(upbeat music) >> We're back talking about the path to sustainable IT and now we're going to get the perspective from Mattia Ballerio who is with Elmec Informatica, an IT services firm in the beautiful Lombardi region, of Italy, north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >> All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elmec Informatica. What's your focus? Talk about your unique value add to customers. >> Yeah! So basically Elmec Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy. And is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay, so the, the main focus area of Elmec is, rich digital transformation, and innovation to our clients with the focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services, okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and innovation through technology and sustainability. >> Yeah, obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries, particularly acute right now in, in Europe, with the, you know, the energy challenges. You've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term, you know, speak to, and, and what can others learn from it? >> Yeah, at Elmec, our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values. And also in a customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care, relationship with the local supplier, and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators, to monitor and setting medium to long term goals. >> Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? 'Cause this was, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today, and, and is it a competitive advantage for you? >> Yeah, yeah. For, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for Elmec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And, regarding our business proposition, Elmec's attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach, as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from, back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to Elmec sustainability are increasingly frequent, and in depth. And which is why we monitor our performance, and invest in certification, such as, EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay? >> Got it! So in a previous life, I actually did some work with, with power companies, and there were two big factors in IT, that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage, and that was all we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disk and it was a big impact. So, you want to talk about, your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array, and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about your experience there? Why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >> Yeah! It was basically, an easy, an easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay, because you said before that, in Elmec, we manage a lot of data, okay. And in the past we, we, we see, we see that, the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And, when, when Pure came to us and share our, their products, their vision, to the data management journey for Elmec Informatica, it was very easy to choose Pure, why? With values and the numbers, we, we create a business case and, we said, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay? And so of course you have to manage a gradual deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology, and monitor, monitoring also the power consumption, and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems, and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that, we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing Pure technology storage. You mentioned the evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, a game challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, it allows us to improve the facility, of the facilities of using technology from our technical side, okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure Storage Technologies, okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say, it allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >> So, you talked about how you've seen, 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you on the spot. Because I, I, I was on Pure's website, and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor. I'm presuming that competitor was not, you know 2010 spinning disk system. But, but, so I'm curious, as to the results that you're seeing with Pure, in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and Ajay earlier in the program. Do you think, again I'm going to put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture, and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms, that you've seen? >> Yeah, of course. Is more competitor, more competitive. Because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay, so the customer is always at the center of a proposition of service provider. And the trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that Pure as inside, by design in the technology is, is for us very, very important and very, very strategic. Because, because, with like a glass, we can ourself transfer, try to transfer the values of Pure, Pure technologies to our service provider client. >> Okay Mattia, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term. It looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates, that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for Elmec, in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have for sustainability leaders that want to make a meaningful impact on the environment but also on the bottom line? >> Okay. So, sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet, and capable of expressing our inclination, and the particularities. Elmec sustainability goals in the near future, I can say that are will be basically free. One define sustainability plan, okay. It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the, its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint, okay. And list, button list, produce a certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report, with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay, so I can say that, this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay? >> Yeah, so I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You got to monitor and measure. You can't improve what you can't measure. So you going to set a baseline, you're going to report on that. You're going to analyze the data and you're going to make continuous improvement. >> Yep. >> Mattia, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >> Yep. Thank you for having me on board. Thank you very much. >> It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm going to be back to wrap up the program, and share some resources , that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(futuristic music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here for theCUBE back with you, three guests join me. Dan Molina is here, the co-president and chief technology officer at NTH Generation. And I'm joined once again by Terry Richardson, North American channel chief for AMD and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Dan. Let's have you kick things off. Talk to us about how NTH Generation is addressing the environmental challenges that your customers are having while meeting the technology demands of the future. That those same customers are no doubt having. >> It's quite an interesting question, Lisa, in our case we have been in business since 1991 and we started by providing highly available computing solutions. So this is great for me to be partnered here with HPE and the AMD because we want to provide quality computing solutions. And back in the day, since 1991 saving energy saving footprint or reducing footprint in the data center saving on cooling costs was very important. Over time those became even more critical components of our solutions design. As you know, as a society we started becoming more aware of the benefits and the must that we have a responsibility back to society to basically contribute with our social and environmental responsibility. So one of the things that we continue to do and we started back in 1991 is to make sure that we're deciding compute solutions based on clients' actual needs. We go out of our way to collect real performance data real IT resource consumption data. And then we architect solutions using best in the industry components like AMD and HPE to make sure that they were going to be meeting those goals and energy savings, like cooling savings, footprint reduction, knowing that instead of maybe requiring 30 servers, just to mention an example maybe we're going to go down to 14 and that's going to result in great energy savings. Our commitment to making sure that we're providing optimized solutions goes all the way to achieving the top level certifications from our great partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Also go deep into micro processing technologies like AMD but we want to make sure that the designs that we're putting together actually meet those goals. >> You talked about why sustainability is important to NTH from back in the day. I love how you said that. Dan, talk to us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers as we are seeing sustainability as a corporate initiative horizontally across industries and really rise up through the C-suite to the board. >> Right, it is quite interesting Lisa We do service pretty much horizontally just about any vertical, including public sector and the private sector from retail to healthcare, to biotech to manufacturing, of course, cities and counties. So we have a lot of experience with many different verticals. And across the board, we do see an increased interest in being socially responsible. And that includes not just being responsible on recycling as an example, most of our conversations or engagements that conversation happens, 'What what's going to happen with the old equipment ?' as we're replacing with more modern, more powerful, more efficient equipment. And we do a number of different things that go along with social responsibility and environment protection. And that's basically e-waste programs. As an example, we also have a program where we actually donate some of that older equipment to schools and that is quite quite something because we're helping an organization save energy, footprint. Basically the things that we've been talking about but at the same time, the older equipment even though it's not saving that much energy it still serves a purpose in society where maybe the unprivileged or not as able to afford computing equipment in certain schools and things of that nature. Now they can benefit and being productive to society. So it's not just about energy savings there's so many other factors around social corporate responsibility. >> So sounds like Dan, a very comprehensive end to end vision that NTH has around sustainability. Let's bring John and Terry into the conversation. John, we're going to start with you. Talk to us a little bit about how HPE and NTH are partnering together. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship from HPE's perspective that enable you both to meet not just your corporate sustainable IT objectives, but those of your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that HPE brings to bear is 20 years experience on sustainable IT, white papers, executive workbooks and a lot of expertise for how do we bring optimized solutions to market. If the customer doesn't want to manage those pieces himself we have our 'As a service solutions, HPE GreenLake. But our sales force won't get to every customer across the globe that wants to take advantage of this expertise. So we partner with companies like NTH to know the customer better, to develop the right solution for that customer and with NTH's relationships with the customers, they can constantly help the customer optimize those solutions and see where there perhaps areas of opportunity that may be outside of HPE's own portfolio, such as client devices where they can bring that expertise to bear, to help the customer have a better total customer experience. >> And that is critical, that better overall comprehensive total customer experience. As we know on the other end, all customers are demanding customers like us who want data in real time, we want access. We also want the corporate and the social responsibility of the companies that we work with. Terry, bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little about AMD. How are you helping customers to create what really is a sustainable IT strategy from what often starts out as sustainability tactics? >> Exactly. And to pick up on what John and and Dan were saying, we're really energized about the opportunity to allow customers to accelerate their ability to attain some of their more strategic sustainability goals. You know, since we started on our current data center, CPU and GPU offerings, each generation we continue to focus on increasing the performance capability with great sensitivity to the efficiency, right? So as customers are modernizing their data center and achieving their own digital transformation initiatives we are able to deliver solutions through HPE that really address a greater performance per watt which is a a core element in allowing customers to achieve the goals that John and Dan talked about. So, you know, as a company, we're fully on board with some very public positions around our own sustainability goals, but working with terrific partners like NTH and HPE allows us to together bring those enabling technologies directly to customers >> Enabling and accelerating technologies. Dan, let's go back to you. You mentioned some of the things that NTH is doing from a sustainability approach, the social and the community concern, energy use savings, recycling but this goes all the way from NTH's perspective to things like outreach and fairness in the workplace. Talk to us a little bit about some of those other initiatives that NTH has fired up. >> Absolutely, well at NTH , since the early days, we have invested heavily on modern equipment and we have placed that at NTH labs, just like HPE labs we have NTH labs, and that's what we do a great deal of testing to make sure that our clients, right our joint clients are going to have high quality solutions that we're not just talking about it and we actually test them. So that is definitely an investment by being conscious about energy conservation. We have programs and scripts to shut down equipment that is not needed at the time, right. So we're definitely conscious about it. So I wanted to mention that example. Another one is, we all went through a pandemic and this is still ongoing from some perspectives. And that forced pretty much all of our employees, at least for some time to work from home. Being an IT company, we're very proud that we made that transition almost seamlessly. And we're very proud that you know people who continue to work from home, they're saving of course, gasoline, time, traffic, all those benefits that go with reducing transportation, and don't get me wrong, I mean, sometimes it is important to still have face to face meetings, especially with new organizations that you want to establish trust. But for the most part we have become a hybrid workforce type of organization. At the same time, we're also implementing our own hybrid IT approach which is what we talk to our clients about. So there's certain workloads, there are certain applications that truly belong in in public cloud or Software as a Service. And there's other workloads that truly belong, to stay in your data center. So a combination and doing it correctly can result in significant savings, not just money, but also again energy, consumption. Other things that we're doing, I mentioned trading programs, again, very proud that you know, we use a e-waste programs to make sure that those IT equipment is properly disposed of and it's not going to end in a landfill somewhere but also again, donating to schools, right? And very proud about that one. We have other outreach programs. Normally at the end of the year we do some substantial donations and we encourage our employees, my coworkers to donate. And we match those donations to organizations like Operation USA, they provide health and education programs to recover from disasters. Another one is Salvation Army, where basically they fund rehabilitation programs that heal addictions change lives and restore families. We also donate to the San Diego Zoo. We also believe in the whole ecosystem, of course and we're very proud to be part of that. They are supporting more than 140 conservation projects and partnerships in 70 countries. And we're part of that donation. And our owner has been part of the board or he was for a number of years. Mercy House down in San Diego, we have our headquarters. They have programs for the homeless. And basically that they're servicing. Also Save a Life Foundation for the youth to be educated to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest for the youth. So programs like that. We're very proud to be part of the donations. Again, it's not just about energy savings but it's so many other things as part of our corporate social responsibility program. Other things that I wanted to mention. Everything in our buildings, in our offices, multiple locations. Now we turn into LED. So again, we're eating our own dog food as they say but that is definitely some significant energy savings. And then lastly, I wanted to mention, this is more what we do for our customers, but the whole HPE GreenLake program we have a growing number of clients especially in Southern California. And some of those are quite large like school districts, like counties. And we feel very proud that in the old days customers would buy IT equipment for the next three to five years. Right? And they would buy extra because obviously they're expecting some growth while that equipment must consume energy from day one. With a GreenLake type of program, the solution is sized properly. Maybe a little bit of a buffer for unexpected growth needs. And anyway, but with a GreenLake program as customers need more IT resources to continue to expand their workloads for their organizations. Then we go in with 'just in time' type of resources. Saving energy and footprint and everything else that we've been talking about along the way. So very proud to be one of the go-tos for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the GreenLake program which is now a platform, so. >> That's great. Dan, it sounds like NTH generation has such a comprehensive focus and strategy on sustainability where you're pulling multiple levers it's almost like sustainability to the NTH degree ? See what I did there ? >> (laughing) >> I'd like to talk with all three of you now. And John, I want to start with you about employees. Dan, you talked about the hybrid work environment and some of the silver linings from the pandemic but I'd love to know, John, Terry and then Dan, in that order how educated and engaged are your employees where sustainability is concerned? Talk to me about that from their engagement perspective and also from the ability to retain them and make them proud as Dan was saying to work for these companies, John ? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we see in technology, and we hear it from our customers every day when we're meeting with them is we all have a challenge attracting and retaining new employees. And one of the ways that you can succeed in that challenge is by connecting the work that the employee does to both the purpose of your company and broader than that global purpose. So environmental and social types of activities. So for us, we actually do a tremendous amount of education for our employees. At the moment, all of our vice presidents and above are taking climate training as part of our own climate aspirations to really drive those goals into action. But we're opening that training to any employee in the company. We have a variety of employee resource groups that are focused on sustainability and carbon reduction. And in many cases, they're very loud advocates for why aren't we pushing a roadmap further? Why aren't we doing things in a particular industry segment where they think we're not moving quite as quickly as we should be. But part of the recognition around all of that as well is customers often ask us when we suggest a sustainability or sustainable IT solution to them. Their first question back is, are you doing this yourselves? So for all of those reasons, we invest a lot of time and effort in educating our employees, listening to our employees on that topic and really using them to help drive our programs forward. >> That sounds like it's critical, John for customers to understand, are you doing this as well? Are you using your own technology ? Terry, talk to us about from the AMD side the education of your employees, the engagement of them where sustainability is concerned. >> Yeah. So similar to what John said, I would characterize AMD is a very socially responsible company. We kind of share that alignment in point of view along with NTH. Corporate responsibility is something that you know, most companies have started to see become a lot more prominent, a lot more talked about internally. We've been very public with four key sustainability goals that we've set as an organization. And we regularly provide updates on where we are along the way. Some of those goals extend out to 2025 and in one case 2030 so not too far away, but we're providing milestone updates against some pretty aggressive and important goals. I think, you know, as a technology company, regardless of the role that you're in there's a way that you can connect to what the company's doing that I think is kind of a feel good. I spend more of my time with the customer facing or partner facing resources and being able to deliver a tool to partners like NTH and strategic partners like HPE that really helps quantify the benefit, you know in a bare metal, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and a TCO tool to really quantify what an implementation of a new and modern solution will mean to a customer. And for the first time they have choice. So I think employees, they can really feel good about being able to to do something that is for a greater good than just the traditional corporate goals. And of course the engineers that are designing the next generation of products that have these as core competencies clearly can connect to the impact that we're able to make on the broader global ecosystem. >> And that is so important. Terry, you know, employee productivity and satisfaction directly translates to customer satisfaction, customer retention. So, I always think of them as inextricably linked. So great to hear what you're all doing in terms of the employee engagement. Dan, talk to me about some of the outcomes that NTH is enabling customers to achieve, from an outcomes perspective those business outcomes, maybe even at a high level or a generic level, love to dig into some of those. >> Of course. Yes. So again, our mission is really to deliver awesome in everything we do. And we're very proud about that mission, very crispy clear, short and sweet and that includes, we don't cut corners. We go through the extent of, again, learning the technology getting those certifications, testing those in the lab so that when we're working with our end user organizations they know they're going to have a quality solution. And part of our vision has been to provide industry leading transformational technologies and solutions for example, HPE and AMD for organizations to go through their own digital transformation. Those two words have been used extensively over the last decade, but this is a multi decade type of trend, super trend or mega trend. And we're very proud that by offering and architecting and implementing, and in many cases supporting, with our partners, those, you know, best in class IT cyber security solutions were helping those organizations with those business outcomes, their own digital transformation. If you extend that Lisa , a Little bit further, by helping our clients, both public and private sector become more efficient, more scalable we're also helping, you know organizations become more productive, if you scale that out to the entire society in the US that also helps with the GDP. So it's all interrelated and we're very proud through our, again, optimized solutions. We're not just going to sell a box we're going to understand what the organization truly needs and adapt and architect our solutions accordingly. And we have, again, access to amazing technology, micro processes. Is just amazing what they can do today even compared to five years ago. And that enables new initiatives like artificial intelligence through machine learning and things of that nature. You need GPU technology , that specialized microprocessors and companies like AMD, like I said that are enabling organizations to go down that path faster, right? While saving energy, footprint and everything that we've been talking about. So those are some of the outcomes that I see >> Hey, Dan, listening to you talk, I can't help but think this is not a stretch for NTH right? Although, you know, terms like sustainability and reducing carbon footprint might be, you know more in vogue, the type of solutions that you've been architecting for customers your approach, dates back decades, and you don't have to change a lot. You just have new kind of toys to play with and new compelling offerings from great vendors like HPE to position to your customers. But it's not a big change in what you need to do. >> We're blessed from that perspective that's how our founders started the company. And we only, I think we go through a very extensive interview process to make sure that there will be a fit both ways. We want our new team members to get to know the the rest of the team before they actually make the decision. We are very proud as well, Terry, Lisa and John, that our tenure here at NTH is probably well over a decade. People get here and they really value how we help organizations through our dedicated work, providing again, leading edge technology solutions and the results that they see in our own organizations where we have made many friends in the industry because they had a problem, right? Or they had a very challenging initiative for their organization and we work together and the outcome there is something that they're very, very proud of. So you're right, Terry, we've been doing this for a long time. We're also very happy again with programs like the HPE GreenLake. We were already doing optimized solutions but with something like GreenLake is helping us save more energy consumption from the very beginning by allowing organizations to pay for only what they need with a little bit of buffer that we talked about. So what we've been doing since 1991 combined with a program like GreenLake I think is going to help us even better with our social corporate responsibility. >> I think what you guys have all articulated beautifully in the last 20 minutes is how strategic and interwoven the partnerships between HP, AMD and NTH is what your enabling customers to achieve those outcomes. What you're also doing internally to do things like reduce waste, reduce carbon emissions, and ensure that your employees are proud of who they're working for. Those are all fantastic guys. I wish we had more time cause I know we are just scratching the surface here. We appreciate everything that you shared with respect to sustainable IT and what you're enabling the end user customer to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, Dave Vellante will return to give you some closing thoughts on sustainable IT You're watching theCUBE. the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain in Coon cloud native con 2022 Europe. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my cohot on Rico senior, Etti senior it analyst at gig home. We are talking to amazing people, creators people contributing to all these open source projects. Speaking of open source on Rico. Talk to me about the flavor of this show versus a traditional like vendor show of all these open source projects and open source based companies. >>Well, first of all, I think that the real difference is that this is a real conference. Hmm. So real people talking about, you know, projects about, so the, the open source stuff, the experiences are, you know, on stage and there are not really too many product pitches. It's, it's about, it's about the people. It's about the projects. It's about the, the challenges they had, how they, you know, overcome some of them. And, uh, that's the main difference. I mean, it's very educative informative and the kind of people is different. I mean, developers, you know, SREs, you know, you find ends on people. I mean, people that really do stuff that that's a real difference. I mean, uh, quite challenginghow discussing with them, but really, I mean, because they're really opinionated, but >>So we're gonna get talked to, to a company that has boosts on the ground doing open source since the, almost the start mm-hmm <affirmative> Kirsten newcomer, director of hybrid platform security at red hat and, uh, Connor Gorman, senior principal software engineer at red hat. So Kirsten, we're gonna start with you security and Kubernetes, you know, is Kubernetes. It's a, it's a race car. If I wanted security, I'd drive a minivan. <laugh> >>That's, that's a great frame. I think, I think though, if we stick with your, your car analogy, right, we have seen cars in cars and safety in cars evolve over the years to the point where you have airbags, even in, you know, souped up cars that somebody's driving on the street, a race car, race cars have safety built into, right. They do their best to protect those drivers. So I think while Kubernetes, you know, started as something that was largely, you know, used by Google in their environment, you know, had some perimeter based security as Kubernetes has become adopted throughout enterprises, as people. And especially, you know, we've seen the adoption accelerate during the pandemic, the move to both public cloud, but also private cloud is really accelerated. Security becomes even more important. You can't use Kubernetes in banking without security. You can't use it, uh, in automotive without security telco. >>And Kubernetes is, you know, Telco's adoption, Telco's deploying 5g on Kubernetes on open shift. Um, and, and this is just so the security capabilities have evolved over time to meet the customers and the adopters really red hat because of our enterprise customer base, we've been investing in security capabilities and we make those contributions upstream. We've been doing that really from the beginning of our adoption of Kubernetes, Kubernetes 1.0, and we continue to expand the security capabilities that we provide. And which is one of the reasons, you know, the acquisition of stack rocks was, was so important to us. >>And, and actually we are talking about security at different levels. I mean, so yeah, and different locations. So you are securing an edge location differently than a data center or, or, or maybe, you know, the cloud. So there are application level security. So there are so many angles to take this. >>Yeah. And, and you're right. I mean, I, there are the layers of the stack, which starts, you know, can start at the hardware level, right. And then the operating system, the Kubernetes orchestration all the services, you need to have a complete Kubernetes solution and application platform and then the services themselves. And you're absolutely right. That an edge deployment is different than a deployment, uh, on, you know, uh, AWS or in a private da data center. Um, and, and yet, because there is this, if you, if you're leveraging the heart of Kubernetes, the declarative nature of Kubernetes, you can do Kubernetes security in a way that can be consistent across these environments with the need to do some additions at the edge, right? You may, physical security is more important at the edge hardware based encryption, for example, whereas in a, in a cloud provider, your encryption might be at the cloud provider storage layer rather than hardware. >>So how do you orchestrate, because we are talking about orchestration all day and how do you orchestrate all these security? >>Yep. So one of the things, one of the evolutions that we've seen in our customer base in the last few years is we used to have, um, a small number of large clusters that our customers deployed and they used in a multi-tenant fashion, right? Multiple teams from within the organization. We're now starting to see a larger number of smaller clusters. And those clusters are in different locations. They might be, uh, customers are both deploying in public cloud, as well as private, you know, on premises, um, edge deployments, as you mentioned. And so we've invested in, uh, multi cluster management and, or, you know, sort of that orchestration for orchestrators, right? The, and because again of the declarative nature of Kubernetes, so we offer, uh, advanced cluster management, red hat, advanced cluster management, which we open sourced as the multi cluster engine CE. Um, so that component is now also freely available, open source. We do that with everything. So if you need a way to ensure that you have managed the configuration appropriately across all of these clusters in a declarative fashion, right. It's still YAML, it's written in YAML use ACM use CE in combination with a get ops approach, right. To manage that, uh, to ensure that you've got that environment consistent. And, and then, but then you have to monitor, right. You have to, I'm wearing >>All of these stack rocks >>Fits in. I mean, yeah, sure. >>Yeah. And so, um, you know, we took a Kubernetes native approach to securing all of this. Right. And there's kind of, uh, we have to say, there's like three major life cycles. You have the build life cycle, right. You're building these imutable images to go deployed to production. Right. That should never change that are, you know, locked at a point in time. And so you can do vulnerability scanning, you can do compliance checks at that point right. In the build phase. But then you put those in a registry, then those go and be deployed on top of Kubernetes. And you have the configuration of your application, you know, including any vulnerabilities that may exist in those images, you have the R back permissions, right. How much access does it have to the cluster? Is it exposed on the internet? Right. What can you do there? >>And then finally you have, the runtime perspective of is my pod is my container actually doing what I think it's supposed to do. Is it accessing all the right things? Is it running all the right processes? And then even taking that runtime information and influencing the configuration through things like network policies, where we have a feature called process baselining that you can say exactly what processes are supposed to run in this pod. Um, and then influencing configuration in that way to kind of be like, yeah, this is what it's doing. And let's go stamp this, you know, declaratively so that when you deploy it the next time you already have security built in at the Kubernetes level. >>So as we've talked about a couple of different topics, the abstraction layers, I have security around DevOps. So, you know, I have multi tendency, I have to deal with, think about how am I going to secure the, the, the Kubernetes infrastructure itself. Then I have what seems like you've been talking about here, Connor, which is dev SecOps mm-hmm <affirmative> and the practice of securing the application through policy. Right. Are customers really getting what's under the hood of dev SecOps? >>Do you wanna start or yeah. >>I mean, I think yes and no. I think, um, you know, we've, some organizations are definitely getting it right. And they have teams that are helping build things like network policies, which provide network segmentation. I think this is huge for compliance and multi-tenancy right. Just like containers, you know, one of the main benefits of containers, it provides this isolation between your applications, right? And then everyone's familiar with the network firewall, which is providing network segmentation, but now in between your applications inside Kubernetes, you can create, uh, network segmentation. Right. And so we have some folks that are super, super far along that path and, and creating those. And we have some folks who have no network policies except the ones that get installed with our products. Right. And then we say, okay, how can we help you guys start leveraging these things and, and creating maybe just basic name, space isolation, or things like that. And then trying to push that back into more the declarative approach. >>So some of what I think we hear from, from what Connor just te teed up is that real DevSecOps requires breaking down silos between developers, operations and security, including network security teams. And so the Kubernetes paradigm requires, uh, involvement actually, in some ways, it, it forces involvement of developers in things like network policy for the SDN layer, right? You need to, you know, the application developer knows which, what kinds of communication he or she, his app or her app needs to function. So they need to define, they need to figure out those network policies. Now, some network security teams, they're not familiar with YAML, they're not necessary familiar with software development, software defined networking. So there's this whole kind of, how do we do the network security in collaboration with the engineering team? And when people, one of the things I worry about, so DevSecOps it's technology, but it's people in process too. >>Right. And one of the things I think people are very comfortable adopting vulnerability scanning early on, but they haven't yet started to think about the network security angle. This is one area that not only do we have the ability in ACS stack rocks today to recommend a network policy based on a running deployment, and then make it easy to deploy that. But we're also working to shift that left so that you can actually analyze app deployment data prior to it being deployed, generate a network policy, tested out in staging and, and kind of go from the beginning. But again, people do vulnerability analysis shift left, but they kind of tend to stop there and you need to add app config analysis, network communication analysis, and then we need appropriate security gates at deployment time. We need the right automation that helps inform the developers. Not all developers have security expertise, not all security people understand a C I C D pipeline. Right. So, so how, you know, we need the right set of information to the right people in the place they're used to working in order to really do that infinity loop. >>Do you see this as a natural progression for developers? Do they really hit a wall before, you know, uh, finding out that they need to progress in, in this, uh, methodology? Or I know >>What else? Yeah. So I think, I think initially there's like a period of transition, right? Where there's sometimes there's opinion, oh, I, I ship my application. That's what I get paid for. That's what I do. Right. <laugh> um, and, and, but since, uh, Kubernetes has basically increased the velocity of developers on top, you know, of the platform in order to just deploy their own code. And, you know, we have every, some people have commits going to production, you know, every commitment on the repo goes to production. Right. Um, and so security is even more at the forefront there. So I think initially you hit a little bit of a wall security scans in CI. You could get some failures and some pushback, but as long as these are very informative and actionable, right. Then developers always wanna do the right thing. Right. I mean, we all want to ship secure code. >>Um, and so if you can inform you, Hey, this is why we do this. Or, or here's the information about this? I think it's really important because I'm like, right, okay. Now when I'm sending my next commits, I'm like, okay, these are some constraints that I'm thinking about, and it's sort of like a mindset shift, but I think through the tooling that we like know and love, and we use on top of Kubernetes, that's the best way to kind of convey that information of, you know, honestly significantly smaller security teams than the number of developers that are really pushing all of this code. >>So let's scale out what, talk to me about the larger landscape projects like prime cube, Litner, OPPI different areas of investment in, in, in security. Talk to me about where customers are making investments. >>You wanna start with coup linter. >>Sure. So coup linter was a open source project, uh, when we were still, uh, a private company and it was really around taking some of our functionality on our product and just making it available to everyone, to basically check configuration, um, both bridging DevOps and SecOps, right? There's some things around, uh, privileged containers, right? You usually don't wanna deploy those into your environment unless you really need to, but there's other things around, okay, do I have anti affinity rules, right. Am I running, you know, you can run 10 replicas of a pod on the same node, and now your failure domain is a single node. Now you want them on different nodes, right. And so you can do a bunch of checks just around the configuration DevOps best practices. And so we've actually seen quite a bit of adoption. I think we have like almost 2000 stars on, uh, and super happy to see people just really adopt that and integrate it into their pipelines. It's a single binary. So it's been super easy for people to take it into their C I C D and just, and start running three things through it and get, uh, you know, valuable insights into, to what configurations they should change. Right. >>And then if you're, if you were asking about things like, uh, OPPA, open policy agent and OPPA gatekeeper, so one of the things happening in the community about OPPA has been around for a while. Uh, they added, you know, the OPPA gatekeeper as an admission controller for Cobe. There's also veno another open source project that is doing, uh, admission as the Kubernetes community has, uh, kind of is decided to deprecate pod security policies, um, which had a level of complexity, but is one of the key security capabilities and gates built into Kubernetes itself. Um, OpenShift is gonna continue to have security context constraints, very similar, but it prevents by default on an OpenShift cluster. Uh, not a regular user cannot deploy a privileged pod or a pod that has access to the host network. Um, and there's se Linux configuration on by default also protects against container escapes to the file system or mitigates them. >>So pod security policies were one way to ensure that kind of constraint on what the developer did. Developers might not have had awareness of what was important in terms of the level of security. And so again, the cube and tools like that can help to inform the developer in the tools they use, and then a solution like OPPA, gatekeeper, or SCCs. That's something that runs on the cluster. So if something got through the pipeline or somebody's not using one of these tools, those gates can be leveraged to ensure that the security posture of the deployment is what the organization wants and OPPA gatekeeper. You can do very complex policies with that. And >>Lastly, talk to me about Falco and Claire, about what Falco >>Falco and yep, absolutely. So, um, Falco, great runtime analysis have been and something that stack rocks leveraged early on. So >>Yeah, so yeah, we leveraged, um, some libraries from Falco. Uh, we use either an EB P F pro or a kernel module to detect runtime events. Right. And we, we primarily focus on network and process activity as, um, as angles there. And then for Claire, um, it's, it's now within red hat again, <laugh>, uh, through the acquisition of cores, but, uh, we've forked in added a bunch of things around language vulnerabilities and, and different aspects that we wanted. And, uh, and you know, we're really interested in, I think, you know, the code bases have diversion a little bit Claire's on V4. We, we were based off V2, but I think we've both added a ton of really great features. And so I'm really looking forward to actually combining all of those features and kind of building, um, you know, we have two best of best of breed scanners right now. And I'm like, okay, what can we do when we put them together? And so that's something that, uh, I'm really excited about. >>So you, you somehow are aiming at, you know, your roadmap here now putting everything together. And again, orchestrated well integrated yeah. To, to get, you know, also a simplified experience, because that could be the >>Point. Yeah. And, and as you mentioned, you know, it's sort of that, that orchestration of orchestrators, like leveraging the Kubernetes operator principle to, to deliver an app, an opinionated Kubernetes platform has, has been one of the key things we've done. And we're doing that as well for security out of the box security policies, principles based on best practices with stack rocks that can be leveraged in the community or with red hat, advanced cluster security, combining our two scanners into one clear based scanner, contributing back, contributing back to Falco all of these things. >>Well, that speaks to the complexity of open source projects. There's a lot of overlap in reconciling. That is a very difficult thing. Kirsten Connor, thank you for joining the cube Connor. You're now a cube alone. Welcome to main elite group. Great. From Valencia Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with en Rico senior, and you're watching the cue, the leader in high tech coverage.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall, it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers, and others have joined in hype machine. Now, it's easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, or staring at a screen, or two-dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play, and communicate? As the internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it's very possible, and even quite likely that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR, VR, brain interfaces, and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences, and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in cyber expert, hacker gamer, NFT expert, and founder of ORE System, Nick Donarski. Nick, welcome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, sir, glad to be here. >> Yeah, okay, so today we're going to traverse two parallel paths, one that took Nick from security expert and PenTester to NFTs, tokens, and the metaverse. And we'll simultaneously explore the complicated world of cybersecurity in the enterprise, and how the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs will provide key underpinnings for digital ownership in the metaverse. We're going to talk a little bit about blockchain, and crypto, and get things started there, and some of the realities and misconceptions, and how innovations in those worlds have led to the NFT craze. We'll look at what's really going on in NFTs and why they're important as both a technology and societal trend. Then, we're going to dig into the tech and try to explain why and how blockchain and NFTs are going to lay the foundation for the metaverse. And, finally, who's going to build the metaverse. And how long is it going to take? All right, Nick, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your career. You started as a hacker at a really, really young age, and then got deep into cyber as a PenTester. You did some pretty crazy stuff. You have some great stories about sneaking into buildings. You weren't just doing it all remote. Tell us about yourself. >> Yeah, so I mean, really, I started a long time ago. My dad was really the foray into technology. I wrote my first program on an Apple IIe in BASIC in 1989. So, I like to say I was born on the internet, if you will. But, yeah, in high school at 16, I incorporated my first company, did just tech support for parents and teachers. And then in 2000 I transitioned really into security and focused there ever since. I joined Rapid7 and after they picked up Medis boy, I joined HP. I was one of their founding members of Shadowlabs and really have been part of the information security and the cyber community all throughout, whether it's training at various different conferences or talking. My biggest thing and my most awesome moments as various things of being broken into, is really when I get to actually work with somebody that's coming up in the industry and who's new and actually has that light bulb moment of really kind of understanding of technology, understanding an idea, or getting it when it comes to that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, and when you think about what's going on in crypto and NFTs and okay, now the metaverse it's you get to see some of the most innovative people. Now I want to first share a little bit of data on enterprise security and maybe Nick get you to comment. We've reported over the past several years on the complexity in the security business and the numerous vendor choices that SecOps Pros face. And this chart really tells that story in the cybersecurity space. It's an X,Y graph. We've shown it many times from the ETR surveys where the vertical axis, it's a measure of spending momentum called net score. And the horizontal axis is market share, which represents each company's presence in the data set, and a couple of points stand out. First, it's really crowded. In that red dotted line that you see there, that's 40%, above that line on the net score axis, marks highly elevated spending momentum. Now, let's just zoom in a bit and I've cut the data by those companies that have more than a hundred responses in the survey. And you can see here on this next chart, it's still very crowded, but a few call-outs are noteworthy. First companies like SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope and Darktrace. They were all above that 40% line in the previous chart, but they've fallen off. They still have actually a decent presence in the survey over 60 responses, but under that hundred. And you can see Auth0 now Okta, big $7 billion acquisition. They got the highest net score CrowdStrike's up there, Okta classic they're kind of enterprise business, and Zscaler and others above that line. You see Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft very impressive because they're both big and they're above that elevated spending velocity. So Nick, kind of a long-winded intro, but it was a little bit off topic, but I wanted to start here because this is the life of a SecOps pro. They lack the talent in a capacity to keep bad guys fully at bay. And so they have to keep throwing tooling at the problem, which adds to the complexity and as a PenTester and hacker, this chaos and complexity means cash for the bad guys. Doesn't it? >> Absolutely. You know, the more systems that these organizations find to integrate into the systems, means that there's more components, more dollars and cents as far as the amount of time and the engineers that need to actually be responsible for these tools. There's a lot of reasons that, the more, I guess, hands in the cookie jar, if you will, when it comes to the security architecture, the more links that are, or avenues for attack built into the system. And really one of the biggest things that organizations face is being able to have engineers that are qualified and technical enough to be able to support that architecture as well, 'cause buying it from a vendor and deploying it, putting it onto a shelf is good, but if it's not tuned properly, or if it's not connected properly, that security tool can just hold up more avenues of attack for you. >> Right, okay, thank you. Now, let's get into the meat of the discussion for today and talk a little bit about blockchain and crypto for a bit. I saw sub stack post the other day, and it was ripping Matt Damon for pedaling crypto on TV ads and how crypto is just this big pyramid scheme. And it's all about allowing criminals to be anonymous and it's ransomware and drug trafficking. And yes, there are definitely scams and you got to be careful and lots of dangers out there, but these are common criticisms in the mainstream press, that overlooked the fact by the way that IPO's and specs are just as much of a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulation, there should, but Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency, and you think about, it's really the confluence of software engineering, cryptography and game theory. And there's some really powerful innovation being created by the blockchain community. Crypto and blockchain are really at the heart of a new decentralized platform being built out. And where today, you got a few, large internet companies. They control the protocols and the platform. Now the aspiration of people like yourself, is to create new value opportunities. And there are many more chances for the little guys and girls to get in on the ground floor and blockchain technology underpins all this. So Nick, what's your take, what are some of the biggest misconceptions around blockchain and crypto? And do you even pair those two in the same context? What are your thoughts? >> So, I mean, really, we like to separate ourselves and say that we are a blockchain company, as opposed to necessarily saying(indistinct) anything like that. We leverage those tools. We leverage cryptocurrencies, we leverage NFTs and those types of things within there, but blockchain is a technology, which is the underlying piece, is something that can be used and utilized in a very large number of different organizations out there. So, cryptocurrency and a lot of that negative context comes with a fear of something new, without having that regulation in place, without having the rules in place. And we were a big proponent of, we want the regulation, right? We want to do right. We want to do it by the rules. We want to do it under the context of, this is what should be done. And we also want to help write those rules as well, because a lot of the lawmakers, a lot of the lobbyists and things, they have a certain aspect or a certain goal of when they're trying to get these things. Our goal is simplicity. We want the ability for the normal average person to be able to interact with crypto, interact with NFTs, interact with the blockchain. And basically by saying, blockchain in quotes, it's very ambiguous 'cause there's many different things that blockchain can be, the easiest way, right? The easiest way to understand blockchain is simply a distributed database. That's really the core of what blockchain is. It's a record keeping mechanism that allows you to reference that. And the beauty of it, is that it's quote unquote immutable. You can't edit that data. So, especially when we're talking about blockchain, being underlying for technologies in the future, things like security, where you have logging, you have keeping, whether you're talking about sales, where you may have to have multiple different locations (indistinct) users from different locations around the globe. It creates a central repository that provides distribution and security in the way that you're ensuring your data, ensuring the validation of where that data exists when it was created. Those types of things that blockchain really is. If you go to the historical, right, the very early on Bitcoin absolutely was made to have a way of not having to deal with the fed. That was the core functionality of the initial crypto. And then you had a lot of the illicit trades, those black markets that jumped onto it because of what it could do. The maturity of the technology though, of where we are now versus say back in 97 is a much different world of blockchain, and there's a much different world of cryptocurrency. You still have to be careful because with any fed, you're still going to have that FUD that goes out there and sells that fear, uncertainty and doubt, which spurs a lot of those types of scams, and a lot of those things that target end users that we face as security professionals today. You still get mailers that go out, looking for people to give their social security number over during tax time. Snail mail is considered a very ancient technology, but it still works. You still get a portion of the population that falls for those tricks, fishing, whatever it might be. It's all about trying to make sure that you have fear about what is that change. And I think that as we move forward, and move into the future, the simpler and the more comfortable these types of technologies become, the easier it is to utilize and indoctrinate normal users, to be able to use these things. >> You know, I want to ask you about that, Nick, because you mentioned immutability, there's a lot of misconceptions about that. I had somebody tell me one time, "Blockchain's Bs," and they say, "Well, oh, hold on a second. They say, oh, they say it's a mutable, but you can hack Coinbase, whatever it is." So I guess a couple of things, one is that the killer app for blockchain became money. And so we learned a lot through that. And you had Bitcoin and it really wasn't programmable through its interface. And then Ethereum comes out. I know, you know a lot about Ether and you have solidity, which is a lot simpler, but it ain't JavaScript, which is ubiquitous. And so now you have a lot of potential for the initial ICO's and probably still the ones today, the white papers, a lot of security flaws in there. I'm sure you can talk to that, but maybe you can help square that circle about immutability and security. I've mentioned game theory before, it's harder to hack Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain than it is to mine. So that's why people mine, but maybe you could add some context to that. >> Yeah, you know it goes to just about any technology out there. Now, when you're talking about blockchain specifically, the majority of the attacks happen with the applications and the smart contracts that are actually running on the blockchain, as opposed to necessarily the blockchain itself. And like you said, the impact for whether that's loss of revenue or loss of tokens or whatever it is, in most cases that results from something that was a phishing attack, you gave up your credentials, somebody said, paste your private key in here, and you win a cookie or whatever it might be, but those are still the fundamental pieces. When you're talking about various different networks out there, depending on the blockchain, depends on how much the overall security really is. The more distributed it is, and the more stable it is as the network goes, the better or the more stable any of the code is going to be. The underlying architecture of any system is the key to success when it comes to the overall security. So the blockchain itself is immutable, in the case that the owner are ones have to be trusted. If you look at distributed networks, something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, where you have those proof of work systems, that disperses that information at a much more remote location, So the more disperse that information is, the less likely it is to be able to be impacted by one small instance. If you look at like the DAO Hack, or if you look at a lot of the other vulnerabilities that exist on the blockchain, it's more about the code. And like you said, solidity being as new as it is, it's not JavaScript. The industry is very early and very infantile, as far as the developers that are skilled in doing this. And with that just comes the inexperience and the lack of information that you don't learn until JavaScript is 10 or 12 years old. >> And the last thing I'll say about this topic, and we'll move on to NFTs, but NFTs relate is that, again, I said earlier that the big internet giants have pretty much co-opted the platform. You know, if you wanted to invest in Linux in the early days, there was no way to do that. You maybe have to wait until red hat came up with its IPO and there's your pyramid scheme folks. But with crypto it, which is again, as Nick was explaining underpinning is the blockchain, you can actually participate in early projects. Now you got to be careful 'cause there are a lot of scams and many of them are going to blow out if not most of them, but there are some, gems out there, because as Nick was describing, you've got this decentralized platform that causes scaling issues or performance issues, and people are solving those problems, essentially building out a new internet. But I want to get into NFTs, because it's sort of the next big thing here before we get into the metaverse, what Nick, why should people pay attention to NFTs? Why do they matter? Are they really an important trend? And what are the societal and technological impacts that you see in this space? >> Yeah, I mean, NFTs are a very new technology and ultimately it's just another entry on the blockchain. It's just another piece of data in the database. But how it's leveraged in the grand scheme of how we, as users see it, it can be the classic idea of an NFT is just the art, or as good as the poster on your wall. But in the case of some of the new applications, is where are you actually get that utility function. Now, in the case of say video games, video games and gamers in general, already utilize digital items. They already utilize digital points. As in the case of like Call of Duty points, those are just different versions of digital currencies. You know, World of Warcraft Gold, I like to affectionately say, was the very first cryptocurrency. There was a Harvard course taught on the economy of WOW, there was a black market where you could trade your end game gold for Fiat currencies. And there's even places around the world that you can purchase real world items and stay at hotels for World of Warcraft Gold. So the adoption of blockchain just simply gives a more stable and a more diverse technology for those same types of systems. You're going to see that carry over into shipping and logistics, where you need to have data that is single repository for being able to have multiple locations, multiple shippers from multiple global efforts out there that need to have access to that data. But in the current context, it's either sitting on a shipping log, it's sitting on somebody's desk. All of those types of paper transactions can be leveraged as NFTs on the blockchain. It's just simply that representation. And once you break the idea of this is just a piece of art, or this is a cryptocurrency, you get into a world where you can apply that NFT technology to a lot more things than I think most people think of today. >> Yeah, and of course you mentioned art a couple of times when people sold as digital art for whatever, it was 60, 65 million, 69 million, that caught a lot of people's attention, but you're seeing, I mean, there's virtually infinite number of applications for this. One of the Washington wizards, tokenized portions of his contract, maybe he was creating a new bond, that's really interesting use cases and opportunities, and that kind of segues into the latest, hot topic, which is the metaverse. And you've said yourself that blockchain and NFTs are the foundation of the metaverse, they're foundational elements. So first, what is the metaverse to you and where do blockchain and NFTs, fit in? >> Sure, so, I mean, I affectionately refer to the metaverse just a VR and essentially, we've been playing virtual reality games and all the rest for a long time. And VR has really kind of been out there for a long time. So most people's interpretation or idea of what the metaverse is, is a virtual reality version of yourself and this right, that idea of once it becomes yourself, is where things like NFT items, where blockchain and digital currencies are going to come in, because if you have a manufacturer, so you take on an organization like Nike, and they want to put their shoes into the metaverse because we, as humans, want to individualize ourselves. We go out and we want to have that one of one shoe or that, t-shirt or whatever it is, we're going to want to represent that same type of individuality in our virtual self. So NFTs, crypto and all of those digital currencies, like I was saying that we've known as gamers are going to play that very similar role inside of the metaverse. >> Yeah. Okay. So basically you're going to take your physical world into the metaverse. You're going to be able to, as you just mentioned, acquire things- I loved your WOW example. And so let's stay on this for a bit, if we may, of course, Facebook spawned a lot of speculation and discussion about the concept of the metaverse and really, as you pointed out, it's not new. You talked about why second life, really started in 2003, and it's still around today. It's small, I read recently, it's creators coming back into the company and books were written in the early 90s that used the term metaverse. But Nick, talk about how you see this evolving, what role you hope to play with your company and your community in the future, and who builds the metaverse, when is it going to be here? >> Yeah, so, I mean, right now, and we actually just got back from CES last week. And the Metaverse is a very big buzzword. You're going to see a lot of integration of what people are calling, quote unquote, the metaverse. And there was organizations that were showing virtual office space, virtual malls, virtual concerts, and those types of experiences. And the one thing right now that I don't think that a lot of organizations have grasp is how to make one metaverse. There's no real player one, if you will always this yet, There's a lot of organizations that are creating their version of the metaverse, which then again, just like every other software and game vendor out there has their version of cryptocurrency and their version of NFTs. You're going to see it start to pop up, especially as Oculus is going to come down in price, especially as you get new technologies, like some of the VR glasses that look more augmented reality and look more like regular glasses that you're wearing, things like that, the easier that those technologies become as in adopting into our normal lifestyle, as far as like looks and feels, the faster that stuff's going to actually come out to the world. But when it comes to like, what we're doing is we believe that the metaverse should actually span multiple different blockchains, multiple different segments, if you will. So what ORE system is doing, is we're actually building the underlying architecture and technologies for developers to bring their metaverse too. You can leverage the ORE Systems NFTs, where we like to call our utility NFTs as an in-game item in one game, or you can take it over and it could be a t-shirt in another game. The ability for having that cross support within the ecosystem is what really no one has grasp on yet. Most of the organizations out there are using a very classic business model. Get the user in the game, make them spend their money in the game, make all their game stuff as only good in their game. And that's where the developer has you, they have you in their bubble. Our goal, and what we like to affectionately say is, we want to bring white collar tools and technology to blue collar folks, We want to make it simple. We want to make it off the shelf, and we want to make it a less cost prohibitive, faster, and cheaper to actually get out to all the users. We do it by supporting the technology. That's our angle. If you support the technology and you support the platform, you can build a community that will build all of the metaverse around them. >> Well, and so this is interesting because, if you think about some of the big names, we've Microsoft is talking about it, obviously we mentioned Facebook. They have essentially walled gardens. Now, yeah, okay, I could take Tik Tok and pump it into Instagram is fine, but they're really siloed off. And what you're saying is in the metaverse, you should be able to buy a pair of sneakers in one location and then bring it to another one. >> Absolutely, that's exactly it. >> And so my original kind of investment in attractiveness, if you will, to crypto, was that, the little guy can get an early, but I worry that some of these walled gardens, these big internet giants are going to try to co-op this. So I think what you're doing is right on, and I think it's aligned with the objectives of consumers and the users who don't want to be forced in to a pen. They want to be able to live freely. And that's really what you're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. You know, when you buy an item, say a Skin in Fortnite or Skin in Call of Duty, it's only good in that game. And not even in the franchise, it's only good in that version of the game. In the case of what we want to do is, you can not only have that carry over and your character. So say you buy a really cool shirt, and you've got that in your Call of Duty or in our case, we're really Osiris Protocol, which is our proof of concept video game to show that this all thing actually works, but you can actually go in and you can get a gun in Osiris Protocol. And if we release, Osiris Protocol two, you'll be able to take that to Osiris Protocol two. Now the benefit of that is, is you're going to be the only one in the next version with that item, if you haven't sold it or traded it or whatever else. So we don't lock you into a game. We don't lock you into a specific application. You own that, you can trade that freely with other users. You can sell that on the open market. We're embracing what used to be considered the black market. I don't understand why a lot of video games, we're always against the skins and mods and all the rest. For me as a gamer and coming up, through the many, many years of various different Call of Duties and everything in my time, I wish I could still have some this year. I still have a World of Warcraft account. I wasn't on, Vanilla, Burning Crusade was my foray, but I still have a character. If you look at it that way, if I had that wild character and that gear was NFTs, in theory, I could actually pass that onto my kid who could carry on that character. And it would actually increase in value because they're NFT back then. And then if needed, you could trade those on the open market and all the rest. It just makes gaming a much different thing. >> I love it. All right, Nick, hey, we're out of time, but I got to say, Nick Donarski, thanks so much for coming on the program today, sharing your insights and really good luck to you and building out your technology platform and your community. >> Thank you, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. >> And thank you for watching. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast", and you'll find them. I publish pretty much every week on siliconangle.com and wikibond.com. And you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter or comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can always email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR, happy 2022 be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This is day two, our first full day of coverage. But day two, we have two life sets here with AWS and its ecosystem partners to remote sets over a hundred guests on the program. We're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation, and I'm pleased to welcome back to cube alumni to the program. Justin Borkman is here, the co-founder and CEO of Starburst and Teresa Tung, the cloud first chief technologist at Accenture guys. Welcome back to the queue. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good to have you back. So, so Teresa, I was doing some research on you and I see you are the most prolific prolific inventor at Accenture with over 220 patents and patent applications. That's huge. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And I love your title. I think it's intriguing. I'd like to learn a little bit more about your role cloud-first chief technologist. Tell me about, >>Well, I get to think about the future of cloud and if you think about clouded powers, everything experiences in our everyday lives and our homes and our car in our stores. So pretty much I get to be cute, right? The rest of Accenture's James Bond >>And your queue. I like that. Wow. What a great analogy. Just to talk to me a little bit, I know service has been on the program before, but give me a little bit of an overview of the company, what you guys do. What were some of the gaps in the markets that you saw a few years ago and said, we have an idea to solve this? Sure. >>So Starburst offers a distributed query engine, which essentially means we're able to run SQL queries on data anywhere, uh, could be in traditional relational databases, data lakes in the cloud on-prem. And I think that was the gap that we saw was basically that people had data everywhere and really had a challenge with how they analyze that data. And, uh, my co-founders are the creators of an open source project originally called Presto now called Trino. And it's how Facebook and Netflix and Airbnb and, and a number of the internet companies run their analytics. And so our idea was basically to take that, commercialize that and make it enterprise grade for the thousands of other companies that are struggling with data management, data analytics problems. >>And that's one of the things we've seen explode during the last 22 months, among many other things is data, right? In every company. These days has to be a data company. If they're not, there's a competitor in the rear view rear view mirror, ready to come and take that place. We're going to talk about the data mesh Teresa, we're going to start with you. This is not a new car. This is a new concept. Talk to us about what a data mesh is and why organizations need to embrace this >>Approach. So there's a canonical definition about data mesh with four attributes and any data geek or data architect really resonates with them. So number one, it's really routed decentralized domain ownership. So data is not within a single line of business within a single entity within a single partner has to be across different domains. Second is publishing data as products. And so instead of these really, you know, technology solutions, data sets, data tables, really thinking about the product and who's going to use it. The third one is really around self-service infrastructure. So you want everybody to be able to use those products. And finally, number four, it's really about federated and global governance. So even though their products, you really need to make sure that you're doing the right things, but what's data money. >>We're not talking about a single tool here, right? This is more of a, an approach, a solution. >>It is a data strategy first and foremost, right? So companies, they are multi-cloud, they have many projects going on, they are on premise. So what do you do about it? And so that's the reality of the situation today, and it's first and foremost, a business strategy and framework to think about the data. And then there's a new architecture that underlines and supports that >>Just didn't talk to me about when you're having customer conversations. Obviously organizations need to have a core data strategy that runs the business. They need to be able to, to democratize really truly democratized data access across all business units. What are some of the, what are some of your customer conversations like are customers really embracing the data strategy, vision and approach? >>Yeah, well, I think as you alluded to, you know, every business is data-driven today and the pandemic, if anything has accelerated digital transformation in that move to become data-driven. So it's imperative that every business of every shape and size really put the power of data in the hands of everyone within their organization. And I think part of what's making data mesh resonates so well, is that decentralization concept that Teresa spoke about? Like, I think companies acknowledge that data is inherently decentralized. They have a lot of different database systems, different teams and data mesh is a framework for thinking about that. Then not only acknowledges that reality, but also braces it and basically says there's actually advantages to this decentralized approach. And so I think that's, what's driving the interest level in the data mesh, uh, paradigm. And it's been exciting to work with customers as they think about that strategy. And I think that, you know, essentially every company in the space is, is in transition, whether they're moving from on cloud to the prem, uh, to, uh, sorry, from on-prem to the cloud or from one cloud to another cloud or undergoing that digital transformation, they have left behind data everywhere. And so they're, they're trying to wrestle with how to grasp that. >>And there's, we know that there's so much value in data. The, the need is to be able to get it, to be able to analyze it quickly in real time. I think another thing we learned in the pandemic is it real-time is no longer a nice to have. It is essential for businesses in every organization. So Theresa let's talk about how Accenture and servers are working together to take the data mesh from a concept of framework and put this into production into execution. >>Yeah. I mean, many clients are already doing some aspect of the data mesh as I listed those four attributes. I'm sure everybody thought like I'm already doing some of this. And so a lot of that is reviewing your existing data projects and looking at it from a data product landscape we're at Amazon, right? Amazon famous for being customer obsessed. So in data, we're not always customer obsessed. We put up tables, we put up data sets, feature stores. Who's actually going to use this data. What's the value from it. And I think that's a big change. And so a lot of what we're doing is helping apply that product lens, a literal product lens and thinking about the customer. >>So what are some w you know, we often talk about outcomes, everything being outcomes focused and customers, vendors wanting to help customers deliver big outcomes, you know, cost reduction, et cetera, things like that. How, what are some of the key outcomes Theresa that the data mesh framework unlocks for organizations in any industry to be able to leverage? >>Yeah. I mean, it really depends on the product. Some of it is organizational efficiency and data-driven decisions. So just by the able to see the data, see what's happening now, that's great. But then you have so beyond the, now what the, so what the analytics, right. Both predictive prescriptive analytics. So what, so now I have all this data I can analyze and drive and predict. And then finally, the, what if, if I have this data and my partners have this data in this mesh, and I can use it, I can ask a lot of what if and, and kind of game out scenarios about what if I did things differently, all of this in a very virtualized data-driven fashion, >>Right? Well, we've been talking about being data-driven for years and years and years, but it's one thing to say that it's a whole other thing to actually be able to put that into practice and to use it, to develop new products and services, delight customers, right. And, and really achieve the competitive advantage that businesses want to have. Just so talk to me about how your customer conversations have changed in the last 22 months, as we've seen this massive acceleration of digital transformation companies initially, really trying to survive and figure out how to pivot, not once, but multiple times. How are those customer conversations changing now is as that data strategy becomes core to the survival of every business and its ability to thrive. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's accelerated everything and, and that's been obviously good for companies like us and like Accenture, cause there's a lot of work to be done out there. Um, but I think it's a transition from a storage centric mindset to more of an analytics centric mindset. You know, I think traditionally data warehousing has been all about moving data into one central place. And, and once you get it there, then you can analyze it. But I think companies don't have the time to wait for that anymore. Right there, there's no time to build all the ETL pipelines and maintain them and get all of that data together. We need to shorten that time to insight. And that's really what we, what we've been focusing on with our, with our customers, >>Shorten that time to insight to get that value out of the data faster. Exactly. Like I said, you know, the time is no longer a nice to have. It's an absolute differentiator for folks in every business. And as, as in our consumer lives, we have this expectation that we can get whatever we want on our phone, on any device, 24 by seven. And of course now in our business lives, we're having the same expectation, but you have to be able to unlock that access to that data, to be able to do the analytics, to make the decisions based on what the data say. Are you, are you finding our total? Let's talk about a little bit about the go to market strategy. You guys go in together. Talk to me about how you're working with AWS, Theresa, we'll start with you. And then Justin we'll head over to you. Okay. >>Well, a lot of this is powered by the cloud, right? So being able to imagine a new data business to run the analytics on it and then push it out, all of that is often cloud-based. But then the great thing about data mesh it's it gives you a framework to look at and tap into multi-cloud on-prem edge data, right? Data that can't be moved because it is a private and secure has to be at the edge and on-prem so you need to have that's their data reality. And the cloud really makes this easier to do. And then with data virtualization, especially coming from the digital natives, we know it scales >>Just to talk to me about it from your perspective that the GTL. >>Yeah. So, I mean, I think, uh, data mesh is really about people process and technology. I think Theresa alluded to it as a strategy. It's, it's more than just technology. Obviously we bring some of that technology to bear by allowing customers to query the data where it lives. But the people in process side is just as important training people to kind of think about how they do data management, data analytics differently is essential thinking about how to create data as a product. That's one of the core principles that Theresa mentioned, you know, that's where I think, um, you know, folks like Accenture can be really instrumental in helping people drive that transformational change within their organization. And that's >>Hard. Transformational change is hard with, you know, the last 22 months. I've been hard on everyone for every reason. How are you facilitating? I'm curious, like to get Theresa, we'll start with you, your perspectives on how our together as servers and Accenture, with the power of AWS, helping to drive that cultural change within organizations. Because like we talked about Justin there, nobody has extra time to waste on anything these days. >>The good news is there's that imperative, right? Every business is a digital business. We found that our technology leaders, right, the top 10% investors in digital, they are outperforming are the laggards. So before pandemic, it's times to post pep devek times five, so there's a need to change. And so data is really the heart of the company. That's how you unlock your technical debt into technical wealth. And so really using cloud and technologies like Starburst and data virtualization is how we can actually do that. >>And so how do you, Justin, how does Starburst help organizations transfer that technical debt or reduce it? How does the D how does the data much help facilitate that? Because we talk about technical debt and it can, it can really add up. >>Yeah, well, a lot of people use us, uh, or think about us as an abstraction layer above the different data sources that they have. So they may have legacy data sources today. Um, then maybe they want to move off of over time, um, could be classical data, warehouses, other classical, uh, relational databases, perhaps they're moving to the cloud. And by leveraging Starburst as this abstraction, they can query the data that they have today, while in the background, moving data into the cloud or moving it into the new data stores that they want to utilize. And it sort of hides that complexity. It decouples the end user experience, the business analyst, the data scientists from where the data lives. And I think that gives people a lot of freedom and a lot of optionality. And I think, you know, the only constant is change. Um, and so creating an architecture that can stand the test of time, I think is really, really important. >>Absolutely. Speaking of change, I just saw the announcement about Starburst galaxy fully managed SAS platform now available in all three major clouds. Of course, here we are at AWS. This is a, is this a big directional shift for servers? >>It is, you know, uh, I think there's great precedent within open source enterprise software companies like Mongo DB or confluent who started with a self managed product, much the way that we did, and then moved in the direction of creating a SAS product, a cloud hosted, fully managed product that really I think, expands the market. And that's really essentially what we're doing with galaxy galaxy is designed to be as easy as possible. Um, you know, Starburst was already powerful. This makes it powerful and easy. And, uh, and, and in our view, can, can hopefully expand the market to thousands of potential customers that can now leverage this technology in a, in a faster, easier way, >>Just in sticking with you for a minute. Talk to me about kind of where you're going in, where services heading in terms of support for the data mesh architecture across industries. >>Yeah. So a couple of things that we've, we've done recently, and whether we're doing, uh, as we speak, one is, uh, we introduced a new capability. We call star gate. Now star gate is a connector between Starburst clusters. So you're going to have a Starbucks cluster, and let's say Azure service cluster in AWS, a Starbucks cluster, maybe an AWS west and AWS east. And this basically pushes the processing to where the data lives. So again, living within this construct of, uh, of decentralized data that a data mesh is all about, this allows you to do that at an even greater level of abstraction. So it doesn't even matter what cloud region the data lives in or what cloud entirely it lives in. And there are a lot of important applications for this, not only latency in terms of giving you fast, uh, ability to join across those different clouds, but also, uh, data sovereignty constraints, right? >>Um, increasingly important, especially in Europe, but increasingly everywhere. And, you know, if your data isn't Switzerland, it needs to stay in Switzerland. So starting date as a way of pushing the processing to Switzerland. So you're minimizing the data that you need to pull back to complete your analysis. And, uh, and so we think that's a big deal about, you know, kind of enabling a data mash on a, on a global scale. Um, another thing we're working on back to the point of data products is how do customers curate and create these data products and share them within their organization. And so we're investing heavily in our product to make that easier as well, because I think back to one of the things, uh, Theresa said, it's, it's really all about, uh, making this practical and finding quick wins that customers can deploy, deploy in their data mess journey, right? >>This quick wins are key. So Theresa, last question to you, where should companies go to get started today? Obviously everybody has gotten, we're still in this work from anywhere environment. Companies have tons of data, tons of sources of data, did it, infrastructure's already in place. How did they go and get started with data? >>I think they should start looking at their data projects and thinking about the best data products. I think just that mindset shift about thinking about who's this for what's the business value. And then underneath that architecture and support comes to bear. And then thinking about who are the products that your product could work better with just like any other practice partnerships, like what we have with AWS, right? Like that's a stronger together sort of thing, >>Right? So there's that kind of that cultural component that really strategic shift in thinking and on the architecture. Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining me on the program, coming back on the cube at re-invent talking about data mesh really help. You can help organizations and industry put that together and what's going on at service. We appreciate your time. Thanks again. All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. The cube is the leader in global live tech coverage. We'll be right back.

>>Welcome back to the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin pleased to be here in person. We are actually with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners running. One of the industry's largest and most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've got two life sets over a hundred guests to remote studios. I'm pleased to welcome two guests from Laos here with me. Next, Derek is here, the VP and director of digital modernization and David chow, the director of cloud capabilities, Derek and David. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having us great to be here in person. Isn't it? >>Absolutely. Last year we missed out. So if we've got to get it all in this week. >>Exactly and well, this is day one and the amount of people that are in here, there's a lot of noise in the background. I'm sure the audience can hear it is, is really nice. AWS has done such a great job of getting us all in here. Nice and safely. So let's go ahead and start. Light is coming off a very strong Q3. When we look at the things that have happened, nearly all defense and classified customers are engaged in digital modernization efforts. We've seen so much acceleration of that in the last 20 months, but let's talk about some of the current challenges Derek that customers are facing across operations sustainment with respect to the need to modernize. >>Sure, sure thing. Um, so over the past two years, we spent a better part of all that time, trying to really figure out what are our customers' hardest problems. And, you know, that's across the health vertical, the DOD vertical, uh, the Intel vertical, uh, you name it. We spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. And we kept coming up on three reoccurring themes, one, which is the explosion of data. There's so much data being generated across our customer's environments. Um, there's not enough human brain power to deal with it. All right. So we need to be able to apply technology in a way that reduces the cognitive burden on operators who must do operations and sustainment to get to a business outcome. Uh, the second one and most importantly for us is advanced cyber threats. We've all heard about the colonial pipeline hack. >>We've heard about solar winds. The scary part about that is what about the hacks that we don't know about? Right. And that's something that here at lighthouse, we're really focused on applying technology, cyber AIML in a way that we can detect when someone's in our environments or in our customer environments. And then we can opt out, obviously, um, do some remediation and get them out of our environment. So mission operations are not compromised. And then lastly, customer environments are heterogeneous. You have cloud, you have on-premise infrastructure. Uh, you have edge devices, IOT devices. It's very difficult to be able to do management and orchestration over all these different devices, all the different platforms that are out there. So working in concert with AWS, we build a solution to be able to do just that, which we'll talk about a little later, David, anything else that you want to, >>We talked about the explosion of data, the cybersecurity landscape changing dramatically, and the customers needing to be able to modernize and leverage the power of technology. Yeah, >>So our customers, uh, we have basically three areas that we see our customers having challenges in. And one of them, once they get to the cloud, they don't have the transparency on cost and usage, right. Uh, when you get the engineers are excited, the mission is exploded with extra activities. Um, but our customers don't have a sense on where the cost is going and how that relates to their mission, right? So we help them figure out, okay, your, your cost is going up, which is fine because it's applying to your mission and it's helping you actually be more successful than before. Right? And the other area is, uh, they need, uh, a multi-platform strategy that doesn't impact their existing conditions, right? They don't have the practicality or the funding that's required to just rip and replace everything. And you can't do that. You have to maintain your mission. >>If you have to maintain about a lot of critical capability that they already have, but at the same time, figure out how am I going to add the extensions and the new capabilities, right? And we have certain ways that we can do that to allow them to start getting into the cloud, leveraging a lot of additional capability that they never had before, but maintaining the investment that they've done in the past years to maintain their mission success. Right. Uh, and then the third is skill up-skilling. So we found that a lot of people have a hard time. Once we move them into AWS, specifically their operational duties and things change. And there's a big gap there in terms of training, uh, getting familiar with how that impacts their process and methodology, and that that's where we helped them a lot, uh, modify that revolution and how they do that stuff. >>That's excellent. That upskilling is critical, as things are changing so dramatically, we have, you talked about data and the cybersecurity changes Derek. And you know, every company, every branch of the federal is probably a data company or data organization, or if it's not, it has to become one. But the cyber threats are crazy. The things that have been going on in the last 20 months, the acceleration of ransomware, ransomware as a service, you talked about colonial, like we only hear about the big ones, but how many it's no longer a will we get hit by ransomware? Or will we be hacked? It's when, talk to me about some of those, about those challenges and also the need to be able to deliver real-time data as real-time missions are going on in that real-time is now no longer a nice to have. >>Right? So, um, it's a great question. And one of the things that I'll say is there's some studies out there that said 75% of the computing, uh, that will be happening over the next 10 years will be at the edge, right? So we're not going to be able to go at the edge, collect all this data, ship it back to a centralized way to process it. We're not going to be able to do that. What we have to do is take capability that may have been clouded, able push that capability to the edge. Where did that be? AI ML. It could be your mission applications, and we need to be able to exploit data in near real time, um, to which allows us to make mission critical decisions at the point of need. There's not going to be enough time to collect a big swath of data, move it back across a bandwidth that is temporarily constrained. In many cases, we just can't do it that way. So I think moving as much capability to the edge as possible in order for us to be able to make an impact in near real time, that's what we need to do across all of our verticals, not just DOD, but on the healthcare side to the Intel side, you name it. We gotta be able to move capability as far forward as >>Possible. And where Derek with you for a minute, where are those verticals with respect to embracing that, adopting that being ready to be able to take on those technologies? Because culturally, I can imagine, you know, legacy his story, history organizations to change his heart >>Change is hard. Um, and one of the strategies that we've tried to implement within that context is that the legacy systems, the culture that is already out there, we're not just going to be able to turn all of that off, right. We're going to have to make sure that the new capabilities and the legacy systems co-exist. So that's one of the reasons that we have an approach where we use microservices, very much API driven, such that, uh, you know, a mission critical system that may have been online for the last 20 years. We're not just going to turn it off, but what we can do is start to build sidecar capabilities, microservices, to extend that capability of that system without rebuilding it, we can't build our way out of all the technical debt. What we can do is figure out how do we need to extend this capability to get to a mission need and build a microservices. That's very thin. That's very lightweight. And that's how you start to connect the dots between your mission applications, the data, the data centricity that we talked about and other capabilities that need access to data, to be able to effectuate a decision. >>You make it sound so easy. Derek, >>It's certainly not easy, but in working with AWS, we really have taken this forward and we're really deploying, uh, similar capabilities today. Um, so it's really the way that we have to modernize. We have to be able to do it step by step strangle out the old as we bring in the new right. >>So David, let's talk about the AWS partnership, what you guys are doing as the critical importance of being able to help the verticals modernize at speed at scale in real time. Talk to me about what Leidos and AWS are doing together. >>So we work with Adobe very closely, um, for every engagement we have with our customers, we have AWS as our side, we do the reviews of, of their architecture and their approach. We take, we take into account the data strategy of the organization as long along with their cloud, uh, because we found that you have to combine their cloud and their data strategy because of the volumes of data that Derrick talked about, right. That they needed to integrate. And so we come up with a custom strategy and a roadmap for them to adopt that without like Derek said, um, deprecating any old capabilities that currently have any extending it out into, into the cloud so that those areas are what we strive to get them through. And we talk about a lot about the digital enterprise and how that is for us from light of this point of view, we see that as building an API ecosystem for our customer, right? Because the API is really the key. And if you look at companies like Twilio that have an API first approach, that's, what's allowed them to integrate very old technology like telephones into the new cloud, right? So that approach is really the unique approach that was taken with our customers for to see the success that we've seen. >>Well, can you tell me, David's sticking with you for a minute about upscaling. I know that AWS has a big focus on that. It's got a restart program for helping folks that were unemployed during the pandemic or underemployed, but the upskilling, as we talked about during this interview is incredibly important. As things change are changing so quickly, is there any sort of upskilling kind of partnerships that you're doing with AWS that you, >>Uh, so as a partner, we ourselves get a lot of free upskilling and training, uh, as AWS from your partner. Um, but also with our customers, we're able to customize and build specific training plans and curriculums that is targeted specifically for the operators, right? They don't come from a technology background like we do, but they come from a mission background so we can modify and understand what they need to learn and what they don't really need to worry about so much and just target exactly what they need to do. So they can just do their day-to-day jobs and their duties for the mission. >>That's what it's all about. Derek, can you share an example that you think really speaks volumes to light us and AWS together to help customers modernize? >>One thing I like about AWS is that the partnership is what we describe as a deep technical partnership. It's not just transactional. It's not like, Hey, buy this X services and we'll, we'll do this. I have a great example of this year. We kicked off a pilot with an army customer and we actually leveraged AWS pro. So we were literally building a proof of concept together. So in 90 days, what we, what we did was get the customer to understand we're moving more to native AWS services, EMR, uh, to be more specific that you can save money on tons of licensing costs that you otherwise would have had to pay for it. After the pilot was over, we recognized that we will save the government $1.2 million and they have now said, yes, let's go AWS native, which is, uh, which is, uh, a methodology that we still want to stamp out and use continually because the more and more that you adopt that native services, you're going to be able to move faster. Because as soon as you deploy a system, it's already legacy. When you start to do the native services, as things more services come online, we're sort of their glue where to make sure those things that are coming, the services that are AWS are deploying out, we'd bring, we, we then bring that innovation into our customer environment. So saving a customer, the government $1.2 million at a big deal for us. >>It's huge. And I'm sure you there's, that's one of many examples of significant outcomes that you're helping the verticals achieve. Absolutely. >>Yeah. One of our >>Core focuses. That's excellent. And also to do it so quickly and 90 days to be able to show the army a significant savings is a, is a huge, uh, kudos to, to Linus and to AWS. David, talk to me a little bit about the, from a partnership perspective, how do you guys go into a joint organizations together? I imagine one of the most important things is that transparency from the verticals perspective, whether it's DOD or health or Intel, talk to me about that, that kind of unified partnership. And what is the customer and customer experience? I imagine one team. >>Yes. So we go into, we engage with our AWS counterparts at the very beginning of an engagement. So they have their dedicated teams. We have our dedicated teams and we are fully transparent with each other, what the customers are facing. And we both focus on the customer pain points, right? What was really going to drive the customer. Um, and that's how we sort of approach the customer. So the customer sees us as a single team. Uh, we do things like we'll build out what we call the well-architected framework or wafer for short, right. And that allows us to make sure that we're leveraging all the best practices from AWS, from their clients on the commercial side. And we can leverage that into the government, right. They can get a lot of learnings and lessons learned that they don't have to repeat because some of the commercial cupboard companies who are ahead of us have I've done the hard learning, right. And we can incorporate that into their mission and into their operations. >>That's critical because there isn't the time. Right? I think that's one of the things that Penn has taught us is that there isn't there, like we talked about real-time data, there is, it's no longer a nice to have, right. But even from a training and from a deployment perspective that needs to be done incredibly efficiently with, we're talking about probably large groups of people. I imagine with Leidos folks, AWS folks, and the verticals. So that coordination between, I imagine what are probably two fairly culturally aligned organizations is critical. No. >>Yeah. One of the things that we put in places, this idea of bachelors environment, so that means you could be a Leidos person. You could be an AWS person, there's no badge. We're just sitting there, we're here to do good work, to bring value to a customer. And that's something that's really fantastic about our relationship that we do have. So every week we are literally building things together and that's, that's what the government, that's what the public sector folks expect. No, one's not gonna own it all. You have to be able to work together to be able to bring value to our customers across all the verticals that >>I like. That badge list environment, that's critical for organizations to work together. Harmoniously given there's as the data explosion just continues as does the edge explosion and the IOT device explosion more and more complexity comes into the environment. So that Badger less environment I met David from your perspective is really critical to the success of every mission that you're working on. >>Yeah. I mean, I think the badge approaches is critical without it, the existing teams have a hard time building that trust and being, and feeling like we're part of that team, right? Trust is really important in, in mission success. And so when we enter a new arena, we try to get, build that trust as quickly as we can show them that, you know, we're there to help them with their mission. And we're not really there for anything else. So they feel comfortable to share, you know, the really deep pain points that they're not really sharing all the time. And that's what allows Leidos specifically to, to really be successful with them because they share all their skeletons and we don't judge them. Right. We've say, okay, here's your problems. Here's some solutions. And here are the pros and cons and we figure out a solution together, right. It's a really built together sort of mindset that makes us successful. Okay. >>Togetherness as key, last question, guys, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and feel and see, and smell from Leidos this week at reinvent? >>We want to take that one. >>Um, yeah. So with Leidos, um, we're around, we have, uh, various custom, uh, processes with AWS, uh, because of our peer partnership. We have the MSSP that we just got as a launch partner. So there's a lot of interaction that we have with AWS. Um, anytime that AWS sees that there is opportunity for us to talk to a customer and talk to potential vendor, they'll pull us in. So if you guys come by the booth and you need to talk to an SSI, they'll, they'll pull us in and we'll have those conversations. >>Excellent guys, thank you so much for joining me, talking about Leidos, AWS, what you guys are doing together and how you're helping transform government. You make it sound easy. Like I said, Derek, I know that it's not, but it's great to hear the transparency with which guys are all working. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the leader in global live tech coverage.

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. This year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two life studios, two remote studios, and over 100 guests. So stick around as we talk about the next 10 years of cloud innovation, I'm very excited to be joined by another Lisa from Zscaler. Lisa Lorenzen is here with me, the field CTO for the Americas. She's here to talk about ZScaler's mission to make doing business and navigating change a simpler, faster, and more productive experience. Lisa, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So let's talk about Zscaler in AWS. Talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing together. >>Yeah, definitely. Z scaler is a strategic security ISV partner with AWS. So we provide AWS customers with zero trust, secure remote access to AWS, and this can improve their security posture as well as their user experience with AWS. These scaler recently announced that we are the first and only cloud security service to achieve the FedRAMP PI authorization to operate. And that FedRAMP ZPA service is built on AWS gov cloud. ZScaler's also an AWS marketplace seller where our customers can purchase our zero trust exchange services as well as request or high value security assessments. We're excited about that as we're seeing a rapid increase in customer adoption as these scaler via the AWS marketplace, we vetted our software on AWS edge services that support emerging use cases, including 5g, IOT, and OT. So for example, Zscaler runs on wavelength, outposts, snowball and snowcones, and Zscaler has strategic partnerships with leading AWS service providers and system integration partners, including Verizon NTT, BT, Accenture, Deloitte, and many of the leading national and regional AWS consulting partners. >>Great summary there. So you mentioned something I want to get more understanding on this. It sounds like it's a differentiator for CSO scale. You said that you guys recently announced to the first and only cloud security service to achieve FedRAMP high. Uh, ATO built on AWS gov cloud. Talk to me about and what the significance of that is. >>I L five authorization to operate means that we are able to protect federal assets for the department of defense, as well as for the civilian agencies. It just extends the certification of our cloud by the government to ensure that we meet all of the requirements to protect that military side of the house, as well as the civilian side of the house. >>Got it super important there, let's talk about zero trust. It's a super hot topic. We've seen so many changes to the threat landscape during the pandemic. How are some of the ways that Z scaler and AWS are helping customers tackle this together? >>Well, I'd actually like to answer that by telling a little bit of a story. Um, Growmark is one of our Z scaler and AWS success stories when they had to send everyone home to work from home overnight, the quote that we had from is the users just went home and nothing changed. ZPA made work from anywhere, just work, and they were able to maintain complete business continuity. So even though their employers might have had poor internet service at home, or, you know, 80 challenging infrastructure, if you've got kids on your wifi bunch of kids in the neighborhood doing remote school, everyone's working from home, you don't have the reliability or the, maybe the bandwidth capacity that you would when you're sitting in an office. And Zscaler private access is a cloud delivered zero trust solution that leverages dynamic resilient, TLS encrypted tunnels to connect the user to an application rather than putting an end point on a network. >>And the reason that's important is it makes for a much more reliable and resilient service, even in environments that may not have the best connectivity I live out in the county. I really, some days think that there's a hamster on a wheel somewhere in my cable modem network, and I am a consumer of this, right. I connect to Z scaler over Zscaler private access, I'm protected by Zscaler internet access. And so I access our internal applications that are running in AWS as well this way. And it makes a huge difference. Growmark really started with an SAP migration to AWS, and this was long before the pandemic. So they started out looking for that better user experience and the zero trust capability. They were able to ensure that their SAP environment was dark to the internet, even though it was running in the cloud. And that put them in this position to leverage that zero trust service when the pandemic was upon us, >>That ability or that quote that you mentioned, it just worked was absolutely critical for all of us in every industry. And I'm sure a lot of folks who were trying to manage working from home, the spouses from home kids doing, you know, school online also felt like you with the hamster on the wheel, I'm sure their internet access, but being able to have that business continuity was table-stakes especially early on for most organizations. We saw a lot of digital transformation, a lot of acceleration of it in the last 20 months during the pandemic. Talk to me about how Z scaler helps customers from a digital transformation perspective and maybe what some of the things were that you saw in the last 20 months that have accelerated >>Absolutely. Um, another example, there would be Jefferson health, and really, as we saw during the pandemic, as you say, it accelerated a lot of the existing trends of mobility, but also migration to the cloud. And when you move applications to the cloud, honestly, it's a complex environment and maybe the controls and the risk landscape is not as well. Understood. So Z scaler also has another solution, which is our cloud security posture management. And this is really ensuring that your configuration on your environment, that those workloads run in is controlled, understood correctly, coordinated and configured. So as deference and health migrated to the cloud first model, they were able to leverage the scalers workload posture to measure and control that risk. Again, it's environment where the combination of AWS and Z scaler together gives them a flexible, resilient solution that they can be confident is correctly configured and thoroughly locked down. >>And that's critical for businesses in any organization, especially as quickly as how quickly things changed in the last 20 months or so I do wonder how your customer conversations have has changed as I introduced you as the field CTO of the America's proceeds killer. I'm sure you talk with a lot of customers. How has the security posture, um, zero trust? How has that risen up within the organizational chain? Is that something that the board is concerned about? >>My gosh, yes. And zero trust really has gone through the Gartner hype cycle. You've got the introduction, the peak of interest, the trough of despair, and then really rising back into what's actually feasible. Only zero trust has done that on a timeline of over a decade. When the term was first introduced, I was working with firewall VPN enact technology, and frankly, we didn't necessarily have the flexibility, the scalability, or the resilience to offer true zero trust. You can try to do that with network security controls, but when you're really protecting a user connecting to an application, you've got an abstraction layer mismatch. What we're seeing now is the reemergence of zero trust as a priority. And this was greatly accelerated honestly by the cybersecurity executive order that came out a few months ago from the Biden administration, which made zero trust a priority for the federal government and the public sector, but also raised visibility on zero trust for the private sector as well. >>When we're looking at zero trust as a way to perhaps ward off some of these high profile breaches and outages like the colonial pipeline, whole situation that was based on some legacy technology for remote access that was exploited and led to a breach that they had to take their entire infrastructure offline to mitigate. If we can look at more modern delivery mechanisms and more sophisticated controls for zero trust, that helps the board address a number of challenges ranging from obviously risk management, but also agility and cost reduction in an environment where more than ever belts are being tightened. New ways of delivering applications are being considered. But the ability to innovate is more important than ever. >>It is more important than ever the ability to innovate, but it really changing security landscape. I'm glad to hear that you're seeing, uh, this change as a result of the executive order that president Biden put down in the summer. That's good news. It sounds like there's some progress being made there, but we saw, you mentioned colonial pipeline. We saw a lot in the last 20, 22 months or so with ransomware becoming a household word, also becoming something that is a matter of when companies in any industry get hit and versus if it's no longer kind of that choice anymore. So talk to me about some of the threats and some of the stats that Z scaler has seen particularly in the last 20, 22 months. >>Oh gosh. Well, let's see. I'm just going to focus on the last 12 months, cause that's really where we've got some of the best data. We've seen a 500% increase in ransomware delivered over encrypted channels. And what that means is it's really critical to have scalable SSL inspection that can operate at wire speed without impeding the user experience or delay in critical projects, server communications, activities that need to happen without any introduced in any additional latency. So if you think about what that takes the Z scaler internet access solution is protecting users, outbound access in the same way that Zscaler private access protects access to private resources. So we're really seeing more and more organizations seeing that both of these services are necessary to deliver a comprehensive zero trust. You have to protect and control the outbound traffic to make sure that nothing good leaks out, nothing bad sneaks in. >>And at the same time, you have to protect and control the inbound traffic and inbound is, you know, a much broader definition with apps in the data center in the cloud these days. We're also seeing that 30% of malware is delivered through trusted applications like file shares or collaboration tools. So it's no longer enough to only inspect web traffic. Now you have to be able to really inspect all flavors of traffic when you're doing that outbound protection. So another good example where Z scaler and AWS work together here is in Amazon workspaces. And there's a huge trend towards desktop as a service, for example, and organizations are starting to recognize that they need to protect both the user experience and also the connectivity onward in Amazon workspaces, the same way that they would for a traditional end user device. So we see Z scaler running in the Amazon workspaces instances to protect that outbound traffic and control that inbound traffic as well. >>Another big area is the ransomware infections are not the problem. It's the result. So over half of the ransomware infections include data theft or leakage. And that is a double whammy because you get what's called double extortion where not only do you have to pay to unlock your machines, but you have to pay not to have that stolen data exposed to the rest of the world. So it's more important than ever to be able to break that kill chain as early as possible to ensure that the or the server traffic itself isn't exposed to the initial infection vector. If you do happen to get an infection vector that sneaks through, you need to be able to control the lateral movement so that it doesn't spread in your environment. And then if both of those controls fail, you also need the outbound protection such as CASBY and DLP to ensure that even if they get into the environment, they can't exfiltrate any of the data that they find as a result. We're seeing that the largest security risk today is lateral movement inside the corporate network. And that's one of the things that makes these ransomware double extortion situations, such a problem. >>Last question for you. And we've got about a minute left. I'm curious, you said over 50% of ransomware attacks are now double extortion. How do you guys help customers combat that? So >>We really deliver a solution that eliminates a lot of the attack surface and a lot of the risks. We have no inbound listener, unlike a traditional VPN. So the outbound only connections mean you don't have the external attack surface. You can write these granular policy controls to eliminate lateral movement. And because we integrate with customer's existing identity and access management, we can eliminate the credential exposure that can lead to a larger spread in a compromised environment. We also can eliminate the problem of unpatched gateways, which led to things like colonial pipeline or some of the other major breaches we've seen recently. And we can remove that single point of failure. So you can rely on dynamic optimized traffic distribution for all of these secure services. Basically, what we're trying to do is make it simpler and more secure at the same time, >>Simpler and more secure at the same time is what everyone needs regardless of industry. Lisa, thank you for joining me today, talking about Zscaler in AWS, zero trust the threat landscape that you're seeing, and also how's the scaler and AWS together can help customers mitigate those growing risks. We appreciate your insights and your thoughtfulness. >>Thank you >>For Lisa Lorenzen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent stick around more great content coming up next.

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Hello, I'm John Frey with the queue here for cube conversation with Devon Reed, senior director of apex offer product mentioned Dell technologies. They have a great to see you. Congratulations on apex and the momentum and the big news. >>Yeah. Thank you for having me here, John. It's a, it's a pleasure to be here with you and I can't wait to talk to you about the stuff. >>So we chatted last Dell technologies world about apex in great length. Um, first given update on what's the new news and to where's it come from since Dell tech DEC world. What's, what's the big update on the product and the news you're launching today. >>Yeah, so it's been a, it's been a fantastic journey here, John. And, um, you know, since Dell technologies world, we've learned a ton from our customers and the reception has been extremely positive. We're seeing a ton of interest from our customers. We're building demand, um, and we're learning a lot, but I think if we boil it down to what we're, we're really learning here is that customers are living in a cloud first world. And what that means is that customers want to move, uh, you know, to the public cloud because the public cloud brings simplicity, agility, the ability to pay for only what they use and they don't need to manage their infrastructure. However, what we're hearing from our customers as well is that they're, um, a little hesitant to move all of their workloads to the public cloud, because there are certain performance requirements, latency requirements, and security requirements that are, uh, still, um, held from on-prem infrastructure vendors. And that's, that's the beauty of apex to bring that the, the simplicity of the public cloud and the security and the performance of the private cloud in one with it. >>I want to get your thoughts real quick before I move on to the news, because this comes up a lot in conversations. In fact, I just had a conversation this morning on camera and also off-camera around virtualization of data, right? So, and how on premises? The bare metal growth is there, right? So you starting to see from a performance standpoint, when you security, we get that. There's not a lot of on premises reasons why to be on premises for the security reason, but performance, you brought that up. Talk more about that real quick, because I think this is really becoming quite more traction than people thought there's a performance gain. On-premise with some of the new tech, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, exactly. I think that's a, it's a great call out John. And especially as you get into some of these new applications where the computation needs to be directly next to, uh, the data in which is processing latency and performance is extremely important. We hear that day in and day out from our customers. And that's why it's really, it's really important to focus on not only on public cloud environments, but on-premise infrastructure. And that's what apex really, really helps customers, um, bridge that bridge, that gap. >>And for the folks watching there's a great interview, search his name, Devon's name, and look at last year's announcement. We covered it in detail with apex. So some great content there. Go check that out. I got to ask about the news. You had some new announcements at VMworld earlier today. What can you tell us about the news? >>Yeah, yeah, we did. John. This is, this is an amazing year for Dell at VM world in general. Um, there's a ton of announcements that have come out with collaboration with VMware and Dell, but for apex specifically. And that's what I'm here to talk to you about is that we're introducing a new offer to the apex portfolio. And this offer, we call apex cloud services with VMware cloud. And what this really is, is it's a full infrastructure as a service stack and it's utilizing Dell's, uh, hyper-converged infrastructure. So it's integrated storage, networking compute, and we combine that with, um, the virtualization stack from, uh, VMware virtualization stack and the services. It's a solution that's managed by Dell, it's designed for six nines of availability. And again, going back to what customers are asking for, it allows customers, the performance, the security, and it also provides those consistent operations across their multi-cloud environments. >>What's the driver behind the customer requirements than this. Is there a specific use case that jumps out off the page on, on the managed service? Could you share why the traction? >>Yeah. You know, um, this space is growing really rapidly and it's the new space. And as we talk to more and more customers, we learned there's a ton of different use cases, a ton of different deployments that are really coming to the forefront. But if I really boil it down, there are a few that are kind of rising to the top year. And I think first and foremost, we see a lot of deployments in VDI and really the driver behind that is some of those, those environments are complex. And what the customers are trying to do is really offload those it administrative tasks and have companies like Dell manager. And that's what we're doing for them. Another one is, um, you know, really around that latency, latency and security, really trying to drive applications to not suffer from, you know, that hate latency and security kind of benefits. >>Now, um, what we've seen is we have a lot of interest from very large enterprises that actually want to build and modernize their data centers. So they're either consolidating their data centers or they're trying to move to a fully automated, uh, hybrid cloud situation, right. And I'm talking very large deployments of, uh, VMware based, um, private cloud, uh, capabilities. And I say one other place that we're seeing a lot of interest in these sort of capabilities is large distributed kind of edge use cases. So think, um, you know, think use cases where you have, um, hundreds of remote office locations or a thousands of retail locations that is very difficult for customers to manage. And we take that burden away from our customers. >>Uh, thanks for laying out the customer scenarios and the use case. Good stuff I got to ask you about the solution now appears that it was jointly developed with VMware. Is that right? And if so, can you tell me more about that? >>Yeah, yeah, exactly. John, this is, this is amazing. The amount of collaboration that has gone into this solution with VMware is incredible and really it's based on customer feedback. And we saw, you know, based on this feedback, we've saw a real need to basically take the best of VMware software and their services capabilities, and our, you know, Dell's world-leading infrastructure capabilities and really combine it with the simplicity and agility that apex apex provides. So we've been working with VMware very tightly, uh, over the past year and more to really develop the solution. It's been a great journey, been spending a ton of time with the VMware team building this and, um, you know, customers really love what VMware cloud enables and customers love apex. So it's a really powerful combo and we think it's, it's really the next, uh, kind of rocket ship for, you know, the combined companies here. Yeah. >>I think the VDI piece and these use cases, you mentioned only get more relevant and complex at the same time with the whole shifting in the working environments, you know, the work from home, the future of work, you know, you have the blurring of the lines between private, you know, home versus corporate network. It's like, I mean, we thought it was hard before it's going to get even more complicated. So the pressure's on to abstract away the complexity. So, so totally relevant. Yeah. >>And demand for these kinds of solutions we're seeing, you know, the interest is, is doubling. Uh, it seems like almost every six months, you know, there's a lot more interest, especially as we progress through this pandemic and the, and uh, this environment that we're living in you. So, okay. >>So I got to ask you going forward again. Great progress from our last time we chatted at Dell technology worlds last year, um, 2021, um, what's ahead for Dell and the VMware partnership. Tell us more, how does that look? Um, extending is what's the trajectory look like, and you share any specifics, what can we expect? What's the headroom? What should customers expect? >>Yeah, yeah. You know, we get that question a lot and really, um, you know, nothing is really, although we are going to be separating as, as different entities, you know, the collaboration and the, the level of, um, joint development that we have between the two companies, uh, couldn't be stronger now. And we don't, we do not expect that to change. And we're just getting started on this thing and there's a lot more to come for sure. >>What's the biggest thing that you're, you're excited about. Obviously apex has been a good, it's a trajectory. The progress has been great. The market's in your favor, what's, what's exciting for you right now. Where do you see the action? Um, you know, where's, where's the fun for you in this what's that what's, uh, what's your take? >>You know, it always, for me, the fun always comes down to customers and understanding what the customers want, understanding what the solution, where the solution works, where the solution doesn't work, really working with our customers to really understand their problems and really try to work. So that's where I, I get my energy, uh, in this whole thing and to see the, see the pipeline grow and the sales coming in, that's just, it's really exciting for me, you know, as we're kind of embarking on this new, as a service, uh, world for the, for the multicloud world, it's, it's just, it's fantastic, John, >>You know, the one-click buy as you go consumption-based, this is the trend and infrastructure as code, which is a cloud ethos, and you may not have any on premises with security and now performance, it seems like we're seeing the second wave of virtualization kick in on premises where now that you're in a cloud operating model from storage compute, networking, kind of almost a reboot, almost a reset or an extension or a real-life, it seems like it's another second life of, of, of, of, of innovation. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. I, I definitely agree with you, John, and, you know, from a, from a vision perspective, we're just, we're just starting to, uh, you know, we're just starting out there and we, you know, if we think about the power, uh, in the breadth of the portfolio that Dell has, it is unmatched in the industry. So first and foremost, you know, there's a lot more from a, from a solution perspective that we can bring to the floor. So I think that's, that's really exciting. I like the position that we have there and in terms of collaboration with VMware, we're just getting started there too. And, uh, I spend, uh, almost a half of my day with VMware employees, which is incredible amount of collaboration. And there's so much more that we've talked about in our roadmap, uh, to really build out this vision when you start thinking about not just virtualization, but you start to talk about, um, you know, these, these new operating environments, including Kubernetes and Tansu capabilities. And, um, you know, how do you, how do you hit different, uh, use cases with, um, not only hyper converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, but different types of infrastructure as well. And then you start to span, uh, not only the prem, but the co-location facilities and, and the edge, and you bring this all together under the apex console. And I like our future >>Console based provisioning, easy, uh, congratulations on the big news apex cloud services with VMware cloud, um, for the folks watching, that's going to come in and maybe adopt the solution, the managed service, what can they expect from Dell? >>Uh, what you can expect is a very simple experience. So, uh, everything starts and ends with what we call our apex console. So a customer from the time they, they want to learn about our services to, um, you know, getting quotes on them, to actually transacting the, uh, the service, um, to operating the infrastructure from that. And then we provide a full set of, uh, services under the cover where a customer doesn't need to worry about the actual infrastructure management. And we provide customer success managers for every account. So we, we are there with you, uh, along every step of the journey to make this as seamless and easy as possible. So it's a fantastic, uh, experience for our customers. And that's, that's one of the things that they really love about the apex is that, um, you know, kind of white glove service that we're providing >>Devin. Great to see you, Devin Marine, senior director of Dell apex offer product management. He's only getting the product to see and congratulatory success, apex cloud services with VMware clouds, the big news here at VMworld with Dell technologies, I'm John furrier cube conversation, breaking it down and bringing the news to you. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat techno music) >> LISA MARTIN: Welcome to today's session of theCubes presentation of the AWS startup showcase, new breakthroughs in DevOps, data analytics, and cloud management tools. This segment features Privacera, and we're going to be talking about data and analytics. I'm Lisa Martin, and today we're joined by Balaji Ganesan the Co-Founder and CEO Privacera. Balaji is going to be talking about accelerating cloud migration and secure self-service analytics with Privacera. Balaji, great to see you again. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Great see you Lisa, and thank you for having me again. >> LISA MARTIN: Our pleasure. Talk to me a little bit about Privacera and specifically what you guys are focused on. >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me start off talking about the problem we are trying to solve. Privacera today is at the intersection of data, data analytics and data governance. And we have seen in the news every time is the use of data in the organizations is increasing and more organizations are becoming data driven. And to solve customer, understand customer more, or to solve supply chain, the use of data is prevalent. And with that, what we are seeing is true data democratization that is happening now in the cloud, where more and more enterprise users are looking for access to the data. And if you look at the world of data teams and IT teams. On one hand, business users are looking for more access to the data, more use cases, more tools, and faster access to the data to drive business decisions, and that's the world they are living in. And every business, every industry is going towards that part. But on the other hand, governance and especially security privacy within has become table stakes, right. Where it's become a board level topic and on especially topics around, how do you get visibility on what data you have? Do you know where your sensitive data is? And making sure you're taking care of all the protections and stipulations around that. But you also have mandates around making sure that people have access to the data only for that purpose, and right people having access to the right data, only the right data and nothing more, is a mandate that is becoming more and more prevalent. Again, driven through privacy regulations and legal mandate. But operationalizing that in the context of data and data democratization is incredibly hard, because these teams are dealing with variety of databases and tools and each have its own way of doing controls. And so if they have a mandate of making sure right people have access to the right data, it's incredibly hard to operationalize that, it's incredibly complex doing manually. And that's the dual mandate we live in today is, on one hand, more users are looking for access to the data, On the other hand, you know, you need to have governance, you need to have guard rails, and how do you balance that out? And for us, it's not a zero sum game and we believe we can balance both, and that's essentially where Privacera comes in, where we are providing a horizontals single pane of glass which helps enterprises to do two major things, right. One is them get visibility, accurately, on what data they have, what is sensitive data and what is not at a pretty fine grain level. And we can leverage that information to build policies and rules in a more unified manner, or on who can access what data, and enforce them across any kind of database or application. And what it helps enterprises to do that is they can deal with this unified layer to get visibility, this deal with this unified layer to manage policies in one place, and they can make sure that these policies are enforced across anywhere that users are accessing data. So in effect, the net result is users can use any tool, any applications to access data. On the other hand, you are governing that, you're governing the access and making sure that people have only access to the data they are supposed to and nothing more. And that is where we are helping those dual mandate coming. >> LISA MARTIN: Talk to me about the timing. Are we at an inflection point? You talked about the data sharing, governance security being a board level conversation, you and I have talked about that before, but also the balancing the need to be able to give the right people access to only the data that they need. Are we at an inflection point in time for Privacera to be able to solve this problem for companies in lots of industries? >> Absolutely. So, if you're taking step back at a macro level, there are a couple of things happening at the macro level, right. Which digitization has become made sure that there's more data than ever than enterprises are sitting in. And the fact that they are now also migrating to the cloud and to the public cloud, which is giving rise to newer architecture, newer way of doing things. And traditionally it used to be the case that you have to make copies of data, and to make it available for different business groups. But now you are at that point where cloud, you definitely don't have to do that, you can make data available in the cloud and run a service on top of it to make data available. And in fact, I'm going to use a use case of Sun Life that are on that that part of it, where Sun Life is a valued customer of us, it's an insurance company and they are in that midst of their journey as well, where they're migrating from on-premise and to cloud, and in this case being AWS. And cloud gives them a lot of flexibility, agility for them to go and accelerate those data initiatives. So at a macro level like Sun Life, digitization has become prominent, and like Sun Life, many other companies are accelerating their cloud migration. But what Sun Life has is, they have to have a lot of mandates built in, in terms of governance and security, being an insurance industry, being dealing with a lot of sensitive data, both which are mandate to have a lot of regulations around it. And Sun Life is global, they are in Canada, they are in US, you have to make sure those are mandates are met then. For the teams which are doing that it's hard to meet that mandate. And how do you balance governance and accelerate cloud migration and use of data? And that's essentially where we are at that inflection point today, where these mandates are coming at cross hairs to each other, right. But companies cannot ignore governance and accelerate cloud migration. On the other hand, they can't just make the data siloed so much that they ignore the use of data part of it. So we are at this interesting inflection point where these drivers are coming in and it crosses each other and it's intersecting at these data teams. We're trying to deal with this dual mandates at the end of the day. And this is exactly what Sun Life was facing, and where they started looking at a solution like Privacera and where we are able to quickly, on the AWS environment, build that unifier layer of access governance, where they can go and manage policies in one place and migrate policies which have been built in the on-premise world to the cloud. And what did help them do that is they were able to build in governance from day one and they were able to quickly get to a faster time to value. It would have taken them in months or maybe a year to get to that stage. They were able to do that in weeks with our tool. And so what we are seeing at this inflection point now is, there are these trends coming at potentially a friction with each other, but it's not a zero sum game, right. It should not be treated as a zero sum game. You can have governance and use of data, and that's essentially where Privacera's mission is. >> LISA MARTIN: Let's talk about digital transformation. You should that great example of Sun Life and the really accelerated time to value that they're getting with Privacera. But if we think about some of the business drivers for data management, modernization, how have they changed and accelerated particularly in the last 18 months? What are some of the business drivers for data management modernization that you see emerging? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Absolutely, Yeah. So, I think what we are seeing is businesses are more hungry for data as, than ever before, and they are not willing to wait for IT teams to complete an infrastructure and a project for many, many years to get access to the data. And cloud makes it possible for them to go and even build tools like Snowflake, for example, where they can quickly go and use that in a SaaS environment and solution without having a dependency, a huge dependency on IT teams. So the world of IT is changing, where business teams can go and gain access to their more modern tools faster than ever before. Infrastructure doesn't have to be built for many, many years before you can realize some of the business initiatives. So cloud is really transforming the agility, the time to value part of it, so what we are seeing that part. From a data management point of view, governance in general, which includes quality, metadata, includes security, privacy, all of this are becoming very, very serious topics, and it's not like they haven't existed before, but given the growth of data you no longer can grow unimpeded, without having those foundational layer of governance. You cannot grow without having your metadata strategy aligned, right. You cannot grow without good quality measures in (indistinct). And security privacy is in that bucket. It used to be the case before that people will do projects and then worry about security. In 2021 that's no longer the case, right. Companies are looking at building these governance mandates upfront, they are thinking about building access governance upfront, building security upfront. Because if you don't do that, if you go and scale in an environment with all those layers, you end up exposing that for risk. But you also have a friction, a friction of not being onboarding more data, because that needs to be compliant as well. So more organizations, more proactive organizations are realizing that they need to be more holistic. They need to put in more governance roadmap very early on in their journey. And that's what Sun Life did, they were very proactive as part of the cloud migration journey, to think about these things upfront and not think of them as an after fact. After fact are something that comes later, most proactive organizations are doing both. >> LISA MARTIN: The need for being able to build things in that print, I'm thinking automation. Talk to me about some of the risks that an enterprise is going to run into if security isn't automated, governance and strategies aren't automated or embedded, as you said upfront. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yep. I think the risk comes up when is in twofold. One is, many companies have started doing manually and manual work and it becomes fairly a complex initiative. And we were talking to one customer where they have started with snowflake, but quickly they ended up having about 2 million policies in snowflake alone, right, it's not they had some more of the other parts. And 2 million policies across various business groups, but if you need to prove right people have access to the right data, it's incredibly hard when you've grown so much inorganically in many, many ways as part of it. And most organizations have realized that that is going to be untenable, right. And because again, going back, they have this dual mandate that they need to meet. So the risks are for companies which don't do it upfront is it becomes a blocker. At some point, governance becomes a blocker of putting even more data in, or more users in because you have to now go and clean up and make sure that again, right people have access to the right data, set those infrastructure in. And that sets back the company away a bit again as part of it. So, we have seen governance becoming a blocker in data initiatives, and we believe that by enabling this upfront, it can be a true enabler, it can be an accelerant in case. And more proactive organizations like Sun Life have realized that part of doing it early enough, setting those foundations early enough helps them being more agile and helps them meet those business objectives faster. >> LISA MARTIN: I can also imagine too, from a liability perspective, the lack of visibility into where sensitive data is stored, how it's used, who can use it, it is a huge risk for any type of organization, right? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Any type of organization. And with what we have seen with privacy regulations now is, privacy impacts any type of organizations which have customer data. And there's more onus now than ever before to go and make sure that you have clear visibility on what is sensitive data, what is personal information and clear protections around that, and make sure it's used for those right purposes. And it has become real, it's become real in every industry. So while it used to be that healthcare industries has certain regulations, or financial industry, would you count those as part of a regulated industries? What privacy regulations have done is now impacting consumer tech companies, .com companies now who have data that they need to be cognizant now of legal and privacy implications upfront. So, there is an incredible amount of risk, as you pointed out, of not taking care of things upfront. And if you outgrow your data initiatives without putting those fundamental layers in you're exposing the risk, and those risks are coming out in recent examples we are seeing in breaches. There are numerous examples of companies which have failed to put in a more comprehensive strategy and that has resulted in, you know, data getting exposed in the cloud, employees who are not supposed to have access to the data or have access to the data and it gets leaked. So it's broader implications. There are implications around security, there's implications around breaches, there are implications are on privacy that we are seeing across the board. >> LISA MARTIN: So let's talk about roles and responsibilities now. If we're talking about data access governance, if it's no longer just exclusively the domain of IT or data governance teams, and it's distributed across these teams, do you think that data governance responsibilities need to be shared responsibilities or de-centralized? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yeah, that's a great question, Lisa, and let's take even Sun Life for example, they are a massive organization, data security organizations, there's compliance teams, and there is data teams. And what most organizations are realizing now at heads, it's untenable, it's not scalable to have one central team being the policeman. It's just not feasible, and it's just not feasible while you can provide mandates. The onus of actually making it happen has to be decentralized and has to be shared across the board with data teams, and data teams have to be trained, have to be enabled to go and share those responsibilities, because you are as good as your weakest link. It doesn't matter if you have a really good mandate at the top, but if there are teams which are doing it more open and don't have those controls built in, the organizations is exposed. And so what organizations, or the most modern organizations are realizing that security governance cannot be always top-down. You can provide a mandate, you can have a central team do that, but it's not feasible for that team to police the entire organization, and you don't want to do that. You don't want to police everybody. You want to encourage people to do the right thing. So the onus and responsibility needs to be distributed apart. And that includes people, that includes processes, that includes technology that needs to come in. And most modern organizations are going towards that world, where they're thinking about your data is distributed everywhere, your business teams are accessing data in their own world, how do you in-build governance into that part? And we are seeing this notion of data mesh coming up more and more in organizations, which is driving the need for my data is distributed, business teams have their own ownership of data, how do you make sure you have a (indistinct) of strategy around leveraging data and analytics around it without the need for data to be copied all into one place and one team doing that. And the connotation of data mesh is coming up more and more, and to realize, the organizations are realizing it's just not feasible for one team to drive all their data initiatives, but they also realizing that governance and security falls in the same boat, right. So you cannot have governance being driven by a governance team and police the entire organization. Your data is going to be used where it is store, business teams are going to be doing on their own. But how do you enable those governance in those shared paradigm is the next evolution of that, and some more organizations are doing that already. >> LISA MARTIN: Let's talk about data sharing, internal data sharing within organizations, having the ownership, the governance, not just sharing it internally within organizations, but across organizations. What are some of the business needs that you guys are seeing in the market? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yes. So going back to the old business strategy is making sure that organizations can leverage data for driving business agility. So data is not a domain for a specific business groups, but organization how they can break down silos, which are existing in the past and leverage data to the maximum value for the organization. So, if you have a marketing team owning marketing data, can this marketing data be accessed by supply chain teams? Or to get some inputs on customers and how they are behaving? So, it doesn't have a lot of value if marketing team holds that data on its own and leverages that. So organizations are trying, chief data officers, one of the biggest things they are trying to do is, how do you break those silos in and make it a more, a common paradigm? Which means that you need to start sharing data. You may, again, in the data governance paradigm or data mesh paradigm, business owners can still own the data and the marketing team can still own the data, but how can you share the data and make sure, again, governance is maintained? You don't want to go and have a very open sharing mechanism that everybody has access to it. You want to do it in a way that only right people have access to the right data for right purpose. So how do you share that data internally? And then it's the extension of that is organizations want to share data across organizations, whether you're in a healthcare industry, whether you are in consumer tech, and that can drive more business value as part of it. But it's the same paradigm. You don't want to share everything. You want to maintain your IP, you want to maintain the compliance, but how do you leverage the data and unblock those silos? And so, again, going back, the paradigm we live in is how organizations can balance both? How you can share data, break down those silos, but how do you bring governance in and security in? That's the interesting paradigm we live in today. >> LISA MARTIN: That external data sharing, something that you brought up is interesting. If that's not governed secured, I imagine huge challenges and risks for organizations. How does Privacera help with that and some of the other AWS partners in that external data sharing, making sure it's done safely and secure? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yes, absolutely. And so one of the paradigms, again, our mission for us is, how can help organizations in this dual mandate of sharing data, but preserving compliance, security and privacy within that part of it? What we are doing is we are taking our notch into these controls into the next level of governance, right. So we are providing tools to make it very easy for enterprises to share data internally, as well as externally, without the need for writing a lot of policies as part of it. The traditional paradigm has to be that if you need to share data, you have to go and write a rule and a policy, in every layer of the data exist as part of it. What we are doing is we are abstracting that, and we are providing a very easy mechanism. You'll see more announcements coming up in the next few months around our data sharing paradigm is, can you just make it easy for people to share data on few clicks without the need for writing rules and policies and knowing a lot about underlying databases? And we take all that complexity and we translate that complexity internally. So what we are doing is making it for an organization to share in few clicks a data, a marketing team to share data based on a business purpose, and have time limits around it, have governance around it, but not needing for the marketing team to go and hire somebody to understand and write a policies around that. So removing that friction, part of it, removing those complexity and going back to the role of providing that governance layer of sharing, and it applies to both internal and external sharing, again. Behind the scenes we are leveraging the power of the underlying data platforms. We are leveraging the power of what AWS provides. We have deep integrations with things like Lake Formation and other things which are providing more deeper controls, but those complexities are abstracted for the user, they don't have to understand all of those nuances. They have to simply go and say, I want to share this data with X user. Do I want to do it or not, and if I do it for what purposes? And that's it. And just making that easy enough while taking all the complexity away is what we're doing. Again, going back to the goal. We want users to share data, we want users to leverage data, not be a zero sum game. But how they can do that without the need for hiring, understanding a lot of complexity. With taking over the complexity, what we are seeing that it makes it easier, it's an accelerant, it's a faster time to value. >> LISA MARTIN: Faster time to value also by abstracting the complexities, removing the friction, you probably make workforce productivity and collaboration and partnerships even more valuable. One of the things last question that I wanted to bring up is a marketing term that is one that I, kind of like fingernails on a chalkboard, for me as a marketer it's feature proofing. You know, as we've seen in the last year and a half, there was a a lot of us, a lot of industries that weren't future ready when the pandemic struck. When Privacera thinks of making enterprises ready for the future, as data volumes continue to expand and grow as does sources of data, what is future-proofing for your enterprise customers? What does that mean to you? >> BALAJI GANESAN: Yeah, that's a great question, because we have these conversations with CIOs and Chief Data Officers, and you always look in the prism of not just what organizations are doing today, but what are they going to do three years, five years down the line? And the trends I've talked about in before, the digitization, the public cloud, these are long-term trends, these are happening across the organization. So most organizations, like Sun Life, have data in the cloud. They continue to have data on-premise and they potentially tomorrow can be multicloud as well. And if you look at what is going to happen in the next three, five years is data use is going to accelerate, cloud migration is going to accelerate, users, companies are going to be in hybrid cloud and multicloud, but governance privacy is becoming even more stringent. So the trends are secular trends that are going accelerating. And so what we are doing is not a short term, it's built for the medium and the long-term part of it. And our solution, what we are doing is by abstracting out the complexity, we are also making it easier for organizations to scale. They are not dependent on one platform or a solution. They are dealing at a higher governance level, and we have abstracted out the complexity and dependency with a specific platform. So tomorrow they can switch that and put something else in. They don't have to reinvent those policies. They don't have to reinvent the data sharing paradigm, right. And by abstracting that we are future proofing and in terms of how their data strategy is going to be, and that's the value that we simply add, we can provide. And that's the value that we are providing is you don't have to change your governance when you're changing your data platforms. You don't have to change your governance based on what cloud you are choosing, your governance needs to be stuck, all right. Your governance needs to be strategic, your platforms can change. Privacera is in that, is that glue which is enabling you to have a cohesive long-term strategy, but that is scalable, not just today, but tomorrow in the multicloud and hybrid cloud world. >> LISA MARTIN: Got it, Privacera that glue. Point the audience audience, Balaji, as we wrap things up here, to where they can go to learn more about Privacera, what you guys are able to do, and maybe even find that Sun Life case study. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Absolutely. Bulk of the information is available in privacera.com and so you can go and find us and we'll make those case studies and videos available as well. If you have any questions you can drop a note privacera.com or reach out to any of our account representative. >> LISA MARTIN: And hopefully we'll see you at re:Invent in person, crossing fingers. >> BALAJI GANESAN: Absolutely, looking forward to that. And really looking forward to a world where we can see each other in person and in the conference and in the community together again. So we are really looking forward to that. And we are planning big time to be an active participant in that. >> LISA MARTIN: Excellent, I look forward to that. For Balaji Ganesan, I am Lisa Martin. This has been part of our coverage of the AWS startup showcase new breakthroughs in DevOps, data analytics and cloud management tools. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin; I am joined by the CEO and co-founder of Privacera, Balaji Ganesan. Balaji, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Great to great to see you, Lisa. Good to see you again, and thanks for the opportunity. >> So tell our audience about Privacera. How do you help balance data security, data sharing? >> Absolutely. At Privacera we are on a mission to help enterprises unlock their data, but do it in a secure and a compliant way. We are in this balance between, we call it a dual mandate, where we see enterprise data teams, on one hand, they are being asked to democratize data and make this data available to all parts of the organization. So everybody in the organization is looking forward to get access to the data faster. On the other hand, governance, privacy, and compliance mandates have become more stringent. And it has come from regulations such as GDPR or California Privacy, but in general, the environment and the culture has changed where, from a board level, there's more owners who are making sure that you have visibility on what data you're bringing in, but also make sure that right people have access to the right data. And that notion is no longer in textbooks or in books, right? It's being actually, an onus is on making it happen. And it's really hard for these data teams do that, as the platforms are very diverse. And again, driven by data democratization today, companies are running very diverse platforms. Even in a single cloud like AWS, they have choices between Snowflake or Databricks and Amazon's native tools and other other services, which are really cropping up and being available in the cloud. But if you need to make sure right people have access to the right data, in that paradigm it's really, really hard. And this is where a tool like Privacera comes in, where we can help them get visibility on their data, but also make sure that we can help them with building a unified layer where they can start managing these tools more cohesively. And the end result is they can get access to the data faster, but you're compliant, you're governed, and you have visibility around who's doing what. And that's the big enabler in their data strategy. >> So, we talk about the need for data monetization, for organizations to be able to give enterprise-wide access across business units, to identify new sources of revenue and new opportunities. That's a big challenge to do. You mentioned the security and governance front at the board level. I imagined that the data-sharing is as well. How are you helping customers navigate multiple platforms, multiple clouds, to be able to get access that is actually secure, that the CEO can go back to the board and say we've got everything, you know, all I's dotted and T's crossed here? >> Absolutely, absolutely. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have the CIOs face today, is on one hand, they have to be agile to the business and make sure that they're present in the cloud, but they are enabling multiple services that the business needs for agility. And data is being one of the business drivers today, And most companies are becoming data companies. And it is to make decisions to serve your customer better, bring more revenue, cut costs. Even in the midst of COVID, we have seen our customers go in and leverage data to find out how they can shift to a different paradigm of doing business. Now, we had a customer which was primarily in retail stores, but they had to go and shift and analyze data on how they can pivot into a more online world in the COVID paradigm, how they can make supply chain decisions faster. So every company is becoming a data-driven business. The data is becoming the currency. So more units want faster access to the data as possible. But on the other hand, you cannot forget about governance. You can not forget about security, it's becoming a table stakes as part of it. And traditionally, this has been a zero-sum game, where, you know, in order to maintain more security, you cannot give more access to the data or you will make copies of the data, and that creates redundancy. The newer paradigm, in our belief, is that you can do both. And that's how Privacera has built toward. And this is how we are helping our customers in their journey where, you know, if you take Comcast, for example, they're building a massive infrastructure on top of AWS to serve the digital analytics part of it. And they are collecting a lot of data and making decisions based on that. But on the other hand, in order for them to achieve compliance and privacy, there needs to be an approach, a more unified layer, which is not innovating from using the data. And this is where a solution like Privacera is coming in, where we have built an approach, we have built an architecture, where they can enable governance and policies, and these policies are being implemented across the data infrastructure. So it doesn't matter which application you use, where you're coming from, you're governed by the same rules and policies. And that uniformity, that consistency is something we can bring in, of being in horizontal layer and having built those integrations, prebuilt those integrations in. So with Comcast, what the end result they're saying is they can be faster to the market, right? Before us, they would be spending a lot of time with manual processes to build that governance. But with an automated layer, with an automated governance, which has prebuilt integrations into all the layers, they are now able to go to market faster, but now they're going into the market with the governance and the compliance built in, so they can have both. So again, our belief is it's not zero-sum. Your governance, security can be built in with this business agility. And we are helping customers do that. >> You mentioned that retail customer and COVID-19, and we saw a massive pivot about a year and a half ago. And some companies did a great job of pivoting from brick and mortar to curbside delivery, for example, which is table stakes. But we saw so much acceleration of digital transformation last year. How has COVID-19 impacted governance? And what are some of the things that you're helping customers achieve there as they're accelerating their digital journeys? >> Again, going back to the drivers, we are seeing our customers, right? So on one hand, digitization and cloud journey, that accelerated during COVID right? So more companies where they were doing their cloud journey, they accelerated, because they can unlock data faster. And, to my earlier examples, they want to make decisions, leveraging data. And COVID brought that, even accelerated some of these initiatives. So there has been more data initiatives than before. Digitalization has accelerated; cloud migration has accelerated. But COVID also brought in the fact that you are not physically located. You can't sit in a room and trust each other and say, "I trust all of you and I'll give you all equal access." You are now sitting in disparate locations, without the traditional securities you would have, a physical boundary, having that. You're now remote. All of a sudden, the CIOs have to think how we can be more agile? How do you build in security, governance in that layer where you have to think start from bottom staff and then say, are you governing and protecting your data wherever it is stored and being accessed, Rather than relying on perimeter or relying on a physical boundary or being in a physical location. So those traditional paradigms are getting shattered. And most companies have recognized, most forward-looking companies, are recognizing that. They accelerated those trends. And from what we have seen from our point of view is we are able to help in that transformation, both in enabling companies to become digital and democratize data faster, but also building this bottom-up layer where they can be sure that they have visibility on what data they have, but also making sure right people have access to the right data, irrespective of what tool they use, irrespective of where they are set, they're always getting that part of it. And that's a sea change we are seeing in the companies now. So COVID in our industry, in our world, has brought in massive transformation and massive opportunities to set a new paradigm for how organizations treat governance, as well as the data initiative. >> A lot of change that it's brought. Some good, as you've mentioned. Talk to me about, so Privacera is built on Apache Ranger; how are you guys helping AWS customers from a cloud migration perspective? Because we know cloud migration is continuing to accelerate. >> Our foundation, given our work in open source, has always been building around open standards and interoperability, and we believe an enterprise solution needs to be built around these standards that we can talk to. You're not the only solution that enterprises will have. There needs to be interoperability, especially around governance and where we exchanging information, and with other tools. And given a legacy of Ranger, it helps us build those standards. And Ranger as a project today is supported from the likes of Cloudera or in the cloud, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, and most of the forward-looking standards and tools, like Presto and Spark. It has been a de facto standard used by some of these analytical engines. The wide adoption around that, and being built on Ranger gives us that standard of interoperability. So when we go and work with other tools, it makes it easier for us to talk. It makes it easier for organizations to transition in their cloud journey, where they can now very easily move the governance and policies of, even if they are running Ranger on premise, they can easily move those standards, those policies, easily into the cloud. For example, with Sun Life, it was the same case, where they built a lot of these rules and policies in their on-premise environment. Being an insurance company, they always had governance and compliance at top of their mind. Very strict rules around who can access what data and what portions of data, because this data is governed by federal laws, by a lot of the industry laws and mandates and compliance. And they always had this notion in on-premise. Now when they're migrating to the cloud, one of the bottlenecks is how do you move this governance and do you have to build it from scratch? But with our tool and the standards we have built in, we can migrate that in days rather than months. So for them, we help in the overall cloud migration. To my earlier point, we are helping customers achieve faster time to market by enabling this governance and making it easier. And by having this open standard, it makes it easier for customers to migrate and then cooperate, rather than having to build it again, having to reinvent the wheel when they migrate to the cloud. Because, the governance and compliance mandates are not changing when you go from prem to cloud. In fact cloud, in some cases, it's more diverse. So by helping organizations do that, we are helping them achieve a faster acceleration, which is the case happened in Sun Life. >> That time to market is absolutely imperative. If anything, we've learned in the last 18 months, it's businesses that needed to pivot overnight multiple times. And they need to be able to get to market faster, whether it's pivoting from being a brick and mortar, to being able to deliver a curbside delivery. The time to market, people don't have that time, regardless of industry, because there's competitors in the rear-view mirror who might be smaller, more agile, and able to get to market faster. So these bigger companies, and any company, needs to have a faster time to market. >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we are seeing. And that's big driver for journey into the cloud is to bring that agility. In the earlier paradigm, you're going to have a monolithical technology standard, and you can adopt changes faster when you are reliant on the IT team. What cloud brings in is, you can now move data into the cloud and enable any service and any team faster than ever before. You can enable a team on Snowflake, you can enable a team on a different machine learning tool, all having access to the same data, without it being the need for the data to be copied and servers built out. The cloud is really bringing that digital transformation, but it's also bringing in the agility of being faster and nimble and as part of it. But the challenge for cloud is it's happening at the same time governance, privacy has become real. And organizations no longer can be assuming that, you know, they can just move data into the cloud and be done with it. You have to really think about all layers of the cloud and say, how do you make sure that data is protected on all layers, in all consumption? How do you make sure that right people have access to the right data? And that's a much comprehensive problem, given the world that we are now not sitting in a physical office anymore, we are distributed. How do you do that? So while cloud brings that business agility, it's also happening, not because of cloud, but because of the climate we are in, that governance and compliance is real. And most forward-looking organizations are thinking about how they can build a foundation that can handle both. How they can build, institutionalize these governance frameworks in the newer paradigms of cloud. We are seeing the companies implementing what is called a data mesh, which is essentially a concept of how the data could be decentralized and owned by business owners and teams. But how do you bring governance in that? How do you make sure that a layer of that, and then a newer paradigm most forward-looking organizations are adopting is, governance doesn't need to be managed by one team. It can be a distributed function. But can you institutionalize a foundation or a framework, and you have pools which can be used by different teams. So they are bound by the same rules, but they're operating in their own independent way. And that's the future for us, is how the organizations can figure out how in the cloud, they can have a more distributed, delegated, decentralized governance that aligns with their business strategy of self-service analytics and use of data across multiple teams, but all bound by the same framework, all bound by common rules so that you're not building your own; the tools and the methods are all common, but each team is able to operate independently. And that's where the agility, true agility, will come in, when organizations are able to do that. And I think we are in probably step one or two of the journey. It's fascinating to see some of the organizations take leaps in that. But for us, the future is how if some organizations can build those foundations in from processes and people, they can truly unlock the power of the cloud. >> You brought in technology and people; last question is, how do you advise customers when you're in conversations? We talked about data access, governance, security, being a board-level conversation, the ability for an organization to monetize their data; but how do you talk about that balance when you're with customers? That's a tricky line. >> And what we say to the customer, it's a journey. You don't have to think of solving this on day one. What we really think about is foundational steps you need to do to achieve that journey. And what are the steps you can do today? And add onto it, rather than trying to solve for everything on day one. And that's what most of the focus areas goes in, is how we can help our customers put together a program which achieves both their data strategy and aligns their governance with it. And most forward-looking organizations are already doing that, where they have a multi-year journey that they're already working on. They are thinking about some of the things that we help with. And in some cases, when organizations are not thinking about it, we come and help and advise with that. Our advice always is, start thinking about today and what your next two or three years is going to look like. We put together a program. And that involves tools, that involves people, and that involves organization structure. And we are a cog in the wheel, but we also recommend them to look at, holistically, all the aspects. And that's our job at the end of the day as vendors in this industry, to help collectively learn from customers what we are learning and can help the next set of customers coming. But we believe, again, going back to my point, if organizations are able to set up this paradigm where they're able to set structures, where they can delegate governance, but they build those common rules and frameworks upfront, they are set up to succeed in the future. They can be more agile than their competitors. >> And that is absolutely table stakes these days. Balaji, thank you so much for joining, telling our audience about Privacera, what you're doing, how you're helping customers, particularly AWS customers, migrate to the cloud in such a dynamic environment. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you and I appreciate it. >> Likewise. For Balaji Ganesan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (upbeat music)

>>the idea of cloud is changing from a set of remote services somewhere out there in the cloud to an operating model that supports workloads on prem across clouds and increasingly at the near and far edge moreover, workloads are evolving from a predominance of general purpose systems to increasingly data intensive applications, developers are a new breed of innovators and kubernetes is a linchpin of creating new cloud native workloads that are in the cloud but also modernizing existing application portfolios to connect them to cloud native apps. Hello, we want to welcome back to HPD discovered 2021 the cubes ongoing coverage. This is Dave Volonte and with me are scott. Buchanan is the vice president of marketing at VM ware and Toby Weiss, who is the vice president of global hybrid cloud practice at HP gents. Welcome to the Q. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Day agreed to be here. >>Okay, thanks for having >>us. So you heard my little narrative upfront. Um and so let's get into it. I want to start with with some of the key trends that you guys see in the marketplace and maybe scott you could kick us off from VM ware's perspective. What are you seeing that's really driving? Uh I. T. Today. >>Well, Dave you started with a conversation around cloud, right, and you can't really have a conversation around cloud without also talking about applications. And so much of the interaction that we're having with customers these days is about how we bring apps and clouds together and modernize across those two dimensions at the same time. And that's a pretty complex discussion to have and it's a complex journey to navigate. And so we're here to talk to customers and to work with h Pe to help our customers across those two dimensions. >>Great, so Toby I mean, it's always been about applications, as scott said, but but the application, the nature of applications is changing how we develop applications. The mentioned it sort of data intensive applications were injecting ai into virtually everything the apps, the process, the the people even um uh from a from the perspective of really a company that supports applications with infrastructure, what are you seeing in the marketplace? What can you add to that discussion? >>Yes. Great point. Dave you know, with the scent with applications becoming more central, think about what that means uh and has been for developer communities and developers becoming uh more important customers for I. T. Uh We have to make it easier for these developers uh to speed their innovations to market. Right? The business demands newer and faster capabilities of these applications. So our job in the infrastructure and was called the platform layer is to help we need to build these kinds of platforms that allow developers to innovate more quickly. >>So we talked earlier about sort of modernizing apps. I mean, it seems to me that the starting point there is you want to containerized and obviously kubernetes is the, is the key there, But so okay, so if that's the starting point, where is the journey, what does that look like? Maybe scott you could chime in there >>Sure. A couple of quick thoughts there, Dave and Toby to build on first is if you look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Landscape today, what you can do at landscape dot c n c f dot io Holy Smokes, is that a jungle? So a lot of organizations need a guide through that CN cf landscape, they need a partner that they can trust to show them the way through that landscape. And then secondly, there needs to be ways to make these technologies easier to adopt and to use in practice, kubernetes being the ultimate example of that. And so we've been hard at work to try and make it easy and natural to make kubernetes part of one's existing infrastructure, so that building with and working with containers can be done on the same platform that you're using for virtual machines. >>So let's talk a little bit about cloud. Um and how you guys are thinking about cloud, remember told me that Back in VM World 2010, it was the very first vm world for the Cube. All we talked about was a cloud, but it was a private cloud, was really what we were talking about, which at the time largely met the virtualized data center. Um it was kind of before the software defined data center and today we're still talking about cloud, but it's it's hybrid cloud. It's kind of the narrative that I set up front data center. It's become for the most part software to find. And so how do you see this changing the I. T. Operating model? >>I think it's a great question. And look today you will see us talk a lot about this notion of cloud everywhere. So less differentiation about private and public and more about the experience of cloud. Right. Public. Cloud brought great innovations and what better than to bring those innovations to on premise workloads that we have chosen to operate and work there. So as we think about cloud more as an experience we want for our developers and our end users and our I. T. Organizations. We begin to think about how can we replicate that experience in an on premise environment. And so part of that is having the technologies that enable you to do that. The other part is um we most of us have evolved right the organization operating models to operate our cloud infrastructures off premises. Well now expanding that more holistically across our organization so we don't have to operating models but a single operating model that bridges both and and brings the ability of both of those together to get the most benefit as we really become to integrate and become truly hybrid in our organization. So I think the operating model is critical and the kinds of experiences we deliver to the users of that I. T. Uh infrastructure and operating model is critical as well. >>Are you guys are both basically in the infrastructure business but scott maybe we can start with you. There's a lot of changes that we're talking about in it. Generally the data center specifically especially big changes in workloads, with a lot more data intensive apps ai being injected into everything kubernetes, making things more fassel. And in many ways it simplifies things, but it also puts stress on the system because you've got to protect this. They they're no longer stateless apps right there, state full and you gotta protect them and and so they've got to be compliant. Um now you've got the edge coming in. Uh So my question is, what does infrastructure have to do to keep pace with all this application innovation? >>Uh one of the conversations that we are having increasingly with our customers is how can they embrace a dev sec ops mindset in their organization and adopt some of these more modern patterns and practices and make sure that security is embedded in the life cycle of the container. And and so I think that this is part of, the answer is equipping the operator through infrastructure to set guard rails in place so that the development organization can work with freedom inside of those guard rails. They can draw on a catalogs of curated container. Images, catalogs of apps start from templates. Those are the building blocks that allow developers to work faster and that allow an operator to ensure the integrity and compliance of the containers and the applications of the organizations building. >>Yeah, So, so that's kind of uh when I hear scott talked about that Toby I think infrastructure as code designing security and governance in right? We always we always said I was an afterthought. We kind of bolted it on second. The security team had to take care of that. This is always the same thing with backup. Right? So we got an app. It's all ready to go. How do we back it up? And so that's changing that whole notion of, of infrastructure as code. Um, I want to talk about Green lake in a minute, but, but before we get there, I wonder if you could talk about how HP E thinks about VM ware and how you guys are partnering. I'm specifically interested and where each of you sees the value that you bring to the table for your joint customers. >>Yeah, great question. You know, and, and starting to think about history like you did 2010 being the start of a cube journey. I, I remember in 2003 when we first partnered with VM ware in the very first data center consolidations and we built practices around this has been quite a long partnership with VM ware and I'm excited to see this. This partnership evolved today, especially into this cloud native space and direction. Uh It's critical we need you know uh you know customers have choices and we need great partners like VM ware uh to help satisfy the many different use cases and choices that our customers have. So while we bring you know good depth when it comes to building these infrastructures that become highly automated uh managed in some cases and consumable like on a consumption basis and automated like we help clients automate their ci Cd pipeline. We depend on technologies and partners like them where to make these outcomes real for our customers. >>Yeah I think there's a way to connect a couple of the points that we've been talking about today. Got some data from a state of kubernetes study that we just ran And this is 350. IT. decision makers who said uh that they're running kubernetes on premise, 55% of respondents are running kubernetes on premise today. And so Vm ware and HP gets worked together to bring kubernetes to those enterprises, 96% of them said that they're having a challenge selecting the right kubernetes distribution, 60 of them in that C. N. C. F. Landscape and the # one criteria that they're going to use to choose the right distribution uh set them on a path forward is that it's easy to deploy and to operate and to maintain in production. And so I think that this is where VM ware and HP get to come together to help try and keep things as simple as possible for customers as they navigate. A fairly complex world. >>That's interesting scott. So who are those um those on prem users of containers and kubernetes? Is it the is it the head of you know the the application team and an insurance company whose kind of maintaining the claims about? Is it is a guy's building new cloud native apps to help companies get digital first. Who are those, What's the persona look like >>in our conversations? You know, this is the infrastructure and operations team seen that there's energy around kubernetes and maybe there's some use in test and development and parts of the organization. And by centralizing over ownership of that kubernetes footprint, they can ensure that it's compliant if policy is set properly to your point earlier that it's meets the security standards for the organization. And so it's increasingly that SRE or site reliability engineer or platform operator who's taking ownership of that kubernetes footprint for the organization to ensure that consistency of management and experience for the development teams across the larger organs. Toby, is that what you're seeing? >>2? We see uh we see quite a few we engage with quite a few developer teams in business leads that have ambitions to speed their application development processes And uh you know, they want help and often, as I stated, the intro, they might be coming off of a much older deployment uh maybe from 2015 where there there were an early adopter of a container platform methodology and wanting to get to some newer platform or they they may be in charge of getting a mobile banking application and its features to market much more quickly. So and often when we get a quote maybe from a client and might come from, you know, the VP of a business unit. But often as we engage, it's, you know, the developers are pretty much our customers and their developer leaders and teams, >>so you're running into container technical debt. Already you're seeing that out there. It sounds like your legacy >>container. It takes some expertise to, to come off those older. You know, the first instance creations of these container platforms were pretty much open source and yeah, you want to bring it to something that's more modern and has the kinds of features, enterprise grade features you might need. >>So is it not so problematic for for customers? Because as I said before, a lot of those apps were sort of disposable and stateless and, and, and now they're saying, hey, we can actually use kubernetes to build, you know, mission critical apps. And so there, that's when they sort of decide to pivot to a new modern platform or is there a more complex migration involved? What are you seeing? >>Okay, I'll give my hot, take your Toby and then uh, ask you for yours. But I guess, uh, I feel like the conversations that I'm involved in with customers is, you know, always begins with their broader application portfolio. These enterprises have hundreds thousands of applications and job one is to figure out how to categorize them into those which need to be re hosted or platform or re factored or reimagined entirely. And so they're looking for help figuring out how to categorize those applications and ultimately how to attack each category of application. Some should be re platforms on environments that make best use of kubernetes, some need to be re factored, some need to be reimagined. And so they are again looking for that expert guide to show them the way >>right. And when we engage in those early discussions, we call it right Mix advisory. Um, you know, you're trying to take a full, a broad scope as you said, scott down to a few and uh you know determine kind of the first movers if you will also you know clients will engage you know for very specific applications that are or suite of applications. Again like mobile applications for banking. I think you're a good example because you know they have an ambition. I mean the leader of that kind of application may very well think that is the mission critical application for the company, right? But of course finance, they have a different point of view. So you know that that application to them is the center of their business getting you know, their customer access to the core banking features that they have and you know they want to zero in on the kind of ecosystem it takes in in the speed at which they can push new features through. So we see both as well um you know the broader scope application, weaning down to the few discovery application, uh and then of course a very focused effort to help a particular business unit speed development on their mobile app, for example, >>it's interesting scott you were talking about sort of, the conversation starts with the application portfolio and there have been there have been these sort of milestones around, you know, major application portfolio, I'll call him rationalizations, I mean there's always an ongoing, but y two K was one of those, this is sort of the big move to SAS was another one, obviously cloud and it feels like kubernetes, I mean it's like the cloud to Dato coming on. Prem is another one of those opportunities to rationalize applications. We all know the stats right, we always see 85% of the spend is to keep the lights on and the other the only small portion of innovation and you know, there's always a promise we can change that. It reminds me of the heavy year, I would go to the boston marathon, it was this guy would run and he had a hat on with the extension and it was a can of Budweiser way out there and he couldn't reach it and so he would run. It was almost the same thing here is they never get there because they have so many projects coming online and the project portfolio and and then and then the C I O has got to maintain those in the application heads and so it's this this ongoing thing. But you do see spikes in rationalization initiatives and it feels like with this push to modernization and digitization maybe the pandemic accelerated that too. Is that a reasonable premise? You're seeing sort of a milestone or a marker in terms of increased effort around rationalization and modernization today because of kubernetes? >>Yeah, I definitely think that there are a couple of kubernetes is a catalyzing technology and the challenges of the pandemic or a catalyzing moment. Right. And I feel like uh Organisations have seen over the past 18 months now that those enterprises that have a way to get innovation to market to customers faster, not once a quarter, but many times a day, are the ones that are separating themselves in competitive marketplaces and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences. So it comes back to some of the ideas full circle that Toby started with around delivering a superior developer experience so that those developers can get code to production and into the hands of customers on a much more rapid basis. Like that's the outcome that enterprises really care about at the end of the day. And kubernetes is part of the way to get there, but it's the outcome that's key. Great thank >>you. And one of our practices dave there was uh you know, that's been our bread and butter for so many years. This, you know, this broad based discovery, narrowing down to a strategy and a plan for migrating and moving certain workloads. We see a slight twist today in that clients and organizations want to move quicker too. The apps, they know that, you know, they want to focus on, they want to prove it by through the broad based discovery and kind of a strategic analysis but they want to get quicker right away to the workloads. They are quite sure that need re factoring or leverage the benefit of a modern developer environment. >>Yeah. And they don't want to be messing around with the provisioning, lungs and servers and all that stuff. They want that to be simplified. So we're gonna end on Green Lake and I want to understand how you guys are thinking about Green Lake in terms of your partnership and, and how you're working together, you know, maybe Toby you could sort of give us the update from your perspective, you can't have a conversation with HP today without talking about Green Lake. So give us the kool aid injection. And then I really interested in how VM ware thinks about participating in that. >>Absolutely. And, and thank you for uh, yeah, for helping us out here. You know, I see more and more of our engagements with clients that ask for and, and, and want to sign a Green Life based contract, >>but, >>and that is one very important foundational element. Uh and there's there's so much more because remember we talked about the cloud experience in cloud everywhere and Green Lake brings us an opportunity to bring dimensions to that, especially on the consumption model because that's that's an important element if we begin adding partners such as VM ware to this equation, especially for clients that have huge investments in VM where there's an opportunity here to really bring a lot of value with this cloud experience to our customers through this partnership. >>All right scott, we're gonna give you the last word. What's your take on this? >>Hey listen hard for me to to to add much to what Toby said, he nailed that you see a ton of energy in this space. I think we've covered a bunch of key topics today. Their ongoing conversations with our customers in Green Lake is a way to take that conversation to the next level. >>Guys really appreciate you coming on and give us your perspectives on kubernetes and and and and thank you scott for that data. 55% of I. T. Decision makers out of 350 said they're doing on prem kubernetes. That's a new stat. I hadn't I would have expected to be that high but I guess I'm not surprised it's the rage the developers want the latest and greatest guys. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and I appreciate you coming on the cube. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thanks Dave. >>Thank you for watching the cubes ongoing coverage. Hp es discover 2021. The virtual version will be right back.

>>the idea of cloud is changing from a set of remote services somewhere out there in the cloud to an operating model that supports workloads on prem across clouds and increasingly at the near and far edge moreover, workloads are evolving from a predominance of general purpose systems to increasingly data intensive applications, developers are a new breed of innovators and kubernetes is a linchpin of creating new cloud native workloads that are in the cloud but also modernizing existing application portfolios to connect them to cloud native apps. Hello, we want to welcome back to HPD discovered 2021 the cubes ongoing coverage. This is Dave Volonte and with me are scott. Buchanan is the vice president of marketing at VM ware and Toby Weiss, who is the vice president of global hybrid cloud practice at HP gents. Welcome to the Q. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Day agreed to be here. >>Okay, thanks for having >>us. So you heard my little narrative upfront. Um and so let's get into it. I want to start with with some of the key trends that you guys see in the marketplace and maybe scott you could kick us off from VM ware's perspective. What are you seeing that's really driving? Uh I. T. Today. >>Well, Dave you started with a conversation around cloud, right, and you can't really have a conversation around cloud without also talking about applications. And so much of the interaction that we're having with customers these days is about how we bring apps and clouds together and modernize across those two dimensions at the same time. And that's a pretty complex discussion to have and it's a complex journey to navigate. And so we're here to talk to customers and to work with h Pe to help our customers across those two dimensions. >>Great, so Toby I mean, it's always been about applications, as scott said, but but the application, the nature of applications is changing how we develop applications. The mentioned it sort of data intensive applications were injecting ai uh into virtually everything the apps, the process, the people even um uh from a from the perspective of really a company that supports applications with infrastructure, what are you seeing in the marketplace? What can you add to that discussion? >>Yes. Great point. Dave you know, with the scent with applications becoming more central, think about what that means uh and has been for developer communities and developers becoming uh more important customers for I. T. Uh We have to make it easier for these developers uh to speed their innovations to market. Right? The business demands newer and faster capabilities of these applications. So our job in the infrastructure and uh it was called the platform layer is to help we need to build these kinds of platforms that allow developers to innovate more quickly. >>So we talked earlier about sort of modernizing apps. I mean, it seems to me that the starting point there is you want to containerized and obviously kubernetes is the, is the key there, but so okay, so if that's the starting point, where's the journey, what does that look like? Maybe scott you could chime in there >>Sure. A couple of quick thoughts there, dave and Toby to build on first, is if you look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Landscape today, which you can do at landscape dot c n c f dot io Holy Smokes, is that a jungle? So a lot of organizations need a guide through that CN cf landscape, they need a partner that they can trust to show them the way through that landscape. And then secondly, there needs to be ways to make these technologies easier to adopt and to use in practice kubernetes being the ultimate example of that. And so we've been hard at work to try and make it easy and natural to make kubernetes Part of 1's existing infrastructure. So that building with and working with containers can be done on the same platform that you're using for virtual machines. >>So let's let's talk a little bit about cloud and how you guys are thinking about cloud. Remember told me that Back in VM World 2010, it was the very first vm world for the Cube. All we talked about was a cloud, but it was a private cloud was really what we were talking about, which at the time largely met the virtualized data center. Um it was kind of before the software defined data center and today we're still talking about cloud, but it's it's hybrid cloud, it's kind of the narrative that I set up front data center. It's become for the most part software to find. And so how do you see this changing the I. T. Operating model? >>I think it's a great question. And and look today you will see us talk a lot about this notion of cloud everywhere. So less differentiation about private and public and more about the experience of cloud. Right public. Cloud brought great innovations and what better than to bring those innovations to on premise workloads that we've chosen to operate and work there. So as we think about cloud more as an experience we want for our developers and our end users and our I. T. Organizations. We begin to think about how can we replicate that experience in an on premise environment. And so part of that is having the technologies that enable you to do that. The other part is um We most of us have evolved alrighty organization operating models to operate our cloud infrastructures off premises. Well now expanding that more holistically across our organization so we don't have to operating models but a single operating model that bridges both and brings the ability of both those together to get the most benefit as we really become to integrate and become truly hybrid in our organization. So I think the operating model is critical and um the kinds of experiences we deliver to the users of that I. T. Uh infrastructure and operating model is critical as well. >>Are you guys are both basically in the infrastructure business scott? Maybe we can start with you there's a lot of changes that we're talking about in it. Generally the data center specifically especially big changes in workloads with a lot more data intensive apps ai being injected into everything Kubernetes, making things more facile. And in many ways it simplifies things, but it also puts stress on the system because you've got to protect this, they're no longer stateless apps right there, state full and you gotta protect them and and so they've got to be compliant. Um Now you've got the edge coming in. Uh So my question is, what does infrastructure have to do to keep pace with all this application innovation? >>Uh One of the conversations that we are having increasingly with our customers is how can they embrace a dev sec ops mindset in their organization and adopt some of these more modern patterns and practices and make sure that security is embedded in the life cycle of the container. And and so, you know, I think that this is part of, the answer is equipping the operator through infrastructure to set guard rails in place so that the development organization can work with freedom inside of those guard rails that it can draw on a catalogs of curated container images, catalogs of apps start from templates. Those are the building blocks that allow developers to work faster and that allow an operator to ensure the integrity and compliance of the containers and the applications that the organizations building. >>Yeah, So, so that's kind of uh when I hear scott talking about that Toby I think infrastructure as code designing security and governance in we always we always said I was an afterthought, we kind of bolted it on second. The security team had to take care of that. This is always the same thing with backup. Right? So we got an app. It's all ready to go. How do we back it up? And so that's changing that whole notion of infrastructure as code. Um, I want to talk about Green lake in a minute, but, but before we get there, I wonder if you could talk about how HP E thinks about VM ware and how you guys are partnering. I'm specifically interested and where each of you sees the value that you bring to the table for your joint customers. >>Yeah, great question. You know, and, and starting to think about history like you did 2010 being the start of a cube journey. I, I remember in 2003 when we first partnered with VM ware in the very first data center consolidations and we built practices around this. It's been quite a long partnership with VM ware and I'm excited to see this. This partnership evolved today, especially into this cloud, native space and direction. Uh, it's critical we need you know uh you know customers have choices and we need great partners like VM ware uh to help satisfy the many different use cases and choices that our customers have. So while we bring you know good depth when it comes to building these infrastructures that become highly automated um and managed in some cases and consume consumable like on a consumption basis and automated like we help clients automate their ci Cd pipeline. We depend on technologies and partners like them where to make these outcomes real for our customers. >>Yeah I think there's a way to connect a couple of the points that we've been talking about today. Got some data from a state of kubernetes study that we just ran and this is 350 I. T. Decision makers who said uh that they're running kubernetes on premise, 55% of respondents are running kubernetes on premise today and so VM ware and HP get to work together to bring kubernetes to those enterprises, 96% of them said that they're having a challenge selecting the right kubernetes distribution, 60 of them in that C. N. C. F. Landscape and the number one criteria that they're going to use to choose the right distribution, you know set them on a path forward is that it's easy to deploy and to operate and to maintain in production. And so I think that this is where the m wear and HP get to come together to help try and keep things as simple as possible for customers as they navigate. A fairly complex world. >>That's interesting scott. So who are those um those on prem users of containers and kubernetes? Is it the is it the head of you know the the application team and an insurance company whose kind of maintaining the claims about? Is it is a guy's building new cloud native apps to help companies get digital first. Who are those? What's the persona look like >>in our conversations? You know, this is the infrastructure and operations team seen that there's energy around kubernetes and maybe there's some use in test and development and parts of the organization. And by centralizing over ownership of that kubernetes footprint, they can ensure that it's compliant if policy is set properly to your point earlier that it's meets the security standards for the organization. And so it's increasingly that SRE or site reliability engineer or platform operator who's taking ownership of that kubernetes footprint for the organization to ensure that consistency of management and experience for the development teams across the larger order Toby, is that what you're seeing? Two, >>yeah, we see uh we see quite a few, we engage with quite a few developer teams in business leads that have ambitions to speed their application development processes And uh you know, they want help and often as I stated, the intro, they might be coming off of a much older deployment uh maybe from 2015 where there there were an early adopter of a container platform methodology and wanting to get to some newer platform or they they may be in charge of getting a mobile banking application and its features to market much more quickly. So, and often when we get a quote maybe from a client, it might come from, you know, the VP of a business unit. But often as we engage, it's, you know, the developers are pretty much our customers and their developer leaders and teams, >>so you're running into container technical debt already. You're seeing that out there. It sounds like your legacy >>container. It takes some expertise to, to come off those older. You know, the first instance creations of these container platforms were pretty much open source. And yeah, you want to bring it to something that's more modern and has the kinds of features, enterprise grade features you might need. >>So is it not so problematic for for customers? Because as I said before, a lot of those apps were sort of disposable and stateless. And, and, and now they're saying, hey, we can actually use kubernetes to build, you know, mission critical apps. And so there, that's when they sort of decide to pivot to a new modern platform or is there a more complex migration involved? What are you seeing? >>Okay, I'll give my hot, take your Toby and then uh, ask you for yours. But I guess I feel like the conversations that I'm involved in with customers is, you know, always begins with their broader application portfolio. These enterprises have hundreds thousands of applications and job one is to figure out how to categorize them into those which need to be re hosted or platforms or re factored or reimagined entirely. And so they're looking for help figuring out how to categorize those applications and ultimately how to attack each category of application. Some should be re platforms on environments that make best use of kubernetes, some need to be re factored, some need to be reimagined. And so they are again looking for that expert guide to show them the way >>right. And when we engage in those early discussions, we call it right Mix advisory. Um, you know, you're trying to take a full of broad scope as he said, scott down to a few and uh you know, determine kind of the first movers if you will also, you know, clients will engage you know, for very specific applications that are or suite of applications. Again like mobile applications for banking I think are a good example because you know they have an ambition. I mean the leader of that kind of application may very well think that is the mission critical application for the company, right? But of course finance, they have a different point of view. So you know that that application to them is the center of their business getting, you know, their customer access to the core banking features that they have and you know, they want to zero in on the kind of ecosystem. It takes in in the speed at which they can push new features through. So we see both as well um you know, the broader scope application, weaning down to the few discovery application, uh and then of course a very focused effort to help a particular business unit speed development on their mobile app, for example, >>it's interesting scott you were talking about sort of the conversation starts with the application portfolio and there have been there have been these sort of milestones around, you know, major application portfolio, I'll call him rationalizations, I mean there's always an ongoing but y two K was one of those, this is sort of the big move to SAS was another one, obviously cloud and it feels like kubernetes, I mean it's like the cloud to Dato coming on Prem is another one of those opportunities to rationalize applications. We all know the stats right, we always see 85% of the spend is to keep the lights on and the other the only small portions innovation and you know, there's always a promise we can change that. It reminds me of the every year I would go to the boston marathon, it was this guy would run and he had a hat on with the extension and it was a can of Budweiser way out there and he couldn't reach it and so he would run, it was almost the same thing here is they never get there because they have so many projects coming online and the project portfolio and and then and then the C I O has got to maintain those in the application heads and so it's this, this ongoing thing but you do see spikes in rationalization initiatives and it feels like with this push to modernization and digitization maybe the pandemic accelerated that too. Is that a reasonable premise? You seeing sort of a milestone or a marker in terms of increased effort around rationalization and modernization today because of kubernetes? >>Yeah, I definitely think that there are a couple of kubernetes is a catalyzing technology and the challenges of the pandemic or a catalyzing moment. Right. And I feel like uh Organisations have seen over the past 18 months now that those enterprises that have a way to get innovation to market to customers faster, not once a quarter, but many times a day are the ones that are separating themselves in competitive marketplaces and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences. So it comes back to some of the ideas full circle that Toby started with around delivering a superior developer experience so that those developers can get code to production and into the hands of customers on a much more rapid basis. Like that's the outcome that enterprises really care about at the end of the day. And kubernetes is part of the way to get there. But it's the outcome that's key. Great, thank >>you. And one of our practices dave there was uh you know, that's been our bread and butter for so many years. This, you know, this broad based discovery, narrowing down to a strategy and a plan for migrating and moving certain workloads. We see a slight twist today in that clients and organizations want to move quicker too. The apps, they know that, you know, they want to focus on, they want to prove it by through the broad based discovery and kind of a strategic analysis, but they want to get quicker right away to the workloads. They are quite sure that need re factoring or leverage the benefit of a modern developer environment >>and they don't want to be messing around with provisioning lungs and servers and all that stuff. They want that to be simplified. So we're gonna end on Green Lake and I want to understand how you guys are thinking about Green Lake in terms of your partnership and how you're working together, you know, maybe Toby you could sort of give us the update from your perspective, you can't have a conversation with HP today without talking about Green Lake. So give us the kool aid injection. And then I really interested in how VM ware thinks about participating in that. >>Absolutely. And, and thank you for uh, yeah, for helping us out here. You know, I see more and more of our engagements with clients that ask for and, and, and want to sign a Green Life based contract, >>but, >>and that is one very important foundational element. Uh and there's there's so much more because remember we talked about the cloud experience in cloud everywhere and Green Lake brings us an opportunity to bring dimensions to that, especially on the consumption model because that's that's an important element if we begin adding partners such as VM ware to this equation, especially for clients that have huge investments in VM where there's an opportunity here to really bring a lot of value with this cloud experience to our customers through this partnership. >>All right scott, we're gonna give you the last word. What's your take on this? >>Hey listen hard for me to to to add much to what Toby said, he nailed that you see a ton of energy in this space. I think we've covered a bunch of key topics today. Their ongoing conversations with our customers in Green Link is a way to take that conversation to the next level. >>Guys really appreciate you coming on and give us your perspectives on kubernetes and and and and thank you scott for that data. 55% of I. T. Decision makers out of 350 said they're doing on prem kubernetes. That's a new stat. I hadn't I would have expected to be that high but I guess I'm not surprised it's the rage the developers want the latest and greatest guys. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and I appreciate you coming on the cube. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thanks Dave. >>Thank you for watching the cubes ongoing coverage. Hp es discover 2021. The virtual version will be right back. >>Mm.

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to ASML day. My name is Yasmin Joffey. I'm the director of systems engineering for ASML at HPE. Today. We're here and joined by my colleague, Don wake, who is a technical marketing engineer who will talk to us about the date and the life of an it administrator through the lens of ASML container platform. We'll be answering your questions real time. So if you have any questions, please feel free to put your questions in the chat, and we should have some time at the end for some live Q and a. Don wants to go ahead and kick us off. >>All right. Thanks a lot, Yasir. Yeah, my name is Don wake. I'm the tech marketing guy and welcome to asthma all day, day in the life of an it admin and happy St. Patrick's day. At the same time, I hope you're wearing green virtual pinch. If you're not wearing green, don't have to look that up if you don't know what I'm scouting. So we're just going to go through some quick things. Talk about discussion of modern business. It needs to kind of set the stage and go right into a demo. Um, so what is the need here that we're trying to fulfill with, uh, ASML container platform? It's, it's all rooted in analytics. Um, modern businesses are driven by data. Um, they are also application centric and the separation of applications and data has never been more important or, or the relationship between the two applications are very data hungry. >>These days, they consume data in all new ways. The applications themselves are, are virtualized, containerized, and distributed everywhere, and optimizing every decision and every application is, is become a huge problem to tackle for every enterprise. Um, so we look at, um, for example, data science, um, as one big use case here, um, and it's, it's really a team sport and I'm today wearing the hat of perhaps, you know, operations team, maybe software engineer, guy working on, you know, continuous integration, continuous development integration with source control, and I'm supporting these data scientists, data analysts. And I also have some resource control. I can decide whether or not the data science team gets a, a particular cluster of compute and storage so that they can do their work. So this is the solution that I've been given as an it admin, and that is the ASML container platform. >>And just walking through this real quick, at the top, I'm trying to, as wherever possible, not get involved in these guys' lives. So the data engineers, scientists, app developers, dev ops guys, they all have particular needs and they can access their resources and spin up clusters, or just do work with the Jupiter notebook or run spark or Kafka or any of the, you know, popular analytics platforms by just getting in points that we can provide to them web URLs and their self service. But in the backend, I can then as the it guy makes sure the Kubernetes clusters are up and running, I can assign particular access to particular roles. I can make sure the data's well protected and I can connect them. I can import clusters from public clouds. I can, uh, you know, put my like clusters on premise if I want to. >>And I can do all this through this centralized control plane. So today I'm just going to show you I'm supporting some data scientists. So one of our very own guys is actually doing a demo right now as well, called the a day in the life of the data scientist. And he's on the opposite side, not caring about all the stuff I'm doing in the backend and he's training models and registering the models and working with data, uh, inside his, you know, Jupiter notebook, running inferences, running postman scripts. And so I'm in the background here, making sure that he's got access to his cluster storage protected, make sure it's, um, you know, his training models are up, he's got service endpoints, connecting him to, um, you know, his source control and making sure he's got access to all that stuff. So he's got like a taxi ride prediction model that he's working on and he has a Jupiter notebook and models. So why don't we, um, get hands on and I'll just jump right over it. >>It was no container platform. So this is a web UI. So this is the interface into the container platform. Our centralized control plane, I'm using my active directory credentials to log in here. >>And >>When I log in, I've also been assigned a particular role, uh, with regard to how much of the resources I can access. Now, in my case, I'm a site admin you can see right up here in the upper right hand, I'm a site admin and I have access to lots and lots of resources. And the one I'm going to be focusing on today is a Kubernetes cluster. Um, so I have a cluster I can go in here and let's say, um, we have a new data scientists come on board one. I can give him his own resources so he can do whatever he wants, use some GPU's and not affect other clusters. Um, so we have all these other clusters already created here. You can see here that, um, this is a very busy, um, you know, production system. They've got some dev clusters over here. >>I see here, we have a production cluster. So he needs to produce something for data scientists to use. It has to be well protected and, and not be treated like a development resource. So under his production cluster, I decided to create a new Kubernetes cluster. And literally I just push a button, create Kubernetes cluster once I've done that. And I'll just show you some of the screens and this is a live environment. So this is, I could actually do it all my hosts are used up right now, but I wouldn't be able to go in here and give it a name, just select, um, some hosts to use as the primary master controller and some workers answer a few more questions. And then once that's done, I have now created a special, a whole nother Kubernetes cluster, um, that I could also create tenants from. >>So tenants are really Kubernetes. Uh namespaces so in addition to taking hosts and Kubernetes clusters, I can also go to that, uh, to existing clusters and now carve out a namespace from that. So I look at some of the clusters that were already created and, um, let's see, we've got, um, we've got this year is an example of a tenant that I could have created from that production cluster. And to do that here in the namespace, I just hit create and similar to how you create a cluster. You can now carve down from a given cluster and we'll say the production cluster and give it a name and a description. I can even tell it, I want this specific one to be an AI ML project, um, which really is our ML ops license. So at the end of the day, I can say, okay, I'm going to create an ML ops tenant from that cluster that I created. >>And so I've already created it here for this demo. And I'm going to just go into that Kubernetes namespace now that we also call it tenant. I mean, it's like, multitenancy the name essentially means we're carving out resources so that somebody can be isolated from another environment. First thing I typically do. Um, and at this point I could also give access to this tenant and only this tenant to my data scientist. So the first thing I typically do is I go in here and you can actually assign users right here. So right now it's just me. But if I want it to, for example, give this, um, to Terry, I could go in here and find another user and assign him from this lead, from this list, as long as he's got the proper credentials here. So you can see here, all these other users have active directory credentials, and they, uh, when we created the cluster itself, we also made sure it integrated with our active directory, so that only authorized users can get in there. >>Let's say the first thing I want to do is make sure when I do Jupiter notebook work, or when Terry does, I'm going to connect him up straight up to the get hub repository. So he gives me a link to get hub and says, Hey man, this is all of my cluster work that I've been doing. I've got my source control there. My scripts, my Python notebooks, my Jupiter notebooks. So when I create that, I simply give him, you know, he gives me his, I create a configuration. I say, okay, here's a, here's a get repo. Here's the link to it. I can use a token, here's his username. And I can now put in that token. So this is actually a private repo and using a token, you know, standard get interface. And then the cool thing after that, you can go in here and actually copy the authorization secret. >>And this gets into the Kubernetes world. Um, you know, if you want to make sure you have secure integration with things like your source control or perhaps your active directory, that's all maintained in secrets. So you can take that secret. And when I then create his notebook, I can put that secret right in here in this, uh, launch Yammel. And I say, Hey, connect this Jupiter notebook up with this secret so he can log in. And when I've launched this Jupiter notebook cluster, this is actually now, uh, within my, my, uh, Kubernetes tenant. It is now really a pod. And if I want to, I can go right into a terminal for that, uh, Kubernetes tenant and say, coop CTL, these are standard, you know, CNCF certified Kubernetes get pods. And when I do this, it'll tell me all of the active pods and within those positive containers that I'm running. >>So I'm running quite a few pods and containers here in this, uh, artificial intelligence machine learning, um, tenant. So that's kind of cool. Also, if I wanted to, I could go straight and I can download the config for Kubernetes, uh, control. Uh well, and then I can do something like this, where on my own system where I'm more comfortable, perhaps coop CTL get pods. So this is running on my laptop and I just had to do a coop CTL refresh and give the IP address and authorization, um, information in order to connect from my laptop to that end point. So from a CIC D perspective from, you know, an it admin guides, he usually wants to use tools right on his, uh, desktop. So here am I back in my web browser, I'm also here on the dashboard of this, uh, Kubernetes, um, tenant, and I can see how it's doing. >>It looks like it's kind of busy here. I can focus specifically on a pod if I want to. I happen to know this pod is my Jupiter notebook pod. So aren't, I show how, you know, I could enable my data scientists by just giving him the, uh, URL or what we call a notebook service end points or notebook end point. And just by clicking on this URL or copying it, copying, you know, it's a link, uh, and then emailing it to them and say, okay, here's your, uh, you know, here's your duper notebook. And I say, Hey, just log in with your credentials. I've already logged in. Um, and so then he's got his Jupiter notebook here and you can see that he's connected to his GitHub repo directly. He's got all of the files that he needs to run his data science project and within here, and this is really in the data science realm, data scientists realm. >>He can see that he can have access to centralized storage and he can copy the files from his GitHub repo to that centralized storage. And, you know, these, these commands, um, are kind of cool. They're a little Jupiter magic commands, and we've got some of our own that showed that attachment to the cluster. Um, but you can see here if you run these commands, they're actually looking at the shared project repository managed by the container platform. So, you know, just to show you that again, I'll go back to the container platform. And in fact, the data scientist, uh, could do the same thing. Attitude put a notebook back to platform. So here's this project repository. So this is other big point. So now putting on my storage admin hat, you know, I've got this shared, um, storage, um, volume that is managed for me by the ESMO data fabric. >>Um, in, in here, you can see that the data scientist, um, from his get repo is able to through Jupiter notebook directly, uh, copy his code. He was able to run as Jupiter notebook and create this XG boost, uh, model. So this file can then be registered in this AIML tenant. So he can go in here and register his model. So this is, you know, this is really where the data scientist guy can self-service kick off his notebooks, even get a deployment end point so that he can then inference his cluster. So here again, another URL that you could then take this and put it into like a postman rest URL and get answers. Um, but let's say he wants to, um, he's been doing all this work and I want to make sure that his, uh, data's protected, uh, how about creating a mirror. >>So if I want to create a mirror of that data, now I go back to this other, uh, and this is the, the, uh, data fabric embedded in a very special cluster called the Picasso cluster. And it's a version of the ASML data fabric that allows you to launch what was formerly called Matt bar as a Kubernetes cluster. And when you create this special cluster, every other cluster that you create is automatically, uh, gets things like that. Tenant storage. I showed you to create a shared workspace, and it's automatically managed by this, uh, data fabric. Uh, and you're even given an end point to go into the data fabric and then use all of the awesome features of ASML data fabric. So here I can just log in here. And now I'm at the, uh, data fabric, web UI to do some data protection and mirroring. >>So >>Let's go over here. Let's say I want to, uh, create a mirror of that tenant. So I forgot to note what the name of my tenant was. I'm going to go back to my tenant, the name of the volume that I'm playing with here. So in my AIML tenant, I'm going to go to my source, control my project repository that I want to protect. And I see that the ESMO data fabric has created 10 and 30 as a volume. So I'll go back to my, um, data fabric here, and I'm going to look for 10 and 30. And if I want to, I can go into tenant 30, >>Okay. >>Down here, I can look at the usage. I can look at all of the, you know, I've used very little of the, uh, allocated storage that I want, but let's, uh, you know what, let's go ahead and create a volume to mirror that one. So very simple web UI that has said create volume. I go in here and I say, I want to do a, a tenant 30 mirror. And I say, mirror the mirror volume. Um, I want to use my Picasso cluster. I want to use tenant 30. So now that's actually looking up in the data fabric, um, database there's 10 and 30 K. So it knows exactly which one I want to use. I can go in here and I can say, you know, ext HCP, tenant, 30 mirror, you know, I can give it whatever name I want and this path here. >>And that's a whole nother, uh, demo is this could be in Tokyo. This could be mirrored to all kinds of places all over the world, because this is truly a global name, split namespace, which is a huge differentiator for us in this case, I'm creating a local mirror and that can go down here and, um, I can add, uh, audit and encryptions. I can do, um, access control. I can, you know, change permissions, you know, so full service, um, interactivity here. And of course this is using the web UI, but there's also rest API interfaces as well. So that is pretty much the, the brunt of what I wanted to show you in the demo. Um, so we got hands on and I'm just going to throw this up real quick and then come back to Yasser. See if he's got any questions he has received from anybody watching, if you have any new questions. >>Yeah. We've got a few questions. Um, we can, uh, just take some time to go, hopefully answer a few. Um, so it, it does look like you can integrate or incorporate your existing get hub, uh, to be able to, um, extract, uh, shared code or repositories. Correct? >>Yeah. So we have that built in and can either be, um, get hub or bit bucket it's, you know, pretty standard interface. So just like you can go into any given, get hub and do a clone of a, of a repo, pull it into your local environment. We integrated that directly into the gooey so that you can, uh, say to your, um, AIML tenant, uh, to your Jupiter notebook. You know, here's, here's my GitHub repo. When you open up my notebook, just connect me straight up. So it saves you some, some steps there because Jupiter notebook is designed to be integrated with get hub. So we have get hub integrated in as well or bit bucket. Right. >>Um, another question around the file system, um, has the map, our file system that was carried over, been modified in any way to run on top of Kubernetes. >>So yeah, I would say that the map, our file system data fabric, what I showed here is the Kubernetes version of it. So it gives you a lot of the same features, but if you need, um, perhaps run it on bare metal, maybe you have performance, um, concerns, um, you know, you can, uh, you can also deploy it as a separate bare metal instance of data fabric, but this is just one way that you can, uh, use it integrated directly into Kubernetes depends really the needs of, of the, uh, the user and that a fabric has a lot of different capabilities, but this is, um, it has a lot of the core file system capabilities where you can do snapshots and mirrors, and it it's of course, striped across multiple, um, multiple disks and nodes. And, uh, you know, Matt BARR data fabric has been around for years. It's, uh, and it's designed for integration with these, uh, analytic type workloads. >>Great. Um, you showed us how you can manage, um, Kubernetes clusters through the ASML container platform you buy. Um, but the question is, can you, uh, control who accesses, which tenant, I guess, namespace that you created, um, and also can you restrict or, uh, inject resource limitations for each individual namespace through the UI? >>Oh yeah. So that's, that's a great question. Yes. To both of those. So, um, as a site admin, I had lots of authority to create clusters, to go into any cluster I wanted, but typically for like the data scientist example I used, I would give him, I would create a user for him. And there's a couple of ways you can create users. Um, and it's all role-based access control. So I could create a local user and have container platform authenticate him, or I can say integrate directly with, uh, active directory or LDAP, and then even including which groups he has access to. And then in the user interface for the site admin, I could say he gets access to this tenant and only this tenant. Um, another thing you asked about is his limitations. So when you create the tenant to prevent that noisy neighbor problem, you can, um, go in and create quotas. >>So I didn't show the process of actually creating a Quentin, a tenant, but integral to that, um, flow is okay, I've defined which cluster I want to use. I defined how much memory I want to use. So there's a quota right there. You could say, Hey, how many CPU's am I taking from this pool? And that's one of the cool things about the platform is that it abstracts all that away. You don't have to really know exactly which host, um, you know, you can create the cluster and select specific hosts, but once you've created the cluster, it's not just a big pool of resources. So you can say Bob, over here, um, he's only going to get 50 of the a hundred CPU's available and he's only going to get X amount of gigabytes of memory. And he's only going to get this much storage that he can consume. So you can then safely hand off something and know they're not going to take all the resources, especially the GPU's where those will be expensive. And you want to make sure that one person doesn't hog all the resources. And so that absolutely quotas are built in there. >>Fantastic. Well, we, I think we are out of time. Um, we have, uh, a list of other questions that we will absolutely reach out and, um, get all your questions answered, uh, for those of you who ask questions in the chat. Um, Don, thank you very much. Thanks everyone else for joining Don, will this recording be made available for those who couldn't make it today? >>I believe so. Honestly, I'm not sure what the process is, but, um, yeah, it's being recorded so they must've done that for a reason. >>Fantastic. Well, Don, thank you very much for your time and thank everyone else for joining. Thank you.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the a day in the life of a data science talk. Uh, my name is Terry Chang. I'm a data scientist for the ASML container platform team. And with me, I have in the chat room, they will be moderating the chat. I have Matt MCO as well as Doug Tackett, and we're going to dive straight into kind of what we can do with the asthma container platform and how we can support the role of a data scientist. >>So just >>A quick agenda. So I'm going to do some introductions and kind of set the context of what we're going to talk about. And then we're actually going to dive straight into the ASML container platforms. So we're going to walk straight into what a data scientist will do, kind of a pretty much a day in the life of the data scientists. And then we'll have some question and answer. So big data has been the talk within the last few years within the last decade or so. And with big data, there's a lot of ways to derive meaning. And then a lot of businesses are trying to utilize their applications and trying to optimize every decision with their, uh, application utilizing data. So previously we had a lot of focus on data analytics, but recently we've seen a lot of data being used for machine learning. So trying to take any data that they can and send it off to the data scientists to start doing some modeling and trying to do some prediction. >>So that's kind of where we're seeing modern businesses rooted in analytics and data science in itself is a team sport. We're seeing that it doesn't, we need more than data scientists to do all this modeling. We need data engineers to take the data, massage the data and do kind of some data manipulation in order to get it right for the data scientists. We have data analysts who are monitoring the models, and we even have the data scientists themselves who are building and iterating through multiple different models until they find a one that is satisfactory to the business needs. Then once they're done, they can send it off to the software engineers who will actually build it out into their application, whether it's a mobile app or a web app. And then we have the operations team kind of assigning the resources and also monitoring it as well. >>So we're really seeing data science as a team sport, and it does require a lot of different expertise and here's the kind of basic machine learning pipeline that we see in the industry now. So, uh, at the top we have this training environment and this is, uh, an entire loop. Uh, we'll have some registration, we'll have some inferencing and at the center of all, this is all the data prep, as well as your repositories, such as for your data, for any of your GitHub repository, things of that sort. So we're kind of seeing the machine learning industry, go follow this very basic pattern and at a high level I'll glance through this very quickly, but this is kind of what the, uh, machine learning pipeline will look like on the ASML container platform. So at the top left, we'll have our, our project depository, which is our, uh, persistent storage. >>We'll have some training clusters, we'll have a notebook, we'll have an inference deployment engine and a rest API, which is all sitting on top of the Kubernetes cluster. And the benefit of the container platform is that this is all abstracted away from the data scientist. So I will actually go straight into that. So just to preface, before we go into the data as small container platform, where we're going to look at is a machine learning example, problem that is, uh, trying to predict how long a specific taxi ride will take. So with a Jupiter notebook, the data scientists can take all of this data. They can do their data manipulation, train a model on a specific set of features, such as the location of a taxi ride, the duration of a taxi ride, and then model it to trying to figure out, you know, what, what kind of prediction we can get on a future taxi ride. >>So that's the example that we will talk through today. I'm going to hop out of my slides and jump into my web browser. So let me zoom in on this. So here I have a Jupiter environment and, um, this is all running on the container platform. All I need is actually this link and I can access my environment. So as a data scientist, I can grab this link from my it admin or my system administrator. And I could quickly start iterating and, and start coding. So on the left-hand side of the Jupiter, we actually have a file directory structure. So this is already synced up to my get repository, which I will show in a little bit on the container platform so quickly I can pull any files that are on my get hub repository. I can even push with a button here, but I can, uh, open up this Python notebook. >>And with all this, uh, unique features of the Jupiter environment, I can start coding. So each of these cells can run Python code and in specific the container at the ESMO container platform team, we've actually built our own in-house lime magic commands. So these are unique commands, um, that we can use to interact with the underlying infrastructure of the container platform. So the first line magic command that I want to mention is this command called percent attachments. When I run this command, I'll actually get the available training clusters that I can send training jobs to. So this specific notebook, uh, it's pretty much been created for me to quickly iterate and develop a model very quickly. I don't have to use all the resources. I don't have to allocate a full set of GPU boxes onto my little Jupiter environment. So with the training cluster, I can attach these individual data science notebooks to those training clusters and the data scientists can actually utilize those resources as a shared environment. >>So the, essentially the shared large eight GPU box can actually be shared. They don't have to be allocated to a single data scientist moving on. We have another line magic command, it's called percent percent Python training. This is how we're going to utilize that training cluster. So I will prepare the cell percent percent with the name of the training cluster. And this is going to tell this notebook to send this entire training cell, to be trained on those resources on that training cluster. So the data scientists can quickly iterate through a model. They can then format that model and all that code into a large cell and send it off to that training cluster. So because of that training cluster is actually located somewhere else. It has no context of what has been done locally in this notebook. So we're going to have to do and copy everything into one large cell. >>So as you see here, I'm going to be importing some libraries and I'm in a, you know, start defining some helper functions. I'm going to read in my dataset and with the typical data science modeling life cycle, we're going to have to take in the data. We're going to have to do some data pre-processing. So maybe the data scientists will do this. Maybe the data engineer will do this, but they have access to that data. So I'm here. I'm actually getting there to be reading in the data from the project repository. And I'll talk about this a little bit later with all of the clusters within the container platform, we have access to some project repository that has been set up using the underlying data fabric. So with this, I have, uh, some data preprocessing, I'm going to cleanse some of my data that I noticed that maybe something is missing or, uh, some data doesn't look funky. >>Maybe the data types aren't correct. This will all happen here in these cells. So once that is done, I can print out that the data is done cleaning. I can start training my model. So here we have to split our data, set into a test, train, uh, data split so that we have some data for actually training the model and some data to test the model. So I can split my data there. I could create my XG boost object to start doing my training and XG boost is kind of like a decision tree machine learning algorithm, and I'm going to fit my data into this, uh, XG boost algorithm. And then I'm going to do some prediction. And then in addition, I'm actually going to be tracking some of the metrics and printing them out. So these are common metrics that we, that data scientists want to see when they do their training of the algorithm. >>Just to see if some of the accuracy is being improved, if the loss is being improved or the mean absolute error. So things like that. So these are all things, data scientists want to see. And at the end of this training job, I'm going to be saving the model. So I'm going to be saving it back into the project repository in which we will have access to. And at the end, I will print out the end time so I can execute that cell. And I've already executed that cell. So you'll see all of these print statements happening here. So importing the libraries, the training was run reading and data, et cetera. All of this has been printed out from that training job. Um, and in order to access that, uh, kind of glance through that, we would get an output with a unique history URL. >>So when we send the training job to that training cluster, we'll the training cluster will send back a unique URL in which we'll use the last line magic command that I want to talk about called percent logs. So percent logs will actually, uh, parse out that response from the training cluster. And actually we can track in real time what is happening in that training job so quickly, we can see that the data scientist has a sandbox environment available to them. They have access to their get repository. They have access to a project repository in which they can read in some of their data and save the model. So very quick interactive environment for the data scientists to do all of their work. And it's all provisioned on the ASML container platform. And it's also abstracted away. So here, um, I want to mention that again, this URL is being surfaced through the container platform. >>The data scientist doesn't have to interact with that at all, but let's take, it's take a step back. Uh, this is the day to day in the life of the data scientists. Now, if we go backwards into the container platform and we're going to walk through how it was all set up for them. So here is my login page to the container platform. I'm going to log in as my user, and this is going to bring me to the, uh, view of the, uh, Emma lops tenant within the container platform. So this is where everything has been set up for me, the data scientist doesn't have to see this if they don't need to, but what I'll walk through now is kind of the topics that I mentioned previously that we would go back into. So first is the project repository. So this project deposited comes with each tenant that is created on the platform. >>So this is a more, nothing more than a shared collaborative workspace environment in which data scientist or any data scientist who is allocated to this tenant. They have this politics client that can visually see all their data of all, all of their code. And this is actually taking a piece of the underlying data fabric and using that for your project depository. So you can see here, I have some code I can create and see my scoring script. I can see the models that have been created within this tenant. So it's pretty much a powerful tool in which you can store your code store any of your data and have the ability to read and write from any of your Jupiter environments or any of your created clusters within this tenant. So a very cool ad here in which you can, uh, quickly interact with your data. >>The next thing I want to show is the source control. So here is where you would plug in all of your information for your source control. And if I edit this, you guys will actually see all the information that I've passed in to configure the source control. So on the backend, the container platform will take these credentials and connect the Jupiter notebooks you create within this tenant to that get repository. So this is the information that I've passed in. If GitHub is not of interest, we also have support for bit bucket here as well. So next I want to show you guys that we do have these notebook environments. So, um, the notebook environment was created here and you can see that I have a notebook called Teri notebook, and this is all running on the Kubernetes environment within the container platform. So either the data scientists can come here and create their notebook or their project admin can create the notebook. >>And all you'd have to do is come here to this notebook end points. And this, the container platform will actually map the container platform to a specific port in which you can just give this link to the data scientists. And this link will actually bring them to their own Jupiter environment and they can start doing all of their model just as I showed in that previous Jupiter environment. Next I want to show the training cluster. This is the training cluster that was created in which I can attach my notebook to start utilizing those training clusters. And then the last thing I want to show is the model, the deployment cluster. So once that model has been saved, we have a model registry in which we can register the model into the platform. And then the last step is to create a deployment clusters. So here on my screen, I have a deployment cluster called taxi deployment. >>And then all these serving end points have been configured for me. And most importantly, this endpoint model. So the deployment cluster is actually a wrap the, uh, train model with the flask wrapper and add a rest endpoint to it so quickly. I can operationalize my model by taking this end point and creating a curl command, or even a post request. So here I have my trusty postman tool in which I can format a post request. So I've taken that end point from the container platform. I've formatted my body, uh, right here. So these are some of the features that I want to send to that model. And I want to know how long this specific taxi ride at this location at this time of day would take. So I can go ahead and send that request. And then quickly I will get an output of the ride. >>Duration will take about 2,600 seconds. So pretty much we've walked through how a data scientists can quickly interact with their notebook. They can train their model. And then coming into the platform, we saw the project repository, we saw the source control. We can register the model within the platform, and then quickly we can operationalize that model with our deployment cluster, uh, and have our model up and running and available for inference. So that wraps up the demo. Uh, I'm gonna pass it back to Doug and Matt and see if they want to come off mute and see if there are any questions, Matt, Doug, you there. Okay. >>Yeah. Hey, Hey Terry, sorry. Sorry. Just had some trouble getting off mute there. Uh, no, that was a, that was an excellent presentation. And I think there are generally some questions that come up when I talk to customers around how integrated into the Kubernetes ecosystem is this capability and where does this sort of Ezreal starts? And the open source, uh, technologies like, um, cube flow as an example, uh, begin. >>Yeah, sure. Matt. So this is kind of one layer up. We have our Emma LOBs tenant and this is all running on a piece of a Kubernetes cluster. So if I log back out and go into the site admin view, this is where you would see all the Kubernetes clusters being created. And it's actually all abstracted away from the data scientists. They don't have to know Kubernetes. They just interact with the platform if they want to. But here in the site admin view, I had this Kubernetes dashboard and here on the left-hand side, I have all my Kubernetes sections. So if I just add some compute hosts, whether they're VMs or cloud compute hosts, like ETQ hosts, we can have these, uh, resources abstracted away from us to then create a Kubernetes cluster. So moving on down, I have created this Kubernetes cluster utilizing those resources. >>Um, so if I go ahead and edit this cluster, you'll actually see that have these hosts, which is just a click and a click and drop method. I can move different hosts to then configure my Kubernetes cluster. Once my Kubernetes cluster is configured, I can then create Kubernetes tenant or in this case, it's a namespace. So once I have this namespace available, I can then go into that tenant. And as my user, I don't actually see that it is running on Kubernetes. So in addition with our ML ops tenants, you have the ability to bootstrap cute flow. So queue flow is a open source machine learning framework that is run on Kubernetes, and we have the ability to link that up as well. So, uh, coming back to my Emma lops tenant, I can log in what I showed is the ASML container platform version of Emma flops. But you see here, we've also integrated QP flow. So, uh, very, uh, a nod to, uh, HPS contribution to, you know, utilizing open source. Um, it's actually all configured within our platform. So, um, hopefully, >>Yeah, actually, Tara, can you hear me? It's Doug. So there were a couple of other questions actually about key flare that came in. I wonder whether you could just comment on why we've chosen cube flow. Cause I know there was a question about ML flow in stead and what the differences between ML flow and coop flow. >>Yeah, sure. So the, just to reiterate, there are some questions about QP flow and I'm just, >>Yeah, so obviously one of, uh, one of the people watching saw the queue flow dashboard there, I guess. Um, and so couldn't help but get excited about it. But there was another question about whether, you know, ML flow versus cube flow and what the difference was between them. >>Yeah. So with flow, it's, it's an open source framework that Google has developed. It's a very powerful framework that comes with a lot of other unique tools and Kubernetes. So with Q flow, you really have the ability to launch other notebooks. You have the ability to utilize different Kubernetes operators like TensorFlow and PI torch. You can utilize a lot of the, some of the frameworks within Q4 to do training like Q4 pipelines, which visually allow you to see your training jobs, uh, within the queue flow. It also has a plethora of different serving mechanisms, such as Seldin, uh, for, you know, deploying your, your machine learning models. You have Ks serving, you have TF serving. So Q4 is very, it's a very powerful tool for data scientists to utilize if they want a full end to end open source and know how to use Kubernetes. So it's just a, another way to do your machine learning model development and right with ML flow, it's actually a different piece of the machine learning pipeline. So ML flow mainly focuses on model experimentation, comparing different models, uh, during the training and it off it can be used with Q4. >>The complimentary Terry I think is what you're saying. Sorry. I know we are dramatically running out of time now. So that was really fantastic demo. Thank you very much, indeed. >>Exactly. Thank you. So yeah, I think that wraps it up. Um, one last thing I want to mention is there is this slide that I want to show in case you have any other questions, uh, you can visit hp.com/asml, hp.com/container platform. If you have any questions and that wraps it up. So thank you guys.

>>Hello. I'm Professor Toru Suzuki Cherif cardiovascular medicine on associate dean of the College of Life Sciences at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, where I'm also director of the Lester Life Sciences accelerator. I'm also honorary consultant cardiologist within our university hospitals. It's part of the national health system NHS Trust. Today, I'd like to talk to you about our Lester Clinical Data Science Initiative. Now brief background on Lester. It's university in hospitals. Lester is in the center of England. The national health system is divided depending on the countries. The United Kingdom, which is comprised of, uh, England, Scotland to the north, whales to the west and Northern Ireland is another part in a different island. But national health system of England is what will be predominantly be discussed. Today has a history of about 70 years now, owing to the fact that we're basically in the center of England. Although this is only about one hour north of London, we have a catchment of about 100 miles, which takes us from the eastern coast of England, bordering with Birmingham to the west north just south of Liverpool, Manchester and just south to the tip of London. We have one of the busiest national health system trust in the United Kingdom, with a catchment about 100 miles and one million patients a year. Our main hospital, the General Hospital, which is actually called the Royal Infirmary, which can has an accident and emergency, which means Emergency Department is that has one of the busiest emergency departments in the nation. I work at Glen Field Hospital, which is one of the main cardiovascular hospitals of the United Kingdom and Europe. Academically, the Medical School of the University of Leicester is ranked 20th in the world on Lee, behind Cambridge, Oxford Imperial College and University College London. For the UK, this is very research. Waited, uh, ranking is Therefore we are very research focused universities as well for the cardiovascular research groups, with it mainly within Glenn Field Hospital, we are ranked as the 29th Independent research institution in the world which places us. A Suffield waited within our group. As you can see those their top ranked this is regardless of cardiology, include institutes like the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute. Mitt Welcome Trust Sanger, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Kemble, Cold Spring Harbor and as a hospital we rank within ah in this field in a relatively competitive manner as well. Therefore, we're very research focused. Hospital is well now to give you the unique selling points of Leicester. We're we're the largest and busiest national health system trust in the United Kingdom, but we also have a very large and stable as well as ethnically diverse population. The population ranges often into three generations, which allows us to do a lot of cohort based studies which allows us for the primary and secondary care cohorts, lot of which are well characterized and focused on genomics. In the past. We also have a biomedical research center focusing on chronic diseases, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health Research, which funds clinical research the hospitals of United Kingdom on we also have a very rich regional life science cluster, including med techs and small and medium sized enterprises. Now for this, the bottom line is that I am the director of the letter site left Sciences accelerator, >>which is tasked with industrial engagement in the local national sectors but not excluding the international sectors as well. Broadly, we have academics and clinicians with interest in health care, which includes science and engineering as well as non clinical researchers. And prior to the cove it outbreak, the government announced the £450 million investment into our university hospitals, which I hope will be going forward now to give you a brief background on where the scientific strategy the United Kingdom lies. Three industrial strategy was brought out a za part of the process which involved exiting the European Union, and part of that was the life science sector deal. And among this, as you will see, there were four grand challenges that were put in place a I and data economy, future of mobility, clean growth and aging society and as a medical research institute. A lot of the focus that we have been transitioning with within my group are projects are focused on using data and analytics using artificial intelligence, but also understanding how chronic diseases evolved as part of the aging society, and therefore we will be able to address these grand challenges for the country. Additionally, the national health system also has its long term plans, which we align to. One of those is digitally enabled care and that this hope you're going mainstream over the next 10 years. And to do this, what is envision will be The clinicians will be able to access and interact with patient records and care plants wherever they are with ready access to decision support and artificial intelligence, and that this will enable predictive techniques, which include linking with clinical genomic as well as other data supports, such as image ing a new medical breakthroughs. There has been what's called the Topol Review that discusses the future of health care in the United Kingdom and preparing the health care workforce for the delivery of the digital future, which clearly discusses in the end that we would be using automated image interpretation. Is using artificial intelligence predictive analytics using artificial intelligence as mentioned in the long term plans. That is part of that. We will also be engaging natural language processing speech recognition. I'm reading the genome amusing. Genomic announced this as well. We are in what is called the Midland's. As I mentioned previously, the Midland's comprised the East Midlands, where we are as Lester, other places such as Nottingham. We're here. The West Midland involves Birmingham, and here is ah collective. We are the Midlands. Here we comprise what is called the Midlands engine on the Midland's engine focuses on transport, accelerating innovation, trading with the world as well as the ultra connected region. And therefore our work will also involve connectivity moving forward. And it's part of that. It's part of our health care plans. We hope to also enable total digital connectivity moving forward and that will allow us to embrace digital data as well as collectivity. These three key words will ah Linkous our health care systems for the future. Now, to give you a vision for the future of medicine vision that there will be a very complex data set that we will need to work on, which will involve genomics Phanom ICS image ing which will called, uh oh mix analysis. But this is just meaning that is, uh complex data sets that we need to work on. This will integrate with our clinical data Platforms are bioinformatics, and we'll also get real time information of physiology through interfaces and wearables. Important for this is that we have computing, uh, processes that will now allow this kind of complex data analysis in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning based applications to allow visualization Analytics, which could be out, put it through various user interfaces to the clinician and others. One of the characteristics of the United Kingdom is that the NHS is that we embrace data and captured data from when most citizens have been born from the cradle toe when they die to the grave. And it's important that we were able to link this data up to understand the journey of that patient. Over time. When they come to hospital, which is secondary care data, we will get disease data when they go to their primary care general practitioner, we will be able to get early check up data is Paula's follow monitoring monitoring, but also social care data. If this could be linked, allow us to understand how aging and deterioration as well as frailty, uh, encompasses thes patients. And to do this, we have many, many numerous data sets available, including clinical letters, blood tests, more advanced tests, which is genetics and imaging, which we can possibly, um, integrate into a patient journey which will allow us to understand the digital journey of that patient. I have called this the digital twin patient cohort to do a digital simulation of patient health journeys using data integration and analytics. This is a technique that has often been used in industrial manufacturing to understand the maintenance and service points for hardware and instruments. But we would be using this to stratify predict diseases. This'll would also be monitored and refined, using wearables and other types of complex data analysis to allow for, in the end, preemptive intervention to allow paradigm shifting. How we undertake medicine at this time, which is more reactive rather than proactive as infrastructure we are presently working on putting together what's it called the Data Safe haven or trusted research environment? One which with in the clinical environment, the university hospitals and curated and data manner, which allows us to enable data mining off the databases or, I should say, the trusted research environment within the clinical environment. Hopefully, we will then be able to anonymous that to allow ah used by academics and possibly also, uh, partnering industry to do further data mining and tool development, which we could then further field test again using our real world data base of patients that will be continually, uh, updating in our system. In the cardiovascular group, we have what's called the bricks cohort, which means biomedical research. Informatics Center for Cardiovascular Science, which was done, started long time even before I joined, uh, in 2010 which has today almost captured about 10,000 patients arm or who come through to Glenn Field Hospital for various treatments or and even those who have not on. We asked for their consent to their blood for genetics, but also for blood tests, uh, genomics testing, but also image ing as well as other consent. Hable medical information s so far there about 10,000 patients and we've been trying to extract and curate their data accordingly. Again, a za reminder of what the strengths of Leicester are. We have one of the largest and busiest trust with the very large, uh, patient cohort Ah, focused dr at the university, which allows for chronic diseases such as heart disease. I just mentioned our efforts on heart disease, uh which are about 10,000 patients ongoing right now. But we would wish thio include further chronic diseases such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, renal disease and further to understand the multi modality between these diseases so that we can understand how they >>interact as well. Finally, I like to talk about the lesser life science accelerator as well. This is a new project that was funded by >>the U started this January for three years. I'm the director for this and all the groups within the College of Life Sciences that are involved with healthcare but also clinical work are involved. And through this we hope to support innovative industrial partnerships and collaborations in the region, a swells nationally and further on into internationally as well. I realized that today is a talked to um, or business and commercial oriented audience. And we would welcome interest from your companies and partners to come to Leicester toe work with us on, uh, clinical health care data and to drive our agenda forward for this so that we can enable innovative research but also product development in partnership with you moving forward. Thank you for your time.