customers, and money for Snowflake, and ultimately AWS, and Google, and Azure. The other thing I would say is the criticism or concern that the cost of goods sold for cloud are going to be so high that it's going to force people to come back on-prem. I think it's a step in the wrong direction. I think cloud, and the cloud operating model is here to stay. I think it's going to be very difficult to replicate that on-prem. I don't think you can do cloud without cloud, and we'll see what the edge brings. >> Curious what your thoughts are. We were just at Dell technologies world a month or so ago when the big announcement, the Snowflake partnership there, cloud native companies recognizing, ah, there's still a lot of data that lives on-prem. Given that, and everything that we've heard the last couple of days, what are your thoughts around that and their partnerships there? >> So Dell is, I think finally, now maybe they weren't publicly talking like this, but certainly their marketing was defensive. But in the last year or so, Dell has really embraced cloud, not just the cloud operating model, Dell has said, "Look, we can build value on top of all these hyperscalers." And we saw some examples at Dell Tech World of them stepping their toe into supercloud. Project Alpine is an example, and there are others. And then of course the Snowflake deal, where Snowflake and Dell got together, I asked Frank Slootman how that deal came about. And 'cause I said, "Did the customer get you into a headlock?" 'Cause I presume that was the case. Customer said, "You got to do this or we're not going to do business with you." He said, "Well, no, not really. Michael and I had a chat, and that's how it started." Which was my other scenario, and that's exactly what happened I guess. The point being that those worlds are coming together. And so what it means for Dell is as they embrace cloud, as they develop supercloud capabilities, they're going to do a lot of business. Dell for sure knows how to sell, they know how to execute. What I would be doing if I were Dell, is I would be trying to substantially replicate what's happening in the cloud on-prem with on-prem data. So what happens with that Snowflake deal is, it's read-only data, you read the data into the cloud, the compute is in the cloud. And I should've asked Terry this, I mean Benoit. Can there be an architecture on-prem? We've seen at Vertica has one, it's called Vertica Eon where you separate compute from storage. It doesn't have unlimited elasticity, but you can grow, compute, and storage independently, and have a lot more. With Dell doing APEX on demand, it's cloudlike, they could begin to develop a little mini data cloud, or a big data cloud within on-prem that connects to the public cloud. So what Snowflake is missing, a big part of their TAM that they're missing is the on-prem. The Dell and Pure deals are forays into that, but this on-prem is massive, and Dell is the on-prem poster child. So I think again what it means for them is they've got to continue to embrace it, they got to do more in software, more in data management, they got to push on APEX. And I'd say the same thing for HPE. I think they're both well behind this in terms of ecosystems. I mean they're not even close. But they have to start, and they got to start somewhere, and they've got resources to make it happen. >> You said in your breaking analysis that you published just a few days ago before the event that Snowflake plans to create a de facto standard in data platforms. What we heard from our guests on this program, your mainstage session with Frank Slootman. Still think that? >> I do. I think it more than I believed it coming in. And the reason I called it that is because I am a super fan of Zhamak Dehghani and her data mesh. And what her vision is, it's kind of the Immaculate Conception, where she wants everything to be open, open standards, and those don't exist today. And I think she perfectly realizes the practicality of de facto standards are going to get to market, and add value sooner than open standards. Now open standards over time, and I'll come back to that, may occur, but that's clear to me what Snowflake is creating, is the de facto standard for data platforms, the data cloud, the supercloud. And what's most impressive, or I think really important, is they're layering applications now on top of that. The metric to me, and I don't know if we can even count this, but VMware used to use it. For every dollar spent on VMware license, $15 was spent in the ecosystem. It started at 1 to 1.5, 1 to 2, 1 to 10, 1 to 15, I think it went up to 1 to 30 at the max. I don't know how they counted that, but it's countable. Reasonable people can make estimates like that. And I think as the ecosystem grows, what Snowflake's doing is it's in many respects modeling the cloud, what the cloud has. Cloud has ecosystems, we talked about startups, and the cloud also has optionality. And optionality means open source. So what you saw with Apache Iceberg is we're going to extend to open technologies. What you saw with Hybrid tables is we're going to extend a new workloads like transactions. The other thing about Snowflake that's really impressive is you're seeing the vertical focus. Financial services, healthcare, retail, media and entertainment. It's very rare for a company in this tenure, they're only 10 years old, to really start going vertical with their go-to-market, and building expertise around that. I think what's going to happen is the GSIs are going to come in, they love to eat at the trough, the trough here is maybe not big enough for them yet, but it will be. And they're going to start to align with the GSIs, and they're going to do really well within those industries, connecting people, collaborating with data. But I think it's a killer strategy, but they're executing on it. >> Right, and we heard a lot of great customer stories from all of those four verticals that you talked about, and then some, that that direction and that pivot from a customer perspective, from a sales and marketing perspective is all aligned. And that was kind of one of the themes as well that Frank talked about in his keynote is mission alignment, mission alignment with customers, but also with the ecosystem. And I feel that I heard that with every customer conversation, with every partner conversation, and Snowflake conversation that we had over the last I think 36 segments, Dave. >> Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's the power of many versus the resources of one. And even though Snowflake tell you they have $5 billion in cash, and assets on the balance sheet, and that's fine, that's nothing compared to what an ecosystem has. And Amazon's part of that ecosystem. Azure is part of that ecosystem. Google is part of that ecosystem. Those companies have huge resources, and Snowflake it seems has figured out how to tap those resources, and build value on top of it. To me they're doing a better job than a lot of the cloud databases out there. They don't necessarily have a better database, in fact, I could argue that their database is less functional. And I would argue that actually in many cases. Their database is less functional if you just want a database. But if you want a data cloud, and an ecosystem, and develop applications on top of that, and to be able to monetize, that's unique, and that is a moat that they're building that is highly differentiable, and being able to do that relatively easily. I mean, I think they overstate the simplicity with which that is being done. We talked to some customers who said, he didn't say same wine, new bottle. I did ask him that, about Hadoop complexity. And he said, "No, it's not that bad." But you still got to put this stuff together. And I think in the early parts of a market that are immature, people get really excited because it's so much easier than what was previous. So my other question is, okay, what's somebody working on now, that's looking at what Snowflake's doing and saying, I can improve on that. And what's going to be really interesting to see is, can they improve on it in a way, and can they raise enough capital such that they can disrupt, or is Snowflake going to keep staying paranoid, 'cause they got good leaders, and keep executing? And then I think the other wild card is edge. Snowflake doesn't really have an edge strategy right now. I think they will develop one. >> Through the ecosystem? >> And I don't think they're missing the boat, and they'll do it through the ecosystem, exactly. I don't think they're missing the boat, I think they're just like, "Well, we don't know what to do today." It's all distributed data, and it's ephemeral, and nobody's storing the data. You know anything that comes back to the cloud, we get. But new architectures are emerging on the edge that are going to bring new economics. There's new silicon, you see what's happening with Apple, and the M1, the M1 Ultra, and the new systems that they've just developed. What Tesla is doing with custom silicon, and amazing things, and programmability of the arm model. So it's early days, but semiconductors are the mainspring of innovation in this industry. Without chips, you got nothing. And when you get innovations in silicon, it drives innovations in software, because developers go, "Wow, I can do that now?" I can do things in parallel, I can do things faster, I can do things more simply, and programmable at scale. So that's happening. And that's going to bring a new set of economics that the premise is that will eventually bleed into the data center. It will, it always does. And I guess the other thing is every 15 years or so, the world gets disrupted, the tech world. We're about 15, 16 years in now to the cloud. So at this point, everybody's like, "Wow this is insurmountable, this is all we'll ever see. Everything that's ever been invented, this is the model of the future." We know that's not the case. I don't know how it's going to get disrupted, but I think edge is going to be part of that. It could be public policy. Governments could come in and take big tech on, seems like Sharekhan wants to do that. So that's what makes this industry so fun. >> Never a dull moment, Dave. This has been a great three days hosting this show with you. We've uncovered a lot. Your breaking analysis was great to get me prepared for the show. If you haven't seen it, check it out on siliconangle.com. Thanks, Dave, I appreciate all of your insights. >> Thank you, Lisa, It's been a pleasure working with you. >> Always good to work with you. >> Awesome, great job. >> Likewise. Great job to the team. >> Yes, thank you to our awesome production team. They've kept us going for three days. >> Yes, and the team back, Kristin, and Cheryl, and everybody back at the office. >> Exactly, it takes a village. For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. We are wrappin' up three days of wall-to-wall coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 from Vegas. Thanks for watching guys, we'll see you soon. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, theCUBE's three days of wall to wall coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 is coming to an end, but Dave Vellante and I, Lisa Martin are so pleased to have our final guest as none other than the co-founder and president of products at Snowflake, Benoit Dageville. Benoit, thank you so much for joining us on the program. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you, thank you. >> So this is day four, 'cause you guys started on Monday. This is Thursday. The amount of people that are still here speaks volumes. We've had close to 10,000 people here. >> Yeah. >> Could you ever have imagined back in the day, 10 years ago that it would come to something like this in such a short period of time? >> Absolutely not. And I always say if I had imagined that I might not have started Snowflake, right. This is somehow scary. I mean and yeah, it's huge. And you can feel the excitement of everyone. It is like mind boggling and the fact that so many people are still there after four days is great. >> Your keynote on Tuesday was fantastic. Your energy was off the charts. It was standing room only. There were overflow rooms. Like we just mentioned, a lot of people are still here. Talk about the evolution of Snowflake, this week's announcements and what it means for the future of the data cloud. >> Yeah, so evolution, I mean, I will start with the evolution. It's true that that's what we have announced. This week is not where we started necessarily. So we started really very quickly with big data combined with data warehouse as one thing. We saw that the world was moving into fragmented siloing data and we thought with Thierry, we are going to combine big data and data warehouse in one system for the cloud with this elasticity and this service simplicity. So simplicity, amazing elasticity, which is this multi workload architecture that I was explaining during the keynotes and really extreme simplicity with the service. Then we realized that there is one other attribute in the cloud, which is unique, which doesn't exist on-premise, which is collaboration. How you can connect different tenets of the platform together. And Google showed that with Google Docs. I always say to me, it was amazing that you could share document and have direct access to document that you didn't produce and you can collaborate on this document. So we wanted to do the same thing for data and this is where we created the data cloud and the marketplace where you can have all these data sets available and really the next evolution I would say is really about applications that are (indistinct) by that data, but are way simpler to use for all the tenets of the data cloud. And this is the way you can share expertise also, including, ML model, everyone talks about ML and the democratization of ML. How are you going to democratize ML? It's not by making necessary training super easy. Such that everyone can train their ML for themselves. It's by having very specialized application where data and ML is at the core, which are shared, through the marketplace and we shall leverage by many tenets of this marketplace that have no necessary knowledge about building this ML models. So that's where, yeah. >> When you and Thierry started the company, I go back to the improbable rise of Kubernetes and there were other more sophisticated container management systems back then, but they chose to focus on simplicity. And you've told me before, that was our main tenet. We are not going to worry about all the complex database stuff. You knew how to do that, but you chose not to. So my question is, did you envision solving those complex problems over time yourselves or through an ecosystem? Was this by design or did you... As you started to get into it, say let's not even try to go there let's partner to go there. >> Yeah, I mean, it's both. It's a combination of both. Snowflake, the simplicity of the platform is really important because if our partners are struggling to put their solution and build solution on top of Snowflake they will not build it. So it's very important that number one, our platform is really easy to use from day one. And that really has to be built inside the platform. You cannot build simplicity on top. You cannot have a complex solution and all of a sudden realize that, oh, this is complex. I need to build another layer on top of it to make it simpler, that will not work. So it had to be built from day one, but you're right. What is going to be Snowflake? I always say in 10 years from now, we just turn 10 years old or we are going to turn 10 years old in few months. Actually a few months, yes. >> Right. >> So for the next 10 years I really believe that most of Snowflake will not be built by Snowflake. And that's the power of the partners and these applications. When you are going to say I'm using Snowflake, actually, probably you are not going to use directly code developed by Snowflake. That code will leverage our platform, but you will use a solution that has been built on top of Snowflake. And this is the way we are going to decouple, the effort of Snowflake and multiply it. >> It's an interesting balance, isn't it? When I think of what you did with Apache Iceberg, if I use Iceberg and I'm not going to get as much functionality, but I may want that openness, but I'm going to get more functionality inside of the data cloud. And I don't know, but if you know the answer to what's going to happen. >> No, that's a super good question. So to explain what we did with Apache Iceberg, and the fact that now it's a native format for us. So everything that you can do with our internal formats, you can do it with Apache Iceberg, including security, defining masking, data masking all the governors that we have, fine grain security aspects, the replications you can define you can use (indistinct) on top of... >> But there's a but, right? But if I do that with native Snowflake tools, I'm going to get an even greater advantage, am I not? >> Yes. So that's what I'm saying. So that's why we embraced Iceberg, because I think we can bring all the benefit of Snowflake to people who have decided to use Iceberg, I mean open formats. Iceberg is a table format. So and why it was important because people had massive investments in open source in Hadoop. And we had a lot of companies saying, we love Snowflake. We want to be a Snowflake customer, but we cannot really migrate all our data. I mean, it will be really costly. And we have a lot of tools that need access, direct access. So this is why we created Iceberg because we can really... I mean, we really think that we can bring the benefit of Snowflake to this data. >> Gives customers optionality. Okay. I use this term super cloud. You don't use the term, but that's okay. And I get a lot of heat for it. But to me, what you're doing is quite a bit different than multicloud because you're creating that abstraction layer. You're bringing value above it. My question to you is, the most of the heat I get is, oh, that's just SaaS. Are you just SaaS? >> No. I mean, no, absolutely not. I mean, you're right we are a super cloud. I mean it's a much better word than saying we are multicloud. Multicloud is often viewed as oh, I have my system and now I can run this system in the different cloud providers. Snowflake is different. We have one single platform for the world, which happens to have some regions are AWS region, some regions are Azure, some regions are GCP, Google and we merge them together. We have this Snowgrid technology that connects all our regions together so that we have really one platform for the world. And that's very important because when you talk about connections of data and expertise applications you want to have global reach, right. It doesn't exist. We are not siloed by region of the world, right? You have a lot of companies which are multinational that have presence everywhere. And you want to have this global reach. The world is not a independent set of regions and countries, right. And that's the realization. So we had to create this global platform for our customers. >> And now you have people building clouds on top of your data cloud, well that to me is the next signal. In your keynote, you talked about seven pillars, all data, all workloads, global architecture, self-managed, programmable, marketplace, governance, which ones are the most important? >> All of them. It's like when you have kids, you don't want to pick and say, this one is my preferred one, so they are really important. All of them, as I said without data, there is no Snowflake, right? So all data is so important that we can reach every data, wherever it is. And Iceberg is a part of that, but all workload is really important because you don't want to put your data in one platform, if you cannot run all your workloads and workloads are much broader than just data warehousing, there is data engineering, data science, ML engineering, (indistinct) all these workloads applications. So that's critical. Programmable is where we are moving, right. We want to be the place where data applications are built. And we think we have a lot of advantages because data application needs to use many workloads at once, right? It's not that that application will do only data warehousing, they need to store their states, they need to use this new workload that we define, which is Unistore. They need to do data engineering because they need to get data, right. They have to save this data. So they need to combine many workload and if they have to stitch this workload, because the platform was not designed as one single product where everything is consistent and works together, that you have to stitch, it's complicated for this application to make it work. So Snowflake is we believe an ideal platform to run these data applications. So all workloads, programmable, obviously, so that you can program. And programmable has two aspects, which is big part of our announcement. Is both data programmability, which is running Python against petabyte, terabytes of data at scale and doing it scale out. So that's what we call data programmability. So both Java, Python and (indistinct), but also running applications like UI. And we had this acquisition of Streamlit. Streamlit now has been fully integrated in Snowflake. We announced that such that not only you can have this data programmability, but you can expose your data through this nice UIs, interactive UI to business users potentially. So it goes all the way there. Global is super important. As we say, we want to be one platform for the world. And of course, as I said, the last pillar, which is somehow critical for us, because we are cloud, we need to have governance. We need to have security of our data. And why it took us so long to do Python is not because it's out to run Python, right? Everyone can run Python it's because we had to secure it. And I talk about it creating this amazing sandboxing technology, such that when you include third party libraries and third party codes, you are guaranteed that this third party code will not reach to infiltrate your data, right. We control the environment that Snowflake provides. >> Can you share us some of the feedback from the customer? You probably had many customer conversations over the last four days. >> Look at that smile. (interviewer laughing) (Lisa laughing) >> Actually not because I was so busy everywhere. Unfortunately, I didn't speak to many customers. Saying that, I had everyone stopping me and talking about what they heard and yeah, there is a huge excitement about all of this. >> What's been the feedback around the theme of the event? The world of data collaboration. Data collaboration is so critical as every company these days must be a data company to compete, to win. What's been from just some of the feedback that you've had customers really embracing data collaboration, what Snowflake is enabling. >> Yeah. I mean, almost every company which is using Snowflake, is collaborating with data. You have heard, the number of stable edges that we have, and there is a real need for that because your data alone... You cannot make sense of your data if it is just alone. It needs to be connected with other data. You haven't not generated. So all data, when you say the first pillar of Snowflake is all data is not only about your data, but is about all the data that's created around you. That puts perspective on your own data. And that's critical and it's so painful to get. I mean, even your data is difficult to have access to your data, but imagine data that you didn't produce. And so yes, so the data collaboration is critical, and then now we expanded it to application and expertise, sharing models, for example, That's going to have a huge impact. >> All data includes now transaction data, right? >> Yes. >> That's a big part of the announcements that you guys made. >> Yeah. So and that's the motivation for that was really, if we want to run application, full application, we announced native applications, which are fully executed and run inside the (indistinct) data cloud, right. They need all the services that application need and in particular managing their states. And so we created Unistore, which is a new workload, which allows you to combine transactional data, which are generated by this application. And at the same time being able to do analytics directly on this data. So we call it Hybrid Table because it has this hybrid aspect. You can do both transactional access to this data and at the same time analytic here without having data pipeline and moving data and transforming it from the transactional system to the analytical system, right. Snowflake is one system. Again, in the spirit of simplifying everything, this is the Snowflake (indistinct). >> I can ask the same question I ask at first, (indistinct) when was the aha moment that you and Thierry had that said, this is not just a better data warehouse, it's actually more than that. You probably didn't call it a data cloud until later on, but did you know that from the beginning or was that something you kind of stumbled into? >> No. So as I said, we founded Snowflake in 2012 and Thierry and I, we locked in my apartment and we were doing the blueprint of Snowflake and trying to find what is the revolution with the cloud for this data warehouse system and analytical system, both big data and data warehouse. And the aha moment was but of course cloud, okay. What is cloud? It's elasticity, it's service and later collaboration. So in the elasticity aspect, when you ask database people, what is elasticity, they will tell you, oh, you have a cluster of nodes. Like if it is Oracle, it would be a (indistinct) cluster. And the elasticities that you can add one node, two node to this cluster without having too much impact on the existing workload, because you need to shuffle data, right. It's hard and doing it online, right, that's elasticity. If you can do that, you are elastic. We thought that that was not very interesting to do that. What is interesting with elasticity is to plug new workloads. You can plug a workload like that and that workload is running without having any impact on other workloads, which are running on the platform. So elasticity for us was having dedicated computer resources to workloads. And these computer resources could start and be part as soon as the workload starts and will shut down when the workload finishes and they will be sized exactly for the demand of that workload. And we thought the aha moment was, okay if we can do that, now we can run a workload with, let's say 10X more computer resources than what you would have used or 100X more. Okay, let's say 100X more because we paralyzed things. Now this workload can run 100X faster, right? That's assuming we do a good job in the scale, which is our IP. And if we can do that, now the computer resources that you have used, you have used them for 100 times less. So you have used 100 times more resources because you have more nodes, but because you go fast, you use them for less time, right? So if you multiply the two it's constant. So you can run and accelerate workload dramatically 10X, 100X for the same price. Even if we are not better in efficiency than competition, just having that was the magic, right? >> You know how Google founders originally had trouble raising money because who needs another search engine? Did you get from original, like when you started going to raise money, Amazon's got a database, so who needs another cloud database? Did you get that early on or was it just obvious Speiser and companies as well. >> Speiser is a little bit on the crazy side and ambitious and so Speiser is Speiser. And of course he had no doubt, but even him was saying Benoit, Thierry, Hadoop, right. Everyone is saying Hadoop is going to be the revolution. And you guys are betting actually against Hadoop because we told Speiser, Hadoop is a bad system, it's going to fail, but at the time everyone was so bullish about Hadoop, everyone was implementing Hadoop that it didn't look like it was going to fail and we were probably wrong. So there was a lot of skepticism about not leveraging Hadoop and not being an Hadoop. Okay, something being on top of Hadoop. That was number one. There was no cloud warehouse at the time we started. Redshift was not started. It was the pioneer somewhere when Snowflake was founded. So creating a data warehouse in the cloud sounded crazy to people. How am I going to move my data over there? And security and what about security, the cloud is not secure. So that was another... >> So you guys predated that Parexel move by... >> Yes. >> Okay, so that's interesting. And I thought when Redshift... I mean, Amazon announced Redshift, I was sure that Mike Speiser will come and say, guys it's too sad, but they beat you guys and they build something and actually it was the reverse. Mike Speiser was super excited and so it was interesting to me. >> Wow, that's amazing. 'Cause John Furrier and I, we were early with theCUBE. when theCUBE started it was like the beginning of Hadoop. And so we brought theCUBE to, I think it was the second Hadoop World and we was rubbing nickels together at the time. And I was so excited bring compute to storage and it made so much sense. But I remember and I won't say who it was, but an early Hadoop committer told me this is going to fail. And I'm like, what? And he started going age basis crap and all this stuff. And I was sad because I was so excited, but it turned out that you had the same (indistinct). >> Because of complexity. Okay, Hadoop failed for two reasons. One is because they decided that, oh, a lot of this database thing, you don't need transaction, you don't need SQL, you don't necessarily, you don't need to go fast. It'll be batch, normal real time interaction with data, no one needs that. >> Cheap storage. >> So a lot of compromise on the very important technology. And at the same time, extreme complexity and complexity for me was, where I was I knew that it was going to fail big time and we bet Snowflake on the failure of Hadoop indeed. >> And there was no cloud early on in Hadoop. >> And there was no cloud too. >> And that was what killed it. That was like... >> You're right. And the model that Hadoop had for data didn't work on block storage. Block storage is not as efficient as HGFS. So that was also another figure. >> Do you ever sit back and think about... So you think about how much money has poured in to separating compute from storage and cloud databases and you started it all. (interviewer laughing) >> Yeah. No, this is... >> Pretty amazing. >> Yeah. >> Right, so that's good. That means that you're onto a good idea, but a lot of people get confused that again, they think that you're a cloud data warehouse and you're not, I mean, you're much more than that. >> Yeah, I hate that. I have to say, because from day one we were not a cloud data warehouse. As I said, it was all about combining the big data, massive amount of unstructured data, petabytes stored as files. Okay, that's very important, store as files where it's very easy to drop data in the system without... Very low cost to combine with data warehouse, full multi statement transaction when people will tell you today, oh, now we are a data warehouse. They don't have multi statement transaction, right. So we had from day one multi statement transaction really efficient SQL. You could run your dashboard. So combining these two worlds was I think the crazy thing, that's the crazy innovation that Snowflake did initially. >> Yeah. >> And I know it's really easy to build data warehouse somewhere, because if you don't think about big data, petabytes, extremely structured data, you remove a lot of complexity. >> This is why Lisa, when you get excited about technology, but you always have to have a, somebody who really deeply understands technology to stink test it, all right so awesome. Thank you for sharing that story. >> Yeah. >> Fantastic. So over 5,900 customers now. I saw over 500 in the Forbes G2K, over almost 10,000 people here this year. If we think back to 2019, there was about what? Less than 2000 people. >> Yeah. >> What do you think is going to happen next year? >> I don't know. I don't like to think about next year. I mean, I always say, Snowflake is so exciting to me because it is like a TV show, right. Where you wait the next season and we have one season every year. So I'm really excited to know what is going to happen next year. And I don't want to project what I think will happen, but all these movements to the Snowflake being the platform for data application. I want to see what people are going to build on our platform. I mean, that's the excitement. >> Season 11 coming up. >> Yes. Season 11. Yes. >> No binge watching here. Benoit, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on incredible success, the momentum, the energy is contagious. We love it. (Benoit laughing) >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Bye bye. >> For Benoit Dageville and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. Dave and I will be right back with a wrap. (upbeat music)

>>Thanks. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of snowflakes. Summit 22 live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here. I have three guests here with me. We're gonna be talking about Snowflake Ventures and the snowflakes start up Challenge. That's in its second year. I've got Harry Glaser with me. Co founder and CEO of Model Bit Start Up Challenge finalist Damon Bryan joins us as well. The CTO and co founder of Hyper Affinity. Also a startup Challenge Finalists. And Stephane Williams to my left here, VP of Corporate development and snowflake Ventures. Guys, great to have you all on this little mini panel this morning. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Let's go ahead, Harry, and we'll start with you. Talk to the audience about model. But what do you guys do? And then we'll kind of unpack the snowflake. The Snowflakes challenge >>Model bit is the easiest way for data scientists to deploy machine learning models directly into Snowflake. We make use of the latest snowflake functionality called Snow Park for python that allows those models to run adjacent to the data so that machine learning models can be much more efficient and much more powerful than they were before. >>Awesome. Damon. Give us an overview of hyper affinity. >>Yes, so hyper affinity were Decision Intelligence platform. So we helped. Specifically retailers and brands make intelligent decisions through the use of their own customer, data their product data and put data science in a I into the heart of the decision makers across their business. >>Nice Step seven. Tell us about the startup challenge. We talked a little bit about it yesterday with CMO Denise Pearson, but I know it's in its second year. Give us the idea of the impetus for it, what it's all about and what these companies embody. >>Yeah, so we This is the second year that we've done it. Um, we it was really out of, um Well, it starts with snowflake Ventures when we started to invest in companies, and we quickly realised that there's there's a massive opportunity for companies to be building on top of the Lego blocks, uh, of snowflake. And so, um, open up the competition. Last year it was the inaugural competition overlay analytics one, Um, and since then, you've seen a number of different functionalities and features as part of snowflakes snow part. Being one of them native applications is a really exciting one going forward. Um, the companies can really use to accelerate their ability to kind of deliver best in class applications using best in class technology to deliver real customer outcomes and value. Um, so we've we've seen tremendous traction across the globe, 250 applicants across 50. I think 70 countries was mentioned today, so truly global in nature. And it's really exciting to see how some of the start ups are taking snowflake to to to new and interesting use cases and new personas and new industries. >>So you had 200 over 250 software companies applied for this. How did you did you narrow it down to three? >>We did. Yeah, >>you do that. >>So, behind the scenes, we had a sub judging panel, the ones you didn't see up on stage, which I was luckily part of. We had kind of very distinct evaluation criteria that we were evaluating every company across. Um and we kind of took in tranches, right? We we took the first big garden, and we kind of try to get that down to a top 50 and top 50. Then we really went into the details and we kind of across, um, myself in ventures with some of my venture partners. Um, some of the market teams, some of the product and engineering team, all kind of came together and evaluated all of these different companies to get to the top 10, which was our semifinalists and then the semi finalists, or had a chance to present in front of the group. So we get. We got to meet over Zoom along the way where they did a pitch, a five minute pitch followed by a Q and A in a similar former, I guess, to what we just went through the startup challenge live, um, to get to the top three. And then here we are today, just coming out of the competition with with With folks here on the table. >>Wow, Harry talked to us about How did you just still down what model bit is doing into five minutes over Zoom and then five minutes this morning in person? >>I think it was really fun to have that pressure test where, you know, we've only been doing this for a short time. In fact model. It's only been a company for four or five months now, and to have this process where we pitch and pitch again and pitch again and pitch again really helped us nail the one sentence value proposition, which we hadn't done previously. So in that way, very grateful to step on in the team for giving us that opportunity. >>That helps tremendously. I can imagine being a 4 to 5 months young start up and really trying to figure out I've worked with those young start ups before. Messaging is challenging the narrative. Who are we? What do we do? How are we changing or chasing the market? What are our customers saying we are? That's challenging. So this was a good opportunity for you, Damon. Would you say the same as well for hyper affinity? >>Yeah, definitely conquer. It's really helped us to shape our our value proposition early and how we speak about that. It's quite complicated stuff, data science when you're trying to get across what you do, especially in retail, that we work in. So part of what our platform does is to help them make sense of data science and Ai and implement that into commercial decisions. So you have to be really kind of snappy with how you position things. And it's really helped us to do that. We're a little bit further down the line than than these guys we've been going for three years. So we've had the benefit of working with a lot of retailers to this point to actually identify what their problems are and shape our product and our proposition towards. >>Are you primarily working with the retail industry? >>Yes, Retail and CPG? Our primary use case. We have seen any kind of consumer related industries. >>Got it. Massive changes right in retail and CPG the last couple of years, the rise of consumer expectations. It's not going to go back down, right? We're impatient. We want brands to know who we are. I want you to deliver relevant content to me that if I if I bought a tent, go back on your website, don't show me more tense. Show me things that go with that. We have this expectation. You >>just explain the whole business. But >>it's so challenging because the brothers brands have to respond to that. How do you what is the value for retailers working with hyper affinity and snowflake together. What's that powerhouse? >>Yeah, exactly. So you're exactly right. The retail landscape is changing massively. There's inflation everywhere. The pandemic really impacted what consumers really value out of shopping with retailers. And those decisions are even harder for retailers to make. So that's kind of what our platform does. It helps them to make those decisions quickly, get the power of data science or democratise it into the hands of those decision makers. Um, so our platform helps to do that. And Snowflake really underpins that. You know, the scalability of snowflake means that we can scale the data and the capability that platform in tangent with that and snowflake have been innovating a lot of things like Snow Park and then the new announcements, announcements, uni store and a native APP framework really helping us to make developments to our product as quick as snowflakes are doing it. So it's really beneficial. >>You get kind of that tailwind from snowflakes acceleration. It sounds like >>exactly that. Yeah. So as soon as we hear about new things were like, Can we use it? You know, and Snow Park in particular was music to our ears, and we actually part of private preview for that. So we've been using that while and again some of the new developments will be. I'm on the phone to my guys saying, Can we use this? Get it, get it implemented pretty quickly. So yeah, >>fantastic. Sounds like a great aligned partnership there, Harry. Talk to us a little bit about model bit and how it's enabling customers. Maybe you've got a favourite customer example at model bit plus snowflake, the power that delivers to the end user customer? >>Absolutely. I mean, as I said, it allows you to deploy the M L model directly into snowflake. But sometimes you need to use the exact same machine learning model in multiple endpoints simultaneously. For example, one of our customers uses model bit to train and deploy a lead scoring model. So you know when somebody comes into your website and they fill out the form like they want to talk to a sales person, is this gonna be a really good customer? Do we think or maybe not so great? Maybe they won't pay quite as much, and that lead scoring model actually runs on the website using model bit so that you can deploy display a custom experience to that customer we know right away. If this is an A, B, C or D lead, and therefore do we show them a salesperson contact form? Do we just put them in the marketing funnel? Based on that lead score simultaneously, the business needs to know in the back office the score of the lead so that they can do things like routed to the appropriate salesperson or update their sales forecasts for the end of the quarter. That same model also runs in the in the snowflake warehouse so that those back office systems can be powered directly off of snowflake. The fact that they're able to train and deploy one model into two production environment simultaneously and manage all that is something they can only do with bottled it. >>Lead scoring has been traditionally challenging for businesses in every industry, but it's so incredibly important, especially as consumers get pickier and pickier with. I don't want I don't want to be measured. I want to opt out. What sounds like what model but is enabling is especially alignment between sales and marketing within companies, which is That's also a big challenge at many companies face for >>us. It starts with the data scientist, right? The fact that sales and marketing may not be aligned might be an issue with the source of truth. And do we have a source of truth at this company? And so the idea that we can empower these data scientists who are creating this value in the company by giving them best in class tools and resources That's our dream. That's our mission. >>Talk to me a little bit, Harry. You said you're only 4 to 5 months old. What were the gaps in the market that you and your co founders saw and said, Guys, we've got to solve this. And Snowflake is the right partner to help us do it. >>Absolutely. We This is actually our second start up, and we started previously a data Analytics company that was somewhat successful, and it got caught up in this big wave of migration of cloud tools. So all of data tools moved and are moving from on premise tools to cloud based tools. This is really a migration. That snowflake catalyst Snowflake, of course, is the ultimate in cloud based data platforms, moving customers from on premise data warehouses to modern cloud based data clouds that dragged and pulled the rest of the industry along with it. Data Science is one of the last pieces of the data industry that really hasn't moved to the cloud yet. We were almost surprised when we got done with our last start up. We were thinking about what to do next. The data scientists were still using Jupiter notebooks locally on their laptops, and we thought, This is a big market opportunity and we're We're almost surprised it hasn't been captured yet, and we're going to get in there. >>The other thing. I think it's really interesting on your business that we haven't talked about is just the the flow of data, right? So that the data scientist is usually taking data out of a of a of a day like something like Smoke like a data platform and the security kind of breaks down because then it's one. It's two, it's three, it's five, it's 20. Its, you know, big companies just gets really big. And so I think the really interesting thing with what you guys are doing is enabling the data to stay where it's at, not copping out keeping that security, that that highly governed environment that big companies want but allowing the data science community to really unlock that value from the data, which is really, really >>cool. Wonderful for small startups like Model Bit. Because you talk to a big company, you want them to become a customer. You want them to use your data science technology. They want to see your fed ramp certification. They want to talk to your C. So we're two guys in Silicon Valley with a dream. But if we can tell them the data is staying in snowflake and you have that conversation with Snowflake all the time and you trust them were just built on top. That is an easy and very smooth way to have that conversation with the customer. >>Would you both say that there's credibility like you got street cred, especially being so so early in this stage? Harry, with the partnership with With Snowflake Damon, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've been using Snowflake from day one. We leave from when we started our company, and it was a little bit of an unknown, I guess maybe 23 years ago, especially in retail. A lot of retailers using all the legacy kind of enterprise software, are really starting to adopt the cloud now with what they're doing and obviously snowflake really innovating in that area. So what we're finding is we use Snowflake to host our platform and our infrastructure. We're finding a lot of retailers doing that as well, which makes it great for when they wanted to use products like ours because of the whole data share thing. It just becomes really easy. And it really simplifies it'll and data transformation and data sharing. >>Stephane, talk about the startup challenge, the innovation that you guys have seen, and only the second year I can. I can just hear it from the two of you. And I know that the winner is back in India, but tremendous amount of of potential, like to me the last 2.5 days, the flywheel that is snowflake is getting faster and faster and more and more powerful. What are some of the things that excite you about working on the start up challenge and some of the vision going forward that it's driving. >>I think the incredible thing about Snowflake is that we really focus as a company on the data infrastructure and and we're hyper focused on enabling and incubating and encouraging partners to kind of stand on top of a best of breed platform, um, unlocked value across the different, either personas within I T organisations or industries like hypothermia is doing. And so it's it's it's really incredible to see kind of domain knowledge and subject matter expertise, able to kind of plug into best of breed underlying data infrastructure and really divide, drive, drive real meaningful outcomes for for for our customers in the community. Um, it's just been incredible to see. I mean, we just saw three today. Um, there was 250 incredible applications that past the initial. Like, do they check all the boxes and then actually, wow, they just take you to these completely different areas. You never thought that the technology would go and solve. And yet here we are talking about, you know, really interesting use cases that have partners are taking us to two >>150. Did that surprise you? And what was it last year. >>I think it was actually close to close to 2 to 40 to 50 as well, and I think it was above to 50 this year. I think that's the number that is in my head from last year, but I think it's actually above that. But the momentum is, Yeah, it's there and and again, we're gonna be back next year with the full competition, too. So >>awesome. Harry, what is what are some of the things that are next for model bed as it progresses through its early stages? >>You know, one thing I've learned and I think probably everyone at this table has internalised this lesson. Product market fit really is everything for a start up. And so for us, it's We're fortunate to have a set of early design partners who will become our customers, who we work with every day to build features, get their feedback, make sure they love the product, and the most exciting thing that happened to me here this week was one of our early design partner. Customers wanted us to completely rethink how we integrate with gets so that they can use their CI CD workflows their continuous integration that they have in their own get platform, which is advanced. They've built it over many years, and so can they back, all of model, but with their get. And it was it was one of those conversations. I know this is getting a little bit in the weeds, but it was one of those conversations that, as a founder, makes your head explode. If we can have a critical mass of those conversations and get to that product market fit, then the flywheel starts. Then the investment money comes. Then you're hiring a big team and you're off to the races. >>Awesome. Sounds like there's a lot of potential and momentum there. Damon. Last question for you is what's next for hyper affinity. Obviously you've got we talked about the street cred. >>Yeah, what's >>next for the business? >>Well, so yeah, we we've got a lot of exciting times coming up, so we're about to really fully launch our products. So we've been trading for three years with consultancy in retail analytics and data science and actually using our product before it was fully ready to launch. So we have the kind of main launch of our product and we actually starting to onboard some clients now as we speak. Um, I think the climate with regards to trying to find data, science, resources, you know, a problem across the globe. So it really helps companies like ours that allow, you know, allow retailers or whoever is to democratise the use of data science. And perhaps, you know, really help them in this current climate where they're struggling to get world class resource to enable them to do that >>right so critical stuff and take us home with your overall summary of snowflake summit. Fourth annual, nearly 10,000 people here. Huge increase from the last time we were all in person. What's your bumper sticker takeaway from Summit 22 the Startup Challenge? >>Uh, that's a big closing statement for me. It's been just the energy. It's been incredible energy, incredible excitement. I feel the the products that have been unveiled just unlock a tonne, more value and a tonne, more interesting things for companies like the model bit I profanity and all the other startups here. And to go and think about so there's there's just this incredible energy, incredible excitement, both internally, our product and engineering teams, the partners that we have spoke. I've spoken here with the event, the portfolio companies that we've invested in. And so there's there's there's just this. Yeah, incredible momentum and excitement around what we're able to do with data in today's world, powered by underlying platform, like snowflakes. >>Right? And we've heard that energy, I think, through l 30 plus guests we've had on the show since Tuesday and certainly from the two of you as well. Congratulations on being finalist. We wish you the best of luck. You have to come back next year and talk about some of the great things. More great >>things hopefully will be exhibited next year. >>Yeah, that's a good thing to look for. Guys really appreciate your time and your insights. Congratulations on another successful start up challenge. >>Thank you so much >>for Harry, Damon and Stefan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of snowflakes. Summit 22 live from Vegas. Stick around. We'll be right back with a volonte and our final guest of the day. Mhm, mhm

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, with Dave Vellante. We are covering day two of our coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. of Snowflake Summit '22. It's been a cannon of content coming your way, the last couple of days. We love talking with customers, with partners. We've got a partner on the program from ThoughtSpot. We're going to be diving into digital transformation with self-service analytics for the modern data stack. Please welcome Kuntal Vahalia, SVP of Channel and Alliances at ThoughtSpot. Welcome Kuntal. >> Thank you, Lisa. Dave, thank you for having us. >> Dave: Good to see you. >> Talk to the audience a little bit about ThoughtSpot. Give 'em an overview, and then de dive into the partnership with Snowflake. >> Yeah, absolutely. So ThoughtSpot is the, what we call live analytics, for the modern data stack, right? We want to be the experience layer for all the data that's getting modernized and moving into the cloud, right? And then specifically to Snowflake, we, of course, we have seen over the last two days here Snowflake has made tremendous innovations where they've accelerated a customer's journey into the cloud, especially the data cloud. Our job is to go really unlock that data, right? Generate that value, make it consumable at the at the experience level layer, right? So what we want to do here with Snowflake is here with Snowflake is make analytics self service for the end users, for the end users, on top of the Snowflake data cloud, right? And we want to empower everyone to create, consume, and operationalize data driven insights. We think if the end users can gender their own insights through live analytics, we could do have a completely different operating model for a business, right? And I think we can do that in accelerated fashion on, sitting on top of Snowflake data cloud. >> End users? Lines of business? >> It's line of business users, so we directly go to end users. That's one of our differentiation, not just IT, not just IT, but as end users as well, so we could be all things to all enterprise, to all enterprise, across our line of businesses. >> So what kind of impact are you seeing with your customers? You know, ones that are leaning into ThoughtSpot and Snowflake and sort of rethinking their data approach? >> Yeah. I mean the impact could be immense, right? As I said, this is not just about analytics. If we are successful in empowering end users, it completely changes the velocity of the business. We are now driving innovation at every node, at every layer in the organization. Not just IT, not just smaller segments in the organization, we are doing this anywhere, in any pocket, right? So I think the impact could be massive, if we do this right. And I think we are starting to see that, we have a lot of customers here actually, joint customers, Capital One, Canadian Tires, Walmart, they're all joint customers, where we have seen starting to see some of those impacts, where we have data getting modernized, the stack being ready, and then we're coming in at the top as the experience layer, which is driving that new digital operating model. >> Describe the maturity curve when you go, you mentioned some of the the the leaders, I mean, take a Walmart. I mean, they kind of invented the whole, you know, beer and diapers thing, right? So obviously a company with tremendous resources and and and advanced technology. Compare. Compare. So some of those leaders with sort of the other end of the spectrum, when you come into a company and you see, okay, here's, okay, here's, what does that spectrum look like? And and what's the upside for the, I don't want to call 'em laggards, but I'll call 'em laggards. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this, this, I think we are still early on. I mean, as this is not just a exercise in getting the data ready, this is also an exercise in in change management, because now, as I said, we are going beyond IT. We are going to line of business users as well, so a lot of change management required, and we have seen companies that are actually putting this in front of the frontline workers, empowering frontline workers to consume analytics and to drive self-service via search and AI, and AI, they're on a different curve. They are actually being competitive in the market. That's an advantage for them, right? >> Right. >> So we are seeing a lot of companies, like Walmart, already ahead in that journey with us still early days, right? We got to go, land in one line of business, go from there to other line of business till we go enterprise wide. >> Can you, it sounds like you might be a facilitator of connecting heads of business with the IT and the tech folks at ThoughtSpot. >> Absolutely. I mean, that is the Holy Grail. How do we get IT And line of business work frictionless, where everyone has their roles defined, right? And still get to the outcome where innovation is happening now with IT on the data cloud and then go beyond IT into the broader business? So yeah, I think that's definitely one of the our goals and outcomes of what we do. >> So what are the roles there? So the business obviously wants to do more business. Okay. They put analytics in their hands and it helps them get there. What role does IT play? Making sure that those services are available? Are they a service provider? Is it more of a governance and compliance thing? >> Yeah, I mean, step number one is still to get the data ready and I think IT still owns the key to that kingdom, especially around governance, security, so I think IT still has to get the data stack ready, right? Step number two is for IT to really build a framework for how to consume analytics for how to consume analytics for the end users. Step number three then is, is the rule is, Hey, we don't need IT to now deliver dashboards or KPIs to the business every day that that's how traditional dashboards work. In our world, once IT does step number one and step number two the business can take over and they can now go operate the business on their own using live analytics. >> Creating self-serve >> Absolutely. Self-service analytics using service in AI. >> What have you seen, in terms of from the IT folks perspective, we talked about change management a minute ago, It's very challenging to do, but these days every company has to be a data company. >> Kuntal: Yeah. >> They don't have a choice. >> Yeah. >> What are you seeing from a change management perspective within the IT function across your customers and then be willing to let go in some cases? and then be willing to let go in some cases? >> Actually, >> Actually, what we have seen is, you know, think about the the technical debt that IT is owning over the last few years, it's just increasing, right? IT is looking for ways to A. cut cost, to A. cut cost, B. deliver more B. deliver more with probably the same amount of resources they have, so in some ways they welcome this new operating model, as long as they can keep the governance, they can keep the security, they can keep the framework around how business is run, as long as IT has a say in that, they're more than welcome to invite business, to really drive innovation at the edges through self-service analytics, so what we found is IT is a is a welcome partner, in this journey, especially when they have to get the data ready and modernize the data set for us. >> You guys announcing a partnership with Matillion this week, what? Tell us what that's all about. The one earlier. >> We did. So we did announce a partnership, so I think, as I said, step number one is getting the data ready, and I think we have heard from Frank and the rest of this team this week, even Snowflake is taking a best of breed approach on the data stack, right? So we want the computer So we want the computer and the storage to be ready, but for that, the data pipeline has to be ready, which is where Matillion comes in with the low code, no code approach, so we think between Matillion, Snowflake, and ThoughtSpot, we could be the accelerated best of breed approach for customers to realize value and and be live on the, on the modern data stack. >> Is that your, is that your stack? >> As we said, we, we meet the customers where they are, but we think this is accelerated path. >> What are the advantages of, you know, what are you optimizing on in that stack? in that stack? >> First with Matillion, we have, what we concept, we have this concept of Spot Apps, so this is ThoughtSpot's way to really capture the IP and the templates for customers to move fast, right? That's where we bake in a lot of the industry IP, a lot of functional IP around end sources, and and endpoints, so we have some of those spot apps built with Matillion, built with Matillion, so now customers able to ingest data into the so now customers able to ingest data into the into the cloud faster using Matillion, right? So that's, that's something we worked with, same thing with Snowflake, you know, we are now starting to go verticalize with Snowflake, So we are starting to build a lot of IP around financial services, healthcare and whatnot, which is where I think we are, again, accelerating customer's path on the modern data stack, all the way to the experience layer. >> A as a partner of Snowflake's, what does all the narrative around the data cloud, we've been talking about that for a while, a lot of conversation around the data cloud the last couple of days, where do partners fit into that overall narrative? >> Yeah, I think multiple places, right? First thing, First thing, First thing, every layer of the data cloud still needs innovation, still needs partners, and every partner adds a different set of value. Just like we add value at the, at the top layer, which is the experience layer, But I think, you know, we have channel partners we have a lot of SIs and GSIs here, and GSIs here, especially once we take a best of breed approach, to delivering customer outcomes, SIs are the neutral ground. They're the ones who are going to have the Matillion expertise, and the Snowflake expertise, and thoughts for expertise, all baked into one DNA practice, data analytics practice, so I think at every layer, partners have a role to play and every layer partners have role, have value to add. have value to add. >> What's the engagement process like for customers when you you're talking about the the the the three way partnership Matillion, Matillion, ThoughtSpot, and stuff like, how do customers get involved, what's your go to market look like? >> Right. I mean, obviously, I mean, we, we, we are humble, we know where we are. I mean, we, a little bit smaller than, than Snowflake Snowflake has a head start, so they've been about five years ahead of us, so we are largely targeting customers that are that are Snowflake ready, where there is some semblance of data cloud, where data seems to be organized and ready to go, right? so once we think the customer is at that point in the journey, we have very strong partnership across both, across entire organization, at a product level, at a field engagement level, and our field teams really understand the value the joint value between the two organizations, so we, we start to see Snowflake feel, and ThoughtSpot feel, starting to work together on key accounts, once we think the data is ready, and wherever we need to accelerate the data, that's where we bring in Matillion as well, to ingest more data into, into the data cloud, but that's largely been the engagement model between the three companies. >> How do you see the announcements that they made around applications affecting what you guys are doing and your ecosystem? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that's a validation. I think to us, I think to us, we always said step number one is to modernize the data, move into the cloud. That's step number one, but we still have to unlock the data. Like the data still needs to be consumed, And we always said, Hey, we are that app that could drive the consumption of data, but now with some of the announcement we have seen, I think the validation is there saying, "Hey, yes." There, even Snowflake is ready to move in a more accelerated fashion into the application world where they want to drive consumption, not just with the analytics layer, but with lot of other applications that's out there. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you've heard this week, in the last couple of days, that really validate that really validate the the partnership with Snowflake, from your perspective? >> Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is, is this concept of modern data stack, which is best of breed. I think we have been thinking about that for a long time, for the last year or so. We have seen this come through at this event here, right? We see Matillion, Snowflake, and then the SIs around it, all coming together, so I think to us, that's the biggest validation that the modern data stack is the right approach, especially best of breed, to drive the right customer outcomes, so to me, that's big. Second is this concept of really accelerating applications on top of the data cloud. I think that's, again a validation of what we've been trying to do over the last few years, which is, the data has modernized, let's now drive consumption and adoption of that data, so I think those are the two big take areas. >> So, so the modern data stack, to get to the modern data stack, you got to do some work. >> Yep. >> But so the, the play is to hold out the carrot, which you just kind of just did, 'cause once you get there, then you can really start to hit the steep part of the S-curve, right? >> That's right. >> What, what are the, what would you say are are the sort of prerequisites that customers need to think about to really jump on that modern data stack curve? >> Um, I think they they got to first have a vision around the outcomes, what outcomes we are driving. I think it's one thing to say, "Hey, we just going to move the data over from from legacy into the cloud." I mean, that's just, that's just migration, that doesn't drive the outcomes. To us, what makes sense is, let's start with the right outcomes around supply chain, around retail, around e-commerce, let's name it, right? I think, it starts there. From there on, let's figure out, what do we need? What's what, what technologies do we need in the stack to enable those outcomes, right? It could be ThoughtSpot at the top, it could be something else at the top, and same thing, it's Matillion, and Snowflake, right? But it really starts with what outcomes we going to drive in what industry and what KPIs are important for our customers. >> What's next for ThoughtSpot and Snowflake? I was just looking at the notes here. Over 250 plus joint customers, you mentioned some Disney+, Capital One, I've seen them around here. What's next for these two powerhouses? >> Well, I think we're just getting started, to be honest. I mean those 250 customers, first, we got to go drive success for them. I mean, we are a 10 year old company with a two year runway because we transferred our business transformed our business to cloud, less than two years ago, so this 250 joint logos are actually all happened in the last two years and that's driven us to be in the, probably in the top five adoption drivers for Snowflake, all in the last two years, So goal number one is to really, let's go drive customer success for these joint logos. Second, let's go expand them, right? Consumption is the key criteria, both for Snowflake, as well as ThoughtSpot. We are very well aligned, our pricing models aligned there, our incentives aligned there, We really want customers to go adopt and consume the stack, and then of course, really, we want to go verticalize ourselves, start speaking the language of the customers, and really just get bigger. I mean, we still got to build a machine around this. >> Lisa: Yep. >> Lisa, this is, this is all still early days for us. >> Early innings. A lot of, but a ton of potential. The, the field is ripe. >> The field is right open. I think in, and we will, I think we are, bottom of the third or bottom of the second, I think you still have a long game to play, right? >> Well good. Most people always use bottom the first. I'm glad to hear it's really bottom of the second or third. That's pretty good. >> Yeah, well, 250 logos are there. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And it's further along 'cause of the, the I don't want to say it like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. The failure of the big data movement, it pushed us along quite, quite a ways, in terms of thinking, putting data at the core, the technology kind of failed us, you know and the, and the, you know and the, and the, the centralization of the architectures, the centralization of the architectures, it failed us, But then the cloud came along. >> That's right. >> We learned a lot and now, you know, technology's advanced I think people's thinking is advanced and they realize increasingly the importance of data >> And ecosystem is coming. I mean, I think you look around here, this is a secret sauce for the future. >> Dave: Yep. This is what's going to really get us moving faster over the next few innings because now the rest of the ecosystem is coming along. >> Yep. The momentum is here. That flywheel is moving. >> That's right. >> Definitely. Kuntal, thank you very much for joining David and me on the program talking about >> Kuntal: Lisa, Dave, thank you so much for your time. >> what ThoughtSpot's all about, what you're up to, a lot of momentum. We wish you the best of luck as you progress into those later innings. >> Thank you >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube. We are live in Las Vegas at Snowflake Summit '22. Dave and I are going to be right back with our next guest, so stick around. (mellow techno music) (mellow techno music) (mellow techno music) (mellow techno music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage of day. One of snowflake summit 22 fourth annual. We're very happy to be here. A lot of people here, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, David's always great to be at these events with you, but me. This one is shot out of the cannon from day one, data, data, data, data. That's what you heard of here. First, we have two guests joining us next, please. Welcome Matthew Scalian. Who's an alumni of the cube CEO and founder of Matillion and Jer staying chief data architect and global head of data engineering from Western union. Welcome gentlemen. Thank >>You. Great to be here. >>We're gonna unpack the Western union story in a second. I love that, but Matthew, I wanted to start with you, give the audience who might not be familiar with Matillion an overview, your vision, your differentiators, your joint value statement with snowflake, >>Of course. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the cube. Again, Matillion S mission is to make the world's data useful, and we do that by providing a technology platform that allows our customers to load transform, synchronize, and orchestrate data on the snowflake data cloud. And on, on the cloud in general, we've been doing that for a number of years. We're co headquartered in the UK and the us, hence my dat accents. And we work with all sorts of companies, commercial scale, large end enterprises, particularly including of course, I'm delighted to say our friends at Western union. So that's why we're here today. >>And we're gonna talk about that in a second, but I wanna understand what's new with the data integration platform from Matillion perspective, lots of stuff coming out, give us an overview. >>Yeah, of course, it's been a really busy year and it's great to be here at snowflake summit to be able to share some of what we've been working on. You know, the Matillion platform is all about making our customers as productive as possible in terms of time to value insight on that analytics, data science, AI projects, like get you to value faster. And so the more technology we can put in the platform and the easier we can make it to use, the better we can achieve that goal. So this year we've, we've shipped a product that we call MDL 2.0, that's enterprise focused, exquisitely, easy to use batch data pipelines. So customers can load data even more simply into the snowflake data cloud, very excitingly we've also launched Matillion CDC. And so this is an industry first cloud native writer, head log based change data capture. >>I haven't come up with a shorter way of saying that, but, and surprise customers need this technology and it's been around for years, but mostly pre-cloud technology. That's been repurposed for the cloud. And so Matillion has rebuilt that concept for the cloud. And we launched that earlier this year. And of course we've continued to build out the core Matillion ETL platform that today over a thousand joint snowflake Matillion customers use, including Western union, of course we've been adding features there such as universal connectivity. And so a challenge that all data integration vendors have is having the right connectors for their source systems. Universal connectivity allows you to connect to any source system without writing code point and click. We shape that as well. So it's been a busy year, >>Was really simple. Sorry. I love that. He said that and it also sounded great with your accent. I didn't wanna >>Thank you. Excellent. Javier, talk about your role at Western union in, in what you've seen in terms of the evolution of the, the data stack. >>So in the last few years, well, a little bit of Western union, a 70 or 170 year old company, pretty much everybody knows what Western union is, right? Driving an interesting synergy from what Matthew says, when data moves money moves, that's what we do when he moves the da, he moves the data. We move the money. That's the synergy between, you know, us and the organization that support us from data move perspective. So what I've seen in the last few years is obviously a shift towards the cloud, but, you know, within the cloud itself, obviously there's a lot of players as well. And we as customers have always been wishing to have a short, smaller footprint of data so that the movement becomes a little lesser. You know, interestingly enough, in this conference, I've heard some very interesting stuff, which kind of helping me to bring that footprint down to a manageable number, to be more governed, to be more, you know, effective in terms of delivering more end results for my customers as well. >>So Matillion has been a great partner for us from our cloud adoption perspective. During the COVID times, we were a re we are a, you know, multi-channel organization. We have retail stores as well, our digital presence, but people just couldn't go to the retail stores. So we had to find ways to accelerate our adoption, make sure our systems are scaling and making sure that we are delivering the same experience to our customers. And that's where, you know, tools like Matillion came in and really, really partnered up with us to kind of bring it up to the level. >>So talk specifically about the stack evolution. Cause I have this sort of theory that everybody talks about injecting data and, and machine intelligence and AI and machine learning into apps. But the application development stack is like totally separate from the, the data analytics and the data pipeline stack. And the database is somewhere over here as well. How is that evolving? Are those worlds coming together? >>Some part of those words are coming together, but where I still see the difference is your heavy lifting will still happen on the data stack. You cannot have that heavy lifting on the app because if once the apps becomes heavy, you'll have trouble communicating with, with, with the organizations. You know, you need to be as lean as possible in the front end and make sure things are curated. Things are available on demand as soon as possible. And that's why you see all these API driven applications are doing really, really well because they're delivering those results back to the, the leaner applications much faster. So I'm a big proponent of, yes, it can be hybrid, but the majority of the heavy lifting still needs to happen down at the data layer, which is where I think snowflake plays a really good role >>In APIs are the connective tissue >>APIs connections. Yes. >>Also I think, you know, in terms of the, the data stack, there's another parallel that you can draw from applications, right? So technology is when they're new, we tend to do things in a granular way. We write a lot of code. We do a lot of sticking of things together with plasters and sticky tape. And it's the purview of high end engineers and people enthusiastic about that to get started. Then the business starts to see the value in this stuff, and we need to move a lot faster. And technology solutions come in and this is what the, the data cloud is all about, right? The technology getting out of the way and allowing people to focus on higher order problems of innovating around analytics, data applications, AI, machine learning, you know, that's also where Matillion sit as well as other companies in this modern enterprise data stack is technology vendors are coming in allowing organizations to move faster and have high levels of productivity. So I think that's a good parallel to application development. >>And's just follow up on that. When you think about data prep and you know, all the focus on data quality, you've got a data team, you know, in the data pipeline, a very specialized, maybe even hyper specialized data engineers, quality engineers, data, quality engineers, data analysts, data scientist, but they, and they serve a lot of different business lines. They don't necessarily have the business, they don't have the business context typically. So it's kind of this back and forth. Do you see that changing in your organization or, or the are the lines of business taking more responsibility for the data and, and addressing that problem? It's, >>It's like you die by thousand paper cuts or you just die. Right? That's the kind >>Of, right, >>Because if I say it's, it's good to be federated, it comes with its own flaws. But if I say, if it's good to be decentralized, then I'm the, the guy to choke, right? And in my role, I'm the guy to choke. So I've selectively tried to be a pseudo federated organization, where do I do have folks reporting into our organization, but they sit close to the line of business because the business understands data better. We are working with them hand in glove. We have dedicated teams that support them. And our problem is we are also regional. We are 200 countries. So the regional needs are very different than our us needs. Majority of the organizations that you probably end up talking to have like very us focused, 50 per more than 50% of our revenue is international. So we do, we are dealing with people who are international, their needs for data, their needs for quality and their needs for the, the delivery of those analytics and the data is completely different. And so we have to be a little bit more closer to the business than traditionally. Some, some organizations feel that they need >>To, is there need for the underlying infrastructure and the operational details that as diverse, or is that something that you bring standardization to the, >>So the best part about this, the cloud that happened to us is exactly that, because at one point of time, I had infrastructure in one country. I had another infrastructure sitting in another country, regional teams, making different different decisions of bringing in different tools. Now I can standardize. I will say, Matillion is our standard for doing ETL work. If this is the use case, but then it gets deployed across the geographies because the cloud helps us or the cloud platform helps us to manage it. Sitting down here. I have three centers around the world, you know, Costa Rica, India, and the us. I can manage 24 7 sitting here. No >>Problem. So the underlying our infrastructure is, is global, but the data needs are dealt with locally. Yep. >>One of the pav question, I was just thinking JVE is super well positioned funds for you, which is around that business domain knowledge versus technical expertise. Cause again, early in technology journeys tend, things tend to be very technical and therefore only high end engineers can do it, but high end engineers are scar. Right? Right. And, and also, I mean, we survey our hundreds of large enterprise customers and they tell us they spend two thirds of their time doing stuff they don't really want to do like reinventing the wheel, basic data movement and the low order staff. And so if you can make those people more productive and allow them to focus on higher value problems, but also bring pseudo technical people into it. Overall, the business can go a lot faster. And the way you do that is by making it easier. That's why Matillion is a low code NOCO platform, but Jer and Western union are doing this right. I >>Mean, I can't compete with AWS and Google to hire people. So I need to find people who are smart to figure the products that we have to make them work. I don't want them to spend time on infrastructure, Adam, I don't want them to spend time on trying to manage platforms. I want them to deliver the data, deliver the results to the business so that they can build and serve their customers better. So it's a little bit of a different approach, different mindset. I used to be in consulting for 17 years. I thought I knew it all, but it changed overnight when I own all of these systems. And I'm like, I need to be a little bit more smarter than this. I need to be more proactive and figure out what my business needs rather than what just from a technology needs. It's more what the business needs and how I can deliver that needs to them. So simple analogy, you know, I can build the best architecture in the world. It's gonna cost me an arm and leg, but I can't drive it because the pipeline is not there. So I can have a Ferrari, but I can't drive it. It's still capped at 80, 80 miles an hour. So rather than spend, rather than building one Ferrari, let me have 10 Toyotas or 10 Fs, which will go further along and do better for my cus my, for my customers. >>So how do you see this whole, we hearing about the data cloud. We hear about the marketplace, data products now, application development inside the data cloud. How do you see that affecting not so much the productivity of the data teams. I don't wanna necessarily say, but the product, the value that, that customers like you can get out >>Data. So data is moving closer to the business. That's the value I see, because you are injecting the business and you're injecting the application much more closer to the data because it, in the past, it was days and days of, you know, churn the data to actually clear results. Now the data has moved much closer. So I have a much faster turnaround time. The business can adapt and actually react much, much faster. It took us like 16 to 30 days to deliver, you know, data for marketing. Now I can turn it down in four hours. If I see something happening, I'll give you an example. The war in Ukraine happened. Let is shut down operations in Russia. Ukraine is cash swamp. There's no cash in Ukraine. We have cash. We roll out campaign, $0 money, transferred to Ukraine within four hours of the world going on. That's the impact that we have >>Massive impact. That's huge, especially with such a macro challenge going on, on the, in, in the world. Thank you so much for sharing the Matillion snowflake partnership story, how it's helping Western union really transform into a data company. We love hearing stories of organizations that are 170 years old that have always really been technology focused, but to see it come to life so quickly is pretty powerful. Guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks >>Guys. Thank you, having it. Thank >>You >>For Dave Velante and our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes live coverage of snowflake summit 22 live from Las Vegas. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break.