>>from the >>Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. >>These are cloud native insights. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome to Episode one of Cloud Native Insights. So this is a new program brought to you by Silicon Angle Media's The Cube. I am your host stew minimum, and we're going to be digging in to cloud native and, of course, cloud native like cloud before kind of a generic term. If you look at it online, there's a lot of buzzwords. There's a lot of jargon out there, and so we want to help. Understand what? This is what This isn't on And really happy to welcome back to the program to help me kick it off you piss car. He is an industry analyst. His company is T l A Tech. You. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks, Dave. Glad we're >>all right. And one of the reasons I wanted you to help me kick this off. Not only have you been on the Cube, you know your background. I met you when you were the cto of a service provider over there in Europe, where you're Netherlands based. You were did strategy for a very large ah, supermarket chain also. And you've been on the program that shows like docker con in the past. You work in the cloud native space you've done consulting for. Some of the companies will be talking about today. But you help me kick this off a little bit. When you heard here the term cloud native. Does that mean anything to you? Did that mean anything back in your previous roles? You know, help us tee that up. >>So, you know, it kind of gives off a certain direction and where people are going. Right. Um so to me, Cloud native is more about the way you use cloud, not necessarily about the cloud services themselves. So, you know, for instance, I'll take the example of the supermarket. They had a big e commerce presence. And so we were come getting them to a place where they could, in smaller teams, deploy software in a faster, more often and in a safer way so that teams could work independently of each other, work on, you know, adding business value, whatever that may be for any kind of different company. That's a cloud native to me, Connie means using that to the fullest extent, using those services available to you in a way organizationally and culturally. That makes sense to you, you know, Go wherever you need to go. Be that release every hour or, you know, transform your s AP environment to something that is more nimble, more flexible, literally more agile. So what cloud native means so many things to so many people? Because it's immediately is not directly about the technology, but how you actually use it. >>Um, and u Pua and I are in, you know, strong agreement on this thing. One is you've noticed we haven't said kubernetes yet. We haven't talked about containers because cloud native is not about the tooling. We're, you know, strong participants in you know, the CN CF activities. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, cube con and cloud native is a huge show. Great momentum one. We're big fans of too often people would conflate and they'd say, Oh, cloud native equals. I'm doing containers and I've, you know, deployed kubernetes one of the challenges out there. You talk about companies, you know? Well, you know, I had a cloud first initiative and I'm using multi cloud and all this stuff. It's like, Well, are you actually leveraging these capabilities, or did I shove things in something I'd railed about for the last couple of years? You talk about repatriation, and repatriation is often I went to go do cloud. I didn't really understand what I was doing. I didn't understand how to leverage that stuff. And I crawled back to what I was doing before because I knew how to do that. Well, so, you know, I think you said it really well. Cloud native means I'm taking advantage of the services. I'm doing things in a much more modern way. The thing I've loved talking to practitioners and one of things I want to do on this program absolutely is talk to practitioners is how have you gone through things organizationally, there are lots of things right now. Talk about like, thin ops. And, of course, all the spin off from Dev Ops and Dev SEC ops. And, like, how are we breaking through silos? How we're modernizing our environments, how we're taking advantage of new ways of doing things and new services. So yeah, I guess you You know, there are some really cool tools out there. Those are awesome things. But, you know, I love your viewpoint. Your perspective on often people in tech are like, Hey, I have this really cool new tool that I can use, you know? Can I take advantage of that? You know, do I do things in a new way, or do I just kind of take my old way and just make things maybe a little incrementally better? Hopefully with some new tooling. >>Oh, yeah. I mean, I totally agree. Um, you know, tooling is cool. Let me let me start by saying that I You know, I'm an engineer by heart, so I love tinkering with new new stuff. So I love communities I love. Um, you know that a new terra form released, for instance, I love seeing competition in the container orchestration space. I love driving into K native server lists. You know, all those technologies I like, But it is a matter of, you know, what can you do with them, right. So, for instance, has she corporate line of mine? I work on their hashtag off. Even they offer kind of Ah, not necessarily an alternative, but kind of adjacent approach to you what the CNC F is doing, and even in those cases, and I'm up specifically calling out Hashi Corp. But I'm kind of giving. The broader overview is, um, it doesn't actually matter what to use, Even though it'll help me. It'll make me happy just to play around with them. But those new tools have to mean something. They have to solve a particular problem. You have either in speed of delivery or consistency of delivery or quality of service, the thing you are building for your customers. So it has to mean something. So back in the day when I started out in engineering 15 years ago, a lot of the engineering loss for the sake of engineering just because, you know you could create a piece of infrastructure a little faster, but there was no actual business value to be out there. That's a lot of the engineering kind of was stuck inside of its own realm, or as what you see now is, if you can use terraform and actually get all of you know the potential out of you, it allow you to release offer more quickly because you're able to stand up infrastructure for that software more quickly. And so you know, we've kind of shifted from back in the in the attic or in the basement doing I t. Stuff that no one really understands. The one kind of perceives the business value of it into the realm of okay, If we can deploy this faster or we don't even need to use a server, we can use server lists. Then we have an advantage in the marketplace. You know, whatever marketplace that is, whatever application we're talking about. And so that's the difference to me. And that was that. You know, that's what CN CF is doing to me. That is what has she Corpus is helping build. That is what you know. A lot of companies that built, for instance, a managed kubernetes service. But from nine spectral crowd, all those kinds of companies, they will help, you know, a given customer to speed up their delivery, to not care about the underlying infrastructure anymore. And that's what this is all about to me. And that is what cloud native means use it in a way that I don't actually have to do the toil off the engineering anymore. There's loads of smart people working for, you know, the Big Three cloud vendors. There's loads of people working for those manage service providers, but he's used them so that you can speed up your delivery, create better software created faster, make customers happy. >>Yeah, it's a lot to unpack there. I want to talk a little bit about that landscape, right When you talk about, you know, cloud native, maybe a little compare contrast I think about, you know, the wave of Dev ops and for often people like, you know, Dev Ops. You know, that's a cultural movement. But there's also tooling that I could buy to help me along that weighs automation, you know, going agile methodology. See, I CD are all things that you're like. Well, is this part of Dev Ops, isn't it? There's lots of companies out there that we saw rows rode that wave of Dev ops. And if you talk about cloud native, you know the first thing you know, you start with the cloud providers. So when I hear you talking about, how do we get rid of things that we don't need to worry about? Well, for years, we heard Amazon Web services talk about getting rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. And it's something that we're huge fans off you talk about. What is the business outcome? It's not. Hey, I went from, you know, a stand alone server to I did virtualized environments. And now I'm looking container ization or serverless. What can I get rid of? How do I take advantage of native services and all of those cloud platforms? One of the huge values there is, it isn't Hey, I deployed this and maybe it's a little bit cheaper and maybe a little better. But there's that that is really the center of where innovation is happening not only from the platform providers they're setting themselves, but from that ecosystem. And I guess I'll put it out there. One of the things I would like to see from Cloud Native should be that I should be able to take care of take advantage of innovation wherever it is. So Cloud Native does not mean it must live in the public cloud. It does not necessarily mean that I'm going, you know, full bore, multi cloud everywhere. I've had some great debates with Corey Quinn, on the Cube Online and the like, because if you look at customer environments today, you know, yes, they absolutely have their data centers. They're leveraging, typically more than one public cloud. SAS is a big part of the picture and then edge computing and pulls everything away into a much more distributed architecture. So, you know, I'm glad you brought up. You know, Hashi, a company you're working with really interesting. And if you talk about cloud native, it's there. They're not trying to get people to, oh, use multiple clouds because it's good for us. It's they. Hey, the reality is that you're probably using multiple clouds, and whether it's one cloud or many clouds or even in your data center, we have a set of tools that we can offer you. So you know, Hashi, you mentioned, you know, terra form vault. You know, the various tooling is that they have open source, you know, big play in this environment, both under the CN CF umbrella and beyond. Give us a little bit as to, you know, where are the interesting places where you see either vendors and technology today, or opportunity to make these solutions better for users. >>So that's an interesting question, because I literally don't know where to begin. The spectrum is so so broad, it's all start off with a joke on this, right? You cannot buy that helps. But the vendors were sure try and sell it to you. So it's kind of where you know, the battle is is raging on its getting foothold into an organization. Um, and you see that? You know, you see companies like, how is she doing that? Um, they started out with open source tooling that kind of move into the enterprise realm. Um, you solve the issues that enterprises usually have, and that's what the club defenders will trying to you as although you know, the kind of kick start you with a free service and then move you up into their their stack. And that's you know, that's where Cloud native is kind of risky because the landscape is so fragmented, it is really hard to figure out. Okay, this tool, it actually solves my use case versus this one doesn't. But again, it's in the ecosystem in this ecosystem already, so let's let's still use it just because it's easier. Um, but it does boil the disk a lot of the discussion down into. Basically, it's a friction. How much effort does it take to start using something? Because that's where and that's basically the issues enterprises are trying to solve. It's around friction, and it used to be friction around, you know, buying servers and then kind of being stuck with him for 4 to 5 years. But now it is the vendor lock in where people in organizations have to make tough decisions. You know, what ecosystems am I going to buy into it? It's It's also where a lot of the multi cloud marketing comes from on the way down to get you into a specific ecosystem on your end companies kind of filling that gap, helping you manage that complexity and how she corpus is one of those examples in my book that help you manage that multi cloud ah challenge. So but yeah, But it is all part of that discussion around friction. >>Yeah, and I guess I would start if you say, as you said, it is such a broad spectrum out there. If you look in the developer tooling marketplace is, there's lots of people that have, you know, landscapes out there. So CN cf even has a great landscape. And you know, things like Security, you no matter wherever I am and everywhere that I am. And there's a lot of effort to try to make sure that I can have something that spans across the environment. Of course, Security, you know, huge issue in general. And right now, Cohen, 19. The global pandemic coming on has been, you know, putting a spotlight on it even more. We know shared responsibility models where security needs to be. Data is at the center of what we're talking about when we've been talking for years about companies going through their transformation, I hadn't talked about, you know, digital transformation. What that means is, at the end of the day, you need to be data driven. So there's lots of companies, you know, big movement and things like ml ops. How can I actually harness my data? I said one of the things I think we got out of the whole big data wave. It was that bit flip from, Oh my God, their data everywhere. And maybe that's a challenge for me. It now becomes an opportunity and often times somewhere that I can have new value or even new business models that we can create around data. So, you know, data security on and everyone is modernizing. So, you know, worry a bit that there is sometimes, you know, cloud native washing. You know, just like everything else. It's, you know, cloud enabled. You know, ai ready from an infrastructure standpoint, you know, how much are you actually leveraging Cloud native? The bar, we always said, is, you know, if you're putting something in your data center, how does that compare against what I could get if I'm doing aws azure or Google type of environment? So I have seen good progress over the last couple of years in what we used to call it Private Cloud. And now it's more Ah, hybrid environment or multi cloud. And it looks and acts and is managed much more like the public cloud at a lot of that. Is that driver for developers? So you know Palmer, you know, developers, developers, developers, you know, absolutely. He was right as to how important that is. And one of the things I've been a little bit hardened at is it used to be. You talked about the enterprise and while the developers were off in the corner and, you know, we need to think about them and help enable them. But now, like the Dev Ops movement, we're trying to break down those silos. You know, developers are much more in the workflow. When I look at tools out there not only get hub, you know, you talked about Hashi, you know, get lab answerable and others. Often they have ways to have nothing to developers. The product owners and others all get visibility into it. Because if you can get, you know, people in the organization all accessing the same work stream the way that they need to have it there. There's goodness there. So I guess final question I have for you is you know, what advice do we have for practitioners themselves? Often, the question is, how do I get from where I've been? So where I'm going, This whole discussion of Cloud native is you know, we spent more than a decade talking about cloud, and it was often the kind of where in the movement and the like So what? I want to tee up with cloud native is discussion, really for the next decade. And you know, if I'm, you know, a c i o If I'm in, i t how do I make sure that I'm ready for these next opportunities while still managing? You know what I have in my own environment. >>So that kind of circles back to where we started this discussion, right? Cloud native and Dev ops and a couple of those methodologies they're not actually about the tooling. They are about what to do with them. Can you leverage them to achieve a goal? And so my biggest advice is Look for that goal. First, have something toward towards because if you have a problem, the solution will present itself. Um, and I'm not saying go look for a problem. The problems, they're already It's a matter of, um, you know, articulating that problem in a way that your developers will actually understand what to do. And then they will go and find the tools that are needed to solve that particular problem. And so we turn this around in a sense that so finally, we are at a point where we can have business problems. Actually, solved by I t in a way that doesn't require, you know, millions of upfront investment or, you know, consultants from an outside company. Your developers are now able to start solving those problems, and it will maybe take a while. They may need some outside help Teoh to figure some stuff out, But the point is, we can now use you know, these cloud resource is these cloud native services in such a small, practical way that we can actually start solving these business problems in a real way. >>Yeah, you actually, earlier this year I've done a series of interviews getting ready for this type of environment. You know, one of the areas I spent a bunch of time trying to dig in. And to be frank, understand has been server lists. So, you know, people very excited about server lists. You know, one of the dynamics always is, You know, everything we're talking about with containers and kubernetes driving them to think about that. I always looked as container ization was kind of moving up the stack in making infrastructure easier. The work for applications, but something like serverless it comes, top down. It's it's more of not the tooling, but how do I build those applications in those environments and not need to think at least as much about the infrastructure? So server lists Absolutely something we will cover, you know, containers, kubernetes what I'm looking for. Always love practitioners love to somebody. You you've been, you know, in that end, user it before startups. Absolutely. We'll be talking to as well as other people you know, in the ecosystem that you want to help, have discussions, have debates. You know, we don't have, you know, a strong. You know, this is the agenda that we have for cloud native, but I really want to help facilitate the dialogue. So I'll give you a final word here. Anything You know, what's exciting you these days when you talk to your peers out there, you know, in general, you know, it can be some tools, even though we understand tools are only a piece of it or any other final tips that you have in this market >>space. Well, I want to kind of go go forward on on your statement earlier about server lists without calling, You know, any specific serverless technology out there specifically, but you're looking at those technologies you'll see, But we're now able to solve those business problems. Um, without actually even needing I t right. So no code low code platforms are very adjacent to you to do serverless movement. Um, and that's where you know, that's what really excites me of this at this point, simply because, you know, we no longer need actual hardcore engineering as a trait Teoh use i t to move the needle forward. And that's what I love about the cloud native movement that it used to be hard. And it's getting simpler in a way also more complex in a way. What we're paying someone else Teoh to solve those issues. So I'm excited to see where you know, no code low code survivalism those the kinds of technologies will take us in the next decade. >>Absolutely wonderful. When you have technology that makes it more globally accessible There, obviously, you know, large generational shifts happening in the workforce. You Thank you so much for joining us, >>actually, Sue. >>All right. And I guess the final call to action really is We are looking for those guests out there, so, you know, practitioners, startups people that have a strong viewpoint. You can reach out to me. My emails just stew Stu at silicon angle dot com where you can hit me up on the twitters. I'm just at stew on there. Also. Eso thank you so much for joining us. Planning to do these in General Weekly cadence. You'll find the articles that go along with these on silicon angle dot com. Of course. All the video on the cube dot net I'm stew minimum in and love to hear more about your cloud Native insights >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to the special edition of the cube insights powered by ETR over the past several weeks we've been running breaking analysis on various market segments and today we're gonna talk about the robotic process automation market the spending data from ETR really shows that that market is poised for for continued growth it's been rocketing these segments are independent editorial they are not sponsored in any way although two of the companies that I'll be talking about today are sponsors of the cube automation anywhere and uipath both sponsor the cube we we attend their shows but they have absolutely no input over these editorial segments it's 100% data-driven based on ETR data and cube insight opinions in my opinions so thank you for watching let's get into it so Alex if you bring up the first slide I want to share with people what the robotic process automation market is and what you need to know about it it's a small but very fast-growing market according to a combination of Forrester and and Gartner data it's around one and a half to 1.7 billion dollars this year and it's growing at over 60 percent per year Gartner calls it the fastest growing software sub segment that they tracked garden just put out a Magic Quadrant on this space which was you know is always interesting reading despite what you think about magic quadrants it's essentially software robots that are automating repetitive mundane tasks and I underline tasks in this chart because it's largely tasks simple tasks that are being automated in a big way as opposed to really big complex processes they tend to be targeted at line of business users and it very popular in environments like finance and service roles and and back office areas where they're a repetitive common tasks that people frankly hate and we're going to give you some feedback from from customers there are a number of upstarts in the space uipath automation anywhere blue prism these these companies have attracted a massive influx of venture capital particularly uipath an automation anywhere over a billion and a half dollars in the last couple of years there monster valuations take those three companies their valuations are up over ten billion dollars and growing uipath for example several months ago announced that it had more than 200 million dollars in annual recurring revenue they were just at eight million dollars two years ago so you're seeing just this this massive growth a lot of influx of capital and a lot of jockeying for position now users that we've talked to will express a great deal of business impact related to the introduction and application of RPA in their business so I want you to take a look at this video of one practitioner that we interviewed at a cube event let's listen to to see what Jeanne younger has to say and then we'll come back and talk about it it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there and one of them my slides I've had for years teaching that classes most business processes are like between 3.2 and 3.6 3.8 Sigma which is like 95 to 98% accurate and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma you look at the places that have Six Sigma it's life-threatening airline you know airplane engines you hope they're at least 7 Sigma you know those type of things but business processes 3 5 3 2 but now I get to change that because with our PA I can make them Six Sigma very cheap very cheaply because I can pull them in I got my bought it comes over pulls the information and there's no double king there's no miss keys its accuracy 100% accuracy this is a perfect example of how companies are applying robotic process automation to to improve existing business processes you would never try to get a standard business process up to Six Sigma it's just not worth it and as Jean younger explained now she can get there very inexpensively with our PA there many many other use cases but I wanted to share that one with you now the next slide I'm going to show you comes from ETR ETR is an organization that runs a panel is about a 4,500 user panel and they focus on spending intentions they do periodic surveys throughout the year they capture a fairly large number of users and what they're spending on that built this great taxonomy and we've been partnering with ETR to share with you some of that insights and what this slide shows is really spending intentions from the july 2019 survey asking about the second half spending intentions on the sector of robotic process automation you can see here the N is 1068 respondents in that July survey on the left-hand side you can see four vendors that we've chose to profile uipath automation anywhere blue prism and pega systems a company that's been around for a long time and is not exclusively focused on RPA they've got more of a business process focus and I'll come back to that but what this slide shows is really the spending intentions around four areas the bright red is we're going to leave the platform stop spending we're out of here the lighter red is we're gonna spend less in the second half the gray is we're flat the dark green is we're gonna increase spending in the lime green is where a new customer coming on so if you subtract the red from the green you get what ETR calls the net score and that is an indication of spending intentions and momentum so the higher the net score the better you can see here uipath leads the pack with an 81% next score ironically that's the identical next school net score as was snowflake in this survey we profiled the enterprise data warehouse market and snowflake was one of the leaders there so uipath and snowflake even though there are sort of different markets and different levels of maturity sort of around in the same net score so two very hot companies and you can see going down the list automation anywhere 69% blue prism 53% and pega systems 44% actually these are all very strong compared to some of the other market segments we track like for instance if you look at the disk array market and some of the legacy disk array companies some of the enterprise data warehouse companies you'll see sometimes negative scores now on the right-hand side and the black you see shared accounts what this says this is the number of accounts that were mentioned as intending to spend on or in the case of the dark red leave or in the case of the bright green add but the number of counts out of that 1068 corpus of data that mentioned these respective companies so you can see relatively small you know 68 for uipath 42 for automation anywhere 45 for blue prism and only 27% repair systems but these I remind you were still significantly statistically significant enough to at least get indications so you can see again your UI path leads but all of the companies are actually quite strong on a relative basis so the next slide that I want to show you Alex if you bring this up is a time series for some of these leading competitors over over time so we'll go back to January of 18 and the number of shared accounts back then was relatively small it was in the low double digits and in some cases the single digits but as we go to the right you can start to see it it increases in terms of the shared accounts out of that a thousand 1068 from this past survey so you can see uipath at that 81% next score of net score very high but but also automation anywhere very very strong blue prism you can see the decline in that yellow line but again very very strong with a 53% Nets so this space is is new and it's in it's very hot I say it's new and then it's been around for a while but it's really starting to take off and then you can see see Pegasus Thames you're lower than these other companies but still very very strong at 44% now we'll tell you the folks at Wycombe on the the analyst side of our house have gone out they've done some research they maybe it was about 18 months ago they they downloaded the UI paths Community Edition they tried to do the same for automation anywhere in blue prison they tried to get access to the software so they could apply it and you know run some robots against some mundane tasks they were only able to get the automation of the sorry the uipath software which was very simple to install and apply and you know some simple tasks they couldn't get the automation anywhere in blue president you had to go to resellers and it was sort of this complicated you know setup so that was sort of a red flag that we put up but but the UI paths you know claims that their stuff was easy to use some of their users that we've talked to you know talked about it in the context of low code and so we've we've clarified some of that we don't have as much data on automation anywhere in blue prism although we've covered automation anywheres events customers you know seemed quite happy and and reporting strong business impacts don't have as much information at this time on blue prisms on blue prism we have attended some of the peg assistance events just as observers I was saying before I come back to them they take more of a holistic approach to business process it's really not they're not positioning themselves as a standalone RPA vendor which you know frankly I wouldn't do if I were up against uipath and automation anywhere because they've got so much influx of capital they've got modern platforms that are ostensibly easy to use so packet system seems to be look going after our PA in a much sort of broader context around process business process engineering so in summer you just want to say so the very fast-growing market there's a book there's a lot of competition you got uipath automation anywhere blue prism there's about 15 or 20 players in this space that are sort of sizable it's a combination of as they say standalone robotic process automation players with integrated BPM players like Pegasus Thames it's important remember you're largely here automating existing procedures and tasks you know you're not doing a lot of necessarily re-engineering it so that's you know some people are concerned about that saying okay we're kind of paving the cart path at the same time practitioners are reporting that it's having a major business impact and and although they've also said that's not likely to reduce headcount rather we're redirecting resources you're not firing people because you're bringing in robots so people aren't necessarily losing their jobs over this they're just shifting away from that sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting that they hate doing mundane tasks automating that and moving on to more strategic items so a lot of discussion in the industry about artificial intelligence in in machine learning and some folks have said well AI and RP a they have nothing to do with each other I will say this that that machine learning has been injected into the RP a space via computer vision and a good example is it recognized a button like a send button if you know you're sending out you know emails or pushing a certain button every day at the you can automate that process so computer vision is a key part of this and again it's something that certain RPF Enders are touting I know uipath again talks about that a lot but the business impact is tangible and this is based on customer feedback a lot of customer feedback you know generally speaking you're seeing CFOs are hopping on to this they're seeing this is a really good way to take out some of the inefficiencies in their business refocus people on higher value activities and so we're going to continue to watch this RPA space I think it's going to be big we see big s eyes coming into this we're talking about companies like Accenture IBM Deloitte PwC Ernie Young those guys are starting to you know go after the space and I've always said this about the the big sis they love to eat at the trough so with there's money there they find it and they go hard after it so thanks for watching everybody we're gonna continue to report on this space this is Dave Volante with cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time

>> Announcer: Live from New York City it's The Cube, covering IBM data science for all. Brought to you by IBM. (light digital music) >> Welcome back to data science for all. It's a whole new game. And it is a whole new game. >> Dave Vellante, John Walls here. We've got quite a distinguished panel. So it is a new game-- >> Well we're in the game, I'm just happy to be-- (both laugh) Have a swing at the pitch. >> Well let's what we have here. Five distinguished members of our panel. It'll take me a minute to get through the introductions, but believe me they're worth it. Jennifer Shin joins us. Jennifer's the founder of 8 Path Solutions, the director of the data science of Comcast and part of the faculty at UC Berkeley and NYU. Jennifer, nice to have you with us, we appreciate the time. Joe McKendrick an analyst and contributor of Forbes and ZDNet, Joe, thank you for being here at well. Another ZDNetter next to him, Dion Hinchcliffe, who is a vice president and principal analyst of Constellation Research and also contributes to ZDNet. Good to see you, sir. To the back row, but that doesn't mean anything about the quality of the participation here. Bob Hayes with a killer Batman shirt on by the way, which we'll get to explain in just a little bit. He runs the Business over Broadway. And Joe Caserta, who the founder of Caserta Concepts. Welcome to all of you. Thanks for taking the time to be with us. Jennifer, let me just begin with you. Obviously as a practitioner you're very involved in the industry, you're on the academic side as well. We mentioned Berkeley, NYU, steep experience. So I want you to kind of take your foot in both worlds and tell me about data science. I mean where do we stand now from those two perspectives? How have we evolved to where we are? And how would you describe, I guess the state of data science? >> Yeah so I think that's a really interesting question. There's a lot of changes happening. In part because data science has now become much more established, both in the academic side as well as in industry. So now you see some of the bigger problems coming out. People have managed to have data pipelines set up. But now there are these questions about models and accuracy and data integration. So the really cool stuff from the data science standpoint. We get to get really into the details of the data. And I think on the academic side you now see undergraduate programs, not just graduate programs, but undergraduate programs being involved. UC Berkeley just did a big initiative that they're going to offer data science to undergrads. So that's a huge news for the university. So I think there's a lot of interest from the academic side to continue data science as a major, as a field. But I think in industry one of the difficulties you're now having is businesses are now asking that question of ROI, right? What do I actually get in return in the initial years? So I think there's a lot of work to be done and just a lot of opportunity. It's great because people now understand better with data sciences, but I think data sciences have to really think about that seriously and take it seriously and really think about how am I actually getting a return, or adding a value to the business? >> And there's lot to be said is there not, just in terms of increasing the workforce, the acumen, the training that's required now. It's a still relatively new discipline. So is there a shortage issue? Or is there just a great need? Is the opportunity there? I mean how would you look at that? >> Well I always think there's opportunity to be smart. If you can be smarter, you know it's always better. It gives you advantages in the workplace, it gets you an advantage in academia. The question is, can you actually do the work? The work's really hard, right? You have to learn all these different disciplines, you have to be able to technically understand data. Then you have to understand it conceptually. You have to be able to model with it, you have to be able to explain it. There's a lot of aspects that you're not going to pick up overnight. So I think part of it is endurance. Like are people going to feel motivated enough and dedicate enough time to it to get very good at that skill set. And also of course, you know in terms of industry, will there be enough interest in the long term that there will be a financial motivation. For people to keep staying in the field, right? So I think it's definitely a lot of opportunity. But that's always been there. Like I tell people I think of myself as a scientist and data science happens to be my day job. That's just the job title. But if you are a scientist and you work with data you'll always want to work with data. I think that's just an inherent need. It's kind of a compulsion, you just kind of can't help yourself, but dig a little bit deeper, ask the questions, you can't not think about it. So I think that will always exist. Whether or not it's an industry job in the way that we see it today, and like five years from now, or 10 years from now. I think that's something that's up for debate. >> So all of you have watched the evolution of data and how it effects organizations for a number of years now. If you go back to the days when data warehouse was king, we had a lot of promises about 360 degree views of the customer and how we were going to be more anticipatory in terms and more responsive. In many ways the decision support systems and the data warehousing world didn't live up to those promises. They solved other problems for sure. And so everybody was looking for big data to solve those problems. And they've begun to attack many of them. We talked earlier in The Cube today about fraud detection, it's gotten much, much better. Certainly retargeting of advertising has gotten better. But I wonder if you could comment, you know maybe start with Joe. As to the effect that data and data sciences had on organizations in terms of fulfilling that vision of a 360 degree view of customers and anticipating customer needs. >> So. Data warehousing, I wouldn't say failed. But I think it was unfinished in order to achieve what we need done today. At the time I think it did a pretty good job. I think it was the only place where we were able to collect data from all these different systems, have it in a single place for analytics. The big difference between what I think, between data warehousing and data science is data warehouses were primarily made for the consumer to human beings. To be able to have people look through some tool and be able to analyze data manually. That really doesn't work anymore, there's just too much data to do that. So that's why we need to build a science around it so that we can actually have machines actually doing the analytics for us. And I think that's the biggest stride in the evolution over the past couple of years, that now we're actually able to do that, right? It used to be very, you know you go back to when data warehouses started, you had to be a deep technologist in order to be able to collect the data, write the programs to clean the data. But now you're average causal IT person can do that. Right now I think we're back in data science where you have to be a fairly sophisticated programmer, analyst, scientist, statistician, engineer, in order to do what we need to do, in order to make machines actually understand the data. But I think part of the evolution, we're just in the forefront. We're going to see over the next, not even years, within the next year I think a lot of new innovation where the average person within business and definitely the average person within IT will be able to do as easily say, "What are my sales going to be next year?" As easy as it is to say, "What were my sales last year." Where now it's a big deal. Right now in order to do that you have to build some algorithms, you have to be a specialist on predictive analytics. And I think, you know as the tools mature, as people using data matures, and as the technology ecosystem for data matures, it's going to be easier and more accessible. >> So it's still too hard. (laughs) That's something-- >> Joe C.: Today it is yes. >> You've written about and talked about. >> Yeah no question about it. We see this citizen data scientist. You know we talked about the democratization of data science but the way we talk about analytics and warehousing and all the tools we had before, they generated a lot of insights and views on the information, but they didn't really give us the science part. And that's, I think that what's missing is the forming of the hypothesis, the closing of the loop of. We now have use of this data, but are are changing, are we thinking about it strategically? Are we learning from it and then feeding that back into the process. I think that's the big difference between data science and the analytics side. But, you know just like Google made search available to everyone, not just people who had highly specialized indexers or crawlers. Now we can have tools that make these capabilities available to anyone. You know going back to what Joe said I think the key thing is we now have tools that can look at all the data and ask all the questions. 'Cause we can't possibly do it all ourselves. Our organizations are increasingly awash in data. Which is the life blood of our organizations, but we're not using it, you know this a whole concept of dark data. And so I think the concept, or the promise of opening these tools up for everyone to be able to access those insights and activate them, I think that, you know, that's where it's headed. >> This is kind of where the T shirt comes in right? So Bob if you would, so you've got this Batman shirt on. We talked a little bit about it earlier, but it plays right into what Dion's talking about. About tools and, I don't want to spoil it, but you go ahead (laughs) and tell me about it. >> Right, so. Batman is a super hero, but he doesn't have any supernatural powers, right? He can't fly on his own, he can't become invisible on his own. But the thing is he has the utility belt and he has these tools he can use to help him solve problems. For example he as the bat ring when he's confronted with a building that he wants to get over, right? So he pulls it out and uses that. So as data professionals we have all these tools now that these vendors are making. We have IBM SPSS, we have data science experience. IMB Watson that these data pros can now use it as part of their utility belt and solve problems that they're confronted with. So if you''re ever confronted with like a Churn problem and you have somebody who has access to that data they can put that into IBM Watson, ask a question and it'll tell you what's the key driver of Churn. So it's not that you have to be a superhuman to be a data scientist, but these tools will help you solve certain problems and help your business go forward. >> Joe McKendrick, do you have a comment? >> Does that make the Batmobile the Watson? (everyone laughs) Analogy? >> I was just going to add that, you know all of the billionaires in the world today and none of them decided to become Batman yet. It's very disappointing. >> Yeah. (Joe laughs) >> Go ahead Joe. >> And I just want to add some thoughts to our discussion about what happened with data warehousing. I think it's important to point out as well that data warehousing, as it existed, was fairly successful but for larger companies. Data warehousing is a very expensive proposition it remains a expensive proposition. Something that's in the domain of the Fortune 500. But today's economy is based on a very entrepreneurial model. The Fortune 500s are out there of course it's ever shifting. But you have a lot of smaller companies a lot of people with start ups. You have people within divisions of larger companies that want to innovate and not be tied to the corporate balance sheet. They want to be able to go through, they want to innovate and experiment without having to go through finance and the finance department. So there's all these open source tools available. There's cloud resources as well as open source tools. Hadoop of course being a prime example where you can work with the data and experiment with the data and practice data science at a very low cost. >> Dion mentioned the C word, citizen data scientist last year at the panel. We had a conversation about that. And the data scientists on the panel generally were like, "Stop." Okay, we're not all of a sudden going to turn everybody into data scientists however, what we want to do is get people thinking about data, more focused on data, becoming a data driven organization. I mean as a data scientist I wonder if you could comment on that. >> Well I think so the other side of that is, you know there are also many people who maybe didn't, you know follow through with science, 'cause it's also expensive. A PhD takes a lot of time. And you know if you don't get funding it's a lot of money. And for very little security if you think about how hard it is to get a teaching job that's going to give you enough of a pay off to pay that back. Right, the time that you took off, the investment that you made. So I think the other side of that is by making data more accessible, you allow people who could have been great in science, have an opportunity to be great data scientists. And so I think for me the idea of citizen data scientist, that's where the opportunity is. I think in terms of democratizing data and making it available for everyone, I feel as though it's something similar to the way we didn't really know what KPIs were, maybe 20 years ago. People didn't use it as readily, didn't teach it in schools. I think maybe 10, 20 years from now, some of the things that we're building today from data science, hopefully more people will understand how to use these tools. They'll have a better understanding of working with data and what that means, and just data literacy right? Just being able to use these tools and be able to understand what data's saying and actually what it's not saying. Which is the thing that most people don't think about. But you can also say that data doesn't say anything. There's a lot of noise in it. There's too much noise to be able to say that there is a result. So I think that's the other side of it. So yeah I guess in terms for me, in terms of data a serious data scientist, I think it's a great idea to have that, right? But at the same time of course everyone kind of emphasized you don't want everyone out there going, "I can be a data scientist without education, "without statistics, without math," without understanding of how to implement the process. I've seen a lot of companies implement the same sort of process from 10, 20 years ago just on Hadoop instead of SQL. Right and it's very inefficient. And the only difference is that you can build more tables wrong than they could before. (everyone laughs) Which is I guess >> For less. it's an accomplishment and for less, it's cheaper, yeah. >> It is cheaper. >> Otherwise we're like I'm not a data scientist but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, right? >> Yeah. (panelists laugh) And there's like a little bit of pride that like they used 2,000, you know they used 2,000 computers to do it. Like a little bit of pride about that, but you know of course maybe not a great way to go. I think 20 years we couldn't do that, right? One computer was already an accomplishment to have that resource. So I think you have to think about the fact that if you're doing it wrong, you're going to just make that mistake bigger, which his also the other side of working with data. >> Sure, Bob. >> Yeah I have a comment about that. I've never liked the term citizen data scientist or citizen scientist. I get the point of it and I think employees within companies can help in the data analytics problem by maybe being a data collector or something. I mean I would never have just somebody become a scientist based on a few classes here she takes. It's like saying like, "Oh I'm going to be a citizen lawyer." And so you come to me with your legal problems, or a citizen surgeon. Like you need training to be good at something. You can't just be good at something just 'cause you want to be. >> John: Joe you wanted to say something too on that. >> Since we're in New York City I'd like to use the analogy of a real scientist versus a data scientist. So real scientist requires tools, right? And the tools are not new, like microscopes and a laboratory and a clean room. And these tools have evolved over years and years, and since we're in New York we could walk within a 10 block radius and buy any of those tools. It doesn't make us a scientist because we use those tools. I think with data, you know making, making the tools evolve and become easier to use, you know like Bob was saying, it doesn't make you a better data scientist, it just makes the data more accessible. You know we can go buy a microscope, we can go buy Hadoop, we can buy any kind of tool in a data ecosystem, but it doesn't really make you a scientist. I'm very involved in the NYU data science program and the Columbia data science program, like these kids are brilliant. You know these kids are not someone who is, you know just trying to run a day to day job, you know in corporate America. I think the people who are running the day to day job in corporate America are going to be the recipients of data science. Just like people who take drugs, right? As a result of a smart data scientist coming up with a formula that can help people, I think we're going to make it easier to distribute the data that can help people with all the new tools. But it doesn't really make it, you know the access to the data and tools available doesn't really make you a better data scientist. Without, like Bob was saying, without better training and education. >> So how-- I'm sorry, how do you then, if it's not for everybody, but yet I'm the user at the end of the day at my company and I've got these reams of data before me, how do you make it make better sense to me then? So that's where machine learning comes in or artificial intelligence and all this stuff. So how at the end of the day, Dion? How do you make it relevant and usable, actionable to somebody who might not be as practiced as you would like? >> I agree with Joe that many of us will be the recipients of data science. Just like you had to be a computer science at one point to develop programs for a computer, now we can get the programs. You don't need to be a computer scientist to get a lot of value out of our IT systems. The same thing's going to happen with data science. There's far more demand for data science than there ever could be produced by, you know having an ivory tower filled with data scientists. Which we need those guys, too, don't get me wrong. But we need to have, productize it and make it available in packages such that it can be consumed. The outputs and even some of the inputs can be provided by mere mortals, whether that's machine learning or artificial intelligence or bots that go off and run the hypotheses and select the algorithms maybe with some human help. We have to productize it. This is a constant of data scientist of service, which is becoming a thing now. It's, "I need this, I need this capability at scale. "I need it fast and I need it cheap." The commoditization of data science is going to happen. >> That goes back to what I was saying about, the recipient also of data science is also machines, right? Because I think the other thing that's happening now in the evolution of data is that, you know the data is, it's so tightly coupled. Back when you were talking about data warehousing you have all the business transactions then you take the data out of those systems, you put them in a warehouse for analysis, right? Maybe they'll make a decision to change that system at some point. Now the analytics platform and the business application is very tightly coupled. They become dependent upon one another. So you know people who are using the applications are now be able to take advantage of the insights of data analytics and data science, just through the app. Which never really existed before. >> I have one comment on that. You were talking about how do you get the end user more involved, well like we said earlier data science is not easy, right? As an end user, I encourage you to take a stats course, just a basic stats course, understanding what a mean is, variability, regression analysis, just basic stuff. So you as an end user can get more, or glean more insight from the reports that you're given, right? If you go to France and don't know French, then people can speak really slowly to you in French, you're not going to get it. You need to understand the language of data to get value from the technology we have available to us. >> Incidentally French is one of the languages that you have the option of learning if you're a mathematicians. So math PhDs are required to learn a second language. France being the country of algebra, that's one of the languages you could actually learn. Anyway tangent. But going back to the point. So statistics courses, definitely encourage it. I teach statistics. And one of the things that I'm finding as I go through the process of teaching it I'm actually bringing in my experience. And by bringing in my experience I'm actually kind of making the students think about the data differently. So the other thing people don't think about is the fact that like statisticians typically were expected to do, you know, just basic sort of tasks. In a sense that they're knowledge is specialized, right? But the day to day operations was they ran some data, you know they ran a test on some data, looked at the results, interpret the results based on what they were taught in school. They didn't develop that model a lot of times they just understand what the tests were saying, especially in the medical field. So when you when think about things like, we have words like population, census. Which is when you take data from every single, you have every single data point versus a sample, which is a subset. It's a very different story now that we're collecting faster than it used to be. It used to be the idea that you could collect information from everyone. Like it happens once every 10 years, we built that in. But nowadays you know, you know here about Facebook, for instance, I think they claimed earlier this year that their data was more accurate than the census data. So now there are these claims being made about which data source is more accurate. And I think the other side of this is now statisticians are expected to know data in a different way than they were before. So it's not just changing as a field in data science, but I think the sciences that are using data are also changing their fields as well. >> Dave: So is sampling dead? >> Well no, because-- >> Should it be? (laughs) >> Well if you're sampling wrong, yes. That's really the question. >> Okay. You know it's been said that the data doesn't lie, people do. Organizations are very political. Oftentimes you know, lies, damned lies and statistics, Benjamin Israeli. Are you seeing a change in the way in which organizations are using data in the context of the politics. So, some strong P&L manager say gets data and crafts it in a way that he or she can advance their agenda. Or they'll maybe attack a data set that is, probably should drive them in a different direction, but might be antithetical to their agenda. Are you seeing data, you know we talked about democratizing data, are you seeing that reduce the politics inside of organizations? >> So you know we've always used data to tell stories at the top level of an organization that's what it's all about. And I still see very much that no matter how much data science or, the access to the truth through looking at the numbers that story telling is still the political filter through which all that data still passes, right? But it's the advent of things like Block Chain, more and more corporate records and corporate information is going to end up in these open and shared repositories where there is not alternate truth. It'll come back to whoever tells the best stories at the end of the day. So I still see the organizations are very political. We are seeing now more open data though. Open data initiatives are a big thing, both in government and in the private sector. It is having an effect, but it's slow and steady. So that's what I see. >> Um, um, go ahead. >> I was just going to say as well. Ultimately I think data driven decision making is a great thing. And it's especially useful at the lower tiers of the organization where you have the routine day to day's decisions that could be automated through machine learning and deep learning. The algorithms can be improved on a constant basis. On the upper levels, you know that's why you pay executives the big bucks in the upper levels to make the strategic decisions. And data can help them, but ultimately, data, IT, technology alone will not create new markets, it will not drive new businesses, it's up to human beings to do that. The technology is the tool to help them make those decisions. But creating businesses, growing businesses, is very much a human activity. And that's something I don't see ever getting replaced. Technology might replace many other parts of the organization, but not that part. >> I tend to be a foolish optimist when it comes to this stuff. >> You do. (laughs) >> I do believe that data will make the world better. I do believe that data doesn't lie people lie. You know I think as we start, I'm already seeing trends in industries, all different industries where, you know conventional wisdom is starting to get trumped by analytics. You know I think it's still up to the human being today to ignore the facts and go with what they think in their gut and sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. But generally if they lose the data will tell them that they should have gone the other way. I think as we start relying more on data and trusting data through artificial intelligence, as we start making our lives a little bit easier, as we start using smart cars for safety, before replacement of humans. AS we start, you know, using data really and analytics and data science really as the bumpers, instead of the vehicle, eventually we're going to start to trust it as the vehicle itself. And then it's going to make lying a little bit harder. >> Okay, so great, excellent. Optimism, I love it. (John laughs) So I'm going to play devil's advocate here a little bit. There's a couple elephant in the room topics that I want to, to explore a little bit. >> Here it comes. >> There was an article today in Wired. And it was called, Why AI is Still Waiting for It's Ethics Transplant. And, I will just read a little segment from there. It says, new ethical frameworks for AI need to move beyond individual responsibility to hold powerful industrial, government and military interests accountable as they design and employ AI. When tech giants build AI products, too often user consent, privacy and transparency are overlooked in favor of frictionless functionality that supports profit driven business models based on aggregate data profiles. This is from Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker who founded AI Now. And they're calling for sort of, almost clinical trials on AI, if I could use that analogy. Before you go to market you've got to test the human impact, the social impact. Thoughts. >> And also have the ability for a human to intervene at some point in the process. This goes way back. Is everybody familiar with the name Stanislav Petrov? He's the Soviet officer who back in 1983, it was in the control room, I guess somewhere outside of Moscow in the control room, which detected a nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union coming out of the United States. Ordinarily I think if this was an entirely AI driven process we wouldn't be sitting here right now talking about it. But this gentlemen looked at what was going on on the screen and, I'm sure he's accountable to his authorities in the Soviet Union. He probably got in a lot of trouble for this, but he decided to ignore the signals, ignore the data coming out of, from the Soviet satellites. And as it turned out, of course he was right. The Soviet satellites were seeing glints of the sun and they were interpreting those glints as missile launches. And I think that's a great example why, you know every situation of course doesn't mean the end of the world, (laughs) it was in this case. But it's a great example why there needs to be a human component, a human ability for human intervention at some point in the process. >> So other thoughts. I mean organizations are driving AI hard for profit. Best minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. Jeff Hammerbacher is famous for saying it. >> You can use data for a lot of things, data analytics, you can solve, you can cure cancer. You can make customers click on more ads. It depends on what you're goal is. But, there are ethical considerations we need to think about. When we have data that will have a racial bias against blacks and have them have higher prison sentences or so forth or worse credit scores, so forth. That has an impact on a broad group of people. And as a society we need to address that. And as scientists we need to consider how are we going to fix that problem? Cathy O'Neil in her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, excellent book, I highly recommend that your listeners read that book. And she talks about these issues about if AI, if algorithms have a widespread impact, if they adversely impact protected group. And I forget the last criteria, but like we need to really think about these things as a people, as a country. >> So always think the idea of ethics is interesting. So I had this conversation come up a lot of times when I talk to data scientists. I think as a concept, right as an idea, yes you want things to be ethical. The question I always pose to them is, "Well in the business setting "how are you actually going to do this?" 'Cause I find the most difficult thing working as a data scientist, is to be able to make the day to day decision of when someone says, "I don't like that number," how do you actually get around that. If that's the right data to be showing someone or if that's accurate. And say the business decides, "Well we don't like that number." Many people feel pressured to then change the data, change, or change what the data shows. So I think being able to educate people to be able to find ways to say what the data is saying, but not going past some line where it's a lie, where it's unethical. 'Cause you can also say what data doesn't say. You don't always have to say what the data does say. You can leave it as, "Here's what we do know, "but here's what we don't know." There's a don't know part that many people will omit when they talk about data. So I think, you know especially when it comes to things like AI it's tricky, right? Because I always tell people I don't know everyone thinks AI's going to be so amazing. I started an industry by fixing problems with computers that people didn't realize computers had. For instance when you have a system, a lot of bugs, we all have bug reports that we've probably submitted. I mean really it's no where near the point where it's going to start dominating our lives and taking over all the jobs. Because frankly it's not that advanced. It's still run by people, still fixed by people, still managed by people. I think with ethics, you know a lot of it has to do with the regulations, what the laws say. That's really going to be what's involved in terms of what people are willing to do. A lot of businesses, they want to make money. If there's no rules that says they can't do certain things to make money, then there's no restriction. I think the other thing to think about is we as consumers, like everyday in our lives, we shouldn't separate the idea of data as a business. We think of it as a business person, from our day to day consumer lives. Meaning, yes I work with data. Incidentally I also always opt out of my credit card, you know when they send you that information, they make you actually mail them, like old school mail, snail mail like a document that says, okay I don't want to be part of this data collection process. Which I always do. It's a little bit more work, but I go through that step of doing that. Now if more people did that, perhaps companies would feel more incentivized to pay you for your data, or give you more control of your data. Or at least you know, if a company's going to collect information, I'd want you to be certain processes in place to ensure that it doesn't just get sold, right? For instance if a start up gets acquired what happens with that data they have on you? You agree to give it to start up. But I mean what are the rules on that? So I think we have to really think about the ethics from not just, you know, someone who's going to implement something but as consumers what control we have for our own data. 'Cause that's going to directly impact what businesses can do with our data. >> You know you mentioned data collection. So slightly on that subject. All these great new capabilities we have coming. We talked about what's going to happen with media in the future and what 5G technology's going to do to mobile and these great bandwidth opportunities. The internet of things and the internet of everywhere. And all these great inputs, right? Do we have an arms race like are we keeping up with the capabilities to make sense of all the new data that's going to be coming in? And how do those things square up in this? Because the potential is fantastic, right? But are we keeping up with the ability to make it make sense and to put it to use, Joe? >> So I think data ingestion and data integration is probably one of the biggest challenges. I think, especially as the world is starting to become more dependent on data. I think you know, just because we're dependent on numbers we've come up with GAAP, which is generally accepted accounting principles that can be audited and proven whether it's true or false. I think in our lifetime we will see something similar to that we will we have formal checks and balances of data that we use that can be audited. Getting back to you know what Dave was saying earlier about, I personally would trust a machine that was programmed to do the right thing, than to trust a politician or some leader that may have their own agenda. And I think the other thing about machines is that they are auditable. You know you can look at the code and see exactly what it's doing and how it's doing it. Human beings not so much. So I think getting to the truth, even if the truth isn't the answer that we want, I think is a positive thing. It's something that we can't do today that once we start relying on machines to do we'll be able to get there. >> Yeah I was just going to add that we live in exponential times. And the challenge is that the way that we're structured traditionally as organizations is not allowing us to absorb advances exponentially, it's linear at best. Everyone talks about change management and how are we going to do digital transformation. Evidence shows that technology's forcing the leaders and the laggards apart. There's a few leading organizations that are eating the world and they seem to be somehow rolling out new things. I don't know how Amazon rolls out all this stuff. There's all this artificial intelligence and the IOT devices, Alexa, natural language processing and that's just a fraction, it's just a tip of what they're releasing. So it just shows that there are some organizations that have path found the way. Most of the Fortune 500 from the year 2000 are gone already, right? The disruption is happening. And so we are trying, have to find someway to adopt these new capabilities and deploy them effectively or the writing is on the wall. I spent a lot of time exploring this topic, how are we going to get there and all of us have a lot of hard work is the short answer. >> I read that there's going to be more data, or it was predicted, more data created in this year than in the past, I think it was five, 5,000 years. >> Forever. (laughs) >> And that to mix the statistics that we're analyzing currently less than 1% of the data. To taking those numbers and hear what you're all saying it's like, we're not keeping up, it seems like we're, it's not even linear. I mean that gap is just going to grow and grow and grow. How do we close that? >> There's a guy out there named Chris Dancy, he's known as the human cyborg. He has 700 hundred sensors all over his body. And his theory is that data's not new, having access to the data is new. You know we've always had a blood pressure, we've always had a sugar level. But we were never able to actually capture it in real time before. So now that we can capture and harness it, now we can be smarter about it. So I think that being able to use this information is really incredible like, this is something that over our lifetime we've never had and now we can do it. Which hence the big explosion in data. But I think how we use it and have it governed I think is the challenge right now. It's kind of cowboys and indians out there right now. And without proper governance and without rigorous regulation I think we are going to have some bumps in the road along the way. >> The data's in the oil is the question how are we actually going to operationalize around it? >> Or find it. Go ahead. >> I will say the other side of it is, so if you think about information, we always have the same amount of information right? What we choose to record however, is a different story. Now if you want wanted to know things about the Olympics, but you decide to collect information every day for years instead of just the Olympic year, yes you have a lot of data, but did you need all of that data? For that question about the Olympics, you don't need to collect data during years there are no Olympics, right? Unless of course you're comparing it relative. But I think that's another thing to think about. Just 'cause you collect more data does not mean that data will produce more statistically significant results, it does not mean it'll improve your model. You can be collecting data about your shoe size trying to get information about your hair. I mean it really does depend on what you're trying to measure, what your goals are, and what the data's going to be used for. If you don't factor the real world context into it, then yeah you can collect data, you know an infinite amount of data, but you'll never process it. Because you have no question to ask you're not looking to model anything. There is no universal truth about everything, that just doesn't exist out there. >> I think she's spot on. It comes down to what kind of questions are you trying to ask of your data? You can have one given database that has 100 variables in it, right? And you can ask it five different questions, all valid questions and that data may have those variables that'll tell you what's the best predictor of Churn, what's the best predictor of cancer treatment outcome. And if you can ask the right question of the data you have then that'll give you some insight. Just data for data's sake, that's just hype. We have a lot of data but it may not lead to anything if we don't ask it the right questions. >> Joe. >> I agree but I just want to add one thing. This is where the science in data science comes in. Scientists often will look at data that's already been in existence for years, weather forecasts, weather data, climate change data for example that go back to data charts and so forth going back centuries if that data is available. And they reformat, they reconfigure it, they get new uses out of it. And the potential I see with the data we're collecting is it may not be of use to us today, because we haven't thought of ways to use it, but maybe 10, 20, even 100 years from now someone's going to think of a way to leverage the data, to look at it in new ways and to come up with new ideas. That's just my thought on the science aspect. >> Knowing what you know about data science, why did Facebook miss Russia and the fake news trend? They came out and admitted it. You know, we miss it, why? Could they have, is it because they were focused elsewhere? Could they have solved that problem? (crosstalk) >> It's what you said which is are you asking the right questions and if you're not looking for that problem in exactly the way that it occurred you might not be able to find it. >> I thought the ads were paid in rubles. Shouldn't that be your first clue (panelists laugh) that something's amiss? >> You know red flag, so to speak. >> Yes. >> I mean Bitcoin maybe it could have hidden it. >> Bob: Right, exactly. >> I would think too that what happened last year is actually was the end of an age of optimism. I'll bring up the Soviet Union again, (chuckles). It collapsed back in 1991, 1990, 1991, Russia was reborn in. And think there was a general feeling of optimism in the '90s through the 2000s that Russia is now being well integrated into the world economy as other nations all over the globe, all continents are being integrated into the global economy thanks to technology. And technology is lifting entire continents out of poverty and ensuring more connectedness for people. Across Africa, India, Asia, we're seeing those economies that very different countries than 20 years ago and that extended into Russia as well. Russia is part of the global economy. We're able to communicate as a global, a global network. I think as a result we kind of overlook the dark side that occurred. >> John: Joe? >> Again, the foolish optimist here. But I think that... It shouldn't be the question like how did we miss it? It's do we have the ability now to catch it? And I think without data science without machine learning, without being able to train machines to look for patterns that involve corruption or result in corruption, I think we'd be out of luck. But now we have those tools. And now hopefully, optimistically, by the next election we'll be able to detect these things before they become public. >> It's a loaded question because my premise was Facebook had the ability and the tools and the knowledge and the data science expertise if in fact they wanted to solve that problem, but they were focused on other problems, which is how do I get people to click on ads? >> Right they had the ability to train the machines, but they were giving the machines the wrong training. >> Looking under the wrong rock. >> (laughs) That's right. >> It is easy to play armchair quarterback. Another topic I wanted to ask the panel about is, IBM Watson. You guys spend time in the Valley, I spend time in the Valley. People in the Valley poo-poo Watson. Ah, Google, Facebook, Amazon they've got the best AI. Watson, and some of that's fair criticism. Watson's a heavy lift, very services oriented, you just got to apply it in a very focused. At the same time Google's trying to get you to click on Ads, as is Facebook, Amazon's trying to get you to buy stuff. IBM's trying to solve cancer. Your thoughts on that sort of juxtaposition of the different AI suppliers and there may be others. Oh, nobody wants to touch this one, come on. I told you elephant in the room questions. >> Well I mean you're looking at two different, very different types of organizations. One which is really spent decades in applying technology to business and these other companies are ones that are primarily into the consumer, right? When we talk about things like IBM Watson you're looking at a very different type of solution. You used to be able to buy IT and once you installed it you pretty much could get it to work and store your records or you know, do whatever it is you needed it to do. But these types of tools, like Watson actually tries to learn your business. And it needs to spend time doing that watching the data and having its models tuned. And so you don't get the results right away. And I think that's been kind of the challenge that organizations like IBM has had. Like this is a different type of technology solution, one that has to actually learn first before it can provide value. And so I think you know you have organizations like IBM that are much better at applying technology to business, and then they have the further hurdle of having to try to apply these tools that work in very different ways. There's education too on the side of the buyer. >> I'd have to say that you know I think there's plenty of businesses out there also trying to solve very significant, meaningful problems. You know with Microsoft AI and Google AI and IBM Watson, I think it's not really the tool that matters, like we were saying earlier. A fool with a tool is still a fool. And regardless of who the manufacturer of that tool is. And I think you know having, a thoughtful, intelligent, trained, educated data scientist using any of these tools can be equally effective. >> So do you not see core AI competence and I left out Microsoft, as a strategic advantage for these companies? Is it going to be so ubiquitous and available that virtually anybody can apply it? Or is all the investment in R&D and AI going to pay off for these guys? >> Yeah, so I think there's different levels of AI, right? So there's AI where you can actually improve the model. I remember when I was invited when Watson was kind of first out by IBM to a private, sort of presentation. And my question was, "Okay, so when do I get "to access the corpus?" The corpus being sort of the foundation of NLP, which is natural language processing. So it's what you use as almost like a dictionary. Like how you're actually going to measure things, or things up. And they said, "Oh you can't." "What do you mean I can't?" It's like, "We do that." "So you're telling me as a data scientist "you're expecting me to rely on the fact "that you did it better than me and I should rely on that." I think over the years after that IBM started opening it up and offering different ways of being able to access the corpus and work with that data. But I remember at the first Watson hackathon there was only two corpus available. It was either the travel or medicine. There was no other foundational data available. So I think one of the difficulties was, you know IBM being a little bit more on the forefront of it they kind of had that burden of having to develop these systems and learning kind of the hard way that if you don't have the right models and you don't have the right data and you don't have the right access, that's going to be a huge limiter. I think with things like medical, medical information that's an extremely difficult data to start with. Partly because you know anything that you do find or don't find, the impact is significant. If I'm looking at things like what people clicked on the impact of using that data wrong, it's minimal. You might lose some money. If you do that with healthcare data, if you do that with medical data, people may die, like this is a much more difficult data set to start with. So I think from a scientific standpoint it's great to have any information about a new technology, new process. That's the nice that is that IBM's obviously invested in it and collected information. I think the difficulty there though is just 'cause you have it you can't solve everything. And if feel like from someone who works in technology, I think in general when you appeal to developers you try not to market. And with Watson it's very heavily marketed, which tends to turn off people who are more from the technical side. Because I think they don't like it when it's gimmicky in part because they do the opposite of that. They're always trying to build up the technical components of it. They don't like it when you're trying to convince them that you're selling them something when you could just give them the specs and look at it. So it could be something as simple as communication. But I do think it is valuable to have had a company who leads on the forefront of that and try to do so we can actually learn from what IBM has learned from this process. >> But you're an optimist. (John laughs) All right, good. >> Just one more thought. >> Joe go ahead first. >> Joe: I want to see how Alexa or Siri do on Jeopardy. (panelists laugh) >> All right. Going to go around a final thought, give you a second. Let's just think about like your 12 month crystal ball. In terms of either challenges that need to be met in the near term or opportunities you think will be realized. 12, 18 month horizon. Bob you've got the microphone headed up, so I'll let you lead off and let's just go around. >> I think a big challenge for business, for society is getting people educated on data and analytics. There's a study that was just released I think last month by Service Now, I think, or some vendor, or Click. They found that only 17% of the employees in Europe have the ability to use data in their job. Think about that. >> 17. >> 17. Less than 20%. So these people don't have the ability to understand or use data intelligently to improve their work performance. That says a lot about the state we're in today. And that's Europe. It's probably a lot worse in the United States. So that's a big challenge I think. To educate the masses. >> John: Joe. >> I think we probably have a better chance of improving technology over training people. I think using data needs to be iPhone easy. And I think, you know which means that a lot of innovation is in the years to come. I do think that a keyboard is going to be a thing of the past for the average user. We are going to start using voice a lot more. I think augmented reality is going to be things that becomes a real reality. Where we can hold our phone in front of an object and it will have an overlay of prices where it's available, if it's a person. I think that we will see within an organization holding a camera up to someone and being able to see what is their salary, what sales did they do last year, some key performance indicators. I hope that we are beyond the days of everyone around the world walking around like this and we start actually becoming more social as human beings through augmented reality. I think, it has to happen. I think we're going through kind of foolish times at the moment in order to get to the greater good. And I think the greater good is using technology in a very, very smart way. Which means that you shouldn't have to be, sorry to contradict, but maybe it's good to counterpoint. I don't think you need to have a PhD in SQL to use data. Like I think that's 1990. I think as we evolve it's going to become easier for the average person. Which means people like the brain trust here needs to get smarter and start innovating. I think the innovation around data is really at the tip of the iceberg, we're going to see a lot more of it in the years to come. >> Dion why don't you go ahead, then we'll come down the line here. >> Yeah so I think over that time frame two things are likely to happen. One is somebody's going to crack the consumerization of machine learning and AI, such that it really is available to the masses and we can do much more advanced things than we could. We see the industries tend to reach an inflection point and then there's an explosion. No one's quite cracked the code on how to really bring this to everyone, but somebody will. And that could happen in that time frame. And then the other thing that I think that almost has to happen is that the forces for openness, open data, data sharing, open data initiatives things like Block Chain are going to run headlong into data protection, data privacy, customer privacy laws and regulations that have to come down and protect us. Because the industry's not doing it, the government is stepping in and it's going to re-silo a lot of our data. It's going to make it recede and make it less accessible, making data science harder for a lot of the most meaningful types of activities. Patient data for example is already all locked down. We could do so much more with it, but health start ups are really constrained about what they can do. 'Cause they can't access the data. We can't even access our own health care records, right? So I think that's the challenge is we have to have that battle next to be able to go and take the next step. >> Well I see, with the growth of data a lot of it's coming through IOT, internet of things. I think that's a big source. And we're going to see a lot of innovation. A new types of Ubers or Air BnBs. Uber's so 2013 though, right? We're going to see new companies with new ideas, new innovations, they're going to be looking at the ways this data can be leveraged all this big data. Or data coming in from the IOT can be leveraged. You know there's some examples out there. There's a company for example that is outfitting tools, putting sensors in the tools. Industrial sites can therefore track where the tools are at any given time. This is an expensive, time consuming process, constantly loosing tools, trying to locate tools. Assessing whether the tool's being applied to the production line or the right tool is at the right torque and so forth. With the sensors implanted in these tools, it's now possible to be more efficient. And there's going to be innovations like that. Maybe small start up type things or smaller innovations. We're going to see a lot of new ideas and new types of approaches to handling all this data. There's going to be new business ideas. The next Uber, we may be hearing about it a year from now whatever that may be. And that Uber is going to be applying data, probably IOT type data in some, new innovative way. >> Jennifer, final word. >> Yeah so I think with data, you know it's interesting, right, for one thing I think on of the things that's made data more available and just people we open to the idea, has been start ups. But what's interesting about this is a lot of start ups have been acquired. And a lot of people at start ups that got acquired now these people work at bigger corporations. Which was the way it was maybe 10 years ago, data wasn't available and open, companies kept it very proprietary, you had to sign NDAs. It was like within the last 10 years that open source all of that initiatives became much more popular, much more open, a acceptable sort of way to look at data. I think that what I'm kind of interested in seeing is what people do within the corporate environment. Right, 'cause they have resources. They have funding that start ups don't have. And they have backing, right? Presumably if you're acquired you went in at a higher title in the corporate structure whereas if you had started there you probably wouldn't be at that title at that point. So I think you have an opportunity where people who have done innovative things and have proven that they can build really cool stuff, can now be in that corporate environment. I think part of it's going to be whether or not they can really adjust to sort of the corporate, you know the corporate landscape, the politics of it or the bureaucracy. I think every organization has that. Being able to navigate that is a difficult thing in part 'cause it's a human skill set, it's a people skill, it's a soft skill. It's not the same thing as just being able to code something and sell it. So you know it's going to really come down to people. I think if people can figure out for instance, what people want to buy, what people think, in general that's where the money comes from. You know you make money 'cause someone gave you money. So if you can find a way to look at a data or even look at technology and understand what people are doing, aren't doing, what they're happy about, unhappy about, there's always opportunity in collecting the data in that way and being able to leverage that. So you build cooler things, and offer things that haven't been thought of yet. So it's a very interesting time I think with the corporate resources available if you can do that. You know who knows what we'll have in like a year. >> I'll add one. >> Please. >> The majority of companies in the S&P 500 have a market cap that's greater than their revenue. The reason is 'cause they have IP related to data that's of value. But most of those companies, most companies, the vast majority of companies don't have any way to measure the value of that data. There's no GAAP accounting standard. So they don't understand the value contribution of their data in terms of how it helps them monetize. Not the data itself necessarily, but how it contributes to the monetization of the company. And I think that's a big gap. If you don't understand the value of the data that means you don't understand how to refine it, if data is the new oil and how to protect it and so forth and secure it. So that to me is a big gap that needs to get closed before we can actually say we live in a data driven world. >> So you're saying I've got an asset, I don't know if it's worth this or this. And they're missing that great opportunity. >> So devolve to what I know best. >> Great discussion. Really, really enjoyed the, the time as flown by. Joe if you get that augmented reality thing to work on the salary, point it toward that guy not this guy, okay? (everyone laughs) It's much more impressive if you point it over there. But Joe thank you, Dion, Joe and Jennifer and Batman. We appreciate and Bob Hayes, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks you guys. >> Really enjoyed >> Great stuff. >> the conversation. >> And a reminder coming up a the top of the hour, six o'clock Eastern time, IBMgo.com featuring the live keynote which is being set up just about 50 feet from us right now. Nick Silver is one of the headliners there, John Thomas is well, or rather Rob Thomas. John Thomas we had on earlier on The Cube. But a panel discussion as well coming up at six o'clock on IBMgo.com, six to 7:15. Be sure to join that live stream. That's it from The Cube. We certainly appreciate the time. Glad to have you along here in New York. And until the next time, take care. (bright digital music)