>>Welcome back to the cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with a couple thousand people here. And I got to tell you it's really great to be back in person, done a wheelchair. Join three next, the SVP of product strategy and innovation at Cooper. Donna, welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. It is great to be here and it's great to be live, but yet >>It is great to be alive. Again. I feel like I'm exhaling for the first time in a long time. >>I know, right. It's just so wonderful. I want >>To talk a little bit about you you've been a Cooper for a long time since it was just a baby startup, a little >>Baby >>Lady that also had a lot of leadership roles, product strategy, marketing, a customer experience, professional services. I also read that you have 12 software patent. I do. I love that. >>I know it's been one of the most amazing things that Coupa, which is this ability to be creative and innovate and then get your item patented. It's wonderful. >>Talk to me about, obviously the last two years have been so interesting, shall we say dynamic challenging? And we were talking before we went live that we haven't. The key bus had been that Coupa inspire, inspire hasn't happened since 2019 and it's almost three years ago. Talk to me about the last 10 years I Cooper and the massive acceleration I'm Rob was saying this morning in the keynote 3.3 trillion under spend under management almost at a trillion a year run rate. Yeah, >>We have huge. The numbers have just started to really become a fly wheel, right? More customers more spend. And really now having this big data repository of $3.3 trillion and the ability to apply AI to that data. But it really has been a journey. Um, when I joined about 11 years ago, now we had this vision, the vision was always a data centric model where we can apply AI to that data and create intelligence. And now we're finally at a volume of data where we can, we can anonymize the data and we can create insights at a level that we just were not able to do 10 years ago. >>One of the things that we've learned, I think fairly recently is that every company has to be a data company regardless of industry. Even I, I, I think about that, like my grocery store has to be a data company. Sure. There's no more, it'd be nice. If we had a data strategy, it would be nice if we actually could glean insights from our data that's table stakes, that's business critical that's differentiating. >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I think what's really interesting in an enterprise software is that as a SAS provider, although we may host the systems, we don't actually own our customer's data. We need to actually have permission to usage of the data. And that was one of the things that Cooper did very early on, about 10 years ago, where we started working with our customers and really building that permission to use into the contracts themselves. And that has really created now this motion of having data that we can now consume and use where a lot of businesses in enterprise software had not really thought about the notion of permission to use and having data available to them. >>That's the power of the community, right? And that's one of the things that clearly sets Cooper apart from its competition. >>Yes, indeed. We have spent so many years on creating this model of how does the community and how does community.ai help each individual customer become more efficient, save more and also do good for the planet in a way that has just never been able to do, if that company was doing it alone by themselves. >>Speaking of good for the planet, let's talk about ESG, your customer conversations. ESG is broad. >>How >>Are customers approaching the topic of it to bring it in as a strategic initiative? Okay. >>You know, I think this is a really great question. So what happened about a few years ago is our customers sat down with us and we said to ourselves, if we were going to make every dollar more sustainable, more inclusive that we're spending, what would we need to do? What would that be? The places within a spend function that you could improve the outcome of that dollar to be more sustainable and inclusive. And we broke it down into so many different features. And over the last three years, we've developed, delivered over 80 different features now available in our BSM sustainable BSM toolkit that our customers can configure Coupa to impact their ESG goals positively. >>So BSM can be a facilitator of ESG or an accelerator, or >>It's definitely an accelerator. And one of the things we're trying to do is democratize the ability to do good, right? So oftentimes the larger organizations are able to invest people into these problems. Well now smaller and smaller organizations are expected to comply with government regulations. How do these businesses do it? They can do it with technology like Kupa. >>Got it. Okay. One of the things I was looking at in my prep for the event was a recent survey that Cooper did just in February. It's just a couple of months ago, 800 decision makers, >>Um, >>Who have overview or responsibility for the supply chain and businesses with over a thousand employees. And this was global. What are some of the improvements that businesses, what did you find that they want to make with respect to ESG? >>You know, I think there was a really great survey that showed businesses, have the intent they want to do good, but the problem is the act secretion of it. How do they actually make it happen? And technology systems have largely failed them or have only looked at a part of the problem without looking at the whole problem. I can give you an example, please >>Do >>So in the scope three emissions, which is on everyone's mind right now, how are we going to comply with scope three emissions? At first on the surface, it looks like a reporting problem. Oh, I'll just create a report. But the real problem is data related the data itself that these organizations have on what they purchased and who they purchased it from is terrible. And so if your data's bad, your report to the government is going to be terrible, right? So you have to look at the problem holistically solving the data problem before you get to the reporting problem. And that's what Coupa really specializes on. >>And the things I was also looking at in the survey was from an overall theme perspective that the availability and reliability of crucial supply chain data is preventing organizations from operationalizing, their corporate purpose with respect to ESG will Kupa solves that problem. >>Absolutely. >>Talk to me about that. >>Yeah. So let's talk about things like third-party risk management. When you are working in a supply chain, you need to know who your suppliers are, not just your suppliers, but their suppliers as well, tier two, tier three, tier four, or even beyond even. Um, and this is everything from anti-bribery and anti-corruption to InfoSec and GDPR and so many different government regulations on knowing who you're doing business with. And Coupa solves that problem of collecting that data from your third parties and then continually monitoring it and passing it into the different systems within your spend processes in order to make sure that the person that is making a decision, how's the data at their fingertips. >>That's critical. And you know, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is that everybody wants things now, instantaneously in real time, it's no longer, oh, that's great to have that. No, I, as a consumer, I want that in business. I want that every company has to be a data company, but if organizations can't be able to extract insights from that data and make smart decisions on it in real time, they're going to be out of business. >>Absolutely. The ability to be able to process data at the time you're making a decision, the best data possible at that moment is critical in order for these companies, really, it's a, it's an ability for this company to thrive and even survive. >>Absolutely. Nobody's going to want one thing, I think we know nobody's going to want less data slot more slowly as time goes on. It's always going to be more data faster, faster, fastest. >>Absolutely. And that's why this model at Kupa has really been formulated over the last 12 years of how do we collect the data across our customer community? How do we pull it together, normalize it, aggregate it, anonymize it, and create insights that are so powerful. Like what we're just announcing now is our ocean freight pricing >>Index. >>So we've collected all of the data from our customers that are sourcing ocean freight and we're taking that data and we're creating a market index for the pricing of ocean freight. So now within Coupa, you can actually see what's happening the price of ocean freight, and we're going to continue to add more and more services. As more data gets processed to Hooper. >>Talk to me about the customer influence and your role. You talk with customers a lot. It used to be on the road a lot. Obviously that's changed. Hopefully that's coming back, but let's talk about one of the things I always know when I, when I come to inspire, I always know I'm going to see a lot of customer logos. I'm going to feel a lot. And on the cube here from the voice of Coupa's customer, talk to me about some of the influence that your customers have been able to have in the last two years alone. >>Absolutely. So our philosophy at Coupa's, uh, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it really is the DNA of this company, the heart of the company. So when the pandemic hit, we just really said to ourselves, okay, how do we continue that collaboration and now a digital world? And that's what we did. We just pivoted really fast into a digital world, but the same volume, the same collaboration, the same conversations were happening with our customer community. And in the last year alone, we probably had over 400 customers over 90% of the features we delivered had customer input into those features. And the model continues around our customers, collaborating with us via the digital channels and our product owners, really working with them as a co innovation team. And not as, you know, product in a ivory tower somewhere. >>I like the co-innovation kind of team part, but it's really what you're describing is that flywheel that you mentioned a few minutes ago, that's really always been there at Coupa for very, very long time. And it's just getting faster and more efficient. And I would say in a nerdy way more, data-driven >>More data, data, data. I will talk data all day long. It's just wonderful. And even this ocean freight thing, I'll tell everyone 10 years ago, this was the dream to have enough data, to be able to create these types of supply chain insights that are just unparalleled. And now as the data continues to increase the next year's insights and the year after are going to just keep improving because as the data increases, the insights get better and in different categories, different ways. >>So when you're in those customer conversations with customers who maybe prospects, I'll say who aren't yet Coupa customers who ha who say Donna, I've got a, we've got a huge data problem. Where do they start? How do you advise them to be able to overcome that? So they can use the data, glean the insights in real time and be competitive? >>You know, the first thing I always say to our customers or prospective customers is start the journey and have conversations with Coupa as a partner and not as a vendor, the more that we can work together and say, help us understand your technology architecture, help us understand your pain points. Where are the, where are the parts of your business that are critically damaged that need us to prioritize. And then let us have a discussion for you as a company that we can make recommendations you based on other customers that have been like you and have those same pain points and then lay it out from that point of view. But it's, it's hard when it's a very, you know, classic old model of we're procurement and you're a vendor and we're going to silo it because what we see is a >>Lot of, >>Well, this is how we used to do it. So we're only asking you questions around how we used to do it. And now how the rest of the, not about how the rest of the community is doing it. So my advice would really be open up the doors, have a conversation, start as a partner, and then let's figure it out from there. >>Well, one of the things that came across in Rob keynote this morning was about Cooper, about we've got to get rid of the silos. Every organization in every industry cannot operate in a silo. And even, even Barbara Corcoran's keynote when she was talking about some of the best ideas. In fact, I think I saw a tweet from her the other day that said she doesn't think she's ever had a really great idea. They've always come from basically collaborating within a group. So not in a silo. >>Absolutely collaboration is key in everything we do. We, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it truly is a key point in technology. These silos that are happening in business that prevents the risk from properly be operationalized. So for example, the risk team may be aware that there is a supplier that has now gone onto a government watch list. Okay? But the payments team is not aware. So the payments team is still issuing payments to that vendor or new orders are going to that vendor or sourcing events. Coupa brings those silos together and says, instead, we're going to employ what we call suite synergy. And we're going to stop the transactions when the risk is increased, routed to the risk team for review before the money goes out the door. >>And how does I love sweet synergy? How does that resonate? Who are you talking to within customers? Are you talking to the C-suite? How does suite synergy resonate that far up the stack? Because the concept is clear. >>Yeah. It's about the collaboration for more value and protecting the brand. The, what the people we speak to are generally the CFO, the CPO, the chief procurement officer and the CIO. Those are generally, um, who we speak to. But increasingly we see the chief sustainability officer, the chief diversity officer, and especially from a notion of how do I not just report on my data? How do I improve it? How do I impact diversity by helping the person, making a spend decisions, giving them diverse options at the time they're doing that spend decision, instead of just reporting on it, throw it, >>Grow it, act on it, take the insights and actually make smart decisions faster. >>Absolutely. And before the money goes out the door, once the money goes out the door, you cannot influence it to be going to a diverse supplier it's already done. >>Right. So I know we're only on day one here. Last question for you is what are its great turnout? All the people behind us. It's great to hear that buzz of, of a conference environment. Once again, what are some of the things that you've heard today that really excite you about the direction that Cooper's going in? >>I think for me, it all started today. And yesterday, yesterday we are a community advisory boards. We had hundreds of customers that were meeting with us and it was just the sense of co-innovation being alive and well. So many customers today, I sat next to ADM, uh, one of our customers and they're working with us on supply chain collaboration and the next generation of supply chain collaboration. And it was just so wonderful to finally meet the people that we've been working with for so long in a digital world. >>That's right. It's always nice. When you look at badges, I know you put video conferencing for two years. You're >>Taller than I thought >>Exactly. I don't get that. I don't get that. You're taller than other >>Taller. No, I'm pretty >>Sure it's been great. Having you on the program, talking about the strategy, the innovation, the direction coop is going and what you've witnessed, the evolution of it in the last 10 years, we congratulate you on your success. And we just look forward to seeing Kupa, continue to evolve and mature. >>Thank you so much. It was wonderful to sit down with you today. Excellent. >>Good. I enjoyed it too. For Donna wheelchairs. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Cooper inspire 22 from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Reporter: From around the globe, it's The Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation and event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Okay, we're back. Focusing on enterprise data automation, we're going to talk about the journey to the cloud. Remember, the hashtag is data automated. We're here with Lester Waters who's the CTO of Io-Tahoe, Lester, good to see you from across the pond on video, wish we were face to face, but it's great to have you on The Cube. >> Also I do, thank you for having me. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Hey, give us a little background on CTO, you got a deep expertise in a lot of different areas, but what do we need to know? >> Well, David, I started my career basically at Microsoft, where I started the Information Security Cryptography Group. They're the very first one that the company had and that led to a career in information security and of course, as you go along with the information security, data is the key element to be protected. So I always had my hands in data and that naturally progressed into a role with Io-Tahoe as their CTO. >> Guys, I have to invite you back, we'll talk crypto all day we'd love to do that but we're here talking about yeah, awesome, right? But we're here talking about the cloud and here we'll talk about the journey to the cloud and accelerate. Everybody's really interested obviously in cloud, even more interested now with the pandemic, but what's that all about? >> Well, moving to the cloud is quite an undertaking for most organizations. First of all, we've got as probably if you're a large enterprise, you probably have thousands of applications, you have hundreds and hundreds of database instances, and trying to shed some light on that, just to plan your move to the cloud is a real challenge. And some organizations try to tackle that manually. Really what Io-Tahoe is bringing is trying to tackle that in an automated version to help you with your journey to the cloud. >> Well, look at migrations are sometimes just an evil word to a lot of organizations, but at the same time, building up technical debt veneer after veneer and year, and year, and year is something that many companies are saying, "Okay, it's got to stop." So what's the prescription for that automation journey and simplifying that migration to the cloud? >> Well, I think the very first thing that's all about is data hygiene. You don't want to pick up your bad habits and take them to the cloud. You've got an opportunity here, so I see the journey to the cloud is an opportunity to really clean house, reorganize things, like moving out. You might move all your boxes, but you're kind of probably cherry pick what you're going to take with you and then you're going to organize it as you end up at your new destination. So from that, I get there's seven key principles that I like to operate by when I advise on the cloud migration. >> Okay. So, where do you start? >> Well, I think the first thing is understanding what you got, so discover and cataloging your data and your applications. If I don't know what I have, I can't move it, I can't improve it, I can't build up on it. And I have to understand there is dependency, so building that data catalog is the very first step. What do I got? >> Now, is that a metadata exercise? Sometimes there's more metadata than there is data. Is metadata part of that first step or? >> In deed, metadata is the first step so the metadata really describes the data you have. So, the metadata is going to tell me I have 2000 tables and maybe of those tables, there's an average of 25 columns each, and so that gives me a sketch if you will, of what I need to move. How big are the boxes I need to pack for my move to the cloud? >> Okay, and you're saying you can automate that data classification, categorization, discovery, correct using math machine intelligence, is that correct? >> Yeah, that's correct. So basically we go, and we will discover all of the schema, if you will, that's the metadata description of your tables and columns in your database in the data types. So we take, we will ingest that in, and we will build some insights around that. And we do that across a variety of platforms because everybody's organization has you've got a one yeah, an Oracle Database here, and you've got a Microsoft SQL Database here, you might have something else there that you need to bring site onto. And part of this journey is going to be about breaking down your data silos and understanding what you've got. >> Okay. So, we've done the audit, we know what we've got, what's next? Where do we go next? >> So the next thing is remediating that data. Where do I have duplicate data? Often times in an organization, data will get duplicated. So, somebody will take a snapshot of a data, and then ended up building a new application, which suddenly becomes dependent on that data. So it's not uncommon for an organization of 20 master instances of a customer. And you can see where that will go when trying to keep all that stuff in sync becomes a nightmare all by itself. So you want to understand where all your redundant data is. So when you go to the cloud, maybe you have an opportunity here to consolidate that data. >> Yeah, because you like to borrow in an Einstein or apply an Einstein Bromide right. Keep as much data as you can, but no more. >> Correct. >> Okay. So you get to the point to the second step you're kind of a one to reduce costs, then what? You figure out what to get rid of, or actually get rid of it, what's next? >> Yes, that would be the next step. So figuring out what you need and what you don't need often times I've found that there's obsolete columns of data in your databases that you just don't need, or maybe it's been superseded by another, you've got tables that have been superseded by other tables in your database. So you got to understand what's being used and what's not and then from that, you can decide, "I'm going to leave this stuff behind, "or I'm going to archive this stuff "cause I might need it for data retention "or I'm just going to delete it, "I don't need it at all." >> Well, Lester, most organizations, if they've been around a while, and the so-called incumbents, they've got data all over the place, their data marts, data warehouses, there are all kinds of different systems and the data lives in silos. So, how do you kind of deal with that problem? Is that part of the journey? >> That's a great point Dave, because you're right that the data silos happen because this business unit is chartered with this task another business unit has this task and that's how you get those instantiations of the same data occurring in multiple places. So as part of your cloud migration journey, you really want to plan where there's an opportunity to consolidate your data, because that means there'll be less to manage, there'll be less data to secure, and it'll have a smaller footprint, which means reduced costs. >> So, people always talk about a single version of the truth, data quality is a huge issue. I've talked to data practitioners and they've indicated that the quality metrics are in the single digits and they're trying to get to 90% plus, but maybe you could address data quality. Where does that fit in on the journey? >> That's, a very important point. First of all, you don't want to bring your legacy issues with you. As the point I made earlier, if you've got data quality issues, this is a good time to find those and identify and remediate them. But that can be a laborious task. We've had customers that have tried to do this by hand and it's very, very time consuming, cause you imagine if you've got 200 tables, 50,000 columns, imagine, the manual labor involved in doing that. And you could probably accomplish it, but it'll take a lot of work. So the opportunity to use tools here and automate that process is really will help you find those outliers there's that bad data and correct it before you move to the cloud. >> And you're just talking about that automation it's the same thing with data catalog and that one of the earlier steps. Organizations would do this manually or they try to do it manually and that's a lot of reason for the failure. They just, it's like cleaning out your data like you just don't want to do it (laughs). Okay, so then what's next? I think we're plowing through your steps here. What what's next on the journey? >> The next one is, in a nutshell, preserve your data format. Don't boil the ocean here to use a cliche. You want to do a certain degree of lift and shift because you've got application dependencies on that data and the data format, the tables on which they sit, the columns and the way they're named. So, some degree you are going to be doing a lift and shift, but it's an intelligent lift and shift using all the insights you've gathered by cataloging the data, looking for data quality issues, looking for duplicate columns, doing planning consolidation. You don't want to also rewrite your application. So, in that aspect, I think it's important to do a bit of lift and shift and preserve those data formats as they sit. >> Okay, so let me follow up on that. That sounds really important to me, because if you're doing a conversion and you're rewriting applications, that means that you're going to have to freeze the existing application, and then you going to be refueling the plane as you're in midair and a lot of times, especially with mission critical systems, you're never going to bring those together and that's a recipe for disaster, isn't it? >> Great analogy unless you're with the air force, you'll (mumbles) (laughs). Now, that's correct. It's you want to have bite-sized steps and that's why it's important to plan your journey, take these steps. You're using automation where you can to make that journey to the cloud much easier and more straightforward. >> All right, I like that. So we're taking a kind of a systems view and end to end view of the data pipeline, if you will. What's next? I think we're through. I think I've counted six. What's the lucky seven? >> Lucky seven, involve your business users. Really, when you think about it, your data is in silos. Part of this migration to the cloud is an opportunity to break down these silos, these silos that naturally occur as part of the business unit. You've got to break these cultural barriers that sometimes exist between business and say, so for example, I always advise, there's an opportunity here to consolidate your sensitive data, your PII, your personally identifiable information, and if three different business units have the same source of truth for that, there's was an opportunity to consolidate that into one as you migrate. That might be a little bit of tweaking to some of the apps that you have that are dependent on it, but in the long run, that's what you really want to do. You want to have a single source of truth, you want to ring fence that sensitive data, and you want all your business users talking together so that you're not reinventing the wheel. >> Well, the reason I think too that's so important is that you're now I would say you're creating a data driven culture. I know that's sort of a buzz word, but what it's true and what that means to me is that your users, your lines of business feel like they actually own the data rather than pointing fingers at the data group, the IT group, the data quality people, data engineers, saying, "Oh, I don't believe it." If the lines of business own the data, they're going to lean in, they're going to maybe bring their own data science resources to the table, and it's going to be a much more collaborative effort as opposed to a non-productive argument. >> Yeah. And that's where we want to get to. DataOps is key, and maybe that's a term that's still evolving. But really, you want the data to drive the business because that's where your insights are, that's where your value is. You want to break down the silos between not only the business units, as I mentioned, but also as you pointed out, the roles of the people that are working with it. A self service data culture is the right way to go with the right security controls, putting on my security hat of course in place so that if I'm a developer and I'm building a new application, I'd love to be able to go to the data catalog, "Oh, there's already a database that has the customer "what the customers have clicked on when shopping." I could use that. I don't have to rebuild that, I'll just use that as for my application. That's the kind of problems you want to be able to solve and that's where your cost reductions come in across the board. >> Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the business context here. We always talk about data, it's the new source of competitive advantage, I think there's not a lot of debate about that, but it's hard. A lot of companies are struggling to get value out of their data because it's so difficult. All the things we've talked about, the silos, the data quality, et cetera. So, you mentioned the term data apps, data apps is all about streamlining, that data, pipelining, infusing automation and machine intelligence into that pipeline and then ultimately taking a systems view and compressing that time to insights so that you can drive monetization, whether it's cut costs, maybe it's new revenue, drive productivity, but it's that end to end cycle time reduction that successful practitioners talk about as having the biggest business impact. Are you seeing that? >> Absolutely, but it is a journey and it's a huge cultural change for some companies that are. I've worked in many companies that are ticket based IT-driven and just do even the marginalist of change or get insight, raise a ticket, wait a week and then out the other end will pop maybe a change that I needed and it'll take a while for us to get to a culture that truly has a self service data-driven nature where I'm the business owner, and I want to bring in a data scientist because we're losing. For example, a business might be losing to a competitor and they want to find what insights, why is the customer churn, for example, happening every Tuesday? What is it about Tuesday? This is where your data scientist comes in. The last thing you want is to raise a ticket, wait for the snapshot of the data, you want to enable that data scientist to come in, securely connect into the data, and do his analysis, and come back and give you those insights, which will give you that competitive advantage. >> Well, I love your point about churn, maybe it talks about the Andreessen quote that "Software's eating the world," and all companies are our software companies, and SaaS companies, and churn is the killer of SaaS companies. So very, very important point you're making. My last question for you before we summarize is the tech behind all of these. What makes Io-Tahoe unique in its ability to help automate that data pipeline? >> Well, we've done a lot of research, we have I think now maybe 11 pending patent applications, I think one has been approved to be issued (mumbles), but really, it's really about sitting down and doing the right kind of analysis and figuring out how we can optimize this journey. Some of these stuff isn't rocket science. You can read a schema and into an open source solution, but you can't necessarily find the hidden insights. So if I want to find my foreign key dependencies, which aren't always declared in the database, or I want to identify columns by their content, which because the columns might be labeled attribute one, attribute two, attribute three, or I want to find out how my data flows between the various tables in my database. That's the point at which you need to bring in automation, you need to bring in data science solutions, and there's even a degree of machine learning because for example, we might deduce that data is flowing from this table to this table and upon when you present that to the user with a 87% confidence, for example, and the user can go, or the administrator can go. Now, it really goes the other way, it was an invalid collusion and that's the machine learning cycle. So the next time we see that pattern again, in that environment we will be able to make a better recommendation because some things aren't black and white, they need that human intervention loop. >> All right, I just want to summarize with Lester Waters' playbook to moving to the cloud and I'll go through them. Hopefully, I took some notes, hopefully, I got them right. So step one, you want to do that data discovery audit, you want to be fact-based. Two is you want to remediate that data redundancy, and then three identify what you can get rid of. Oftentimes you don't get rid of stuff in IT, or maybe archive it to cheaper media. Four is consolidate those data silos, which is critical, breaking down those data barriers. And then, five is attack the quality issues before you do the migration. Six, which I thought was really intriguing was preserve that data format, you don't want to do the rewrite applications and do that conversion. It's okay to do a little bit of lifting and shifting >> This comes in after the task. >> Yeah, and then finally, and probably the most important is you got to have that relationship with the lines of business, your users, get them involved, begin that cultural shift. So I think great recipe Lester for safe cloud migration. I really appreciate your time. I'll give you the final word if you will bring us home. >> All right. Well, I think the journey to the cloud it's a tough one. You will save money, I have heard people say, you got to the cloud, it's too expensive, it's too this, too that, but really, there is an opportunity for savings. I'll tell you when I run data services as a PaaS service in the cloud, it's wonderful because I can scale up and scale down almost by virtually turning a knob. And so I'll have complete control and visibility of my costs. And so for me, that's very important. Io also, it gives me the opportunity to really ring fence my sensitive data, because let's face it, most organizations like being in a cheese grater when you talk about security, because there's so many ways in and out. So I find that by consolidating and bringing together the crown jewels, if you will. As a security practitioner, it's much more easy to control. But it's very important. You can't get there without some automation and automating this discovery and analysis process. >> Well, great advice. Lester, thanks so much. It's clear that the capex investments on data centers are generally not a good investment for most companies. Lester, really appreciate, Lester waters CTO of Io-Tahoe. Let's watch this short video and we'll come right back. You're watching The Cube, thank you. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Reporter: From around the globe, it's The Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation and event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Okay, we're back. Focusing on enterprise data automation, we're going to talk about the journey to the cloud. Remember, the hashtag is data automated. We're here with Lester Waters who's the CTO of Io-Tahoe, Lester, good to see you from across the pond on video, wish we were face to face, but it's great to have you on The Cube. >> Also I do, thank you for having me. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Hey, give us a little background on CTO, you got a deep expertise in a lot of different areas, but what do we need to know? >> Well, David, I started my career basically at Microsoft, where I started the Information Security Cryptography Group. They're the very first one that the company had and that led to a career in information security and of course, as you go along with the information security, data is the key element to be protected. So I always had my hands in data and that naturally progressed into a role with Io-Tahoe as their CTO. >> Guys, I have to invite you back, we'll talk crypto all day we'd love to do that but we're here talking about yeah, awesome, right? But we're here talking about the cloud and here we'll talk about the journey to the cloud and accelerate. Everybody's really interested obviously in cloud, even more interested now with the pandemic, but what's that all about? >> Well, moving to the cloud is quite an undertaking for most organizations. First of all, we've got as probably if you're a large enterprise, you probably have thousands of applications, you have hundreds and hundreds of database instances, and trying to shed some light on that, just to plan your move to the cloud is a real challenge. And some organizations try to tackle that manually. Really what Io-Tahoe is bringing is trying to tackle that in an automated version to help you with your journey to the cloud. >> Well, look at migrations are sometimes just an evil word to a lot of organizations, but at the same time, building up technical debt veneer after veneer and year, and year, and year is something that many companies are saying, "Okay, it's got to stop." So what's the prescription for that automation journey and simplifying that migration to the cloud? >> Well, I think the very first thing that's all about is data hygiene. You don't want to pick up your bad habits and take them to the cloud. You've got an opportunity here, so I see the journey to the cloud is an opportunity to really clean house, reorganize things, like moving out. You might move all your boxes, but you're kind of probably cherry pick what you're going to take with you and then you're going to organize it as you end up at your new destination. So from that, I get there's seven key principles that I like to operate by when I advise on the cloud migration. >> Okay. So, where do you start? >> Well, I think the first thing is understanding what you got, so discover and cataloging your data and your applications. If I don't know what I have, I can't move it, I can't improve it, I can't build up on it. And I have to understand there is dependency, so building that data catalog is the very first step. What do I got? >> Now, is that a metadata exercise? Sometimes there's more metadata than there is data. Is metadata part of that first step or? >> In deed, metadata is the first step so the metadata really describes the data you have. So, the metadata is going to tell me I have 2000 tables and maybe of those tables, there's an average of 25 columns each, and so that gives me a sketch if you will, of what I need to move. How big are the boxes I need to pack for my move to the cloud? >> Okay, and you're saying you can automate that data classification, categorization, discovery, correct using math machine intelligence, is that correct? >> Yeah, that's correct. So basically we go, and we will discover all of the schema, if you will, that's the metadata description of your tables and columns in your database in the data types. So we take, we will ingest that in, and we will build some insights around that. And we do that across a variety of platforms because everybody's organization has you've got a one yeah, an Oracle Database here, and you've got a Microsoft SQL Database here, you might have something else there that you need to bring site onto. And part of this journey is going to be about breaking down your data silos and understanding what you've got. >> Okay. So, we've done the audit, we know what we've got, what's next? Where do we go next? >> So the next thing is remediating that data. Where do I have duplicate data? Often times in an organization, data will get duplicated. So, somebody will take a snapshot of a data, and then ended up building a new application, which suddenly becomes dependent on that data. So it's not uncommon for an organization of 20 master instances of a customer. And you can see where that will go when trying to keep all that stuff in sync becomes a nightmare all by itself. So you want to understand where all your redundant data is. So when you go to the cloud, maybe you have an opportunity here to consolidate that data. >> Yeah, because you like to borrow in an Einstein or apply an Einstein Bromide right. Keep as much data as you can, but no more. >> Correct. >> Okay. So you get to the point to the second step you're kind of a one to reduce costs, then what? You figure out what to get rid of, or actually get rid of it, what's next? >> Yes, that would be the next step. So figuring out what you need and what you don't need often times I've found that there's obsolete columns of data in your databases that you just don't need, or maybe it's been superseded by another, you've got tables that have been superseded by other tables in your database. So you got to understand what's being used and what's not and then from that, you can decide, "I'm going to leave this stuff behind, "or I'm going to archive this stuff "cause I might need it for data retention "or I'm just going to delete it, "I don't need it at all." >> Well, Lester, most organizations, if they've been around a while, and the so-called incumbents, they've got data all over the place, their data marts, data warehouses, there are all kinds of different systems and the data lives in silos. So, how do you kind of deal with that problem? Is that part of the journey? >> That's a great point Dave, because you're right that the data silos happen because this business unit is chartered with this task another business unit has this task and that's how you get those instantiations of the same data occurring in multiple places. So as part of your cloud migration journey, you really want to plan where there's an opportunity to consolidate your data, because that means there'll be less to manage, there'll be less data to secure, and it'll have a smaller footprint, which means reduced costs. >> So, people always talk about a single version of the truth, data quality is a huge issue. I've talked to data practitioners and they've indicated that the quality metrics are in the single digits and they're trying to get to 90% plus, but maybe you could address data quality. Where does that fit in on the journey? >> That's, a very important point. First of all, you don't want to bring your legacy issues with you. As the point I made earlier, if you've got data quality issues, this is a good time to find those and identify and remediate them. But that can be a laborious task. We've had customers that have tried to do this by hand and it's very, very time consuming, cause you imagine if you've got 200 tables, 50,000 columns, imagine, the manual labor involved in doing that. And you could probably accomplish it, but it'll take a lot of work. So the opportunity to use tools here and automate that process is really will help you find those outliers there's that bad data and correct it before you move to the cloud. >> And you're just talking about that automation it's the same thing with data catalog and that one of the earlier steps. Organizations would do this manually or they try to do it manually and that's a lot of reason for the failure. They just, it's like cleaning out your data like you just don't want to do it (laughs). Okay, so then what's next? I think we're plowing through your steps here. What what's next on the journey? >> The next one is, in a nutshell, preserve your data format. Don't boil the ocean here to use a cliche. You want to do a certain degree of lift and shift because you've got application dependencies on that data and the data format, the tables on which they sit, the columns and the way they're named. So, some degree you are going to be doing a lift and shift, but it's an intelligent lift and shift using all the insights you've gathered by cataloging the data, looking for data quality issues, looking for duplicate columns, doing planning consolidation. You don't want to also rewrite your application. So, in that aspect, I think it's important to do a bit of lift and shift and preserve those data formats as they sit. >> Okay, so let me follow up on that. That sounds really important to me, because if you're doing a conversion and you're rewriting applications, that means that you're going to have to freeze the existing application, and then you going to be refueling the plane as you're in midair and a lot of times, especially with mission critical systems, you're never going to bring those together and that's a recipe for disaster, isn't it? >> Great analogy unless you're with the air force, you'll (mumbles) (laughs). Now, that's correct. It's you want to have bite-sized steps and that's why it's important to plan your journey, take these steps. You're using automation where you can to make that journey to the cloud much easier and more straightforward. >> All right, I like that. So we're taking a kind of a systems view and end to end view of the data pipeline, if you will. What's next? I think we're through. I think I've counted six. What's the lucky seven? >> Lucky seven, involve your business users. Really, when you think about it, your data is in silos. Part of this migration to the cloud is an opportunity to break down these silos, these silos that naturally occur as part of the business unit. You've got to break these cultural barriers that sometimes exist between business and say, so for example, I always advise, there's an opportunity here to consolidate your sensitive data, your PII, your personally identifiable information, and if three different business units have the same source of truth for that, there's was an opportunity to consolidate that into one as you migrate. That might be a little bit of tweaking to some of the apps that you have that are dependent on it, but in the long run, that's what you really want to do. You want to have a single source of truth, you want to ring fence that sensitive data, and you want all your business users talking together so that you're not reinventing the wheel. >> Well, the reason I think too that's so important is that you're now I would say you're creating a data driven culture. I know that's sort of a buzz word, but what it's true and what that means to me is that your users, your lines of business feel like they actually own the data rather than pointing fingers at the data group, the IT group, the data quality people, data engineers, saying, "Oh, I don't believe it." If the lines of business own the data, they're going to lean in, they're going to maybe bring their own data science resources to the table, and it's going to be a much more collaborative effort as opposed to a non-productive argument. >> Yeah. And that's where we want to get to. Data apps is key, and maybe that's a term that's still evolving. But really, you want the data to drive the business because that's where your insights are, that's where your value is. You want to break down the silos between not only the business units, as I mentioned, but also as you pointed out, the roles of the people that are working with it. A self service data culture is the right way to go with the right security controls, putting on my security hat of course in place so that if I'm a developer and I'm building a new application, I'd love to be able to go to the data catalog, "Oh, there's already a database that has the customer "what the customers have clicked on when shopping." I could use that. I don't have to rebuild that, I'll just use that as for my application. That's the kind of problems you want to be able to solve and that's where your cost reductions come in across the board. >> Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the business context here. We always talk about data, it's the new source of competitive advantage, I think there's not a lot of debate about that, but it's hard. A lot of companies are struggling to get value out of their data because it's so difficult. All the things we've talked about, the silos, the data quality, et cetera. So, you mentioned the term data apps, data apps is all about streamlining, that data, pipelining, infusing automation and machine intelligence into that pipeline and then ultimately taking a systems view and compressing that time to insights so that you can drive monetization, whether it's cut costs, maybe it's new revenue, drive productivity, but it's that end to end cycle time reduction that successful practitioners talk about as having the biggest business impact. Are you seeing that? >> Absolutely, but it is a journey and it's a huge cultural change for some companies that are. I've worked in many companies that are ticket based IT-driven and just do even the marginalist of change or get insight, raise a ticket, wait a week and then out the other end will pop maybe a change that I needed and it'll take a while for us to get to a culture that truly has a self service data-driven nature where I'm the business owner, and I want to bring in a data scientist because we're losing. For example, a business might be losing to a competitor and they want to find what insights, why is the customer churn, for example, happening every Tuesday? What is it about Tuesday? This is where your data scientist comes in. The last thing you want is to raise a ticket, wait for the snapshot of the data, you want to enable that data scientist to come in, securely connect into the data, and do his analysis, and come back and give you those insights, which will give you that competitive advantage. >> Well, I love your point about churn, maybe it talks about the Andreessen quote that "Software's eating the world," and all companies are our software companies, and SaaS companies, and churn is the killer of SaaS companies. So very, very important point you're making. My last question for you before we summarize is the tech behind all of these. What makes Io-Tahoe unique in its ability to help automate that data pipeline? >> Well, we've done a lot of research, we have I think now maybe 11 pending patent applications, I think one has been approved to be issued (mumbles), but really, it's really about sitting down and doing the right kind of analysis and figuring out how we can optimize this journey. Some of these stuff isn't rocket science. You can read a schema and into an open source solution, but you can't necessarily find the hidden insights. So if I want to find my foreign key dependencies, which aren't always declared in the database, or I want to identify columns by their content, which because the columns might be labeled attribute one, attribute two, attribute three, or I want to find out how my data flows between the various tables in my database. That's the point at which you need to bring in automation, you need to bring in data science solutions, and there's even a degree of machine learning because for example, we might deduce that data is flowing from this table to this table and upon when you present that to the user with a 87% confidence, for example, and the user can go, or the administrator can go. Now, it really goes the other way, it was an invalid collusion and that's the machine learning cycle. So the next time we see that pattern again, in that environment we will be able to make a better recommendation because some things aren't black and white, they need that human intervention loop. >> All right, I just want to summarize with Lester Waters' playbook to moving to the cloud and I'll go through them. Hopefully, I took some notes, hopefully, I got them right. So step one, you want to do that data discovery audit, you want to be fact-based. Two is you want to remediate that data redundancy, and then three identify what you can get rid of. Oftentimes you don't get rid of stuff in IT, or maybe archive it to cheaper media. Four is consolidate those data silos, which is critical, breaking down those data barriers. And then, five is attack the quality issues before you do the migration. Six, which I thought was really intriguing was preserve that data format, you don't want to do the rewrite applications and do that conversion. It's okay to do a little bit of lifting and shifting >> This comes in after the task. >> Yeah, and then finally, and probably the most important is you got to have that relationship with the lines of business, your users, get them involved, begin that cultural shift. So I think great recipe Lester for safe cloud migration. I really appreciate your time. I'll give you the final word if you will bring us home. >> All right. Well, I think the journey to the cloud it's a tough one. You will save money, I have heard people say, you got to the cloud, it's too expensive, it's too this, too that, but really, there is an opportunity for savings. I'll tell you when I run data services as a PaaS service in the cloud, it's wonderful because I can scale up and scale down almost by virtually turning a knob. And so I'll have complete control and visibility of my costs. And so for me, that's very important. Io also, it gives me the opportunity to really ring fence my sensitive data, because let's face it, most organizations like being in a cheese grater when you talk about security, because there's so many ways in and out. So I find that by consolidating and bringing together the crown jewels, if you will. As a security practitioner, it's much more easy to control. But it's very important. You can't get there without some automation and automating this discovery and analysis process. >> Well, great advice. Lester, thanks so much. It's clear that the capex investments on data centers are generally not a good investment for most companies. Lester, really appreciate, Lester waters CTO of Io-Tahoe. Let's watch this short video and we'll come right back. You're watching The Cube, thank you. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Inforum D.C. 2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well, back here on theCUBE, we are at Inforum '18. We're in Washington, D.C. here in the Walter Washington Convention Center. Not far from the White House. It's about a mile that way, and Capitol Hill's about a mile that way, I think. I know we're right in here, but I know we are smack dab in the middle of it. Dave Vellante and John Walls and Kevin Curry, who's the SVP of the global public sector at Infor. Good to have you with us. Good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here. Thanks for your time. >> So public sector, you're in the heart of it here, and you were telling us before we went on the air that you've got more than 700 clients here at the show this week? >> We do, we do. It's the best attendance we've had yet for Inforum, and I joined about six and a half years ago. And we built this business pretty much from the ground up. So it's been a great experience, and now we're starting to get a lot of adoption within the government, across the government, from federal to state to locals. >> What's the process been like, especially across those three, because I assume they're all different? You know, local, state, federal, everybody has different pain points and there's different tolerances. >> They do, they do. I mean, there's different micro-verticals within each of those statements. As an example, if you look at local governments, it could be anything from transit agencies to K-12 schools, to public works, to police, to fire. They all have all different requirements. State's the same thing, whether it's Department of Transportation or Department of Health and Human Services. And then when you get the federal side of it, then it's from the intelligence community to Department of Defense, healthcare within Defense, like the VA and DoD and Defense agencies as well. So it's a pretty wide swatch of use cases and business cases that you need to be able to sell to. >> Charles said something interesting in the keynote today. I want to ask you about it. He said, "We made a strategic decision to go to the cloud. "We didn't want to compete with Google "and Amazon and Microsoft for CloudScale. "That didn't make any sense for us." And he said, "When we were an on-prem software vendor, "we weren't managing servers for our customers." Now what struck me there is if you look back at the software company back in the day, they really didn't care about the server, right? It was just sort of infrastructure. It was kind of irrelevant to them. The cloud feels different. It seems like a more strategic relationship with Amazon. You know, we talk about Teresa Carlson and what a force she is in the government. AWS in the GovCloud has been a huge force. They had a giant lead. So have you been able to draft off that or is it just another sort of infrastructure platform? >> No, they're a major strategic partnership there with AWS and NN4. At the company level, and especially for me, with the government, they've made the right investments at the right time, I mean, and they actually have cloud environments that are very specific to different segments of the government and to different geographies. So as an example, in the federal government they have an intelligence cloud called C2S, which we work with them on. There's a very large procurement out right now for the Department of Defense called Jedi, which Amazon's going after, as well as the other larger cloud providers, so we're obviously riding that horse with AWS. And also for local governments, and they've done all of the compliancy for the government, whether it be FedRAMP, whether it be CJIS for those departments that are worried about the justice type of requirements. And as you get outside of the U.S., they're putting clouds and we're a global company as well, putting clouds in all the right places. They have a G-Cloud offering in the U.K. and as we talked about earlier when we sat down, they're opening a cloud in the Middle East right now too, in Bahrain that I think traces on oil over there as we speak. >> Right, right. The first Middle East country to claim cloud first. But it just seems like there's a strategic advantage there. And even with the other cloud suppliers. I mean, you know, Google's got its niche, big niche, you know, Microsoft, with its software state, but it seems like Amazon, they talk about that flywheel effect, brings certain technologies that, you know, when you talk to Soma, you guys have been able to take advantage of. It just feels a lot different than the old traditional server manufacturer. Oh, it's a Unix box and there's no difference between vendor A, B and C. >> Absolutely correct. And for us, we've taken advantage of the tools that Amazon has and obviously, we're doing all the compliancy on our applications and they've got whole the infrastructure piece of it, so the two work very well together. >> And that has allowed you to focus on your knitting, if you will. >> Yes. >> The things that you do best, which is a micro-verticals, suite across the application portfolio, bringing AI to the equation, automation, we heard a lot about robotic process automation, which is probably a hot topic in the government. >> Yes. I mean, Charles famously, he may have had a quote. I'm sure you heard it. It's friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Great quote. >> You know, that's not a business we're in. We're a software company. >> Right. >> So the public sector, obviously a different animal than the private sector. Very different needs, different constituents, you got tax payers, you got all that. When you bring the technology into the public sector, what does that do for it or how does that have to be, I don't know, re-conformed or adapted? And ultimately, what's the payoff, right? What's the return on that investment? >> So it was actually pretty shocking how quickly the government has adopted and moved towards the cloud. Typically, they're laggards. Everything happens in the commercial market and then government's a little bit of a late adopter, right? But we're seeing them very quickly go to the cloud and there's a lot of reasons for that. One being, you have an aging workforce. Okay, so the baby boomers are all retiring so a lot of that intellectual knowledge is going out the door. Two, is there's some economies of scale to be realized by doing that because once you're in the cloud, I mean, it's up to the vendor who's maintaining it to maintain that for you. So, you know, the people behind the scenes, they have to do it. You know, when you upgrade your software to go from one release to the other, it's automatically done for you. I mean, so there's real cost savings to be had, you know, from a care and feeding perspective there as well. Also a lot of the, on the ERP side of the things, a lot of the systems that are out in the marketplace today that governments have bought, like the Oracles or the SAPs, a lot of these systems are at end-of-life and the companies are no longer supporting them. So it's a re-implementation for them. You know, and so now they're looking, okay, if we have to re-implement and we have to look at our new options, we're going to do it in a cloud. >> So when you've been around as long as I have, Kevin, >> Right. >> you've seen the pendulum swing. You don't have to agree so vehemently. (laughing) But from mainframe to client server and so you're back to the cloud, and now with IoT, it seems like the pendulum is swinging back to a distributed environment. So help us understand where IoT fits to the cloud and even your on-prem business. >> Okay, so like I say, cloud is a pretty broad topic, okay? We have multiple applications that would run in that environment. So when I look at IoT, I think of things like our asset management platform. We have a very strong enterprise asset management platform that runs in the cloud or runs on-prem. And if you think about infrastructure as an example, which government has a lot of, okay. Think about the ability to have sensors on different pieces of equipment and being able to read that information. Think about using drone technology, okay, to be able to do physical inspections under bridges, so you're not having people having to climb around underneath there. I mean, so being able to do live feeds of data and be able to streamline the way you do business and have that automatically captured within an application. So yes, that is one area where we see it. I mean, I think you're going to see more and more of robotics and artificial intelligence and all the things come into play. I think you heard a lot about that here and it's here. I mean, they were things we saw in movies before but now the technology's here today. >> Well, the other thing we heard this morning that Charles has always talked a lot about the data. You guys always talked about your data lake. I like to think of it as a data ocean. You think about all the data out of GT Nexus and, you know, your customers that are providing data to inform. The data model starts to really expand and you guys have seemed to really take advantage of that. Talk about the data, the importance of data, the importance of securing data to the government. >> Well, think about that. I mean, there's islands of information that governments have that if they were able to consolidate that data and put some intelligence into it, be able to make business decisions versus, you know, one system sitting over here, one system sitting over here and none of them ever communicating or talking to each other. You know, the ability to, You could do from anything from, just think about crime statistics, okay? The ability to deploy resources where the crime is and then as it moves, be able to further deploy resources. You know, New York, years ago, did things like that with CompStat when they were cleaning up Times Square and so forth. But just think of that as a concept, realtime being able to manage data. >> So you've got, here at the show, we were talking about earlier, 700 and some odd clients, 725. You've got the federal forum for the first time. Why now? And what are you getting out of that or what do you hope to get out of that at the end of the week? >> So the whole executive team and our board of directors have made significant investments in this marketplace because they understand that government is a very large beast, if you will, and there's a lot of opportunity for deployment of our solutions and there's a real need to solve problems for constituents here as well. So they've made very significant investments in things for security like FedRAMP, compliancy. You know, some companies are doing it on some of their solutions. We're doing it across the board on all the products that we take to the government marketplace. So we're invested in it. You've probably heard today, Charles talked about the fact that we're going to have a federal cloud suite, which we are. So that means federal financials, okay? Actually being able to solve all the problems for the federal government and comply to all their needs and all the things that are part of mandated accounting for the federal government. They made all the right investments and human capital management would be another area. If you think about, we've got an application called Talent Science. The ability to hire the right people for the right job and retain those people. Just think about, ICE is a good example. You heard that they have to hire thousands of people to deploy on the borders, right? How do you quickly ramp and hire these right people if you don't have the right tools to do it? >> You were quoted in TIME magazine, Marc Benioff's new publication, about America's crumbling infrastructure. What role do you see technology playing generally and specifically in for software and helping with that problem? >> So we do a lot today around infrastructure. As an example, we have a very strong presence in transit agencies here in the U.S. New York City runs us, amounts to about a trillion dollars worth of assets there. So anything moving in, out or around the city, so subways, buses, trains, tunnels, bridges, Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road. L.A. runs us, San Francisco runs us, Chicago runs us, Dallas runs us and many others. So we're managing all of that infrastructure. So you hear a lot about infrastructure bills coming out of the federal government. And they're right. I mean, a lot of these tunnel, a lot of these bridges and tunnels and even roadways were built back during World War II, right? And they're aged, you know, they are starting to crumble and there's going to be a lot of money spent to do that and when it comes to rebuilding those types of things, there's a lot of assets that are going to need to be managed, you know, to do that. So we think there's a real opportunity for software such as what we bring to the marketplace to help with that process. >> How about talent retention? I mean, obviously, as administrations come and go, you know, people move, but there's been a lot of brain drain. I mean, take the Patent Office, people in commercial industry stealing some of the best and brightest out of government. Can software play a role in helping better retain, train, you know, evolve growth paths and careers? >> Yes. I guess, in a couple different ways. I mean, number one, I think the applications of today versus the applications of yesterday have changed so much. I mean, you look at, you know, the applications you have on your mobile phone. The ability to have that look and feel, I mean, our kids today are going to go into the workforce and they won't settle for anything less. They're going to want to have that look and feel. They're going to want to have those intuitive type of applications that help them do their job. And that's the kind of offering we're bringing to the marketplace. Then from just actually bringing the right people and we have an application called Talent Science, as an example, where actually there's multiple different areas of your personality that it can determine and map it back to your top performers in your company. And determine the right people for the right job where they'll fit into that environment and then they would thrive hopefully. And it should increase retention on the staff. In government, we've actually sold it to Department of Health and Human Services for hiring case workers. Okay? Or to police departments for hiring of law enforcement. So there's a real opportunity to take those types of applications and do some pretty creative things. >> What's, I hate to say, the pain side of it. But dealing with the government obviously contracts is an issue, right? And a challenge sometimes maybe for you. I'm curious, in a quickly evolving space such as yours, how do you help them keep up with you and their regulatory oversight and whatever mandated restrictions they have? All those things, you know, that come with government. It just doesn't square up with what you do. >> It is, it's a very, again, to your point, it's a different, it's a different industry with different requirements. And everything here is very open and above board. It's open procurements. Everything is competitively bid. There are contractual vehicles that you competitively bid for that'll allow you to be able to do business a lot easier in the future. I mean, in the feds you have things like the GSA 70 Schedule. U.K., you have something called the G-Cloud contract. A lot of states have vehicles where you can bid for it, so all states and local can buy off of those contracts without having to go to a competitive offering. So there's ways that the business can get done without having to go through a lot. >> Every hoop and every, yeah, right. >> The major pain process. But then there's also competitive RFPs, which, you know, well, they'll put a bid out, it'll be very detailed. You have to answer 3,000 requirements. And then after that you'll end up going into an orals and a demo process and, you know, nine months later, they're going to pick a winner. (laughs lightly) Then you go through, but then you have to go through a very painful contract negotiation process. >> That's the process I was talking about. (laughing) Exactly what I was talking about, right. >> Right. >> Yeah, yeah. Well, Kevin, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> It's my pleasure. >> And it sounds impressive, right, with the turnout you had, so I'm sure you're very, very pleased with the response you've had here on the show for so far. >> I am and I thank you for your time and >> You bet. >> have a good show. >> Look forward to seeing you down the road. Alright, sir, thank you. Back with more here live on theCUBE. We're at Inforum '18 and we are in Washington, D.C. >> I'm quite sure they got me pinned up back here, but I can't-- (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE. We are live in Washington, D.C. at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is their big event, this is their reinvent for the public sector, but it's technically a summit. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Atkinson who is the CEO of JHC Technologies, small business partner doing huge deals. Great to have you on, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, you guys have a lot of experience working on the front lines with some really big deployments, implementations with cloud, working with some agencies. So, first question right out of the gate is, is this really happening, this cloud thing? >> Yeah absolutely, you know, we started the company in 2010 and one of my partners and I worked on recovery.gov as a cloud engineer and it was just something that, at the time, no one knew what the cloud was and we really looked at it as an opportunity when we started the business. This is where things are going to go. We didn't realize when we started the company, though, as a small business, you can't just get started and say, yeah, we know the cloud and can help you do these things. You have to have past performance, you have to have relationships. And so, it's taken so long for the government to get around to the point where they're really just starting now to put a lot of larger production workloads into the cloud. And it's been a long journey where you've had, it's like Groundhog Day, you have the same conversation over and over again with different people and different organizations about security, about compliance, about a variety of issues, how you procure it and everyone has the same questions, has the same problems and it's so much about education. >> Yeah, and saving time and there's a lot of upfront medicine you got to take. Like you said, if you're new, it's like a jungle, oh, wait a minute, I thought it was going to be easier. What was the key motivational point, how did you keep going, what was the driving force? Was it Amazon tailwind for you, was it more of... >> Our relationship with Amazon Web Services has been great. They've been a tremendous supporter of us. And, as a small business, you know, they really relied on their partners to be a force multiplier for them in the public sector space, And that's been tremendous for us. They've really allowed us to play... >> And that's true, that's actually, they're doing that. >> Absolutely, and not necessarily the case as much on the commercial side where they're more apt to deal directly with the customers. But, they really relied on the partner network, partner ecosystem, on the public sector space to really help them drive things forward. So, for us, to have that relationship has been tremendous value for us. But also, we do things and allow those to broaden the group and what we have from a vehicles perspective, small business set of size that allow us to do business with organizations that AWS can't. >> Well I think I'm going to explain what you guys do, great commentary on the cloud and your opportunity. What do you guys do for services, what kind of services are you providing, and can you take a minute to talk about the company. >> Sure, we started the company in 2010, really it was my two partners and I, we'd been consultants in the IT industry, and worked in the beltway, and felt like we should do a company that was different than everyone else, more of a commercial style focused entity, where it's about the technology and how do you bring that disruptive technology to government and business so that they can take advantage of it as opposed to being overwhelmed by it, and the cloud is really that underlying core technology that really affects, it's really a paradigm shift for how organizations do business. So for us, that's the area we wanted to get into, and we did a lot around mobility, a lot around collaboration, virtualization, virtual apps, virtual desktops, but really at the end of the day, the cloud-- >> Are you guys writing software, are you an integrator? >> Well, we're really, it was about building a company that technologists, who are in this area, there's some great smart people who work in the D.C. area, people will, in the Beltway, you'll sit at a desk, doing a job, for five years, your company will lose that contract to some other company, you'll stay in the same seat, you'll go work for a different company for the next five years. Somebody else will win the contract and you'll stay in that same seat. So, you're really working for the agency and not really working for the company that you're employed by, and we really wanted to build something that was more commercial-esque where it was about what do you bring to me as an organization, how do I put you in a position that you're challenged by the workload that's in front of you that you get to do different things and that you're more upwardly mobile as opposed to just being a butt in a seat, as with a lot of, what work they call it. >> So this morning, Theresa showed a slide, I think I counted 60 consulting partners. Now you guys have achieved a premier consulting partners status, you're not like a everyday name, like some of the big guys that are on there, so how did you achieve that, how do you differentiate, in that sea of really world-class consultants, and how do you achieve that premier status with AWS? >> It's been a lot of work for us. There are some organizations that have gotten it just based off their size. AWS needs to have those larger partners. But we, I think we really did earn it, we've met every requirement to get to that status and for us, it's a huge badge of honor that we've achieved that, and it's a lot of hard work for a small company. We're coming up on 70 employees, so we're not 10,000, 20,000 employee environment, so for us to achieve that and have the level of sales that we do in the space, it's certainly not easy, it's really being singularly focused on the vision of how we want to run the company and sticking to that, even though the market may try to push you other directions, and even your customers say we're not ready for cloud, you have to really stick to it and be focused on that being your core business. >> You talked about moving production workloads to the cloud earlier. I wonder if you could help us sort of squint through that because when you talk to what Andy Jassy calls the Old Guard, John, right, they all say, people aren't moving production workloads to the cloud. When you talk to AWS, you just referenced, production workloads are going into the cloud. I like to talk to consultants that are at least quasi-independent. What's really happening there? What kind of production workloads are going into the cloud? >> I think we're just now hitting that part of the market, where we're starting to see more of the large scale production workloads being moved to the cloud. We moved our first organization, 2500 user environment, that we moved to the cloud three, four years ago, so for us, being able to do that kind of workload to be all in on the cloud, isn't something that we shied away from. But when you started to deal with a lot of these organizations, we have prime contracts with NOAA, which has massive data, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and working with the USGS, some of these agencies have massive data, they're just weren't really built as an organization to be able to adopt that cloud technology, so we really looked at it a couple years ago, and made a bit of a conscious effort to help to push them as an organization to help them understand the structure of how they need to really build their organization. We're very much an I till shop, how you build an IT process, but even with that, it doesn't really take in innovative technology. The speed at which AWS innovates and produces new technology, new features, is something that I don't think that anyone has seen before in an IT realm, so, building an organization that's able to understand that, to be able to implement that technology and be in a compliant manner to make it available to their application owners and their users is something that you really have to have the right organizational structure to be able to achieve. >> And why is that not a problem for AWS customers, your customers, because if a legacy IT vendor, first of all, they can't innovate that fast, but if they were to innovate that fast, they tend to move at a much slower speed, the IT organizations that buy from them. Why is that pace of innovation not problematic for your customers? >> I think it is, and again I think, our challenge has been to help them to build the type of an organization that can respond to that, knowing that there's one constant in IT technology today, which is change. Whatever's here today is going to be different tomorrow. There's going to be new features, and you have to be able to build an organization that isn't just we're going to build a data center, build a bunch of firewalls around it, put our data there and we're going to be safe. Today's IT landscape moves too quickly. You really have to build, look to the way it's done in the commercial enterprises, the way a Netflix builds really to be destructive and how they build their technology, knowing it's going to fail, and look to do that same type of implementation, help build your security within a federal organization. >> You're going to change the culture and process, everything all at once with new tech, so I want to ask you the question that's in everyone's mind, mine included, what's your observation of the current state of affairs with respect to the cloud native and cloud because you've got people who might jump on it, say I love this, some'll be fearful, you're there, what's the new aha moment that people are having, can you share some insight into (laughs) what's going on in the mind and the actual implementations, what's changed, what's the most important story that we should be telling? >> We're right now at that point. I think I've heard reports less than 7% of the data center workloads have been moved to infrastructures of service. I think that's probably even on the high side, 7%, but you're now starting to get all of the work that we've done, a lot of these organizations is they've been pilots, proof of concepts, really dipping their toe, large organizations just dipping their toe in the water. We're getting to the point now where these organizations are approaching their primary applications for their organization saying we're ready to move that too. For us it's a lot, it's been so much education so much work to try to help get them there, so for us we're just excited to actually see it come to fruition. >> In 2010, around the time you started your company, I remember, John, VM Ware, at the time Paul Moritz was saying any app, any workload will run on VM Ware, and there were a lot of skeptics, and they've largely achieved that, remember they used to talk about the software mainframe. You know with the cloud, similar kind of narrative. Now it's a little different now, let's take the example of Oracle in particular, you're seeing Oracle use for example its pricing power to really try to force people to use its own cloud jacking up prices if they want to use it on Amazon. What do you tell customers that are basically reliant on that Oracle database? Should they move that into the cloud, should they try to figure out okay let's go to Aurora or Redshift, or some other better, what's the right strategy? >> So I mean we're a technology agnostic, generally speaking-- >> Right that's why I can trust your answer here. >> But we really do lean to where what we call best in breed technologies. So AWS has been something that we've been all in on AWS since 2011, 2012. We made that a conscious effort and they've really done some things I think as part of their business model that we really appreciate as a partner, and as a customer. We've always had our infrastructure from day one on AWS. Also our infrastructure on Office 365. We understand where to focus those efforts. When it comes to an organization like an Oracle, I don't want to necessarily disparage them, but they're not necessarily focused on bringing the best value to their customers. A lot of times it seems that it's about what's right for the bottom line of their stockholders and what drives up the price of their stock as opposed to what's the best solution I could put forward to really be great at database. I think if you look at it, AWS has already built a roadmap to where you can get 70-80% of your database applications to be migrated to an open software database model, and you can massively reduce, so many of these large organizations, a large portion of their IT spend is on those Oracle and those specialty applications. >> It's the licenses too. >> So if you can drop that cost by 60, 70%. What we always tell those organizations, don't just throw that money away, take those savings, roll that into making a better application. Use that 60, 70% savings and fix how you deliver. Make your data more mobile, make it more available to your userbase. >> Invest in analytics. >> Invest back in how you're doing, using Redshift or whatever other analytics, to get better results. >> Awesome, Craig, great insight, congratulations on your success at JHC Technologies, you're the founder and CEO of, congratulations on all the hard work, you got to just, I don't want to say do your time, I've heard that quoted in the government sector, you got to do your time, time's shrinking with the cloud, so you've got a great opportunity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, for having me. >> You're watching theCUBE here live in Washington, D.C. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, day one here is continuing, be right back. (synth music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our studios in Palo Alto, California. Today we're joined by Michael Liebow, who's the global managing director of Accenture Cloud, brings a great perspective on what is happening as customers try to move to the cloud, in part because you helped direct Accenture's move to the cloud. Welcome to theCUBE, Michael. >> Thank you, great to be here, Peter. >> So Michael, tell us a little bit about yourself and what Accenture's global cloud business unit does. >> We've been at this for a long time now. I've personally been with Accenture for five years and we've been driving this transformation, not just in our industry, but for Accenture, as we pivot to cloud and cloud-enabled technologies and essentially creating, rotating, to the new. And that is our focus. So how do you do that? Cloud is an enabler, it is a vehicle, it helps to create agility. We researched a whole bunch of enterprise customers not too long ago and found that every organization, like 90-odd percent, had a cloud strategy. A very few had a cloud strategy that was aligned to a business outcome. And so what I would posture is that where you have cloud aligned with business, you have cloud. Otherwise, you just have a paper exercise. >> Or just a new set of technologies that could fail as easy as anything else you might have. >> Well, in a lab somewhere, as a science experiment. And not real business impact, where you're saving money or you're innovating or you're creating the next, you're disrupting your industry. So where people are actually using cloud to change their business, that's where it gets exciting. And there are lots of industries across the globe where that's happening. Countries are adopting cloud. We are adopting cloud. We're now just declared 90% in the public cloud. And that's been a three, four-year journey and we figured, how do you sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff? >> No, I think it's a great point, Michael. I want to use a metaphor to try to tease some of that out. So a legal scholar would say that there's constitutional and statutory law. Statutory law guides day-to-day activities, so it's not unlike how you provision this or how you optimize that. And then there's constitutional law, which is basically the laws or how you change the laws. What we're talking about is two shifts going on at once within a lot of companies, and that's driving a significant amount of complexity and uncertainty. They are changing statutory law as they think about moving to the cloud, but they're also changing the constitutional law, or they're applying constitutional law, the rules of how they think about workloads, how they think about their businesses changing. So let's start with some of the constitutional principles, if you will, of moving to the cloud. What did Accenture learn about the rules for changing the rules as you went to the cloud, and how are you using the historical discipline that Accenture brings to those kinds of questions and applying it to helping customers? >> So one of the things you learn very quickly is that your old policies, your rules, whatever regulations, laws, were drafted for a bygone era, for legacy. And in the cloud, things are different. And so if you take those policies and how you think about how you do things and you apply it to the cloud, then you're treating the cloud as just another data center. So right there, five years of learning, that's a huge mistake. >> So number one is, don't treat the cloud as another data center. >> Yes. >> As kind of that high level metalogue, then. >> Right, 'cause if you look at your policies and your security models, an organization would take the cloud and they would put it... The access to the cloud in a bunker in a basement with no windows and no doors, and so you wouldn't have cloud. Cloud is democracy. It's about allowing all. So constitutionally, all people have access to the cloud and all the innovation is in the cloud. All the investment in the industry is in the cloud. We're looking at an unprecedented build-out of cloud capacity across the globe. They're opening new regions, new availability zones all the time in new places. >> Peter: These are the big cloud providers. >> Yes, 'cause I mean, they're spending in aggregate $30 billion a year. No organization can match that. >> And that's just the top three. That's just Google-- >> That's just the hyper three. >> Yeah, and that doesn't include what Alibaba's doing and some of the other players elsewhere in the world. >> But they're not spending at the rate that the hyper three are. >> Got it. >> The hyper three are spending about 10 billion a year each, a little bit more, a little bit less. Anybody else? They're down around the single digit. One, two, maybe three. Alibaba's I think about three or four, but everybody else is in that ones or twos. >> So rule number one is don't treat it as a data center. Rule number two is recognize that one of the beauties of the cloud model is that it gives you access to everybody. >> Michael: Yes. >> And you just have to determine how you want to provide that access as opposed to just the resources inside your network or inside your organization. >> So early days, about the whole notion of service orientation was to publish services that could be consumed. So you want to abstract these services and you want to make them available, broadly. And so people talk about platforms. What's a platform? A platform is nothing without community. So you're now able to do things that we've been talking about for decades, and that is huge. That's where all the innovation occurs. So now you're providing a level of access, level of capability. Broadly speaking, it's like the next revolution from the early days of the internet. And it's changing enterprise and it's changing it dramatically. It's not just the change, it's a disruption. So now IT needs to think differently. It's probably the biggest shift, paradigm shift that we've seen ever. And so your existing vendor stable and those relationships that you've built up over the years may not be helpful to you right now in terms of how much things are changing and how fast things are changing. Do you have a cloud strategy? Is it aligned with business outcomes? And it's not just cost saving. It's about agility, it's about speed, it's about creating an innovative culture. Do you have the right talent? These are all things that come into play, in terms of your law analogy, that change the game. So now I need new laws. I need new ways to think about my new enterprise and how I'm going to operate. One of the things, not only if you think about cloud as an underpinning, so we're now 90% in the cloud, but if you look at our financials, we've rotated to the new. So digital cloud security are now well over 50% of our revenues. We're taking our legacy business or our core business, it's shrinking, and we've rotated. And now we're starting to think about the new new, which are things like machine learning and applied intelligence and whatnot, you know, block chain. New capabilities that you could do because now you have a cloud underpinning that helps you get there. >> I think it's a really important point, 'cause we've always argued at Wikibon that cloud really, in many respects, is that network application development world that we've talked about. SOA, all these other things, still presume that you had a whole bunch of individual pieces and it was about bringing them together. Cloud really provides a whole notion of network or internet-scale computing, and how you developed that really is what you're getting when you move to the cloud. Is that accurate? >> No, I mean, it's absolutely, because the notion then became about orchestration, standardization, self or shared services. Automation. When I think about what cloud is, those are the words, the underpinning, for why cloud. You get all of that. And so now I have shared services that I can publish out, people can consume. I can orchestrate these services. I can create a standard. Even for GSIs, global system integrators, that's a big change. Because I used to just bespoke stuff on your premise. Now I can assemble stuff, alright, and make it available to you and I can change your business model overnight. And so that's the kind of things that we're seeing. We're bringing our best people, landing them at a client, and saying, "How do we transform?" It's not just about the cloud, it's not about selecting a provider, it's about a transformation of operating model. It's about change. How do I educate, reskill your people, retrain them, refocus them? And it's about, really, just the technology platform for the future. >> So I want to build on something you just said. Accenture has moved 90% of the cloud, maybe you have some more, I'm sure you have some more to go, and maybe that last 10% is going to be especially tricky. We'll see. But clearly you mentioned the global system integrators. You said that Accenture, your market, the way you're servicing your customers is changing. How overall is the role of the GSI evolving as companies move to the cloud? Because are you getting there once, you're getting in there once and they do everything themselves? Is there some sort of approach you're taking to help them sustain that? Because the diffusion of knowledge about the cloud and how to get to the cloud is not evenly spread across the industry. How is the role of the GSI changing in the midst of this transformation? >> I can speak to Accenture and not the industry per se. We embarked on something that we packaged as, we call it to Journey to Cloud, J to C, is our internal acronym, and Journey to Cloud has different components. It has a strategy and assessment focus. It has a migration focus and a run. And that's your journey. And so we've basically codified, invested in, and hardened a set of assets and capabilities, skills, people, around those three key elements so that any organization, if you just want a strategy or if you want us to take you through strategy to migration, get you to the cloud, and then run that operation for you, we can do any and all. And so that really is the motion, and one of the good things about Accenture, per se, I think we're probably number one in cloud, cloud services. But the point here is that we never did your mess for less. We never bought your assets, rebatched your people. There were other organizations that did that. So we weren't encumbered. One of the things I liked about coming to Accenture is that it didn't have certain encumbrances that would skew, just in culture. So the way we used to do things is not necessarily the way we will be doing things. >> You don't have a bunch of assets that you bought that you now have to service and that's going to impact your strategy? >> It's going to slow you down, right, and it's going to cause whatever internal friction between the old and the new. So you have those types of issues that go on in a lot of organizations. I mean, people love their data centers. They love the blinking lights. They like their vendors. I mean, that's inertia. And so in order to move, you have to free yourself of some of these encumbrances and think differently about your new operating environment. >> We've said that the difference between business and digital business is that a digital business acknowledges and explicitly acknowledges the role that data plays in their business, data as an asset. And that you can measure a digital business transformation based on the degree to which a business has reinstitutionalized work and organized work and organized its resources around data as an asset. It sounds as though your suggestion can do the same type of thing thinking about cloud, where the migration to the cloud or the transition to the cloud or transformation to the cloud is, how deeply have you really reinstitutionalized your work around that new operating model the cloud suggests? Is that accurate? >> Yeah, no, there was new roles and new capabilities that have to be thought through. There's new workflows, so your service model, your security model, your operating model, your execution model, they're all new. And you have to embrace that, think through that, and then have a change program to get you from where you are to this new place. People have said bimodal, right? There's this old mode and this new mode. Whatever, right? But the fact of the matter is that there's a gap between the old and the new. And so how do you bridge that gap? Now, I run a platform, and so we acknowledge the legacy, so our goal is to get you from legacy to cloud. We have to manage the policies, the security model, the governance, between the old and the new. How do you do that? Well, it's, yes, an abstraction, but it's a control plane. And so you have to tool for it. You have to tool for the change management and for the transformation, and then you have to have an underpinning that allows you to move from legacy through virtual, private maybe, to public, and that's your spectrum. We've invested significantly in creating that platform so that we can help organizations. Not everything is fully automated end to end. That would be kind of foolish. But you have to be able to think through how your legacy IT operations approach and your new cloud operations approach, how they connect. >> Well, as you said, you could assess, migrate, and run, and the migration is not just migrating hardware or data or workloads, it's migrating the operating model, how you think about what your business is, how your business is going to operate in a digital context as part of the run process. So two quick questions, and then, well, two quick questions. Number one is that... That there is this hump. This migrate is a hump. It's a hump from a risk standpoint, it's a hump from a cost standpoint, it's a hump from a management standpoint, some of the dislocations that might be required. I'm going to ask you to take us through that a little bit, how it worked at Accenture and how you think it's going to work elsewhere, and then finally you've kind of described what the one relationship would be with a company like Accenture, but I want to be a little bit more explicit about that. But let's start with that hump. What is a client going to face when they look at that hump? That migration hump? >> No, no, the word you used, and it's the right word, is risk. How do you re-risk the risk? How do you approach this so that you understand one, your cost model? A lot of organizations don't have-- >> Peter: From a technology standpoint. >> They don't have a clear line of sight to what that cost model is. They might have bits and pieces, but they haven't really pulled it all together into a common view, 'cause they haven't had to. If you think about where the cost was centered, it wasn't at a project level or an application, it was at a senior level, and they bought a data center. And then they depreciated it. So now, and they didn't do showback. Forget about chargeback. So now you're trying to give you in that assessment phase as to what your costs are, and if you decommissioned, exited data centers, what would the savings be, 'cause that underwrites your migration. So we can bring clarity to that, number one. Number two, we do migration at scale, so we have factories and we have runbooks and we have tooling end to end. So we can discover what's not in your CMBD and we can take you from your current situation to the cloud and we can do it quickly, 'cause speed is everything. Give me a year, give me a month. I've taken people out of data centers in a month. We can do that because we've hardened these processes and we've built the factories in order to be able to scale them. And then once we get you there, because you looked at the business case, but you're not just moving to an environment of continuous integration or continuous improvement or continuous deployment, you're looking at a new environment of continuous optimization. You have to structure the operating model so that you know at any given moment, we're moving to the ability to build by the day. You're buying assets by the second. This is a whole-- >> Or resources. >> Yes. Well, I think of them as assets. But you're right. It's about resource management and you're consuming these resources literally by the second. You know, for cloud native companies, they can wipe the slate clean every day, every night, and the next morning spin up a whole new set of resources. They've just refreshed their entire estate overnight. Other organizations are sitting there with assets depreciating on cement and they're refreshing every seven years. So it's a whole new kind of environment to be able to think through that. They have DR facilities that are sitting there idle that are sucking tons of cash out of the balance sheet. What do you do with that? If you free that up, and think about, not just DR in the cloud, but active active implementations of applications that are scaling up and down so you're not buying to the peak, you're not buying to a valley. Your whole operating style: dramatically different. And the optimization, if I'm looking at your cost profile, I'm looking at it daily, I can see you used to overprovision machines because you weren't ever sure you were going to get another one so you'd buy big. Now you buy small and you just kind of-- >> Or rent. >> To me, the language changed. Yeah, I'm buying for the moment. I mean, if I spot-buy them, I could buy 10,000 instances for an hour and then get rid of it. The whole construct here in terms of how you think about consumption is dramatically different. >> Alright, so last question: as you think about a client's relationship after this during the run phase, very quickly, what is the difference in their relationship with an Accenture versus what was their relationship with an Accenture 10 years ago? How is it different? How is Accenture a cloud company? >> 10 years ago, it's kind of hard, 'cause I think about traditional outsourcing, and Accenture never really got into that market. It was never your mess for less. And people were locked in, they weren't happy with the level of service. It took six months to provision new hardware. That was 10 years ago. Today you take a process, provision whatever you need... >> But Accenture has a management platform that sustains that relationship. >> Well... What Accenture wanted to do was to figure out how do we add value in this new world? So we created a management plane above multiple clouds. We said, it's highly likely that there will be more than one single provider. There will be three. And we bet it was three a long time ago. And then we built fidelity around those three and we said, "How do we add value around that?" Well, multi-cloud, so I just got a patent, my first patent of many, on multi-cloud tagging. It allows us to tag resources across clouds. Okay, now what does that do for you? Well, that allows you to enforce policy. Policy's not paper. Policy is dynamic. So now I can govern how people use things and I can tag resources across different providers, and what does that allow me to do? Well, not only can I govern that, I can analyze that. So it's not data as an asset, it's data as a service. So now I have insight into what people are doing, how these tagged resources, how they're using them. Are they consistent with policy? I can scan my entire environment every 10 minutes and I can ensure a level of compliance. So now I'm more secure, I'm more confident, that not only are we governing the usage of these resources, but they're being used within policy and they're secure. And then the last thing is cost. I can look at cost. You just spun up a whole bunch of resources. Were you allowed to do that? Is that within budget? >> So in many respects, Accenture participates in the governance process of resources as part of the ongoing relationship. >> Securely and within cost. To provide those controls. But it's a level of freedom because you as a developer, I want you to go native. I want to coexist. I'll discover what you're doing, but you go straight to that console, 'cause that's the most robust. They just launched 1,000 new services, whomever. Use them. Leverage them. >> Well, that's part of the whole, the cloud gives you access to more than you had before. >> Right, and 10 years ago, it was contained. It was a separated from. You issued a ticket or service request. It took whatever latency, whatever process, to get that service request approved. And this new age, you need to be able to move fast. You need to be able to respond to whatever market demand, and so you need to enable this community to leverage those things, not go around you, but for you to support them, but ensure that it's within policy, that it's secure, and that it's cost-managed. >> And within that whole construct, Accenture hopes to be able to help sustain those relationships to keep the transaction costs low so that all the riches of the cloud can be brought to bear in a company's business. >> Very well put. >> Alright, so Michael Liebow, global director, or global manager-- >> Managing director. Global managing director of Accenture's cloud platform, thank you very much for being theCUBE, Michael. Great conversation. >> Thank you. Yeah, terrific. >> Once again, this is Peter Burris, you've been watching a CUBE Conversation. 'Til next time.

(Latin music) >> Narrator: Live, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to by Blockchain Industries. (Latin music) >> Welcome back to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage, here, this is theCUBE for Blockchain Unbound, the future of blockchain cryptocurrency, the decentralized web, the future of society, the world, of work, et cetera, play, it's all happening right here, I'm reporting it, the global internet's coming together, my next guest is Fred Krueger, a founder and CEO of a new innovative approach called WorkCoin, the future of work, he's tackling. Fred, great to see you! >> Thank you very much, John. >> So we saw each other in Palo Alto at the D10e at the Four Seasons, caught up, we're Facebook friends, we're LinkedIn friends, just a quick shout out to you, I saw you livestreaming Brock Pierce's keynote today, which I thought was phenomenal. >> Yeah, it was a great keynote. >> Great work. >> And it's Pi Day. >> It's Pi Day? >> And I'm a mathematician, so, it's my day! (Fred laughs) >> It's geek day. >> It's geek day. >> All those nerds are celebrating. So, Fred, before we get into WorkCoin, I just want to get your thoughts on the Brock Pierce keynote, I took a video of it, with my shaky camera, but I thought the content was great. You have it up on Facebook on your feed, I just shared it, what was your takeaway of his message? I thought it was unedited, obviously, no New York Times spin here, no-- >> Well first of all, it's very authentic, I've known Brock 10 years, and, I think those of us who have known Brock a long time know that he's changed. He became very rich, and he's giving away, and he really means the best. It's completely from the heart, and, it's 100% real. >> Being in the media business, kind of by accident, and I'm not a media journalist by training, we're all about the data, we open our datas, everyone knows we share the free content. I saw the New York Times article about him, and I just saw it twisted, okay? The social justice warriors out there just aren't getting the kind of social justice that he's actually trying to do. So, you've known him for 10 years, I see as clear as day, when it's unfiltered, you say, here's a guy, who's eccentric, smart, rich now, paying it forward? >> Yep. >> I don't see anything wrong with that. >> Look, I think that the-- >> What is everyone missing? >> There's a little jealously, let's be honest, people resent a little bit, and I think part of it's the cryptocurrency world's fault. When your symbol of success is the Lamborghini, it's sort of like, this is the most garish, success-driven, money-oriented crowd, and it reminds me a little bit of the domain name kind of people. But Brock's ironically not at all that, so, he's got a-- >> If you look at the ad tech world, and the domain name world, 'cause they're all kind of tied together, I won't say underbelly, but fast and loose would be kind of the way I would describe it. >> Initially, yes, ad tech, right? So if you look at ad tech back in say, I don't know, 2003, 2004, it was like gunslingers, right? You wanted to by some impressions, you'd go to a guy, the guy'd be like, "I got some choice impressions, bro." >> I'll say a watch too while I'm at it. >> Yeah, exactly. (John laughs) That was the ad tech world, right? And that world was basically replaced by Google and Facebook, who now control 80% of the inventory, and it's pretty much, you go to a screen, it's all service and that's it. I don't know if that's going to be the case in cryptocurrencies, but right now, initially, you sort of have this, they're a Wild West phenomenon. >> Any time you got alpha geeks, and major infrastructure application developer shift happening, which is happening, you kind of look at these key inflection points, you need to kind of have a strong community self-policing policy, if you look at the original DNS days, 'cause you remember, I was there too, Jon Postel, rest in peace, godspeed, we all know what he did, Vint Cerf with TCP/IP, the core dudes, and gals, back then, they were tight! So any kind of new entrants that came in had to prove their worth. I won't say they were the most welcoming, 'cause they were nervous of people to infect the early formation, mostly they're guys, they're nerds. >> Right, so I think if you look back at domain names, back in the day, a lot of people don't know this, but Jon Postel actually kept the list of domain names in a text file, right? You had basically wanted a domain name, you called Jon up, and you said, "I'd like my name added to the DNS," and he could be like, "Okay, let me add it "to the text file." Again, these things all start in a very sort of anarchic way, and now-- >> But they get commercial. >> It gets commercial, and it gets-- >> SAIC, Network Solutions, in various time, we all know the history, ICANN, controlled by the Department of Commerce up until a certain point in time-- >> Uh, 'til about four years ago, really. >> So, this is moving so fast. You're a student of the industry, you're also doing a startup called WorkCoin, what is the formula for success, what is your strategy, what are you guys doing at WorkCoin, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, your team, your approach-- >> So let's start with the problem, right? If you look at freelancing, right now, everybody knows that a lot of people freelance, and I don't think people understand how many people freelance. There are 57 million people in America who freelance. It's close to 50%, of us, don't actually have jobs, other than freelancing. And so, this is a slow moving train, but it's basically moving in the direction of more freelancers, and we're going to cross the 50% mark-- >> And that's only going to get bigger, because of virtual work, the global workforce, no boundaries-- >> Right, and so it's global phenomena, right? Freelancing is just going up, and up, and up. Now, you would think in this world, there would be something like Google where you could sit there, and go type patent attorney, and you could get 20 patent attorneys that would be competing for your business, and each one would have their price, and, you could just click, and hire a patent attorney, right? Is that the case? >> No. >> No, okay. >> I need a patent attorney. >> So, what if you have to hire a telegram manager for your telegram channel? Can you find those just by googling telegram manager, no. So basically-- >> The user expectation is different than the infrastructure can deliver it, that's what you're basically saying. >> No, what I'm saying is it should be that way, it is not that way, and the reason it's not that way is that basically, there's no economics to do that with credit cards, so, if you're building a marketplace where it's kind of these people are find each other, you need the economics to make sense. And when you're being charged 3.5% each way, plus you have to worry about chargebacks, buyer fraud, and everything else, you can't built a marketplace that's open and transparent. It's just not possible. And I realized six months ago, that with crypto, you actually could. Not that it's going to be necessarily easy, but, technically, it is possible. There's zero marginal cost, once I'm taking in crypto, I'm paying out crypto, in a sort of open marketplace where I can actually see the person, so I could hire John Furrier, not John F., right? >> But why don't you go to LinkedIn, this is what someone might say. >> Well, if you go to LinkedIn, first of all, the person there might not be in the market, probably is not in the market for a specific service, right? You can go there, then you need to message them. And you just say, "Hey, your profile looks great, "I noticed you're a patent attorney, "you want to file this patent for me?" And then you have to negotiate, it's not a transactional mechanism, right? >> It's a lot of steps. >> It's not transactional, right? So it's not click, buy, fund, engage, it just doesn't work that way. It's just such a big elephant in the room problem, that everybody has these problems, nobody can find these good freelancers. What do you end up doing? You end up going to Facebook, and you go, "Hey, does anybody know any good patent attorneys?" That's what you do. >> That's a bounty. >> Well, it's kind of, yeah. >> It's kind of a social bounty. "Hey hive, hey friends, does anyone know anything?" >> It's social proof, right? Which is another thing that's very important, because, if John, if you were-- >> Hold on, take a minute to explain what social proof is for the folks. >> Social proof is just the simple concept that it's a recommendation coming from somebody that you know, and trust. So, for example, I may not be interested in your video services, John, but I know you, and I am in the business of a graphic designer, and you're like, "Fred, I know this amazing graphic designer, "and she's relatively cheap." Okay, well that's probably good enough for me to at least start looking at her work, and going the next step. On the other hand, if I'm just looking at 100 graphic designers, I do not know. >> It's customized contextual data, around a specific transaction from a trusted source. So you socially, are connected to, or related. >> It, sort of, think about this, it doesn't even have to be a source that you know, it could be just a source that you know of, right? So, to use the Brock example again, Brock's probably not going to be selling his services on my platform, but what if he recommends somebody, people like giving the gift of recommendation. So Brock knows a lot of people, may not be doing as well as him, right? And he's like, "Well, this guy could be a fantastic guy "to hire as social media manager," for example. Helping out a guy that needs a little bit of work. >> And endorsement's a major thing. >> It is giving something, right? You're giving your own brand, by saying, "I stand behind this person." >> Alright, so tell me about where you are with WorkCoin, honestly, people might not know your background, if you check him out on LinkedIn, Fred Krueger, mathematician, Stanford PhD, well-educated, from a centralized organization, like Stanford, has a good reputation, you're a math guy, is there math involved? Obviously, Blockchain's math related, you got crypto, how are you guys building this out, share a little bit of, if you can, show a little leg on the tech-- >> The tech is sort of simple. So basically the way it is, is right now it's built in Google Cloud, but we have an interface where you can fund the thing, and so it's built, first of all, that's the first thing. We built it on web and mobile. And you can basically buy WorkCoins from the platform itself, using Ethereum, and also, we've integrated with Sensei, a different token. So, we can integrate with different tokens, so you're using these tokens to fund the coin, to fund your account, right? And then, once you have the tokens in your account, you can then buy services with them, right? And then the service provider, the minute they finish delivery of the service, to your expectation, they get the coin in their account, and then they can transfer that coin back into Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or whatever, to cash out. >> Okay, so wait, now that product's built, has the coins been issued? Are you guys doing an ICO? Are you raising money? >> So we're in the middle of an ICO-- >> Private? >> Private, only for now. So we've raised just under $4,000,000-- >> Great, congratulations. >> I have no idea if that's good or not-- >> Well, it's better than a zero (laughs). >> It's better than zero, right? It is better than zero, right? >> So there's interest obviously. >> Yeah, so look, we've got a lot of interest in our product, and I think part of the interest is it's very simple. A lot of people can go, "I think this thing makes sense." Now, does that mean we're going to be completely successful in taking over the world, I don't know. >> Well, I mean, you got some tailwinds at your back. One, the infrastructure in e-commerce, and the things that you're going after, are 20-year-old stacks. Number two, the business model, and expectation of the users, is shifting radically, and expectations are different, and there's no actual product that does it (laughs), so. >> So a lot of these ICOs, I think they're going to have technical problems actually building into the specification. 'Cause it's difficult, when you're dealing with the Blockchain, first of all, you're building on some movable platform, right? I met some people just today who are building on Hash-Craft, now, that's great, but Hash-Craft is like one day old, you know? So you're building on something that is one day old, and they've just announced their coin five minutes ago, you know. Again, that's great, but normally as a developer myself, I'm used to building on things that are years old, I mean, even something that's three years old is new. >> This momentum going on, that someone might want to tout Hash-Craft for is, 'cause it's got momentum-- >> It's got total momentum. >> They're betting on an ecosystem. But that brings up the other thing I want to get your thoughts on, because we've observed this at Polycon, we've been watching the industry landscape now, onto our 10th year, there's almost an ecosystem stake in the ground. The good news is, ecosystem's developing. You got entrepreneurs, you got projects, you got funding coming in, but as it's going to be a fight for the ecosystem, because you can't have zillion ecosystems, eventually they have to be-- >> Well, you know-- >> Or can you? >> Here's the problem, that everybody's focused on the plumbing right now, right, the infrastructure? But, what they should be focusing it on is the app. And I've a question for you, and I've asked this question to my advisors and investors, which are DNA Fund, and I say-- >> Let's see if I get it right, it's a test here on the spot, I love this, go. >> Okay, so here's the question, how many, in your wallet right now, on your mobile phone, show me how many Blockchain apps you have right now. >> Uh, zero, on my phone? >> Okay, zero. >> Well I have a burner phone for my other one, so (laughs). >> But on any phone, on any phone that you possess, how many Blockchain apps do you have on your phone? >> Wallet or apps? >> An app that you-- >> Zero. >> An app, other than a wallet, zero, right? Every single person I've asked in this conference has the same number, zero. Now, think about this, if you'd-- >> Actually, I have one. >> Uh, which one? >> It's called Cube Coin. >> Okay, there you go, Cube Coin. But, here's the problem, if you went to a normal-- >> Can I get WorkCoin right now? >> Yeah, well not right now, but I have it on my wallet. So for example, it's in test flight, but my point is I have a fully functional thing I can go buy services, use the coin, everything, in an app. I think this is one of the things-- >> So, hypothetically, if I had an application that was fully functional, with Blockchain, with cryptocurrency, with ERC 2 smart contracts, I would be ahead of the game? >> You would be ahead of the game. I mean, I think-- >> Great news, guys! >> And I think you absolutely are thinking the right thinking, because, everybody's just looking at the plumbing, and, look, I love EOS, but, it's sort of a new operating system, same as Hash-Craft, but you need apps to run on your thing-- >> First of all, I love chatting with you, you're super smart, folks out there, Fred is someone you should check out, you got great advisor potential. You're right on this, I want to test something out with you, I've been thinking about this for a while. If you think about the OSI model, OSI stack, for the younger kids, that was a key movement that generated the key standards in the stack for inner networking, and physical devices. So, it was started from the bottom up. The top of the stack actually never standardized, it became the presentation session layer, they differentiated, then eventually became front end. If you look at what's happening now, the top of the stack is really the ones that's standardizing, or standardizing with business logic, the bottom of the stack has many different versions of say, Blockchain, so the question is is that, it might be the world that will never have a TCP/IP moment, it might be that the business app logic will dictate to some sort of abstraction layer, down to programmable plumbing. You see this with cloud with DevOps. So the question is, do see it that way? I'm thinking out loud here, but when I'm seeing the trend here, it's just that, people who make the business logic decisions first, and nail those, that they're far more successful swapping out and hedging on the plumbing. >> Look, I think you mentioned the word alpha geek, and I think you've just defined yourself as an alpha geek. Let's just go in Denzel Washington's set in the movie Philadelphia, talk to me like I'm a five year old, okay? What is the problem you're solving? >> The app, you said it, it's the app! >> My point is like, everybody is walking around with apps, if the thing doesn't fit on an app, it's not solving any problem, that's the bottom line. I don't care whether you're-- >> You're validating the concept that all that matters is the app, the plumbing will sort itself out. >> I think so. >> Is that a dependency, or is it an interdependency? >> What do you need in a plumbing? Here's how I think you should think. Do I need 4,000 transactions per second? I would say, rarely, most people are not sitting there going, "I need to do 4,000 transactions per second." >> If you need that, you've already crossed the finish line, you probably want a proprietary solution. >> Just to put things in perspective, Bitcoin does 300,000 transactions per day. >> Well, why does Ripple work? Ripple works because they nailed the business model. >> I'll tell you what I think of Ripple-- >> What's your take? >> Why ripple works, I think all, and I'm not the first person to say this, but I think that, the thing that works right now, the core application of all this stuff, is money, right? That's the core thing. Now, if you're talking about documents on the Blockchain, is that going to be useful, perhaps. In a realist's say in the Blockchain, perhaps. Poetry on the Blockchain, maybe. Love on the Blockchain? Why ban it, you know? >> Hey, there's crypto-kiddies on the Blockchain, love is coming next. >> Love is coming next. But, the core killer app, the killer app, is money. It's paying people. That is the killer app of the Blockchain right now, okay? So, every single one of the things that's really successful is about paying people. So what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is super great, for taking money, and moving it out of China, and into the United States. Or out of Nigeria, and into Switzerland, right? You want to take $100,000 out of Nigeria, and move it to Switzerland? Bitcoin is your answer. Now, you want to move money from bank A to bank B, Ripple is your answer, right? (John laughs) If you want to move money from Medellin, Colombia, that you use in narcos, Moneiro is probably your crypto of choice, you know? (John laughs) Business truly anonymous. And I think it's really about payment, right? And so, I look at WorkCoin as, what is the killer thing you're doing here, you're paying people. You're paying people for work, so, it's designed for that. That's so simple. >> The killer app is money, Miko Matsumura would say, open source money, that's his narrative, love that vision. Okay, if money's the killer app, the rest is all kind of window dressing around trying to race to-- >> I think it's the killer, it's the initial killer app. I think we need to get to the point where we all, not all of us, but where enough of us start transacting, with money, with digital money, and then after digital money, there will be other killer apps, right? It's sort of like, if you look at the internet, and again, I'm repeating somebody else's argument-- >> It's Fred Krueger's hierarchy of needs, money-- >> Money starts, right? >> Money is the baseline. >> The initial thing, what was the first thing of internet? I was on the internet before it was the internet. It was called the ARPANET, at Stanford, right? I don't know if you remember those days-- >> I do remember, yeah, I was in college. >> But the ARPANET, it was email, right? We had the first versions of email. And that was back in 1986. >> Email was the killer app for 15, 20 years. >> It was the killer app, right? And I think-- >> For 15 or 20 years. >> Absolutely, well before websites, you know? So I think, we got to solve money first. And I bless everybody who has got some other model, and maybe they're right, maybe notarization of documents on the internet is a-- >> There's going to be use cases for Blockchain, some obvious low-hanging fruit, but, that's not revolutionary, that's not game-changing, what is game-changing is the promise of a new decentralized infrastructure. >> Here's the great thing that's absolutely killer about what this whole world is, and this is why I'm very bullish, it's, if you look at the internet of transmitting value, from one node to another node, credit cards just do not do a very good job of that, right? So, you can't put a credit card inside a machine, very well, at all, right? It doesn't work! And very simple reason, why? Because you get those Amex fraud alerts. (John laughs) Now the machine, if he's paying another machine, the second machine doesn't know how to interpret the first machine's Amex fraud alerts. So, the machine has to pay in, the machine's something that's immutable. I'm paying you a little bit of token. The classic example is the self-driving car that pays the gas pump, 'cause it's a gas self-driving car, it pays it to fill up, and the gas pump may have to pay its landlord in rent, and all of this is done with tokens, right? With credit cards, that does not work. So it has to be tokens. >> Well, what credit cards did for other transactions a little bit simplifies your things, there's a whole 'nother wave coming, that just makes it easier and reduces the steps. >> It reduces the friction, and that's why I think, actually, the killer app's going to be marketplaces, because, if you look at a marketplace, whether it's a marketplace like ours, for freelancers, or your marketplace for virtual goods, and like wax, or whatever it is, right? I think marketplaces, where there's no friction, where once you've paid, it's in. There's no like, I want my money back. That is a killer app, it's an absolute killer app. I think we're going to see real massive consumer adoption with that, and that's ultimately, I think, that's what we need, because if it's all just business models, and people touting their 4,000 transactions a second, that's not going to fly. >> Well Fred, you have a great social graph, that's socially proved, you got a great credentials, in mathematics, PhD from Stanford, you reinvent nine, how many exits? >> Nine exits. >> Nine exits. You're reinventing freelancing on the Blockchain, you're an alpha geek, but you can also explain things to a five year old, great to have you on-- >> Thank you very much John. >> Talk about the WorkCoin, final word, get the plugin for WorkCoin, can people use it now, when is it going to be available-- >> Look, you can go check out our platform, as Miko said, Miko's an advisor, and Miko said, "Fred, think of it as a museum, "you can come visit the museum, "you're not going to see a zillion, "but you can do searches there, you can find people." The museum is not fully operational, right? You can come and check it out, you can take a look at the trains at the museum, the trains will finally operate once we're finished with our ICO, we can really turn the thing on, and everything will work, and what I'd like you to do, actually, you can follow our ICO, if you're not American, you can invest in our ICO-- >> WorkCoin dot-- >> Net. >> Workcoin.net >> Workcoin.net, and, really, at the end, if you have some skill that you can sell on the internet, you're a knowledge worker, you can do anything. List your skill for sale, right? And then, that's the first thing. If you're a student at home, maybe you can do research reports. I used to be a starving student at Stanford. I was mainly spending my time in the statistics department, if somebody said, "Fred, instead of grading "undergrad papers, we'll pay you money "to do statistical work for a company," I would be like, "That would be amazing!" Of course, nobody said that. >> And anyways, you could also have the ability to collaborate with some quickly, and do a smart contract, you could do some commerce, and get paid. >> And get paid for it! >> Hey, hey! >> How 'about that, so I just see-- >> Move from the TA's grading papers payroll, which is like peanuts-- >> And maybe make a little bit more doing something that's more relevant to my PhD. All I know is there's so many times where I've said, my math skills are getting rusty, and I was like, I'd really wish I could talk to somebody who knew something about this distribution, or, could help me-- >> And instantly, magically have them-- And I can't even find them! Like, I have no idea, I have no idea how I would go and find people at Stanford Institute, I would have no idea. So if I could type Stanford, statistics, and find 20 people there, or USC Statistics, imagine that, right? That could change the world-- >> That lowers the barriers, friction barriers, to-- >> Everybody could be hiring graduate students. >> Well it's not just hiring, collaborating too. >> Collaborating, yeah. >> Everything. >> And any question that you have, you know? >> Doctor doing cancer research, might want to find someone in China, or abroad, or in-- >> It's a worldwide thing, right? We have to get this platform so it's open, and so everybody kind of goes there, and it's like your identity on there, there's no real boundary to how we can get. Once we get started, I'm sure this'll snowball. >> Fred, I really appreciate you taking the time-- >> Thanks a lot for your time. >> And I love your mission, and, we support you, whatever you need, WorkCoin, we got to find people out there to collaborate with, otherwise you're going to get pushed fake news and fake data, best way to find it is through someone's profile on WorkCoin-- >> Thanks. >> Was looking forward to seeing the product, I'm John Furrier, here in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, Restart Week, a lot of great things happening, Brock Pierce on the keynote this morning really talking about his new venture fund, Restart, which is going to be committed 100% to Puerto Rico, this is where the action will be, we will be following this exclusive story, continuing, we'll be back with more, thanks for watching. (soothing electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, we are live here in Las Vegas, located at the Sands. Day three of our coverage here at re:Invent. AWS starting to wrap things up, but still, I think, making a very major statement about the progress they're making in their making in their market. 45,000 plus attendees here, thousands of exhibitors and exhibit space being used here in hundreds of thousands of square footage. Sort of a reflection of the vibrancy of that market. I'm with James Kobielus, who's the lead analyst at Wikibon and we're joined, once again, second appearance on theCUBE in one day, how 'bout that for Nayaki Nayyar, who is the President of Digital Services Management at BMC. Glad to have you back, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you, John, thank you, Jim. Great to be here and I'm becoming a pro at this, right? >> You are. >> My second time of the day. >> We'll punch your card and you win a prize by being on theCUBE more than once a day. >> Twice in four hours, I mean, that's a pretty good track record. >> We'll pick up your toy, you know. >> Tell me about, first off, just your thought about the show in general. I mean, you've been in this environment for some time now, but I'm kind of curious what you think about what you're seeing here and the sense of how this thing's really taking off. >> So, first of all, it's just the energy, the vibe, the fun that we're having here is just amazing. But, I do want to drop to the keynote that Andy did yesterday, it's just phenomenal the pace at which AWS is innovating. Just to be releasing over 1300 features in a year, that is phenomenal. >> James: I think he said innovations in a year. >> Features a year. >> Did he say features, okay. >> Yeah, I think so. But, independent of that, I'm just saying the pace at which, and their model of new stuff that they're bringing to the market is just phenomenal. For customers like us, vendors, it's just phenomenal. >> We hear a lot about, I mean, it's the buzzword, digital transformation and all that. So, what does it really mean to service? What transformation is happening in that, what is that pushing you on that side of the fence to have to be thinking about now? >> You said the word, digital, and sometimes it's very hyper-used. And what we have done at BMC, since our core is service management, we have defined what service management looks like for our customers in this digital age. And we have defined it, because we were primarily in I.T. service management for the last 10-15 years, the future of the service management in this digital world is what we call cognitive service management. Where service management is no longer just reactive, it is proactive and it is also a conversational through various agents like chatbots, or Alexa or virtual agents. So, it's a complete transformation that we are experiencing and we are driving most of that change for our customers right now. >> And, of course, the word cognitive signals the fact that there's some artificial intelligence going on behind the scenes, possibly to drive that conversational UI. With that in mind, I believe that, at BMC, you are one of AWS's partners for Alexa for businesses, is that true? And you're bringing it into an I.T. service management context. That's sounds like an innovation, can you tell us more about that? >> Absolutely, so we announced partnership with AWS on multiple fronts. One of them is with Alexa, Alexa for Business, where we do integrate with Alexa for providing that end user experience. So, Alexa was known for consumer world, my son used it all the time. >> Tell me the temperature? >> But now, we are looking at how we could bring it into the enterprise world, especially to provide service to all employees. So that, you don't actually have to send an email or pick up the phone to call a service agent, now you can actually interact with Alexa or a chatbot to get any service you need. So that's what we call omni-channel experience for providing that experience for end users, employees, customers, partners, anyone. >> So, do you have, right now, any reference customers, it's so new? Or, can you give us a sense for how this capability is working in the field in terms of your testing? Do business people understand, or are they comfortable, with using essentially a consumer appliance as an interface to some serious business infrastructure? Like, being able to report a fault in a server, or whatnot. There's a risk there of bringing in a technology, like a consumer technology, before it's really been accepted as a potential business tool. Tell us how that's working. >> That's a very interesting. We are actually seeing a very fast pace at which customers are adopting it. As we speak, I have three customers I'm working with right now, who not only wants to use a chatbot, or a virtual agent, for providing service, not just to employees but to the end customers, also want to use Alexa inside their company for providing service to their employees. So, it's starting the journey, we already have the integration that is working with Alexa. Customers have gotten very excited about it, they're doing POCs, they're starting their journey. I think in the next couple of years, we'll see a huge uptake with customers wanting to do that across the board. >> Well, give me an example, if I'm working and I need to go to Alexa Business, how deep can I go? What kind of problems can be solved? And then, at what point where does that shut off and then we trip over to the human element? >> James: Don't forget where the A.I. fits in to the picture. If you could just have a little bit of the plumbing, not too much. >> So, let me give you like two segments, one is the experience through Alexa, the second one is, where does deep learning get embedded into the process. So, usually every company has level one, level two service desk agents who are taking the calls, are responding to emails for resetting passwords or fixing foreign issues, laptop issues. So, that level one, level two service desk process is what is being replaced through a chatbot or an Alexa. So, now you can take the routine kind of a task away from having a human respond to it, you can have Alexa or a chatbot respond, do that work. The second piece, for high-complex scenarios, is where it switches. So, being able to automatically switch between an Alexa to a live agent, is where the beauty comes in and how we handle the transition. It has all the historical interaction through the whole journey for the customer. >> But then, Alexa forwards any information it has gained from the conversations- >> That interaction history we call it. >> To a human being who takes it to the next step. >> Nayaki: So when I- >> Can a human kick it back to Alexa at some point? >> No, no, we haven't seen that go back. It's usually, level one, level two is where Alexa takes care and then level three is where the human takes care and goes forward. Now, the second piece, the A.I.-ML piece. In a service management, there are a lot of processes that are very, I would say, routine and very manual. Like, every ticket that comes in, customers have millions of tickets that come in on a periodic basis. Every ticket that comes in, how you assign the ticket to the right individual, log the ticket and categorize the ticket is a very labor intensive and expensive process. So, we are embedding deep learning capabilities into that so we can automate, customers can automate all of those. >> James: Natural language processing, is that? >> With NLP embedded into it. Now, customers can choose to use an NLP engine of their choice, like Watson, or Amazon, or Cortana. And then, that gets fed back into the service management process. >> In fact, that's consistent with what AWS is saying about the whole deep learning space. They are agnostic as to the underlying deep learning framework you use to build this logic, whether it be TensorFlow or MXNet, or whatever. So, what you're saying is very consistent with that sort of open framework for plugging deep learning, or A.I., into the, in this case, the business application. Very good. So, developers within your customer base, what are you doing, BMC, to get developers up to speed on what they'll need to do to build the skills to be able to drive this whole service management workflow? >> So, all this work that we're doing with, what we call these cognitive services, they're all micro services that we are built into our platform. That, not only we are using in our own applications, like in Remedy, like in, what we call digital workplace, but also we have made it available for all the developers, partners, ecosystems, to consume it in their own applications. Just like what Amazon is doing with their micro services strategy, we have micro services for every one of these processes that developers can now consume and build their own special use cases, or use cases that are very unique to their business or to their customers. >> So who, I mean we were talking about this before we started the interview, about invent versus innovation, so, on the innovation side, what's driving that? I mean, are these interactions that you're having with customers and so you're trying to absorb whatever that input is, that feedback? Or, are you innovating almost in a vacuum, or in space a little bit, and are providing tools that you think could get traction? >> No, in fact, no, we are not just dreaming in our labs and saying, "This is what we should go do." (laughing) >> James: Dreaming in our labs. >> That's not where the driver is. What's really happening, independent of the industry, you pick any industry like telcos or financial industry, any industry is going through a major transformation where they are under competitive pressure to provide a service at the highest efficiency, highest speed, at the lowest cost. So if I'm a bank, or if I'm a telco, when a customer calls me and they have an issue, the pace at which I provide the service, the speed, and the cost at which I provide that service, and the accuracy at which I provide that service, is my competitive advantage. So, that is what is actually driving the innovations that we are bringing to market. And, all the three things that I talked about, end user experience through bots or through virtual agents, how we are automating the processes inside the service management, and how we are also providing it for the developers. All these three, create a package for our customers in every one of those industries, to address the speed, the efficiency and the cost for their service management. >> John: Go ahead James. >> At this show, AWS, among their many announcements that are building on their A.I., they have a new product called, and it's related to this, the accuracy, it's called Amazon Comprehend. Which is able to build on Polly, their NLP, their Natural Language Processing, to be able to identify in a natural language, entities like, "Hey, my PC doesn't work "and I think it's the hard drive," those are entities. But, also identify sentiment, whether the customer is very angry, mildly miffed, and so forth. Conceivably, you could use, or your customers could use that information in building out skills that are more fine-grained in terms of handing off to level two or level three support, "Okay, we've identified with a high degree of confidence "that the problem might reside in this particular component "of the system, the customer is really out of joint, "you need to put somebody on this right away." So forth and so on. Any thoughts about possibly using this new functionality within the context of Alexa for Business as you were deploying it at BMC? In the future? Your thoughts? >> Absolutely, in fact that was what I was very excited about that, when they announced that. You know, in an NLP, NLP has been around for many years now and there's been a lot of experiments around NLP. >> The first patent for NLP was like in the late '50s. >> But the maturity of NLP now, and the pace at which, like Amazon, they're innovating is just phenomenal. And the real beauty of it would be, when an NLP engine can really become intelligent when it can understand the sentiment of the customer, when the customer is saying something, it should detect that the customer is angry, happy, or on the edge. We are not there yet, I'm really excited to see the announcements from AWS on the Comprehend side. If they really can deliver on that understanding sentiment, I think it would be phenomenal. >> I don't want to get us off the tracks, but it's a fascinating point. Because, as you know words, in a static environment can be misinterpreted one of 50,000 ways. So, how do you get this A.I. to apply to emotional pitch, tone, agitation? How do you recognize that? >> That is where NLP, the maturity of an NLP, is what's gonna be game changing in the long term. For it to be able to know what the underlying sentiment. >> Anger, excitement, joy, despair, I mean, all those things. "I've had enough," can be said many different ways. >> And that's when we'll switch to a live agent, if it's not able to do it, we will quickly switch to a live agent. (laughing) >> The bot gives up, right? (laughing) >> Or is it emotion threshold where a human being might be the best immediate front-line support. >> Just curious, it's fascinating. Well, thank you for the time, we certainly appreciate that. And, we promise, this'll be it for the day. (laughing) All right, no more CUBE duty. But, we certainly wish you all the best down the road. And, like you, I think we've certainly seen, and have a deeper appreciation for what's happening in this marketplace with what we've seen here this week. It was extraordinary. >> Fascinating. >> Thank you, John, it was a pleasure. And really excited to have two CUBE interviews in a day. >> John: How 'bout that? >> But, I think it's a great forum for us to get our message out and get the world to know what we are doing as BMC and the innovations we're beginning. >> We're excited to talk to real innovators in the business world, so, all power to you. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> Nice to meet you. Back with more, we are live here at re:Invent AWS in Las Vegas. Back with more live here on theCUBE right after this break. (upbeat music)

welcome back to vmworld 2013 this is our special live coverage live in San Francisco California this is the cube so look at angles flagship program we go out for the advantix track the signal from the noise talk to the tech athletes talk to the entrepreneurs talk to the customers talk to the party stuff to the execs join my coach Dave vellante and we're here the very special guest Sanjay from the new GM of the end-user computing business unit at vmware welcome back to the queue your cube alumni from sa p of which we've done for four years as well it's our fourth year vmware great to see you on the cube nice to be back executive at vmware so what a year it's been the whole theme has changed in 10 years a 10 year anniversary of vmworld defy convention change and our past conversations you can handle that your have so much experience at s 8 p-9 convinced that's made a by convention and and it via more need some help at the end user computing here at strategic area so over to my data center hybrid cloud and use computing pat simplified it down to three areas you're heading up and use a computing strategic to say the least for vmware what's your take of what that is today where has it been and what motivated you to come to vmware from sa p which had great edge mobile mobile analytics everything's happening at sa be great mobility okay you know i think what got you I've always loved being here so so first off thank you guys for having me back i looked at the way in which end users have been using computing and as you know I've been in the business user space practically all my life analytics big data in the last 15 18 months in mobile so I saw this as a great opportunity for a company that was came to extend their brand from the data center to the desktop and whether desktop is going my views of the desktop obviously is not just the laptop for the future of these mobile devices so the desktop of today is clearly going to move into the cloud there's mobile and then there's machines your Tesla your thermostat your refrigerator these are all the ways in which we think about children and these are all going to be end-user computing devices as personal computers absolutely not there is more software today in your car and then there was in the first spacecraft 1970 I believe that or not so from our perspective and you think about the types of players and technology infrastructure players that are going to be strong I believe that needs to be three core disciplines to what that company you have in terms of technology now cover the other aspen tree one was management technology the other security and virtualization and quite frankly I felt the VMware had much better access than any of the other companies to make that happen for what end-user computing the other aspect of it was VMware's always been accompanied this value of innovation we look at the roots of this company it's an innovative product and go to market it's an innovation company I wanted to be close to an innovating team the culture is very much of innovation from product to go to market and then you know from a joking perspective thirdly my commute got 50 yards shorter I used to turn left now I turn right 50 yards shorter that was effective and the campus is nice at the end of this beautiful campus as well I was SI p but I got to ask you about the end-user computing cuz you know one of the things Dave and I were talking about earlier we love that stack that Joe Tucci Pat Gelsinger and Palmer's laid out in 2010 you know four years ago and it was some call it the software mainframe cloud computing and it was beautiful nice we all recognize dad bill in the stack but there was some misfires virtualization expanded he could flash date of fabric all kind of was happening software to find jumped in there and and changed a little bit didn't change the direction but the top of the stack it was some misfires and just didn't feel right was that a factor that come in with a clean sheet of paper was it a turnaround situation was it just ok reboot reset grow what was the the dynamics at the top of the stack that yeah I don't think first off you want to go I mean I felt this was a company that had a tremendous brand 500,000 customers you know 40 50 million but this is a company that's a brand this year so that's always a good place to start you're not creating a brand you're building on that brand that was very very important but as you looked at where the data center was going it's moving to the cloud and cloud computing and we have a clear strategy there to play in cloud computing that was very very important to me but in terms of where the end-user computing opportunity was I saw this as just being the first inning the VDI space virtual desktops it really is a two player market there and I think our competitor isn't innovating very much we have an opportunity to be the innovator and gain market share and overtake them to be number one I'm here to be the number one player in bi but mobile were just in the beginning of that inning if you would the first to second and it's a wide open market social computing we've got social constants a great product Tim Young's the CEO of that company he's the real deal and in social computing we think that those areas desktop mobile social and where they're going to go are at least the first three aspects of where a user computing has a lot a lot of opportunity just Sanjay we the first three shows we ever did we did emc world was the first one we ever did with the Cuban and right after that we did SI p sapphire and then vmworld was always interesting to contrast you know the sort of infrastructure shows the sapphire and we saw the transformation of SI p pretty substantially particularly after the sybase acquisition so you had you know serious management as top management thrust toward mobile and then you also the acquisition of sybase gave you some of the management technology the security and and maybe not the virtualization piece but you really began to change the discourse and you and the customers bought into it so that was I felt a catalyst this there's an outside observer is that true and then what's the catalyst here was it cleaning up sort of what I used to call the misfit toys creating the pivotal piece and getting more focused bringing in the new leader what is that that catalyst you know I think force I was very blessed to see a transformation of saap from systems of record to systems of engagement I was very involved as you know in the analytics to the data and the mobile business much of that catalyst is still valid systems of record the systems our engagement so a lot of what's happening the end user computing area is those systems of engagement that continues that's abroad but then as I looked at the IT trends or the Big Data of mobile of social of cloud there's at least three or four of those now that we have an opportunity to play here in a big way yes there was an opportunity to redefine things with almost a clean slate in many areas and a fantastic team both patent and joe tucci were involved in recruiting me here have a grand vision and a great vision of where this is going they're fantastic executives and then the rest of the executive team from called to jonathan to everybody else here world-class people that i felt i could just culturally fit in very well with and in this area you know as you know business users stuff and end-user computing has been my passion me so it's a very natural area for me too hopefully extend what I've done in the last 15 20 years into something like their help to melt this company and then from a revenue perspective if we can double the revenue this company with hopefully a good par they're coming from and use your computer this will continue to be a very very hopefully well market capitalized company and also you mentioned SI p about you know the cloud they've had some cloud issues we've seen some ships and some some things they ever the mobile they were kicking butt on we saw that right away and you're in that but I looking at your view on the competition because Damon are talking yesterday are the first day about Ballmer's resignation and just did a reorg announcement goodly intelligent edge of the network so the conversation was disruptor or sustainer you know who are you right i mean vmware technology driven company is not sustaining anything still disrupting microsoft obviously kind of sustaining the status quo so so the question is who's your competitors is it a Microsoft is it someone else who's in your rear-view mirror and who's who you looking to laugh on the field I mean clearly if you look at each of our businesses there are different ones but in the core data center stuff traditionally computer in Microsoft but we are far and ahead a market share leader you know in that at least seventy percent plus so that's a very strong position there in the way the cloud is going it's open mark it's a complete open opportunity I think you heard from Pat Gelsinger a message where we're going to embrace an appropriate places OpenStack so you're going to see this not be a combative but a place where it's it's collaborative in some places in the end user computing area we are in some areas number two behind Citrix but I view it as a huge opportunity we're bigger them and as a brand as a company and my ambition here is to play to be number one and in the areas of mobile there is no clear leader it's very much an open area especially relates to mobile management of mobile security in the enterprise mobile and the good news i think in the end user computing especially as you think about the new aspects of mobile there is no one device operating system in the laptop world you guys both have max but windows is still about eighty ninety percent market share their in the device operating world of mobile it's a heterogenous world already from the get-go iOS Android Windows Mobile and that actually creates much more of an opportunity for a Switzerland type of player to be a leader in management security and virtualization so much of those dynamics you know I think requires to being innovative but my gentle attitude on competitors is you don't obsess about it clearly you have to UM ambition to be number one and competition keeps you honest but I'm much more focused not on who's in the rearview mirror competitors I describe some of them in that league but a lot of where we believe we should be going you were talking a little bit before I caught the Internet of Things at the industrial internet and Cisco calls the internet of everything i love the cube because we get to do all these great events we were at the GE industrial internet launch and and I know pivotal so they're a big partner in a part of that right so I wanted to scrape because get to talk to all the smartest people like you and extract their their knowledge so I want to understand the roadmap for the customer so you take down the enterprise with what used to be known as a VDI is it a parallel path to the Internet of Things or the industrial Internet talk about that look I think you know first off you've got to think about where the desktop is today and where the desktop is going because that's the primary aspect of where people have traditionally been using their computing time has been on the desk top 10 for 20 years ago you probably did all your email on a desktop area today a significant part of that is on smartphones okay as little as possible so the world of the time spent between a desktop and a mobile device is changing we've seen it especially since iOS came out now the fact of the matter is that computing inside machines is not not a new concept it's been there for a while but the ability to manage them secure them potentially virtualized on is something that's very nation and one way I believe there'll be an opportunity so my view is that whether it's the desktop whether it's a mobile whether it's a machine the technologies are going to have some common substrate a fabric that are going to be common to all of them but there's going to need to be some miniaturization you can't apply potentially the exact same software you have in the data center to a tiny thermostat and not the beauty of it is we've got smart engineers we have understand the miniaturization aware this technology needs to apply and we're going to play this out i think the machine a machine Internet of Things opportunities well ahead of us we're in the beginning of that but the good opportunity there is it's 50 billion plus things tens of billions of devices and so and so forth the other thing that I think is important is that there are other technologies i mentioned management security virtualization there are other technologies that I think they're also going to play social computing what is the appropriate place for how people are going to collaborate in processes I don't think that's been that it's well understood in the consumer world because you see the facebooks in the LinkedIn but there is some mirror of that in the enterprise which i think is wide open any machine learning big data those kinds of trends will drive a lot of how you're going to collaborate not just between man to man man dies yeah right otherwise the Steelers opportunity that's the automation piece that keeps on coming back as the automation I got to answer since you brought up the thermostat thing and you're kind of riffing on that you've a lot of experience and certainly SI p in the verticals it's interesting mobile has different verticals they know how you talk to financial services government is that a constraint or an opportunity I think it's a great opportunity I think that any company that grows horizontal which is what we've done you know we're fight i'm in three the most baffling stat when Pat and Joe talked to me was that VMware's 500,000 customers that's huge but most of that growth has happened horizontally there's been no gradually an industry verticals ation one of the things we did very well at SAAP was industry verticals there's now SI p is a 40 year old company you'd expect that what we're going to start doing and end-user computing is starting to vertical eyes some of our aspects of how we sell for example in VDI we're finding a number of healthcare places where they want to equip physicians and clinicians with either laptops or devices now where you can get get to their clinical records medical records on a device that's completely locked down and virtualized so that you don't have to worry about that device or that laptop getting locks that's a real real opportunity for virtualization in healthcare the same and government we're seeing the same in many of the very very sophisticated branch and local type of remote you know office type of settings so increasingly we think both the desktop and mobile they're going to be vertical use cases and we'll start building out technology and both solutioning of them that allow them over I want your app sunk in the industry and I think some of them that are very relevant our health care banking federal and then you know several the other sectors where there's lots of employees very distributed and sense and also ones where you've got to ensure that the data doesn't leave their device laptop or mobile Sanjay ponen here inside the cube now with VMware GM at the end user computing group thanks for coming inside the cube I'll give you the final words I want to ask you I'll see your senior executive great leadership move for VMware you can come in with your running shoes on there's no no real delay there so I'm expecting to see some great stuff from you but what's your objective you're gonna get ingratiating from the new culture which is not going to be hard for you again left turn vs right turn your understand tech what's your going to be here your personal objectives over the next couple months as you get in and start to you know put together the plan I mean obviously metrics or clean the objects are clear SDDC hybrid cloud and use a computing Europe and fear piece what are you going to roll out and I think you all as you know in any software company your assets of your people so my first focus is to really understand the fabric of our team of people it's a it's a smaller team than s API to worry about 65,000 people here it's 15,000 but in my own team getting to understand how we can continue to retain and grow great talent we have a fantastic team not just if we remember also in my immediate team and we're going to continue to grow that team and in that I think you'll find great innovation secondly we're going to define goals that are revenue and market share related that a both short-term and long-term to be number one than the undisputed number one in every aspect of our market in some of our markets there are existing competitors being other ones we're completely creating new markets and third we're going to go and make customers enormously successful I think when you make customers successful with great innovation and great people you have a fantastic business right and I could envision you know over a multi-year period imagine that VMware's twice the size that we are today five billion dollar company if a significant part of that could come from end-user computing that's going to be a phantom great you know morale-boosting and better shut the streets down here in San Francisco like to do with oracle openworld right down 23,000 people estimated here everybody else is going right up straight up so vmworld you can a vision that fifty fifty billion dollar Tim you know 39 million billion market cap I mean you could I could see that within i double the revenue you guys do the estimators but double right along with it and then you gotta focus make we talked we talked to pat you got to figure out that your camp and then it yeah we can double the revenue triple mark it was all good problems and now we're dreaming a little bit but I think you guys ringing the future before you create an aftermarket most inspirational thing we could do is help our employees and our customers be in that future and that's what I'm excited to do sanjay pune we're here at vm will be document it's our fourth straight vmworld will be continuing document we're here in the cube thank you for coming on your check athlete looking forward to seeing you with your running shoes on and using computers needs a big lift they have the right guy for a job be right back with the cube with our next guest our friends at Andreessen Horowitz and a hot start up in the space in virtualization I'll be right back after this short break