(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual program, covering VMware Explorer, 2022. The first time since 2019 that the VMware ecosystem is gathered in person. But in the post isolation economy, hybrid is the new format, cube plus digital, we call it. And so we're really happy to welcome Cal Al-Dhubaib who's the founder and CEO and AI strategist of Pandata. And Jonathan Seckler back in theCUBE, the senior director of product marketing at Dell Technologies. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks a lot for having us. >> Yeah, thank you >> Cal, Pandata, cool name, what's it all about? >> Thanks for asking. Really excited to share our story. I'm a data scientist by training and I'm based here in Cleveland, Ohio. And Pandata is a company that helps organizations design and develop machine learning and AI technology. And when I started this here in Cleveland six years ago, I had people react to me with, what? So we help demystify AI and make it practical. And we specifically focus on trustworthy AI. So we work a lot in regulated industries like healthcare. And we help organizations navigate the complexities of building machine learning and AI technology when data's hard to work with, when there's risk on the potential outcomes, or high cost in the consequences. And that's what we do every day. >> Yeah, yeah timing is great given all the focus on privacy and what you're seeing with big tech and public policy, so we're going to get into that. Jonathan, I understand you guys got some hard news. What's your story around AI and AutoML? Share that with us. >> Yeah, thanks. So having the opportunity to speak with Cal today is really important because one of the hardest things that we find that our customers have is making that transition of experimenting with AI to making it really useful in real life. >> What is the tech underneath that? Are we talking VxRail here? Are you're talking servers? What do you got? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the Dell validated design for AI is a reference framework that is based on the optimized set of hardware for a given outcome. That includes it could be VxRail, VMware, vSphere and Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia software to make all of that happen. And for today, what we're working with is H2O.ai's solution to develop automatic machine learning. So take just that one more step to make it easier for customers to bring AI into production. >> Cool. >> So it's a full stack of software that includes automated machine learning, it includes NVIDIA's AI enterprise for deployment and development, and it's all built on an engineering validated set of hardware, including servers and storage and whatever else you need >> AI out of the box, I don't have to worry about cobbling it all together. >> Exactly. >> Cal, I want to come back to this trusted AI notion. A lot of people don't trust AI just by the very nature of it. I think about, okay, well how does it know it's a cat? And then you can never explain, it says black box. And so I'm like, what are they do with my data? And you mentioned healthcare, financial services, the government, they know everything about me. I just had to get a real ID and Massachusetts, I had to give all my data away. I don't trust it. So what is trusted AI? >> Well, so let me take a step back and talk about sobering statistics. There's a lot of different sources that report on this, but anywhere you look, you'll hear somewhere between 80 to 90% of AI projects fail to yield a return. That's pretty scary, that's a disappointing industry. And why is that? AI is hard. Versus traditional software, you're programming rules hard and fast. If I click this button, I expect A, B, C to happen. And we're talking about recognizing and reacting to patterns. It's not, will it be wrong? It's, when it's wrong, how wrong will it be? And what are it cost to accept related to that? So zooming back in on this lens of trustworthy AI, much of the last 10 years the development in AI has looked like this. Let's get the data, let's race to build the warehouses, okay we did that, no problem. Next was race to build the algorithms. Can we build more sophisticated models? Can we work with things like documents and images? And it used to be the exclusive domain of deep tech companies. You'd have to have teams of teams building the software, building the infrastructure, working on very specific components in this pipeline. And now we have this explosion of technologies, very much like what Jonathan was talking about with validated designs. So it removes the complexities of the infrastructure, it removes the complexities of being able to access the right data. And we have a ton of modeling capabilities and tools out there, so we can build a lot of things. Now, this is when we start to encounter risk in machine learning and AI. If you think about the models that are being used to replicate or learn from language like GPT-3 to create new content, it's training data set is everything that's on the internet. And if you haven't been on the internet recently, it's not all good. So how do you go about building technology to recognize specific patterns, pick up patterns that are desirable, and avoid unintended consequences? And no one's immune to this. So the discipline of trustworthy AI is building models that are easier to interrogate, that are useful for humans, and that minimize the risk of unintended consequences. >> I would add too, one of the good things about the Pandata solution is how it tries to enforce fairness and transparency in the models. We've done some studies recently with IDC, where we've tried to compare leaders in AI technology versus those who are just getting started. And I have to say, one of the biggest differences between a leader in AI and the rest of us is often that the leaders have a policy in place to deal with the risks and the ethics of using data through some kind of machine oriented model. And it's a really important part of making AI usable for the masses. >> You certainly hear a lot about, AI ultimately, there's algorithms which are built by humans. Although of course, there's algorithms to build algorithms, we know that today. >> Right, exactly. >> But humans are biased, there's inherent bias, and so this is a big problem. Obviously Dell, you have a giant observation space in terms of customers. But I wonder, Cal, if you can share with us how you're working with your customers at Pandata? What kind of customers are you working with? What are they asking? What problems are they asking you to solve? And how does it manifest itself? >> So when I like to talk about AI and where it's useful, it usually has to do with taking a repetitive task that humans are tasked with, but they're starting to act more like machines than humans. There's not much creativity in the process, it's handling something that's fairly routine, and it ends up being a bottleneck to scaling. And just a year ago even, we'd have to start approaching our clients with conversations around trustworthy AI, and now they're starting to approach us. Really example, this actually just happened earlier today, we're partnering with one of our clients that basically scans medical claims from insurance providers. And what they're trying to do is identify members that qualify for certain government subsidies. And this isn't as straightforward as it seems because there's a lot of complexities in how the rules are implemented, how judges look at these cases. Long story short, we help them build machine learning to identify these patients that qualify. And a question that comes up, and that we're starting to hear from the insurance companies they serve is how do you go about making sure that your decisions are fair and you're not selecting certain groups of individuals over others to get this assistance? And so clients are starting to wise up to that and ask questions. Other things that we've done include identifying potential private health information that's contained in medical images so that you can create curated research data sets. We've helped organizations identify anomalies in cybersecurity logs. And go from an exploration space of billions of eventual events to what are the top 100 that I should look at today? And so it's all about, how do you find these routine processes that humans are bottlenecked from getting to, we're starting to act more like machines and insert a little bit of outer recognition intelligence to get them to spend more time on the creative side. >> Can you talk a little bit more about how? A lot of people talk about augmented AI. AI is amazing. My daughter the other day was, I'm sure as an AI expert, you've seen it, where the machine actually creates standup comedy which it's so hilarious because it is and it isn't. Some of the jokes are actually really funny. Some of them are so funny 'cause they're not funny and they're weird. So it really underscored the gap. And so how do you do it? Is it augmented? Is it you're focusing on the mundane things that you want to take humans out of the loop? Explain how. >> So there's this great Wall Street Journal article by Jennifer Strong that she published I think four years ago now. And she says, "For AI to become more useful, it needs to become more boring." And I really truly believe in that. So you hear about these cutting edge use cases. And there's certainly some room for these generative AI applications inspiring new designs, inspiring new approaches. But the reality is, most successful use cases that we encounter in our business have to do with augmenting human decisions. How do you make arriving at a decision easier? How do you prioritize from millions of options, hundreds of thousands of options down to three or four that a human can then take the last stretch and really consider or think about? So a really cool story, I've been playing around with DALL.E 2. And for those of you who haven't heard, it's this algorithm that can create images from props. And they're just painting I really wish I had bought when I was in Paris a few years ago. And I gave it a description, skyline of the Sacre-Coeur Church in Montmartre with pink and white hues. And it came up with a handful of examples that I can now go take to an artist and say paint me this. So at the end of the day, automation, it's not really, yes, there's certain applications where you really are truly getting to that automated AI in action. But in my experience, most of the use cases have to do with using AI to make humans more effective, more creative, more valuable. >> I'd also add, I think Cal, is that the opportunity to make AI real here is to automate these things and simplify the languages so that can get what we call citizen data scientists out there. I say ordinary, ordinary employees or people who are at the front line of making these decisions, working with the data directly. We've done this with customers who have done this on farms, where the growers are able to use AI to monitor and to manage the yield of crops. I think some of the other examples that you had mentioned just recently Cal I think are great. The other examples is where you can make this technology available to anyone. And maybe that's part of the message of making it boring, it's making it so simple that any of us can use it. >> I love that. John Furrier likes to say that traditionally in IT, we solve complexity with more complexity. So anything that simplifies things is goodness. So how do you use automated machine learning at Pandata? Where does that fit in here? >> So really excited that the connection here through H2O that Jonathan had mentioned earlier. So H2O.ai is one of the leading AutoML platforms. And what's really cool is if you think about the traditional way you would approach machine learning, is you need to have data scientists. These patterns might exist in documents or images or boring old spreadsheets. And the way you'd approach this is, okay, get these expensive data scientists, and 80% of what they do is clean up the data. And I'm yet to encounter a situation where there isn't cleaning data. Now, I'll get through the cleaning up the data step, you actually have to consider, all right, am I working with language? Am I working with financial forecasts? What are the statistical modeling approaches I want to use? And there's a lot of creativity involved in that. And you have to set up a whole experiment, and that takes a lot of time and effort. And then you might test one, two or three models because you know to use those or those are the go to for this type of problem. And you see which one performs best and you iterate from there. The AutoML framework basically allows you to cut through all of that. It can reduce the amount of time you're spending on those steps to 1/10 of the time. You're able to very quickly profile data, understand anomalies, understand what data you want to work with, what data you don't want to work with. And then when it comes to the modeling steps, instead of iterating through three or four AutoML is throwing the whole kitchen sink at it. Anything that's appropriate to the task, maybe you're trying to predict a category or label something, maybe you're trying to predict a value like a financial forecast or even generate test. And it tests all of the models that it has at its disposal that are appropriate to the task and says, here are the top 10. You can use features like let me make this more explainable, let me make the model more accurate. I don't necessarily care about interrogating the results because the risk here is low, I want to a model that predicts things with a higher accuracy. So you can use these dials instead of having to approach it from a development perspective. You can approach it from more of an experimental mindset. So you still need that expertise, you still need to understand what you're looking at, but it makes it really quick. And so you're not spending all that expensive data science time cleaning up data. >> Makes sense. Last question, so Cal, obviously you guys go deep into AI, Jonathan Dell works with every customer on the planet, all sizes, all industries. So what are you hearing and doing with customers that are best practices that you can share for people that want to get into it, that are concerned about AI, they want to simplify it? What would you tell them? Go ahead, Cal. >> Okay, you go first, Cal. >> And Jonathan, you're going to bring us home. >> Sure. >> This sounds good. So as far as where people get scared, I see two sides of it. One, our data's not clean enough, not enough quality, I'm going to stay away from this. So one, I combat that with, you've got to experiment, you got to iterate, And that's the only way your data's going to improve. Two, there's organizations that worry too much about managing the risk. We don't have the data science expertise that can help us uncover potential biases we have. We are now entering a new stage of AI development and machine learning development, And I use those terms interchangeably anymore. I know some folks will differentiate between them. But machine learning is the discipline driving most of the advances. The toolkits that we have at our disposal to quickly profile and manage and mitigate against the risk that data can bring to the table is really giving organizations more comfort, should give organizations more comfort to start to build mission critical applications. The thing that I would encourage organizations to look for, is organizations that put trustworthy AI, ethical AI first as a consideration, not as an afterthought or not as a we're going to sweep this on the carpet. When you're intentional with that, when you bring that up front and you make it a part of your design, it sets you up for success. And we saw this when GDPR changed the IT world a few years ago. Organizations that built for privacy first to begin with, adapting to GDPR was relatively straightforward. Organizations that made that an afterthought or had that as an afterthought, it was a huge lift, a huge cost to adapt and adjust to those changes. >> Great example. All right, John, I said bring us home, put a bow on this. >> Last bit. So I think beyond the mechanics of how to make a AI better and more workable, one of the big challenges with the AI is this concern that you're going to isolate and spend too much effort and dollars on the infrastructure itself. And that's one of the benefits that Dell brings to the table here with validated designs. Is that our AI validated design is built on a VMware vSphere architecture. So your backup, your migration, all of the management and the operational tools that IT is most comfortable with can be used to maintain and develop and deploy artificial intelligence projects without having to create unique infrastructure, unique stacks of hardware, and then which potentially isolates the data, potentially makes things unavailable to the rest of the organization. So when you run it all in a VMware environment, that means you can put it in the cloud, you can put it in your data center. Just really makes it easier for IT to build AI into their everyday process >> Silo busting. All right, guys, thanks Cal, John. I really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's been a great time, thanks. >> All right. And thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Keep it right there for more action from the show floor with myself, Dave Velante, John Furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson, keep it right there. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS re:invent 2021 live in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, with David Nicholson. We are running one of the industry's largest, most important hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its enormous ecosystem of partners. We've been talking yesterday and today about the next decade and cloud innovation. We're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Henson, the Vice President of Pariveda Solutions. Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So talk to us about what's going on at Pariveda. What are some of the things that you're focused on in the energy space? >> So for us, specifically, we're looking at energy as it's redefining itself, right? It's no longer just oil and gas. It's no longer just coal. It's renewable energies, it's carbon capture, it's retail energy, it's power generation. We're trying to understand as this energy industry redefines itself, how companies are starting to participate in there and how technologies are really helping them as they redefine their business models and go through their digital transformations. >> I was doing some reading that Amazon is already the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world and will be 100% renewable energy by 2025. Talk to me about the partnership with AWS. >> So our partnership goes back quite a while. We were one of their early partners. We saw the early potential of AWS, jumped in both feet in the deep end, and we've had a wonderful partnership ever since. More recently over the last couple of three years, as they've really matured their definition of energy, we've been right there with them, partnering with them on a number of different projects across multiple industries and really getting excited about how they define their journey going forward in the energy industry. >> We're in such a state of flux right now. We have been for quite a while, but talk about the energy transition. What is that? Why now? Are we all ready? >> Ooh, great question. So the energy transition is really about us as a society, looking to new sources of energy over fossil fuels. 83% of the world's energy today comes from fossil fuels, about 30% from coal, a little over 50% from oil and gas itself. We as a world are looking at this as this is energy that can't continue to be our primary source. It has been a pivot-able source of energy getting us here. It is cheap, it is reliable, it is abundant. It's very good at what it does today. However, it's causing harm. So we need to address that. So what we're doing looking forward is helping companies understand what does it mean to be net zero? What does it mean to monitor and capture your carbon? What does it mean to transition your business model from a pure oil and gas play to one that's looking at new energies like carbon capture, like wind, like solar. So we're helping all of these companies go through that journey as they figure out those next steps. >> So where does Pariveda come into the picture? Take this down to the level of an engagement with an energy company. Who are the people that you parachute in? >> Sure. >> To engage with the customer? Well let's talk about oil and gas first. The most near-term best solution that we're seeing is really about operational excellence. How can I better run my business so I reduce my footprint? Am I having better maintenance to reduce accidental spills? Am I controlling my unexpected emissions, like flaring? How can I use technology to help me run my business better? Then we have companies in the retail energy, who are looking at their customer base who are purchasing large amounts of energy, who they themselves are striving to be net zero by 2050, 2060 and creating solutions for them so they can begin to capture their carbon solutions. So we typically parachute in a couple of different types of groups. Pariveda is both an advisory services firm and a technology services firm. So based upon where a company is in their journey, we may start more in the strategy space, working with the C-Suite. What does it mean to build and structure an organization to strategically go after this new energy space or perhaps they're focusing more on operational excellence. They're trying to figure out how to leverage technology and process, to run their business better, more cost effectively. More importantly, more ESG friendly. >> ESG is a big buzzword these days. You were talking about conversations at the C-Suite level? Has it always been there or is that something that with climate change and all the things going on, you think of, you know, Hurricane Ida, the drought in California and the fires, the flooding in Washington, is that something that is now more of a focus of the C-suite level? >> I think it has to be. Global warming first became mainstream back in the seventies, when we first started realizing there was going to be an impact from our use of fossil fuels. Originally, it wasn't quite sure the scientific data wasn't there necessarily to support it. But now we're starting to see that there is a climate change. Whether or not it's caused by fossil fuels is a debate for another day. But we are starting to see that. As a result, we're also starting to see a lot of pressures coming from various different areas of our world, the financial industry, wanting to become a lot more transparent about their investment holdings. Which means they're looking at their portfolio and choosing whether or not to put investment into capital projects, which is the heart of oil and gas companies. We're seeing social pressers, not just with campaigns and protests, but where people are choosing to work, the products they're choosing to buy, the brand that they're using to associate their identity. And that's also creating pressures for the C-Suite to start to pay attention because that impacts their whole pipeline of talent. So I think we're starting to see that because of those impacts becoming much more far reaching than just some scientific publications. >> Well, the focus on people is critical. You know, we talk about often people process technology, but the people focus is critical, especially since this has such, from an optics perspective, global visibility. >> Yes, people is critically important, not just from a talent acquisition, but also from a talent development perspective. These organizations are going to be going through some pretty dramatic changes. They're going to be leveraging technology they're already familiar with, perhaps some processes they're already familiar with, but they're ultimately moving into new industries, new competitive markets. So you need to not only be able to recruit the top talent by promoting an image that people can align to, but also be able to build that talent internally so that you can make them effective as you go through these business model transformations. >> You know, there's been a theme that we've seen just in the first full day today here at AWS re:invent. And that theme is that the AWS ecosystem is thriving and critical to the success of what AWS is developing. You've given a great example of an organization, your organization, that connects or bridges the divide between technology and the value that technology can bring. You said it at the outset, you're not going in and talking technology first, typically. It's, let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about people and culture, and then let's find the tools that are best suited to leverage to achieve the goals. Because you started talking about energy, and it's like, well, so which compute instance do I need for that, exactly? Somebody has to connect those dots. >> Absolutely. That's what I love about AWS. They offer a broad suite of services in their overall cloud infrastructure that allow you to start in multiple areas. Let's start with one of the very first projects that we got into that really focused on operational excellence and improving how the organization ran its business. This is a public reference, I'm going to go ahead and say it, we did work with AWS, partnering with them at ExxonMobil to help them redefine how they collaborate with their engineering procurement and construction companies. So this was a cloud platform that allowed them to change the way they interface with those vendors as they took on these large capital projects. We were able to take time out of the system, help that organization run more profitably, which allows them to invest in that new energy technology. Then we moved to retail energy where we've been looking at a large adoption in IOT technologies. That IOT capability of AWS allows organizations to monitor their infrastructure, understand how their equipment is performing, where carbon emissions might be occurring, or other greenhouse gases might be occurring, and bringing that in. Then you bring in the AL and ML stack capabilities. One of the leading ways of detecting emissions right now is image machine learning around emissions, looking at satellite photos to see if there are changes in the atmosphere where there might be a methane leak. So all these technologies work together to help us derive better answers for how to be a better energy company and how to be a more environmentally friendly corporation. >> What's the customer flywheel like? You know, often we talk with AWS there, they talk about really-- we start backwards. We start from the customer, we work forward, our customer obsession. We saw the NASCAR slides this morning of all the logos and I'm sure many more that didn't fit. But talk to me about the alignment between Pariveda, your focus on the customers, how they help you guys innovate and create new solutions, I imagine similar culturally to AWS. >> That's one of my favorite aspects about being a premier partner with AWS is the cultural alignment. We have a process that we call right to left faking. It's beginning with business outcomes before we ever look at the technology, ever start to design the solution, ever start to build that solution. Are we meeting the end user's needs, and where that culturally aligns with AWS is it aligns with their working backwards process where they sit with their primary end users and pick some point in the future and say, if I were to do a press release today, announcing the solution that we just built, what would it say? And then if I had questions, I wanted people to be able to find answers to the frequently asked questions. What would be in those frequently asked questions and what would those answers look like? So those two approaches to starting with the right to left business outcome focus helps us begin with the most important thing that we call "jobs to be done". So we're not working on a symptom, we're working on the actual problem. And that's where we've really aligned with AWS and our cultures have helped us focus on the most critical issues at hand. >> So we've talked a lot about energy and your affiliation with AWS in these efforts, but tell us a little more about Pariveda in terms of in a more broad sense. What's the history? >> Sure. >> Give us the pitch. >> Yeah, absolutely. Pariveda has been around for over 18 years. It started with a vision that our mission should be about developing people to their fullest potential. Start there and everything else will come. Since then, we've developed into both a strategy services firm and a technology services firm where we want to bring together what we consider to be the three primary components of an enterprise architecture. Basically business, product, technology, all wrapped around strategy. And so we want to focus on those areas when we use those to help deliver projects. So whether it's technology, whether we're helping travel and hospitality companies that you probably would recognize, or we're working with sports leagues to help rebrand, we're working in the agricultural industry to change how they capture data from equipment in the field. To working in the medical industry, redefining the way that doctors work with your patients by capturing your entire conversation for them. So they're spending less time translating their notes and instead evaluating their notes to ensure top quality health care, to working energy. So we're based in North America. We have ten offices in the U.S., one in Toronto. We're about 750 strong. And we are really focused on deliberate growth versus just exponential growth. >> Well the outcomes focus is absolutely critical, as you talked about earlier. For every organization, you know, one of the things that we learned during the last 22 months is that real-time data access is no longer a "nice to have". It's absolutely essential. But we're also seeing every company's becoming a data company, but they have to learn how. How can we work with technology partners like AWS, like Pariveda, to be able to capture the value that it -- unlock it quickly so that we can iterate and be able to deliver, especially in this interesting climate that we're in and pivot and pivot and pivot. So that outcomes focus that Pariveda has, is really critical for enabling businesses in every industry to be able to survive and thrive these days. >> You said it well, we agree with you completely. What we've designed at Pariveda is what we call the modern data enterprise, where it looks at the holistic vision of becoming a data company, everything from governance to technology choices, to how I structure my organization to have the right roles, the right leadership, the right executive support, and thinking about the full picture of delivering a successful data platform so that we can really focus on something that one of my mentees calls "data liquidity". It's the ability of a company to convert their data to value as quickly as possible. In order to do that, you have to come at it from multiple angles. >> You do, and that's a competitive differentiator these days. >> Yes, absolutely. It's more than just "Let me bring you a data link and hookup some data pipelines". Again, if that's where you start, you're probably not starting in the right place. We want to start with the end users. What questions are they answering? What jobs they trying to get done? And then moving back and say, well, what data do we need? And what form do we need and how do we present it to them so they can do their job extremely well and create their own competitive differentiation. >> Right. That's really critical. Last question is -- we have just a few seconds left here, Alan -- is so much announced today alone. This is, like David said, the first full day of coverage at re:invent, but from a visionary perspective, what are some of the things that we can expect to see from Pariveda as we finish the year 2021 and enter 2022? >> So let me speak a little selfishly to the energy. What you are going to see is us as an organization are going to work side-by-side with AWS energy to help shape the picture. What does it mean to be an energy company? As these industries start to converge, we're going to build more holistic platforms and more holistic approaches so organizations can figure out "How do I still do the business I need to do today to fund the business I need to so tomorrow?" And you're going to start to see us bringing better messaging to that on both strategy, technology, and product approaches. >> Awesome. Alan, thank you for joining David and me, talking about what's going on with power data, awesome approach. I love the people focus. Great stuff. >> Lisa, David, thank you for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com virtual this year. I'm John ferry, host of the cube. And one of the great reasons of great reasons of being on site with the team here is we have to bring remote guests in real guests from all no stories, too small. We bring people into the cube to have the right conversations. We've got Brooke Cunningham area, VP of global partner marketing experience. Brooke, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thank you, John. This is my sixth dot conflict, but this is actually my first time being on the cube. So I'm delighted. >>Great to have you on these new hybrid events. We can bring people in. You don't have to be here. All the execs are here, the partners are here. Great news is happening all around the world. You guys just announced a new partner program for the cloud called partner verse program. This is kind of, you know, mostly partner news is okay. Okay. Partner news partner ecosystem. But I think this is an important story because Splunk is kind of going to the next level of scale. That's to me is my observations walking away from the keynote, a lot of the partners, great technology, great platform, a lot of growth with cloud. We had formula one on you guys have a growing ecosystem. What is the new announcement partner versus about? >>Yes. Thanks, John. And you are spot on. We are growing for scale and Splunk's partner ecosystem is 2200 strong and we were so delighted to have so much partner success highlighted today on the keynotes. And specifically we have announced an all new spunk Splunk partner program called the Splunk partner verse. So we're taking it to new frontiers for our partners, really built for the cloud to help our partners lean into those cloud transformations with their customer. >>Great. Fro can you walk me through some of the numbers inside the numbers for a second? How many partners do you have and what is this program about specifically? >>Yeah, so 2200 partners that we featured some amazing stories in the keynotes today, around some of the momentum we have with partners like AWS, a center blue buoyant, a partner that just recently rearchitected all of their managed services from Splunk enterprise to Splunk cloud, because as they put it, Splunk is the only solution that can truly offer that hybrid solution for their customers. So all new goodness for our partners to help them lean in, to get enabled around all of the Splunk products, as well as to differentiate, differentiate their offerings with a new badging system. And we're going to help our partners really take that to the market by extending and expanding our marketing and creating an all new solutions catalog for our partners to differentiate themselves to their customers. >>You mentioned a couple things I want to double down on this badging thing, get in some of the nuances, but I want to just point out that, you know, and get your reaction to this when you see growth. And I saw this early on with AWS early on, when they performing, when you start to see the ecosystem grow like this, you start to see more enablement. You see more, money-making going on more, more, um, custom solutions, more agility you. So you started to see these things develop around you guys. So what does all this badging mean? How what's in it for me as a partner? Like how do I win on this? >>Yeah, great question. So first of all, John partner listening is a big part of what we do here at Splunk. And it's specifically a major part of what I do in my role. So we create a lot of forums to get that real deal partner feedback. What do they need to be successful with their customers? Especially as Splunk continues to expand our portfolio. And we heard some really clear feedback from our partners. Number one, they need more enablement faster, especially all those new products. They really want to get enabled around new product areas like observability, their customers are asking for it. They secondly told us that being able to differentiate themselves to customers was key. And that showing that they had core expertise around specific solution areas, types of services, as well as specializations. For example, some of our partners that are authorized learning partners, they really want it to be able to showcase these skills and differentiate that to their customers in the market. And it's not a role for us at Splunk to really help them do that. And so we took that feedback and really incorporated it into this new program, badging specifically will help to address some of those things I mentioned. So for example, a lot of badging around those use case areas, security, observability, AOD migrations, as well as specializations. Like I mentioned, for things like, uh, partners that are doing, uh, learning specific partners that are really helping us extend our reach in, in different international markets and so on. >>Okay. Let me just ask a question on the badge if you don't mind. Um, so you mentioned, you mentioned almost like you were going through like verticals is badging to be much more about discovery from a client customer, uh, end user customer standpoint. Are you looking to create kind of much more categorical differentiation is what's the, what, what's the purpose of the badge? Cause I noticed it was like different verticals. I heard security and >>Yeah, so I would say it's think of it as both. So for example, our partners go to market with us in many different ways. Some of them are selling servicing building. So there'll be partner motion badges to really differentiate the different ways that they're supporting customers from a go-to-market approach and then additional badging to help really identify some of those specialization areas around whether that's clunky use cases, specializations and more, uh, for example, a specific badge that we're rolling out right here at.com is around cloud migrations and partners will be able to get started to get engaged on that badge in preparation for our full-scale launch in February, we'll, they'll start to be able to take advantage of learning pathways, get their teams skilled up, and that will then unlock some new incentives as well as, uh, benefits that they can take advantage of things like accessing or of the Splunk's I've experience and the proof of concept platform and really giving their teams more, uh, capability. And, >>You know, I such a recent cross in the hallway here at dot confidence. She was, she and I were talking about how AI and data is enabling a lot of people to create these solutions. So, you know, you got kind of this almost like Amazon web services dynamic, where it's growing really fast and we're hearing stories, how data is driving value. We had formula one on the cube, the keynotes were giving some examples as you start to see this momentum kind of scaling up to the next level, if you're enabling customers, which you are with data, the monetization or the economic shifts, right? So it's healthy ecosystems, the partners create solutions, they deal with the customer, they're making some money, right? So, so can you share your vision on the unit on the economic equation of how partners are tapping into this? Because I almost imagine, um, a thousand flowers are blooming and then you start to see more value being created and Splunk also gets a cut of it, but there's, there should be that kind of deck. And you can talk about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that I have the opportunity to do with our partners is study our partners, success and profitability. And some of the things that we learned from those studies with our partners is that what's really helping our partners to grow their practices with Blanca and their profitability with that business is really the stickiness that they have with their customers, being able to deliver solutions and services and really be those subject matter experts for their customers. And we know that our most successful and profitable partners are servicing their customers across the Splunk cases. So for example, many of our partners came from a security background and they are super deep, super knowledgeable around security, and they are trusted by their customers as the, you know, subject matter experts around security. And so many of them are starting to lean in on some of the new, additional use cases. Observability is a hot topic with our partners right now it's a new and emerging use cases case for them to transition some of the same sets of data that they are addressing in their current appointments with our customers and bring new value with those new use cases. But that's where we're seeing partner profitability growth. >>I love the channel dynamic. There we go, indirect and real and value creation. I got to ask you about the day-to-day dynamic. Of course we all know about the mark injuries and story. Software's eating the world, okay. Software ate the world. Okay. Now that's done. Now we're data is continuing to drive the value proposition. And so that's going to have an impact on how customer your partners serve their customers, ultimately your customer at the end of the day. How, how is that happening? And from a success standpoint, how would you talk to, uh, where people are on the progress of bringing the most innovative solutions? What, where's the headroom, where do you see that going Brook >>There's? I would say there's just endless opportunity here. And we just see so much innovation in our partner ecosystem to create purpose built solutions for their customers business problems. And that's where I think the value of the data comes to life. Really turning that data into doing as is really the Matic for all the things that we're talking about here, uh, at.com 21, that our partners really see these opportunities and then can replicate some of those same solutions for other customers in the same spaces. So for example, you know, really specialized solutions for healthcare where they're, uh, providing, you know, access to all the data across the hospital, or, um, you heard in guard's keynote about unlocking the value of SAP data. This is just a huge opportunity accessing all that data and really turning that data into doing. And we'll be talking even more about the new SAP relationship and the value for the partner ecosystem to go address those FP data sets in their customers. We'll be talking more about that on our partner feature session, which is tomorrow in day two of dotcom. >>Well, you guys to have a nice mix of business in the partner ecosystem from, you know, small boutiques to high-end system integrators and everything in between, I noticed you're doing a lot with censure. Could you talk about how you guys are partnering with the large global system integrators because they're becoming their own clouds. So, you know, as Jerry Chen at Greylock says, are these castles being built in the cloud with real competitive advantage with data? Again, this is a new phenomenon in the past really two years, you're starting to see explosion of, of scale and refactoring business models with data. What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>Absolutely. In fact, we are really leading in with some of these global systems integrators, and you've heard this exciting news in Theresa Carlson's portion of the keynote earlier today, where we've announced a partner, a center partner business group together. And we're so excited about the center and Splunk partner business group. It's going to elevate the Splunk and essential partnership eCenter has invested in thousands and thousands of joint professionals that are skilled up on flunk. They are building a purpose patients. We have so many amazing examples where Splunk and essential work together to solve real life problems. For example, there's a joint solution that helps address anti-human trafficking. Uh, there's a joint solution that helped with vaccine tracking. I mean, just really powerful examples that are just really extending value to customers and solving real life, data problems. >>Well, you guys have a lot of momentum, bro. Congratulations on the success and partner versus we're going to follow it again. It was built for the cloud. I know it's in the headline. It says flunked launches, new partner program for the cloud. Was there a partner program for the on premises and what's different about on the cloud? Was it kind of new, everything is cloud what's that? What does that mean? That statement? Yeah, >>Absolutely. So we, you know, as we've all seen, customers are leaning into the class that growth to the movement, to the cloud, just accelerated during COVID. And so part of that feedback that I referenced earlier that we heard from our partners, they said, we need help. We need help moving faster. And so that's really the underpinning of the all-new Splunk partner vers program is to really that acceleration to skill up our partners and give them the tools to be successful. And so with that, we did want to rebrand and reinvigorate it to really signal this newness. And as it was mentioning earlier, when we were talking about the badges, it's really about making sure we're providing the partners the right enablement so that they can be ready and able to support their customers on this journey, to the cloud, as well as the access, the resources, the support and the marketing so that they can be successful and really featured their expertise and value in the market. >>Well, Brooke, I want to get one final question before we go. Cause I know you have a lot of experience in the partner ecosystems and over your career. And we just interviewed the formula one CEO, uh, Zach brown, and, and they've been very popular with the, with the Netflix series driving to survive. And I was joking with him driving value with data as channel partners and your partners look to the post pandemic survive and thrive trend that people are going through right now. What should they be thinking about when they look at partner versus, and how Splunk can help them drive an advantage, not only just survive, but to actually drive to an advantage. >>I, I just see this as an opportunity for partners that haven't already leaned into the cloud and helping their customers migrate to the cloud now is the time rapid five acceleration is just essential for organizations to reach their most critical missions and their outcomes. And this one partner versus program is a significant move forward for Splunk partners. And we want to pursue a massive market opportunity focused on the cloud with our partners, for our customers. So I just really encourage our partners to engage, participate and join us on this journey. >>Well, it's a lot of evidence to support this vision. Uh, with pandemic, we saw refab replatforming and refactoring the businesses in the cloud at speeds, that unprecedented deployments. So, uh, cloud can, can bring that scale and speed to the table. It's really incredible. So thank you very much for coming on the cube remotely. Thanks have you had, >>Thank you. This was a delight. Really appreciate the time, John and very excited to have my first opportunity to be a >>Okay. You're a cube alumni. We are here in the studios, Splunk studios for their virtual event here with all the top executives and partners bringing in guests remotely. It's a virtual event. So we'll be back in person. I'm Jennifer, the cube. Thanks for watching.

hey welcome back to los angeles thecube is live here at kubecon cloud native con 2021 we're so excited to be here in person lisa martin with dave nicholson and we are here with priyanka sharma the executive director of cnc at prayanka welcome to the program thank you so much for having me first of all congratulations on doing an event in person in such a safe clean way i was really impressed when i walked in this morning was asked for my vaccination record my temperature was scanned you're proving you can do these events safely this isn't rocket science so agreed and i'm so glad you appreciate all the measures we've put in place because this is how we can do it in-person interaction is essential for us as human beings for us as professionals and so we owe it to each other to just do the right thing you know have a vaccine requirement wear your masks have these what i call the traffic light uh system where if you have a green a green band it means people can come a little closer it's okay red means please at least six feet of distance and these things go a long way in making an event successful in times like this they do i love that when i saw that mine keeps falling off i'm cold so it keeps falling i'm green just so you know i know you're green what about you i'm green here you can can i have yours that's my favorite and you know you fell off again you had um the three folks that came up who were uh like uh co-chairs co-chairs yeah yeah and uh and they did almost a little almost a little skit yes that on the surface people could say well that's ridiculous and it's like no it's not it's giving everybody the guidelines so that everyone can be comfortable because when i see your green wristband i understand that you are comfortable because i don't want to accidentally reach out to give you a fist bump when you might be particularly of course yeah yeah so no visual cues make it easy yes yeah yeah very very easy very comfortable talk about the energy at the event this is the second full day tina was standing room only yesterday give us an overview of the energy and some of the things that are happening since you can't replicate those hallway networking conversations on video conference i know exactly what you mean man it is so lovely to be in person to meet people and you know for those who are comfortable there's like the fist bumps and the hugs and the big smiles and that energy i haven't seen it in almost two years um and even you know just standing on stage as i was telling you folks uh off camera i've been in this role for over a year and a close to a year and a half i've done three cube cons already but this was my first in person and being on that stage experiencing the energy of the people in that room like when i asked everyone during my keynote i was like are you all proud to be team cloud native and i got a resounding yes back from the audience that's what i'm talking about yeah you know it was amazing what's some of the news that's breaking lots of stuff going on obviously some first one in person in almost two years but talk to me about some of the the news that's breaking here at the event yes so so much new stuff to share um from our side on cncf our journey has been very much about being celebrating our culture and welcoming more and more people into it so that we can have more folks in team cloud native to take various jobs to find fulfillment and all those great things right and all of our announcements are around that theme of people finding a place here people paying it forward in this community and building the culture the first one i would like to share is the announcement of the kubernetes and cloud native associate certification so this is an exam that is going to go live end of the year so people sign up apparently the beta signups went away like this after i announced it so it was really cool wow popular by demanding yeah very very popular and it's it's an exam for folks who are brand new to cloud native and it the studying for it you'll go through you know the fun fundamentals of kubernetes what is the cncf landscape what are the key projects and ultimately you will actually deploy an application using coop cuddle commands and it's such a great primer so so how brand new can someone be when you when you say brand new are you talking about someone who already has a phd in computer science but hasn't done anything in the kubernetes space tell me how brand new can you be uh-huh that's a very good question and it is literally you can come with zero knowledge you would of course have to study for the exam and like go through that journey but the idea is that it is the gateway and so it is possible you're a phd in computer science but you've studied some esoteric part of computer science that's very unconnected to what we do sure go ahead and take it but maybe most likely you would like the more advanced certifications better but if you're let's say a marketer looking to break into the cloud native industry this is the move take this exam and suddenly all these employers you speak their language they'll be impressed that you took it and it's it's an opportunity to advance your career the oh community is huge i was looking at the website the other day 138 000 contributors yes from more than 177 countries 186 is the latest number 186 awesome 289 plus million lines of code written this community is really so productive and so prolific and it's great that you're offering more folks that don't have the background like you were saying to be able to get in and get started absolutely it's our whole thing of bring in more people because as you all probably know there's so much demand for cloud native skill sets across job functions so that's why we're here to help with yeah i you know i i want to double click on this as we say because you hear the word inclusive associated with this whole community so much um you're talking about something that is a certification yeah a marketer okay fine but we're really talking about anyone who has the drive to potentially completely transform their lives yes and in this age where things can be done remotely you don't necessarily have to live in silicon valley or cambridge massachusetts to do this or in one of the other global centers of technology anywhere yeah so that's the that's the kind of energy that's part of this that isn't a part of any large industry focused conference because you really are making opportunities for people of all backgrounds to change their lives so i don't know i don't am i extending a a virtual thank you from all of those people whose lives have been changed and will be changed in the future maybe i am but so but talk about inclusiveness in in you know from from other perspectives yes i think that you know talent drive skills none of these are exclusive to a certain zip code you know people everywhere have great qualities and deserve chances and why shouldn't they be part of a community that as you said is especially inclusive feels especially nice to be a part of and that's what i exhorted the community to do in my keynote yesterday which is that our ranks will grow and we should go out of our way to make sure our ranks grow and we do that by shining a light on our culture telling people to join in lending a hand and you know letting people's personalities shine even when they'll be different from who we are whether in terms of job function or skill set whatever and i think that's the top level um paradigm that we want to have right where we are always welcoming people when we think of inclusiveness it is you know there is certifications like kcna did do a great job there are also efforts that we must always be doing so something that we work on constantly consistently is contributor strategy where we're working on creating ladders and pathways for folks to become open source contributors it is known now that open source contributions lead to job advancement in your career right and so the whole goal is bring people in not just to hang out not just to talk but to actually grow and actually kubecon cloudnativecon is a great example of another little thing we do which is uh we uh award uh underrepresented minorities and people who are who need need-based funds scholarships to attend nice yeah and it's changed one thousand 1518 lives already and we actually uh in uh in this event have announced that we are renaming the scholarship to the dan khan scholarship fund um i i do you folks know dan yes did yeah so dan he breathed life into team cloud native right he built this organization to have the impact that it does today and all the while he was relentlessly focused on diversity equity inclusion so it was it was just like the idea came from within the team and the minute someone said it it just struck a chord with all of us yeah we're like we're doing this no question and it was one of the fastest decisions we've ever made i saw uh some results of a dei micro survey on the website where 75 percent of respondents say this community is becoming more inclusive there's obviously work to go but as a female in technology you feel that you see that as well yes i think i'm very proud of that survey that we did by the way because it's our way we're going to keep doing it it's our way to keep a pulse on the ecosystem because you can keep doing initiatives right but if people are not feeling great then who cares and so um but yes i think dei is a journey if there is no destination right always we have to be thinking harder trying harder to you know i think for example something cncf's done a great job is identifying particularly gender diverse folks who are in the community and maybe could deserve a role of high responsibility so i'm really proud that our technical oversight committee which is our really the top technical people in the ecosystem who desi decide project stuff they are led by a woman there's many women on that and it's they're all very exemplary awesome technologists and so i think um the diversity survey gives us like a hint into like the things people do like and i mean the fact remains we need to do more to source more people to come into the ecosystem we need to always be changing and evolving with the needs of the community right as i mentioned the community is 138 000 strong 6.8 million plus contributions so far you can imagine by opening that dei door just the thought diversity that comes in alone and the number of projects that will come from folks that just come in with a different mindset oh 100 we are already seeing that um we started off as folks who had you know lots of projects from the great big tech companies people who had web scale problems as i call it and that was great but in recent years the end users who are initially just consuming this technology and that too slowly are now hook line and sinker in and we have like argo cd came from intuit which is an end user uh backstage came from spotify which is an end user so this trend is growing and the diversity as you said is continuing yeah i i'm particularly interested in the dynamic where you have people who have their day job if you will where their employer is absolutely 100 encouraging them to participate in the community to develop things that will not only help the employer and that mission but also building uh solutions for everyone and providing enrichment for the for the person and and i i'm i'm going to make a little bit of a prediction i want to get your thoughts on this i think that um one of the silver linings of what we've been through in the pandemic having a lot of people at home having that relationship with your primary employer be just a little bit different and just a little bit more removed i think everyone is realizing that you know what um we all need a passion play to be a part of in addition to whatever we're doing to put bread on the table in the immediate future and so i i think that i want to hear your thoughts there's going to be an explosion in contributions from people and hopefully a lot more openness on the part of employers to let people dedicate their time to this do you do you see that do you think that yes i think i think you're really on to something here um something i mentioned in my keynote right was this conversation i've had with so many that we in this community our identity is cloud native first so we're folks who are in team cloud native before we are working at insert company name you know um google at t spotify whatever it's not a dig on the company it's actually a celebration of those companies because they are liking the developments that happen in open source they are appreciating the value these people are creating and they're employing them so absolutely there is this ongoing trend of folks seeing great value in folks who understand this cloud native projects in particular and of course right because we have been such a great place for industry collaboration lots of vendors have great products make lots of money on these projects and that's as it should be and so the value of the people contributing to these projects is very high and it will only continue to grow i imagine so so here we are in los angeles at kubecon cloud native con 21 what's what's next well uh the good news is this was the first of many to come hybrid events in person plus virtual and the next one is happening in end of may in valencia for europe 22. valencia spain and i have heard beautiful weather very nice people amazing food so just for that that alone is worth registration yes i know right it's going to be amazing i'm so excited and i hope i will see you folks there sign me up i've never been to spain i'm there me too let's do it excited let's do it for our spanish-speaking uh viewers i will say claroque he you can't you do you can do it all you can speak spanish on the queue we can have something honestly i'm impressed i'm impressed i can't i can't do that any and you donated your green card so thank you so much so nice congratulations on the event thank you uh for growing the community for and growing the diversity of it and for the the projects that are going on now and we're sure many more to come we look forward to seeing you in valencia in may thank you so much see you in valencia all right we'll see you there for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin we are live in los angeles the cube is covering kubecon and cloudnativecon at 21. stick around we'll be back after a short break with our next guest

>> Announcer: From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV brought to you by UiPath. >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, and users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dines the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel, great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's good to see you again. >> You are, this is your fifth... >> Fifth time on theCUBE. >> Fifth time, yes. >> Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers. You're a public company now, ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? >> Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it, and we invested a lot in the last 5-6 years because in the beginning when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe like a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important that you look at your roots and who are you? What defines you? So we ended up of this really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble, but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew onboard. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory with life and jobs is in whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life-work balance. I believe in life-work cycles, in life-work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture, that nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UiPath and we appointed her as Chief Culture Officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a Chief Culture Officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we're really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they have the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that fosters these values. >> I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility. Because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on talking about how UiPath is fundamental in their transformation. I think that the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. >> Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. Maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, "Yes, we are here for you." And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric Yuan is a friend of mine, but a combination I think, and going into this hybrid world, I think it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year, then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's, Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events 'cause they can't get their customers here. You got 2000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers. I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies, always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, I've never bought into the narrative about replacing jobs. I'd never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable, but I think the way you've changed the market, I wonder if you could comment is... You had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome. And so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money you can actually try it even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off, and so people then said, "Oh, wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, but making my life better." And you've always said that. And that's I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically, and now you have a lot of people following that path. >> That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value and actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, and we always start with this high level, how can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value and that serves us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go side by side with other competitors. It was a very simple strategy for us. Asking customers, "Just go and test it side-by-side and see," and they see. We implement the same process in halftime, half of resources involved. It's an easy math multiplied by a thousand processes and it's done. >> When theCUBE started Daniel in 2010. It was our first year. And so it coincided with big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way now the problem with big data was too complicated, right? There were only a few big internet giants who could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation, I think is even bigger in a way, 'cause it involves data. It involves AI, it's transformative. And so we're saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. But coming back to you 'cause I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stove pipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is feels like you have the potential to build a next great software company and with the founder as the CEO, and there aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there, Marc Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UiPath? Are you envisioning building the next great software company, may take 20 years? >> People were asking me for a long time. Did you envision that you'd get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no. Otherwise I would have been considered mad. (Lisa and Dave laughing) So you build the vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, "We are going to change the world." This is not how the world works. Really, you build and you understand the customer and you build more. But at some point I realized we change so much how people work, we get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual, repetitive, low value tasks that we have to do. And it took the humanity of us. And I talked to Tom Montag about with this book "Sapiens". It's interesting and that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So, in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generation of software company. >> How do you like... That's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90-day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? You've never been a CEO of a public company, the street's getting to know you like, "Who is this guy?" I'll give you another cute story. There were three companies in the early CUBE days, Tableau, Splunk, and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau now part of Salesforce. I think Splunk was under capitalized, but we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company, except the street's getting to know you a little bit. They're like, "Hmm, how do we read the guy?" All that stuff. That'll sort itself out. But so what's life like on the public markets? >> Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public company. (Dave laughing) I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not, because we were used to deal with private investors and it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to like a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a split. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from how I dress, how do I say this word? They watch the FED announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the shim we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us and like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough, but you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model, and they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. >> It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. >> You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So, the DNA I think is there at UiPath to be able to build that trust with the street. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. This is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. >> Lisa: It does. >> Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is that you look at the productivity decline and particularly in Western countries over the last two decades. Now I know with the pandemic and especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. It has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But does that resonate with you? >> It totally resonates with me. Look at US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. It's just obvious. Like it plateaued in Japan, in Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our case and restart the engine. So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. >> Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? >> I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain is fascinating technology, but crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the very same. Look, Daniel, from Americans perspective we have the dollars, and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Columbia or Venezuela, countries where there people don't have so much trust in their currency, and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be able to be capable of putting them into something else that is outside government context. I believe this is a good use case but I still don't believe that crypto is that type of asset that you know will survive the test of time. I think it's really too much... To me the difference between gold and Bitcoin is that it's too... You cannot replicate gold whatever you... It's impossible, unless you are God you cannot create gold two, right? It's impossible, but you can create Bitcoin 2. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3. So I don't think the value that you can build in one particular crypto currency right now will stay over time. But it's just me. I was the wrong so many times in my life. >> You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. >> I agree, totally agree. (Lisa and Dave laughing) >> What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here. We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? >> Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I don't know, I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. Suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So, I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really awesome. And the transition to a platform, from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers because even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them, what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. You've seen them now. So I think even the next evolution of semantic automation, this one is very well with our customers. >> Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here, and I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies. Although as I wrote, you had a long, strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. >> Absolutely. >> And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple, and that you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success and you can see it and so congratulations, but many more years to come and we're really watching. >> Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you, that was awesome really. Great discussion. >> Exactly, good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to FORWARD V. >> You will be invited forever. Thank you, guys, really. >> Forever, did you hear that? All right, for Daniel Dines and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV day two. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (Announcer) From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCube covering UiPath FORWARD IV, brought to you by UiPath. >> Good afternoon. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're on day two of our coverage. We've been talking a lot about automation, all of the opportunities that it's uncovering across industries. We're now going to be talking about a big company undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Joining us next, Mariesa Coughanour, head of Automation Advisory Services at Cognizant. Mariesa, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >> So let's talk. So Cognizant is a part, both a partner and a customer of UiPath. >> Yes. >> We're going to talk about you in the customer realm today. Cognizant is undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Let's talk about that. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that are, that you're expecting, how it's going to transform the employee experience, the customer experience. >> (Mariesa) Sure, absolutely. We actually started working with automation ourselves back in 2018, where we just put in a CoE, we said we want to drive it into our business operations. But about a year ago, we said, let's go further. I really wanted to play with all of our employees. We wanted to empower them. We talk about citizen development, of robot for every person. And we know that that's really the future. That's where we're going. We're digitally transforming our organizations. And so what we did is we sat down and we worked really closely with UiPath on how do we do this? What kind of training do we need? We're going to need some process, some governance in there. And so we put that in place and, you know, we said, let's get this going this year. So we went out, we did, our first Hackathon, went really well. It was Bring Your Own Bots. So BYOB, so, fun themes. And we got some good savings. We actually drove over 10,000, close to 20,000 hours back into the organization. And we said after that, let's go a bit bigger though. And we did what's called Game of Bots. So obviously we know where that came from, right? And we said, we're going to go a little bit longer and we want to go bigger. So we went and had 2,500 people participate over eight weeks. We built over a thousand bots. And guess what? We drove over 200,000 hours back into the organization in just eight weeks. So super big success story. People loved it. Our teams were excited. We recognized over 200 people out of that with team awards, who submitted the most ideas. And even our top leadership said, let's do a presentation. So the guys and gals who had the top, biggest impact automations got to meet with our top senior leaders and present out to them. It's been awesome. And now we're starting to move that force. We're scaling bigger. We're actually going pretty big in Cognizant. We have some big goals right now. >> That's a gob of hours. Game of Bots, get it? GOB. >> (laughs) >> Come on, with me. >> It is a gob of hours. >> How do you measure the hours? Is it a back of napkin kind of thing? We ask people, Hey, how much, how what, how do you actually measure it? >> No, we actually track it. We could see how many hours people were doing a certain tasks and things that they do every day, whether they're running reports, submitting claims for a customer. And so we're able to see that that time is actually going down. We're faster. We get better quality. People were also able to get hours back in their day so they could do more value added work in the organization. So we actually do track it. And we're able to really measure those tangible outcomes for the teams. >> Sounds like you guys have been moving pretty quickly on this. >> We are. >> So the appetite at Cognizant was there, the culture was there to embrace it. Those are probably, I imagine, two big facilitators of being able to move at the speed and the scale, >> Yeah >> that, with what you're doing. >> Culture was there. We're really digitally savvy. I would say we're digital at heart in Cognizant. We are, we're really a tech company and we really focus on how to be at the forefront of all things when it comes to technology. But we said, we also want to transform how we work. So starting to shift the conversation from, you know, do you want to automate, to why not? How do we actually start talking about, you know, I have this to do list, but you know what, actually, we can improve if we did some of this other stuff instead. So let's free up that time, but use automation there and we can actually grow things. We can add more value. We do all that stuff on your to-do list that I think everybody has and they want to get to, but you get caught up in your day-to-day job all the time. So we're actually getting people to be more excited about and have a real voice. And I actually think that's important. Is that, it's not just about giving people the tool, it's about shifting our culture to really embrace digital, embrace this technology, because we're trying to transform how we all work. And we want to lead by example. >> So we talk about BPO. Business Process Optimization, right? It was kind of the buzz word of the '90s and early 2000s. A lot of times it meant putting in SAP. (chuckles) >> (Mariesa) (laughs) Yeah. >> So that's evolved. And there's some companies that would say, "Hey, we specialize in that," technology companies, obviously, >> (Mariesa) Yep. >> you know, SI's as well. How do you think about the difference between end-to-end enterprise automation and, and sort of traditional BPO? >> I think it has to come together a bit, is one thing. So when you do the BPO, or you do shared services, or you outsource some of the work. We actually put into those contracts, because we do a lot of that for our customers. And we put in automation. The step we took further was we actually started to empower people to actually build the automations themselves, which meant we actually had to work with customers too. So they knew we were doing this. We wanted to make sure they understood, they were comfortable. We put any controls in place that they also needed, to make sure that, you know, we didn't impact any of their services. We want to make it better. We want them to feel nothing but bigger, better results in outcomes. And then as you think about the enterprise side, we have to compliment, because a lot of those processes do feed back into how you run a business. And so we focus on how do you bring both of those stories together so that you're driving synergies across the board. And actually some good lessons learned along the way because some of this stuff becomes reusable. You have best practices you could share across the board. And we want to make sure that we are connecting the dots from the shared services BPO work, back into the enterprise because really a process is end to end, an organization. And we want to help people think that way and also get the results that way too. >> Is that end to end automation, at enterprise automation, more tech heavy, or, or maybe it's tech light in a way, whereas BPO is maybe a lot more, sort of, lean thinking, a lot more chalkboard. Are we deep into the, so I, sometimes, you're saying they have to come together. >> They do yeah. >> But from, from where I guess is, is what I'm trying to better understand. >> So I would think about it this way. When you think about a process, right, from when you even placed an order, the whole way through when you fulfill it for a customer. There's work that we, we do outsource all the time, right? So maybe it's the, the PO process, some of the order transactions from the payment, but you also have the pieces is actually touching the customer, too. You have the pieces that are fulfilling the order. So we say end to end, that is really thinking about that beginning, from a conversation with the customer, the whole way to when we're delivering. And I do think there's a lot of technology. That is something I think everyone gravitates to because there is a lot. Especially if you're going to go end to end, you have to be able to take in documents. You have automation. You're not going to know all the rules, no matter how many times you ask, you're going to need machine learning to be able to help figure it out and get smarter as what, as you go along the way. But as you're putting this into place, what's important is: as you're thinking about, kind of, transforming that business so that they're feeling the results the whole way through, because if you just focus on one, you might create a bottleneck, right? You might've got super fast, but the guy who's going to get the work from you, they're going to feel like, oh my goodness, there's all this work on my plate. So we really want to make sure that we create that seamless experience for everyone across the board, as we put it in. >> And how does UiPath, help facilitate that? >> Across the board, I mean, we were sitting down, we were laying out our program. 'Cause we're actually trying to get to 60,000 strong. So we have 7,000 trained today. We're going to get to 60,000. That's our plan. So we're working very closely with UiPath on what does that training that you need to have in place? What's that model? How do we get people comfortable? Because one thing you'll find is not everyone's in the same spot. Some are going to jump in, dive right in, give me the tool. I want to build. I love this. Others might need a little bit more confidence boost. They might need more handholding. And I think that's really important. And it's probably the one thing I would add too, as you do talk a lot about the technologies, we put it in, but it's the people at the end of the day, it's how you help them adopt, feel comfortable with this technology and really embrace it. That's really going to be the difference on whether, how fast you get down that line for transformation. >> Is it a classic bell curve? You got your 10% early adopters, you got a big fat middle, and then you've got some laggards who come along. >> It kind of is. And I think what's important is that middle is all up in how you do it because 10% are always going to love it. You're always going to have a few people, they're a little extra nervous maybe. But in the middle, if you really think about it, and you're able to put in that culture, you're able to put in your leadership is engaged. You're putting us in gamification, make it fun. That's what we found is, if we got people really having fun up front with it, it gives people a reason to be a part of it. And also, why don't we let people partner up? We can give them the technology, but if someone's not as comfortable, let us do teams. Let's meet people where they're at and then move them along this journey. And let's try to accelerate the best we can. >> How did you gamify it? Crypto. No. (chuckles) >> (laughs) >> (laughs) No, no crypto. But I will say we have some really cool prizes and people were super excited to get to do the presentations because they got to show their, their bots live, their creations, to the team. And I think that was important. Not everyone always is able to capture all the results, but we wanted to actually talk about like, what were the ideas, share it across the board. Cause it also generated ideas. because what you'll find is, when you hear something like, you know what, that's kind of what I do. Wonder if I could do some automation too. At least submit an idea, and then, maybe they're moving down the line, they're getting their hands on the technology. And I think that's how we all push the needle forward and move this along faster. >> One of the most important things about automation is letting people be able to move away from the mundane, the repetitive tasks, that they probably don't enjoy. And being able to focus more on their core competencies or more strategic initiatives that really make them more relevant to themselves and to their company. And it sounds like you guys have achieved that pretty quickly and, and you have an aggressive plan >> (chuckles) We do. >> to go from 7,000 to 60,000. >> Yes. And that's really the power of automation, if you think about it. We all have things in our job we don't like to do. I don't know about you guys, but there's things that I'm like, oh man, like, can we please automate this? Expense reports, for example. All about automated expense reports. (laughs) But it's really about freeing people up. Think about it. These people went to school, they often have degrees and things, and they do get caught in a lot of the manual things, downloading reports, consolidating data, you know, submitting spreadsheets and forms. Imagine if we're able to make that easier for people, we give them what they need to do their job. So that all that stuff you would like to do, that you know would improve things. You know would make the company better. The culture better. Heck, maybe it's a new product that people know would be really awesome to go build, but everyone feels like they're so busy. They don't have the time to do it. I mean, that's one of the big values of automation. Is this value creation conversation that you get to have with people. And you get to start asking 'why not' a little bit more. >> You've mentioned a couple of times the IDC presentation this morning. And we were talking about earlier, and the pie chart of, of, of value benefits was cost savings, which was very large, new revenue, which was very large. And then I think 15% was quality improvements. And that, I think that's an underappreciated slice of the pie. Somebody, I think years ago, of the UiPath FORWARD said to me, I can very inexpensively apply Six Sigma to business process. >> (Mariesa) Yeah. >> And I could never afford to do that before RPA. And, and so I wonder if you could talk to the quality impacts that you're seeing. >> Absolutely. I actually spent a lot of time in Lean Six Sigma in my early career days. And one of the things about it too, is when you're doing automation, we actually asked that question upfront, can we just simplify, can we just stop doing this? Because you don't want to automate a bad process either. So you want to ask some of those questions. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> But you're spot on. There's a ton of quality benefits that you get from automation. And one of the things I've actually seen is if you focus on some of the quality upfront, process gets better. Get better impact, as when you get faster. If you have better quality, and get faster, you also get your cost out targets. And I, that really matters because quality also, beyond being able to drive the cost out, it also helps a lot with the experience that people face. Customers are frustrated if they have poor quality, something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, a site's not working the way it should. And also even employees, they go, how many times, if you try to do something and you try to follow a process and something's hung up or who knows what happened, right. It's frustrating. So if you're able to improve the quality in the process, not only do you get the cost savings, but you get these, it's softer tan, there's still tangible experiences that get better and actually motivates people to want to do more. >> And those motivated people are probably dealing with customers much, much better. >> Yes, yeah. >> I mean, it's, I always think the employee experience is so, is, is a critical component. >> It is. >> But the customer experience. So how has the customer experience improved at Cognizant as a result of building in automation and enabling all these people? >> Yeah, they're loving the results because we're giving them back efficiencies in their process immediately by putting this automation in. These are quick impacts they're feeling and we're able to do more for them as well. So we're actually having conversations now on how do we drive more efficiencies for you and also, you know, how can we do more? Is there more volume of work? Is there more we could be doing to add value back to your organization? And that's what you want to talk about with customers is we're able to give you this value. And by the way, we actually did X for you now as well, because we knew you needed it. And we have the capacity to do this for you. So it's a really positive conversation, but we did have to upfront talk to them about it, to make sure that we, everyone was on board. They're comfortable. And we're continuing to have those conversations because you know, sometimes you're in a regulated business and we did put a little extra control in. Absolutely okay. But we want to be able to drive these efficiencies back for them. So they feel it in their own operations internally too. And it hits their bottom line and oftentimes helps their employees too, because we interact with them. So those downstream benefits and sometimes even upstream get some nice returns there as well. >> We've heard from, well, we're going to have Daniel on soon. He's the CEO. We've of course heard from CFOs. We've, that's kind of one of the main springs of RPA in the early days. We've heard a lot more CIOs at this event and we have a CTO coming on later. Are these C suite executives totally aligned in their objectives? Do they have they have different agendas? What are you seeing in terms of serving the C suite? >> Yeah. They're all going to have a little bit different agendas, right? Cause that's, their roles have different objectives, but they all align back to the strategy, obviously, for their company. But they're going to have portions of it that they're trying to drive and deliver. What we do see is that there's still some merging that needs to happen between the operations, the more business focused side and the more technical side. But we do, we're starting to see that convergence happen. Because what happens is, is that, you have these technologists, who really are going to have to help move you forward. We're, you know, we're applying AI, ML. Very technical technologies, and we want to make sure we do it right, that we put the right governance in. And we think about the security that we have to have in place for this too. And but we also have the business outcomes and coming together is where you really see the results. If you look at all of those that have reached true maturity, it's where you see these agendas aligning a bit more because you also have to shift the culture too. And it's a collaboration point. You need to be able to have the tech savvy folks. It helps bring them along this journey, but you also have to have the business depth as because you're looking at a process and you're going really deep into it to apply the technology. So it's when people partner is when we really see the results become more exponential. >> So digital transformation, you know, we hear that term a lot. And automation-led digital transformation. >> Yep. >> I hear a lot of data led digital transformations are those parallel tracks, or they can talk a lot about convergence. >> Yeah. >> Are they? I mean, they're not competing. They're obviously very much related. How do you see the data agenda and the automation agenda coming together. >> They have to. Because you really need good quality data to be able to enable your automation at the end of the day. And, but they actually play nicely together. You can actually use automation to help go back and improve your master data management too, which is the core of your information because that's actually where a lot of the struggle sometimes comes, is in the quality of the data that everyone has to work with. So you see the data agenda working on, "How do I clean this? How do I get more insightful, predictful information?" And then from an automation standpoint, how do I then use that to go take action? So all we see is you bring it together, to be able to identify where do you need to get in the process? How do I get the right information? So the automation also is proven data behind it, that we drove the outcomes, because that's where you take it to the bank at the end of the day. Is that you see it in the data itself. But I think one of the things I've seen with automation that helps drive the digital transformation conversation is, the business and IT teams are coming together and having a joint conversation now. People are excited. They're understanding it. I think that's why people jumped on with RPA so quickly, was because they're like, I get this, this is rule-based, this is my business process. I just tell it what to do. I'll take that. I want to do that. And so people got excited about that. And then they said, let's do more. How do I make it more intelligent? How do I help it do things in my process that it's harder for me to explain because there's just so much information here. There's so many nuances. Well, we have the technology can help make it more intelligent, smarter, and learn, so that we're able to drive that back into the business itself to transform. >> You mentioned Master Data Management is, is the data agenda as it relates to automation, primarily reporting, is it moving? Is it transcending reporting into the building of data products, for example, data services that can be monetized either within Cognizant or in your customer base? >> So it's really evolving. I would say some start with reports. That's easy. That's where we'll start, but I'll just kind of give you maybe a little example. So we have a customer and we work with them. So they have customers where they need to, when they call in, the sales folks and the contact centers, they have to upsell. So they work with a lot of different restaurants and different, maybe, bars and, you know, different companies that have different type of like beverages and things like that. So we worked with them to show, how are they performing today with all their sales reps? And then we started to use some automation to be able to get them more helpful information the moment the customer's calling in. And we also did some semantic analysis on a voice, how people were, how were they sounding? How was their tone? Were they happy? Were they upset? Were they sad during the call? And we fed that information back to those teams, back to those managers, and went back even to their training programs. What they actually saw was a ton of top line growth. They saw all of their metrics starting to get better, and they also start to get more predictive on ways that they can use more data to drive the support for those teams and their customers. Like for example, if you know holidays are coming up or a certain time of year with weather, we're able to actually put that type of information in and helps those sales reps better serve their customers. >> Last question, some of the announcements that came out yesterday and some of the news today about UiPath, what excites you about the technology and how it's going to continue to enable you to, to foster this new culture that you've shifted? >> I think, so one thing about UiPath that we've always loved to be able to partner with them as we're still customer centric. And you see that in every announcement that they're doing, and also they're focused on this true process transformation, intelligent end to end thinking, because I think a lot of times when we've had conversations most get stuck in kind of point solutions. And that's just because people are trying to solve today's problems. But with where UiPath is moving and where we want to move to, is how do we help you to really transform how people work? We know automation is a part of our future. We know it's going to be how we work in the future. And we love about UiPath is to really think about how do we integrate it? How do we make those connections? So we can drive the bigger results, we can make it easier for people to adopt and really embrace it because we need to bring the people along this journey and we need to be able to actually impact our processes too, so we can transform them. So I think that's one thing that's been really exciting is just watching them in general. Involved with the announcements the last couple of days, we really see them continue to push that needle. >> Excellent. Well, Mariesa, thanks for joining us. Talking to us about the automation-led digital transformation at Cognizant. Good luck raising your trained individuals from 7K to 60K. It sounds like the momentum is there. The culture's there. We can't wait to hear what happens next! >> Awesome. Thanks again for having me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. UiPath FORWARD IV is the event we're covering. We'll be right back with our next guest. >> (bubbly outro music)

>>Yeah, >>approximately two years after HP split into two separate companies, antonioni Ranieri was named president and Ceo of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under his tenure, the company has streamlined its operations, sharpened his priorities, simplified the product portfolio and strategically aligned its human capital with key growth initiatives. He's made a number of smaller but high leverage acquisitions and return the company to growth while affecting a massive company wide pivot to an as a service model. Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte for the cube and it's my pleasure to welcome back Antonio Neary to the program. Antonio it's been a while. Great to see you again. >>Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. >>That's really our pleasure. It was just gonna start off with the big picture. Let's talk about trends. You're a trend spotter. What do you see today? Everybody talks about digital transformation. We had to force marks to digital last year. Now it's really come into focus. But what are the big trends that you're seeing that are affecting your customers transformations? >>Well, Dave, I mean obviously we have been talking about digital transformation for some time uh in our view is no longer a priority is a strategic imperative. And through the last 15 months or so since we have been going through the pandemic, we have seen that accelerated to a level we haven't never seen before. And so what's going on is that we live in a digital economy and through the pandemic now we are more connected than ever. We are much more distributed than ever before and an enormous amount of data is being created and that data has tremendous value. And so what we see in our customer's name, more connectivity, they need a platform from the edge to the cloud to manage all the data and most important they need to move faster and extracting that inside that value from the data and this is where HP is uniquely positioned to deliver against those experiences and way we haven't imagined before. >>Yeah, we're gonna dig into that now, of course you and I have been talking about data and how much data for decades, but I feel like we're gonna look back at 2030 and say, wow, we never, we're not gonna do anything like that. So we're really living in a data centric era as the curves are going exponential, What do you see? How do you see customers handling this? How are they thinking about the opportunities? >>Well, I think, you know, customer realized now that they need to move faster, they need to absolutely be uh much more agile and everything. They do, they need to deploy a cloud experience for all the work clothes and data that they manage and they need to deliver business outcomes to stay ahead of the competition. And so we believe technology now plays even a bigger role and every industry is a technology industry in many ways, every company, right, is a technology company, whether your health care, your manufacturer, your transportation company, you are an education, everybody needs more. It no less. It but at the same time they want the way they want to consumer dave is very different than ever before, right? They want an elastic consumption model and they want to be able to scale up and down based on the needs of their enterprise. But if you recall three years ago, I knew and I had this conversation, I predicted that enterprise of the future will be edge century, cloud enable and data driven. The edge is the next frontier, we said in 2018 and think about it, you know, people now are working remotely and that age now is much more distribute than we imagined before. Cloud is no longer a destination, it is an experience for all your apps and data, but now we are entering what we call the edge of insight, which is all about that data driven approach and this is where all three have to come together in ways that customer did envision before and that's why they need help. >>So I see that, I see the definition of cloud changing, it's no longer a set of remote services, you know, somewhere up there in the cloud, it's expanding on prem cross clouds, you mentioned the edge and so that brings complexity. Every every company is a technology company but they may not be great at technology. So it seems that there are some challenges around there, partly my senses, some of some of what you're trying to do is simplify that for your customers. But what are the challenges that your customers are asking you to solve? >>Well, the first they want a consistent and seamless experience, whatever that application and data lives, so, you know, for them, you know, they want to move away from running it to innovate in our 90 and then obviously they need to move much faster. As I said earlier about this data driven approaches. So they need help because obviously they need to digitize every every aspect of the company, but at the same time they need to do it in a much more cost effective way. So they're asking for subject matter expertise on process engineering. They're asking for the fighting the right mix of hybrid experiences from the edge to cloud and they need to move much faster at scale in deploying technologies like Ai deep learning and machine learning and Hewlett Packard Enterprise uh is extremely well positioned because we have been building an age to club platform where you provide connectivity where you bring computing and storage uh in a softer, define scalable way that you can consume as a service. And so we have great capabilities without HP Point next technology services and advice and run inside. But we have a portfolio with HP Green Lake, our cloud services, the cloud that comes to you that are addressing the most critical data driven warlords. >>Probably about 24 months ago you announced that HP was was going to basically go all in on as a service and get there by by 2022 for all your solutions. I gotta get, I gotta say you've done a good job communicating the Wall Street, I think, I think culturally you've really done a good job of emphasizing that to your, to the workforce. Uh, but but how should we measure the progress that you've made toward that goal? How our customers responding? I I know how the markets responding, you know, three or four year big competitors have now announced. But how should we measure, you know, how you're tracking to that goal? >>Well, I think, you know, the fact that our competitors are entering the other service market is a validation that our vision was right. And that's that's that's good because in the end, you know, it tells us we are on the right track. However, we have to move much faster than than ever before. And that's why we constantly looking for ways to go further and faster. You're right. The court of this is a cultural transformation. Engineering wise, once you state, once you state the North Star, we need to learn our internal processes to think Cloud first and data first versus infrastructure. And we have made great progress. The way we measure ourselves. Dave is very simple is by giving a consistent and transparent report on our pivot in that financial aspect of it, which is what we call the annualized revenue run rate, which we have been disclosed enough for more than a year and a half. And this past quarter grew 30% year over year. So we are on track to deliver a 30-40% Kegel that we committed two years ago And this business going to triple more than uh more than one year from now. So it's gonna be three times as bigger as we enter 2022 and 2023. But in the end, it's all about the experience you deliver and that's why architecturally uh while we made great progress. I know there is way more work to be done, but I'm really excited because what we just announced here this week is just simply remarkable. And you will see more as we become more a cloud operating driven company in the in the next months and years to come. >>I want to ask you kind of a personal question. I mean, COVID-19 is you know, sharpened our sensitivity and empathy to to a lot of different things. Uh and I think uh ceos in your position of a large tech company or any large company, they really can't just give lip service to things like E. S. G. Or or ethical uh digital transformation, which is something that you've talked about in other words, making sure that it's inclusive. Everybody is able to participate in this economy and not get left behind. What does this mean to you personally? >>Well, they remember I'm in a privileged position, right? Leading a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has Hewlett and Packard on the brand is an honor, but it's also a big responsibility. Let's remember what this company stands for and what our purpose is, which is to advance the way people live and work, and in that we have to be able to create a more equitable society and use this technology to solve some of the biggest societal challenge you have been facing The last 18 months has been really hard on a number of dimensions, not just for the business but for their communities. Uh, we saw disruption, we saw hardships on the financial side, we saw acts of violence and hatred. Those are completely unacceptable. But if we work together, we can use these technologies to bring the community together and to make it equitable. And that's one is one of my passion because as we move into this digital economy, I keep saying that connecting people is the first step and if you are not connected, you're not going to participate. Therefore we cannot afford to create a digital economy for only few. And this is why connectivity has to become an essential service, not different than water and electricity. And that's why I have passion and invest my own personal time working with entities like World Economic Forum, educating our government, right, Which is very important because both the public sector and the private sector have to come together. And then from the technology standpoint, we have to architect these things that are commercially accessible and viable to everyone. And so it's uh it's I will say that it's not just my mission. Uh this is top of mind for many of my colleagues ceos that talked all the time and you can see of movement, but at the same time it's good for business because shareholders now want to invest in companies that take care about this, how we make, not just a word more inclusive and equitable, but also how we make a more sustainable and we with our technologies, we can make the world way more sustainable with circular economy, power, efficiency and so forth. So a lot of work to be done dave but I'm encouraged by the progress but we need to do way way more. >>Thank you for that Antonio. I want to ask you about the future and I want to ask you a couple of different angles. So I want to start with the edge. So it seems to me that you're you're building this vision of what I call a layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of the whether it's the public cloud across clouds on prem and and and the edge and it's your job to simplify that. So I as the customer can focus on more strategic initiatives and that's clearly the vision that you guys are setting forth on. My question is is how far do you go on the edge? In other words, it seems to me that Aruba for example, for example, awesome acquisition could go really, really deep into the far edge, maybe other parts of your portfolio, you're kind of more looking at horizontal. How should we think about HP. Es, positioning and participation in that edge opportunity? >>Well, we believe we are becoming one of the merger leaders at the intelligent edge. Right? These edges becoming way more intelligent. We live in a hyper connected world and that will continue to grow at an exponential pace. Right? So today we we may have billions of people and devices pursue. We're entering trillions of things that will be connected to the network. Uh, so you need a platform to be able to do with the scale. So there is a horizontal view of that to create these vertical experiences which are industry driven. Right? So one thing is to deliver a vertical experience in healthcare versus manufacturer transportation. And so we take a really far dave I mean, to the point that we just, you know, put into space 256 miles above the Earth, a supercomputer that tells you we take a really far, but in the end, it's about acting where the data is created and bringing that knowledge and that inside to the people who can make a difference real time as much as possible. And that's why I start by connecting things by bringing a cloud experience to that data, whatever it lives because it's cheaper and it's way more economical and obviously there's aspects of latest in security and compliance. They have to deal with it and then ultimately accelerate that inside into some sort of outcome. And we have many, many use cases were driving today and Aruba is the platform by the way, which we have been using now to extend from the edge all the way to the core into the cloud business. And that's why you HP has unique set of assets to deliver against that opportunity. >>Yes, I want to talk about some of the weapons you have in your arsenal. You know, some people talk about, hey, well we have to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I've heard that statement made, certainly HP is in that battle. It's not a zero sum game, but you're a player there. And so when I, when I look at as a service, great, you're making progress there. But I feel like there's more, there's, there's architecture there, you're making acquisitions, you're building out as moral, which is kind of an interesting data platform. Uh, and so I want to ask you how you see the architecture emerging and where H. P. S sort of value add, I. P. Is your big player and compute you've got actually, you've got chops and memory disaggregate asian, you've done custom silicon over the years. How how should we think about your contribution to the next decade of innovation? >>Well, I think it's gonna come different layers of what we call the stock, right? Obviously, uh, we have been known for an infrastructure company, but the reality is what customers are looking for. Our integrated solutions that are optimized for the given world or application. So they don't have to spend time bringing things together. Right? And and spend weeks sometimes months when they can do it in just in a matter of minutes a day so they can move forward innovative on I. T. And so we were really focused on that connectivity as the first step. And Aruba give us an enormous rich uh through the cloud provisioning of a port or a wifi or a one. As you know, as we move to more cloud native applications. Much of the traffic through the connectivity will go into the internet, not through the traditional fixed networks. And that's what we did acquisitions like Silver Peak because now we can connect all your ages and all your clouds in an autonomous softer. The final way as we go to the other spectrum. Right? We talk about one load optimization and uh for us H. P. S my role is the recipe by which we bring the infrastructure and the software in through that integrated solution that can run autonomously that eventually can consume as a service. And that's why we made the introduction here of HP Green like Lighthouse, which is actually a fully optimised stack. They with the push of a bottom from HP Green Lake cloud platform, we can deploy whatever that that is required and then be able to Federated so we can also address other aspects like disaster recovery and be able to share all the knowledge real time. Swarm learning is another thing that people don't understand. I mean if you think about it. So I'm learning is a distributed Ai learning ecosystem and think about what we did with the D. C. Any in order to find cures for Alzheimer's or dementia. But so I'm learning is going to be the next platform sitting on this age to cloud architecture. So that instead of people worrying about sharing data, what we're doing is actually sharing insights And be able to learn through these millions of data points that they can connect with each other in a secure way. Security is another example, right? So today on an average takes 28 days to find a bridge in your enterprise with project Aurora, which we're going to make available at the end of the year by the end of the year. We actually can address zero day attacks within seconds. And then we're work in other areas like disaster recovery when you get attacked. Think about the ransom ramp somewhere that we have seen in the last few weeks, right? You know, God forbid you have to pay for it. But at the same time, recovery takes days and weeks. Sometimes we are working on technology to do it within 23 seconds. So this is where HP can place across all spectrums of the stack And at the same time of course people expect us to innovate in infrastructure layer. That's why we also partner with companies like Intel were with the push of a bottom. If you need more capacity of the court, you don't have to order anything. She's pushed the bottle, we make more calls available so that that warlord can perform and when you don't need it, shut it off so you don't have to pay for it. And last finalist, you know, I will say for us is all about the consumption availability of our solutions And that's what I said, you know, in 2019 we will make available everything as a service by 2022. You know, we have to say as you know, there is no need to build the church for Easter Sunday when you can rent it for that day. The point here is to grow elastically. And the fact that you don't need to move the data is already a cost savings because cost of aggression data back and forth is enormous and customers also don't want to be locked in. So we have an open approach and we have a true age to cloud architecture and we are focusing on what is most valuable aspect for the customer, which is ultimately the data. >>Thank you for that. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, again, another weapon in your arsenal is you mentioned supercomputing before. Up in space, we're on the cusp of exa scale and that's the importance of high performance computing. You know, it used to be viewed as just a niche. I've had some great conversations with DR go about this, but that really is the big data platform, if you will. Uh can I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that fits into the future. Your expertise in HPC, you're obviously a leader in that space. What's the fit with this new vision you're laying out? >>Well, HPC, high performance computing in memory computer are the backbone to be able to manage large data sets at massive scale. Um, and, you know, deployed technologies like deep learning or artificial intelligence for this massive amount of data. If we talked about the explosion of data all around us and uh, you know, and the algorithms and the parameters to be able to extract inside from the day is getting way more complex. And so the ability to co locate data and computed a massive scale is becoming a necessity, whether it's in academia, whether it's in the government obviously to protect your, your most valuable assets or whether it is in the traditional enterprise. But that's why with the acquisition of cray as G. I. And our organic business, we are absolutely the undisputed leader to provide the level of capabilities. And that's why we are going to build five of the top six exa scale systems, which is basically be able to process the billion billion, meaning billion square transactions per second. Can you imagine what you can do with that? Right. What type of problems you can go solve climate problems? Right. Um you know, obviously be able to put someone back into the moon and eventually in mars, you know, the first step to put that supercomputer as an edge computer into the international space station. It's about being able to process data from the images that take from the ice caps of the of the earth to understand climate changes. But eventually, if you want to put somebody in in into the Marks planet, you have to be able to communicate with those astronauts as they go and you know, you can't afford the latency. Right? So this is what the type of problems we are really focused on. But HPC is something that we are absolutely super committed and it's something that honestly, we have the full stack from silicon to software to the system performance that nobody else has in the industry. >>Well, I think it's a real tailwind for you because the industry is moving in that direction and everybody talks about the data and workloads are shifting. We used to be uh I got O. L. T. P. And I got reporting. Now you look at the workloads, there's so much diversity so I'll give you the last word. What what really is the most exciting to you about the future of HPV? >>Well, I'm excited about the innovation will bring it to the market and honestly as the Ceo I care about the culture of the company. For me, the last almost 3.5 years have been truly remarkable. As you said at the beginning, we are transforming every aspect of this company. When I became Ceo I had three priorities for myself. One is our customers and partners. That's why we do these events right to communicate, communicate, communicate. They are our North Star, that's why we exist. Second is our innovation right? We compete and win with the best innovation, solving the most complex problems in a sustainable and equitable way. And third is the culture of the company, which are the core is how we do things in our Team members and employees. You know, I represent my colleagues here, the 60,000 strong team members that had incredible passion for our customers and to make a contribution every single day. And so for me, I'm very optimistic about what we see the recovery of the economy and the possibilities of technology. Uh, but ultimately, you know, we have to work together hand in hand and I believe this company now is absolutely on the right track to not just be relevant, but really to make a difference. And remember That in the end we we have to be a force for good. And let's not forget that while we do all of this, we have some farm with technology. We have to also help some, uh, to address some of the challenges we have seen in the last 18 months and H. P. E. is a whole different company uh, that you knew 3.5 years ago. >>And as you said, knowledge is the right thing to do. It's good. It's good for business Antonio. Neary, thanks so much for coming back to the cube is always a pleasure to see you. >>Thanks for having me. Dave and >>thank you for watching this version of HP discover 2021 on the cube. This is David want to keep it right there for more great coverage. Mm

>>approximately two years after HP split into two separate companies, antonioni Ranieri was named president and Ceo of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under his tenure, the company has streamlined its operations, sharpened his priorities, simplified the product portfolio and strategically aligned its human capital with key growth initiatives. He's made a number of smaller but high leverage acquisitions and return the company to growth while affecting a massive company wide pivot to an as a service model. Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte for the cube and it's my pleasure to welcome back Antonio. Neary to the program Antonio it's been a while. Great to see you again. >>Dave Thanks for having me. >>That's really our pleasure. I was just gonna start off with >>the big picture. >>Let's talk about trends. You're a trend spotter. What do you see today? Everybody talks about digital transformation. We had to force marks to digital last year now it's really come into focus. But what are the big trends that you're seeing that are affecting your customers transformations? >>Okay. I mean obviously we have been talking about digital transformation for some time uh in our view is no longer a priority is a strategic imperative. And through the last 15 months or so since we have been going through the pandemic we have seen that accelerated to a level we haven't never seen before. And so what's going on is that we live in a digital economy and through the pandemic now we are more connected than ever. We are much more distributed than ever before and an enormous amount of data is being created and that data has tremendous value. And so what we see in our customers need more connectivity, they need a platform from the edge to the cloud to manage all the data and most important they need to move faster and extracting that inside that value from the data and this is where HP is uniquely positioned to deliver against those experiences the way we haven't imagined before. >>Yeah, we're gonna dig into that now, of course, you and I have been talking about data and how much data for decades, but I feel like we're gonna look back at, you know, in 2030 and say, Wow, we never, we're not gonna do anything like that. So we're really living in a data centric era as the curves are going exponential. What do you see? How do you see customers handling this? How are they thinking about the opportunities? >>Well, I think, you know, customer realized now that they need to move faster, they need to absolutely be uh much more agile and everything. They do. They need to deploy a cloud experience for all the war clothes and data that they manage and they need to deliver business outcomes to stay ahead of the competition. And so we believe technology now plays even a bigger role and every industry is a technology industry in many ways. Every company right, is a technology company, whether your health care, your manufacturer, your transportation company, you are an education, everybody needs more. It no less I. T. But at the same time they want the way they want to consumer Dave is very different than ever before, right? They want an elastic consumption model and they want to be able to scale up and down based on the needs of their enterprise. But if you recall three years ago I knew and I had this conversation, I predicted that enterprise of the future will be edge centric cloud enable and data driven. The edge is the next frontier. We said in 2018 and think about it, you know, people now are working remotely and that age now is much more distribute than we imagined before. Cloud is no longer a destination, it is an experience for all your apps and data, but now we are entering what we call the edge of insight which is all about that data driven approach and this is where all three have to come together in ways that customer did envision before and that's why they need help. >>So I see that I see the definition of cloud changing, it's no longer a set of remote services, you know, somewhere up there in the cloud, it's expanding on prem cross clouds, you mentioned the Edge and so that brings complexity. Every every company is a technology company but they may not be great at technology. So it seems that there are some challenges around there, partly my senses, some of some of what you're trying to do is simplify that for your customers. But what are the challenges that your customers are asking you to solve? >>Well the first they want a consistent and seamless experience, whatever that application and data lives. And so um you know for them you know they want to move away from running I. T. to innovate in our 90 and then obviously they need to move much faster. As I said earlier about this data driven approaches. So they need help because obviously they need to digitize every every aspect of the company but at the same time they need to do it in a much more cost effective way. So they're asking for subject matter expertise on process engineering. They're asking for the fighting the right mix of hybrid experiences from the edge to cloud and they need to move much faster as scale in deploying technologies like Ai deep learning and machine learning. Hewlett Packard Enterprise uh is extremely well positioned because we have been building an age to cloud platform where you provide connectivity where you bring computing and storage uh in a soft of the fine scalable way that you can consume as a service. And so we have great capabilities without HP Point next technology services and advice and run inside. But we have a portfolio with HP Green Lake, our cloud services, the cloud that comes to you that are addressing the most critical data driven warlords. >>Probably about 24 months ago you announced that HP was, was going to basically go all in on as a service and get there by by 2022 for all your solutions. I gotta get, I gotta say you've done a good job communicating the Wall Street, I think. I think culturally you've really done a good job of emphasizing that to your, to the workforce. Uh, but but how should we measure the progress that you've made toward that goal? How our customers responding? I know how the markets responding, you know, three or four year big competitors have now announced. But how should we measure, you know, how you're tracking to that goal? >>Well, I think, you know, the fact that our competitors are entering the other service market is a validation that our vision was right. And that's that's that's good because in the end, you know, it tells us we are on the right track. However, we have to move much faster than than ever before. And that's why we constantly looking for ways to go further and faster. You're right. The court of this is a cultural transformation. Engineering wise, once you step, once you state the North Star, we need to learn our internal processes to think cloud first and data first versus infrastructure. And we have made great progress. The way we measure ourselves. Dave is very simple is by giving a consistent and transparent report on our pivot in that financial aspect of it, which is what we call the annualized revenue run rate, Which we have been disclosed enough for more than a year and a half. And this past quarter grew 30% year over year. So we are on track to deliver at 30 to 40% cake or that we committed two years ago And this business going to triple more than uh more than one year from now. So it's gonna be three times as bigger as we enter 2022 and 2023. But in the end it's all about the experience you deliver and that's why architecturally uh while we made great progress. I know there is way more work to be done, but I'm really excited because what we just announced here this week is just simply remarkable. And you will see more as we become more a cloud operating driven company in the next month and years to come. >>I want to ask you kind of a personal question. I mean, COVID-19 has sharpened our sensitivity and empathy to a lot of different things. And I think ceos in your position of a large tech company or any large company, they really can't just give lip service to things like E. S. G. Or or ethical uh digital transformation, which is something that you've talked about in other words, making sure that it's inclusive. Everybody is able to participate in this economy and not get left behind. What does this mean to you personally? >>Well, they remember I'm in a privileged position, right? Leading a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has Hewlett and Packard on the brand is an honor, but it's also a big responsibility. Let's remember what this company stands for and what our purpose is, which is to advance the way people live and work. And in that we have to be able to create a more equitable society and use this technology to solve some of the biggest societal challenge you have been facing Last 18 months has been really hard on a number of dimensions, not just for the business but for their communities. Uh, we saw disruption, we saw hardships on the financial side, we saw acts of violence and hatred. Those are completely unacceptable. But if we work together, we can use these technologies to bring the community together and to make it equitable. And that's one is one of my passion because as we move into this digital economy, I keep saying that connecting people is the first step and if you are not connected you're not going to participate. Therefore we cannot afford to create a digital economy for only few. And this is why connectivity has to become an essential service, not different than water and electricity. And that's why I have passion and invest my own personal time working with entities like World Economic Forum, educating our government, which is very important because both the public sector and the private sector have to come together. And then from the technology standpoint, we have to architect these things. They are commercially accessible and viable to everyone. And so it's uh it's I will say that it's not just my mission. Uh this is top of mind for many of my colleagues ceos that talked all the time and you can see of movement, but at the same time it's good for business because shareholders now want to invest in companies that take care about this. How we make, not just a world more inclusive and equitable, but also how we make a more sustainable and we with our technologies we can make the world way more sustainable with circular economy, power, efficiency and so forth. So a lot of work to be done dave but I'm encouraged by the progress but we need to do way way more. >>Thank you for that Antonio I want to ask you about the future and I want to ask you a couple of different angles. So I want to start with the edge. So it seems to me that you're you're building this vision of what I call a layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of the whether it's the public cloud across clouds on prem and and and the edge And it's your job to simplify that. So I as the customer can focus on more strategic initiatives and that's clearly the vision that you guys are setting forth on. My question is is how far do you go on the edge? In other words, it seems to me that Aruba for example, for example, awesome acquisition can go really, really deep into the far edge. Maybe other parts of your portfolio, you're kind of more looking at horizontal. How should we think about HP es positioning and participation in that edge opportunity? >>Well, we believe we are becoming one of the merger leaders at the intelligent edge. Right. These edges becoming more intelligent. We live in a hyper connected world and that will continue to grow at an exponential pace. Right? So today we we might have billions of people and devices pursue. We're entering trillions of things that will be connected to the network. Uh, so you need a platform to be able to do with the scale. So there is a horizontal view of that to create these vertical experiences which are industry driven. Right? So one thing is to deliver a vertical experience in healthcare versus manufacturer transportation. And so we take a really far dave I mean, to the point that we just, you know, put into space 256 miles above the earth, a supercomputer that tells you we take a really far, but in the end it's about acting where the data is created and bringing that knowledge and that inside to the people who can make a difference real time as much as possible. And that's why I start by connecting things by bringing a cloud experience to that data wherever it lives because it's cheaper and it's where more economical and obviously there is aspects of latest in security and compliance that you have to deal with it and then ultimately accelerate that inside into some sort of outcome and we have many, many use cases were driving today and Aruba is the platform by the way, which we have been using now to extend from the edge all the way to the core into the cloud business and that's why you HP has unique set of assets to deliver against that opportunity. >>Yes, I want to talk about some of the weapons you have in your arsenal. You know, some people talk about a week and we have to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I've heard that statement made, certainly HPV is in that balance is not a zero sum game, but but you're a player there. And so when I when I look at as a service, great, you're making progress there. But I feel like there's more, there's there's architecture there, you're making acquisitions, you're building out as moral, which is kind of an interesting data platform. Uh, and so I want to ask you, so how you see the architecture emerging and where H. P. S sort of value add i. P. Is your big player and compute you've got actually you've got chops and memory disaggregate asian, you've done custom silicon over the years. How how should we think about your contribution to the next decade of innovation? >>Well, I think it's gonna come different layers of what we call the stock, right? Obviously, uh, we have been known for an infrastructure company, but the reality is what customers are looking for Our integrated solutions that are optimized for the given workload or application. So they don't have to spend time bringing things together. Right? And and spend weeks sometimes months when they can do it in just in a matter of minutes a day so they can move forward innovative or 90. And so we we are really focused on that connectivity as the first step. And Aruba give us an enormous rich uh through the cloud provisioning of a port or a wifi or a one. As you know, as we move to more cloud native applications. Much of the traffic through the connectivity will go into the internet, not through the traditional fixed networks. And that's what we did acquisitions like Silver Peak because now we can connect all your ages and all your clouds in an autonomous software defined way as you go to the other spectrum, right. We talk about what load optimization and uh for us H. P. S. My role is the recipe by which we bring the infrastructure and the software in through that integrated solution that can run autonomously that eventually can consume as a service. And that's why we made the introduction here of HP Green like lighthouse which is actually I fully optimised stack the with the push of a bottom from HP Green Lake cloud platform we can deploy whatever that that is required and then be able to Federated so we can also address other aspects like disaster recovery and be able to share all the knowledge real time. So I'm learning is another thing that people don't understand. I mean if you think about it. So I'm learning is a distributed Ai learning uh ecosystem and think about what we did with the D. C. Any in order to find cures for Alzheimer's or dementia. But swam learning is gonna be the next platform sitting on this age to cloud architecture so that instead of people worrying about sharing data, what we're doing is actually sharing insights And be able to learn to these millions of data points that they can connect with each other in a secure way. Security is another example, right? So today on an average takes 28 days to find a bridge in your enterprise with project Aurora, which we're gonna make available at the end of the year, by the end of the year. We actually can address zero day attacks within seconds. And then we're work in other areas like disaster recovery when you get attacked. Think about the ransom ramp somewhere that we have seen in the last few weeks, right? You know, God forbid you have to pay for it. But at the same time, recovery takes days and weeks. Sometimes we are working on technology to do it within 23 seconds. So this is where HP can place across all spectrums of the stack. And at the same time, of course, people expect us to innovate in infrastructural layer. That's why we also partnered with companies like Intel, we're with the push of a bottle. If you need more capacity of the court, you don't have to order anything, just push the bottle. We make more calls available so that that will load can perform and when you don't need to shut it off so you don't have to pay for it. And last finalist, you know, I will say for us is all about the consumption availability of our solutions And that's what I said, you know, in 2019 we will make available everything as a service by 2022. You know, we have to say as you know, there is no need to build the church for easter sunday when you can rent it for that day. The point here is to grow elastically and the fact that you don't need to move the data is already a cost savings because cost of aggression data back and forth is enormous and customers also don't want to be locked in. So we have an open approach and we have a through age to cloud architecture and we are focusing on what is most valuable aspect for the customer, which is ultimately the data. >>Thank you for that. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, and again, another weapon in your arsenal is you mentioned uh supercomputing before up in space where we're on the cusp of exa scale and that's the importance of high performance computing. You know, it used to be viewed as just a niche. I've had some great conversations with Dr go about this, but that really is the big data platform, if you will. Uh can I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that fits into the future. Your expertise in HPC, you're obviously a leader in that space. What's the fit with this new vision? You're laying out? >>Well, HPC, high performance computer in memory computer are the backbone to be able to manage large data sets at massive scale. Um and, you know, deployed technologies like deep learning or artificial intelligence for this massive amount of data. If we talked about the explosion of data all around us and uh, you know, and the algorithms and the parameters to be able to extract inside from the day is getting way more complex. And so the ability to co locate data and computed a massive scale is becoming a necessity, whether it's in academia, whether it's in the government obviously to protect your, your most valuable assets or whether it is in the traditional enterprise. But that's why with the acquisition of Cray, S. G. I. And our organic business, we are absolutely the undisputed leader to provide the level of capabilities. And that's why we are going to build five of the top six exa scale systems, which is basically be able to process they billion billion, meaning billion square transactions per second. Can you imagine what you can do with that? Right. What type of problems you can go solve climate problems? Right. Um you know, obviously be able to put someone back into the moon and eventually in mars you know, the first step to put that supercomputer as an edge computer into the international space station. It's about being able to process data from the images that take from the ice caps of the, of the earth to understand climate changes. But eventually, if you want to put somebody in in into the Marks planet, you have to be able to communicate with those astronauts as they go and you know, you can't afford the latency. Right? So this is where the type of problems we are really focused on. But HPC is something that we are absolutely uh, super committed. And it's something that honestly we have the full stack from silicon to software to the system performance that nobody else has in the industry. >>Well, I think it's a real tailwind for you because the industry is moving that direction. Everybody talks about the data and workloads are shifting. We used to be uh, I got LTP and I got reporting. Now you look at the workloads, there's so much diversity. So I'll give you the last word. What what really is the most exciting to you about the future of HPV? >>Well, I'm excited about the innovation, will bring it to the market and honestly, as the Ceo, I care about the culture of the company. For me, the last almost 3.5 years have been truly remarkable. As you said at the beginning, we are transforming every aspect of this company. When I became CEO, I had three priorities for myself. One is our customers and partners. That's why we do these events right to communicate, communicate, communicate. Uh they are our North Star, that's why we exist. Uh, second is our innovation right? We compete to win with the best innovation, solving the most complex problems in a sustainable and equitable way. And third is the culture of the company, which are the core is how we do things in our Team members and employees. You know, I represent my colleagues here, the 60,000 strong team members that have incredible passion for our customers and to make a contribution every single day. And so for me, I'm very optimistic about what we see the recovery of the economy and the possibilities of technology. But ultimately, you know, we have to work together hand in hand. Uh and I believe this company now is absolutely on the right track to not just be relevant, but really to make a difference. And remember that in the end we we have to be a force for good. And let's not forget that while we do all of this, we have some farm with technology. We have to also help some uh to address some of the challenges we have seen in the last 18 months. An H. P. E is a whole different company, uh, that you knew 3.5 years ago. >>And as you said, it's, it's knowledge is the right thing to do. It's good. It's good for business Antonio. Neary. Thanks so much for coming back to the cube. Is always a pleasure to see you. >>Thanks for having me Dave >>and thank you for watching this version of HP discover 2021 on the cube. This is David want to keep it right there for more great coverage. >>Mm

>>Mhm >>Yes, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm lisa martin excited about this conversation. It's combining my background in life sciences with technology. Please welcome Mike Tarsa Lee, the chief scientific officer at Tetra Science. Mike I'm so excited to talk to you today. >>Thank you lisa and thank you very much to the cube for hosting us. >>Absolutely. So we talk about cloud and data all the time. This is going to be a very interesting conversation especially because we've seen events of the last what are we on 14 months and counting have really accelerated the need for drug discovery and really everyone's kind of focused on that. But I want you to talk with our audience about Tetra science, Who you guys are, what you do and you were founded in 2014. You just raised 80 million in series B but give us an idea of who you are and what you do. >>Got it. Tetro Science, what are we? We are digital plumbers and that may seem funny but really we are taking the world of data and we are trying to resolve it in such a way that people can actually pipe it from the data sources they have in a vendor agnostic way to the data targets in which they need to consume that data. So bringing that metaphor a little bit more to life sciences, let's say that you're a chemist and you have a mass spec and an NMR and some other piece of technology and you need all of those to speak the same language. Right? Generally speaking, all of these are going to be made by different vendors. They're all going to have different control software and they're all going to have slightly different ways of sending their data in. Petro Science takes those all in. We bring them up to the cloud or cloud native solution. We harmonize them, we extract the data first and then we actually put it into what we call our special sauce are intermediate data schema to harmonize it. So you have sort of like a picture and a diagram of what the prototypical mass spec or H P. L. C. Or cell counting data should look like. And then we build pipelines to export that data over to where you need it. So if you need it to live in an L. N. Or a limb system or in a visualization tool like spot fire tableau. We got you covered. So again we're trying to pipe things from left to right from sources to targets and we're trying to do it with scientific context. >>That was an outstanding description. Data plumbers who have secret sauce and never would have thought I would have heard that when I woke up this morning. But I'm going to unpack this more because one of the things that I read in the press release that just went out just a few weeks ago announcing the series B funding, it said that that picture science is pioneering a $300 billion dollar Greenfield data market and operating this is what got my attention without a direct cloud native and open platform competitor. Why is that? >>That's right. If you look at the way pharma data is handled today, even those that long tend to be either on prem solutions with a sort of license model or a distribution into a company and therefore maintenance costs, professional services, etcetera. Or you're looking at somebody who is maybe cloud but their cloud second, you know, they started with their on prem journey and they said we should go and build out some puppies, we should go to the cloud migrate. However, we're cloud first cloud native. So that's one first strong point. And the second is that in terms of data harmonization and in terms of looking at data in a vendor agnostic way, um many companies claim to do it. But the real hard test of this, the metal, what will say is when you can look at this with the Scientific contextual ization we offer. So yes, you can collect the data and put it on a cloud. Okay great. Yes. You may be able to do an extract, transform and load and move it to somewhere else. Okay. But can you actually do that from front to back while retaining all the context of the data while keeping all of the metadata in the right place? With veracity, with G XP readiness, with data fidelity and when it gets over to the other side can somebody say oh yeah that's all the data from all the H. P. L. C. S we control. I got it. I see where it is. I see where to go get it, I see who created it. I see the full data train and validation landscape and I can rebuild that back and I can look back to the old raw source files if I need to. Um I challenge someone to find another direct company that's doing that today. >>You talk about that context and the thing that sort of surprises me is with how incredibly important scientific discovery is and has been for since the beginning of time. Why is why has nobody come out in the last seven years and tried to facilitate this for life sciences organizations. >>Right. I would say that people have tried and I would say that there are definitely strides being made in the open source community, in the data science community and inside pharma and biotech themselves on these sort of build motif, right. If you are inside of a company and you understand your own ontology and processes while you can probably design an application or a workflow using several different tools in order to get that data there. But will it be generally useful to the bioscience community? One thing we pride ourselves on is when we product eyes a connector we call or an integration, we actually do it with a many different companies, generic cases in mind. So we say, OK, you have an h p l C problem over at this top pharma, you have an HPC problem with this biotech and you have another one of the C R. O. Okay. What are the common points between all of those? Can we actually distill that down to a workflow? Everyone's going to need, for example a compliance workflow. So everybody needs compliance. Right. So we can actually look into an empower or a unicorn operation and we can say, okay, did you sign off on that? Did it come through the right way? Was the data corrupted etcetera? That's going to be generically useful to everybody? And that's just one example of something we can do right now for anybody in bio pharma. >>Let's talk about the events of the last 14 months or so mentioned 10 X revenue growth in 2020. Covid really really highlighted the need to accelerate drug discovery and we've seen that. But talk to me about some of the things that Tetra science has seen and done to facilitate that. >>Yeah, this past 14 months. I mean um I will say that the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone involved ourselves as well. We've basically gone to a full remote workforce. Um We have tried our very best to stay on top of it with remote collaboration tools with vera, with GIT hub with everything. However, I'll say that it's actually been some of the most successful time in our company's history because of that sort of lack of any kind of friction from the physical world. Right? We've really been able to dig down and dig deep on our integrations are connections, our business strategy. And because of that, we've actually been able to deliver a lot of value to customers because, let's be honest, we don't actually have to be on prem from what we're doing since we're not an on prem solution and we're not an original equipment manufacturer, we don't have to say, okay, we're going to go plug the thing in to the H. P. L. C. We don't have to be there to tune the specific wireless protocols or you're a W. S. Protocols, it can all be done remotely. So it's about building good relationships, building trust with our colleagues and clients and making sure we're delivering and over delivering every time. And then people say great um when I elect a Tetra solution, I know what's going right to the cloud, I know I can pick my hosting options, I know you're going to keep delivering more value to me every month. Um Thanks, >>I like that you make it sound simple and that actually you bring up a great point though that the one of the many things that was accelerated this last year Plus is the need to be remote that need to be able to still communicate, collaborate but also the need to establish and really foster those relationships that you have with existing customers and partners as everybody was navigating very, very different challenges. I want to talk now about how you're helping customers unlock the problem that is in every industry data silos and point to point integration where things can talk to each other, Talk to me about how you're helping customers like where do they start with? Touch? Where do you start that? Um kind of journey to unlock data value? >>Sure. Journey to unlock data value. Great question. So first I'll say that customers tend to come to us, it's the oddest thing and we're very lucky and very grateful for this, but they tend to have heard about what we've done with other companies and they come to us they say listen, we've heard about a deployment you've done with novo Nordisk, I can say that for example because you know, it's publicly known. Um so they'll say, you know, we hear about what you've done, we understand that you have deep expertise in chromatography or in bio process. And they'll say here's my really sticky problem. What can you do here? And invariably they're going to lay out a long list of instruments and software for us. Um we've seen lists that go up past 2000 instruments. Um and they'll say, yeah, they'll say here's all the things we need connected, here's four or five different use cases. Um we'll bring you start to finish, we'll give you 20 scientists in the room to talk through them and then we to get somewhere between two and four weeks to think about that problem and come back and say here's how we might solve that. Invariably, all of these problems are going to have a data silos somewhere, there's going to be in Oregon where the preclinical doesn't see the biology or the biology doesn't see the screening etcetera. So we say, all right, give us one scientist from each of those, hence establishing trust, establishing input from everybody. And collaboratively we'll work with, you will set up an architecture diagram, will set up a first version of a prototype connector, will set up all this stuff they need in order to get moving, we'll deliver value upfront before we've ever signed a contract and will say, is this a good way to go for you? And they'll say either no, no, thank you or they'll say yes, let's go forward, let's do a pilot a proof of concept or let's do a full production rollout. And invariably this data silos problem can usually be resolved by again, these generic size connectors are intermediate data schema, which talks and moves things into a common format. Right? And then also by organizationally, since we're already connecting all these groups in this problem statement, they tend to continue working together even when we're no longer front and center, right? They say, oh we set up that thing together. Let's keep thinking about how to make our data more available to one another. >>Interesting. So culturally, within the organization it sounds like Tetra is having significant influences their, you know, the collaboration but also data ownership. Sometimes that becomes a sticky situation where there are owners and they want to read retain that control. Right? You're laughing? You've been through this before. I'd like to understand a little bit more though about the conversation because typically we're talking about tech but we're also talking about science. Are you having these technical conversations with scientists as well as I. T. What is that actual team from the customer perspective look >>like? Oh sure. So the technical conversation and science conversation are going on sometimes in parallel and sometimes in the same threat entirely. Oftentimes the folks who reach out to us first tend to be the scientists. They say I've got a problem, you know and and my research and and I. T. Will probably hear about this later. But let's go. And then we will invariably say well let's bring in your R. And D. I. T. Counterparts because we need them to help solve it right? But yes we are usually having those conversations in parallel at first and then we unite them into one large discussion. And we have varied team members here on the Tetris side we have me from science along with multiple different other PhD holders and pharma lifers in our business who actually can look at the scientific use cases and recommend best practices for that and visualizations. We also have a lot of solutions architects and delivery engineers who can look at it from the how should the platform assemble the solution and how can we carry it through? Um And those two groups are three groups really unite together to provide a unified front and to help the customer through and the customer ends up providing the same thing as we do. So they'll give us on the one call, right? Um a technical expert, a data and QA person and a scientist all in one group and they'll say you guys work together to make sure that our orders best represented here. Um And I think that that's actually a really productive way to do this because we end up finding out things and going deeper into the connector than we would have otherwise. >>It's very collaborative, which is I bet those are such interesting conversations to be a part of it. So it's part of the conversation there helping them understand how to establish a common vision for data across their organization. >>Yes, that that tends to be a sort of further reaching conversation. I'll say in the initial sort of short term conversation, we don't usually say you three scientists or engineers are going to change the fate of the entire orig. That's maybe a little outside of our scope for now. But yes, that first group tends to describe a limited solution. We help to solve that and then go one step past and then they'll nudge somebody else in the Oregon. Say, do you see what Petra did over here? Maybe you could use it over here in your process. And so in that way we sort of get this cultural buy in and then increased collaboration inside a single company. >>Talk to me about some customers that you've worked with it. Especially love to know some of the ones that you've helped in the last year where things have been so incredibly dynamic in the market. But give us an insight into maybe some specific customers that work with you guys. >>Sure. I'd love to I'll speak to the ones that are already on our case studies. You can go anytime detector science dot com and read all of these. But we've worked with Prelude therapeutics for example. We looked at a high throughput screening cascade with them and we were able to take an instrument that was basically unloved in a corner at T. Can liquid handler, hook it up into their Ln. And their screening application and bring in and incorporate data from an external party and do all of that together and merge it so they could actually see out the other side a screening cascade and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days. We've also worked as you've seen the press release with novo Nordisk, we worked on automating much of their background for their chromatography fleet. Um and finally we've also worked with several smaller biotechs in looking at sort of in stan shih ation, they say well we've just started we don't have an L. N. We don't have a limbs were about to buy these 50 instruments. Um what can you do with us and we'll actually help them to scope what their initial data storage and harmonization strategy should even be. Um so so we're really man, we're at everywhere from the enterprise where its fleets of thousands of instruments and we're really giving data to a large amount of scientists worldwide, all the way down to the small biotech with 50 people who were helping add value there. >>So big range there in terms of the data conversation, I'm curious has have you seen it change in the last year plus with respect to elevating to the C suite level or the board saying we've got to be able to figure this out because as we saw, you know, the race for the Covid 19 vaccine for example. Time to value and and to discovery is so critical. Is that C suite or board involved in having conversations with you guys? >>It's funny because they are but they are a little later. Um we tend to be a scientist and user driven um solution. So at the beginning we get a power user, an engineer or a R and D I. T. Person in who really has a problem to solve. And as they are going through and developing with us, eventually they're going to need either approval for the time, the resources or the budget and then they'll go up to their VP or their CIA or someone else at the executive level and say, let's start having more of this conversation. Um, as a tandem effort, we are starting to become involved in some thought leadership exercises with some larger firms. And we are looking at the strategic aspect through conferences, through white papers etcetera to speak more directly to that C suite and to say, hey, you know, we could fit your industry for dato motif. And then one other thing you said, time to value. So I'll say that the Tetro science executive team actually looks at that as a tract metric. So we're actually looking at driving that down every single week. >>That's outstanding. That's a hard one to measure, especially in a market that is so dynamic. But that time to value for your customers is critical. Again, covid sort of surfaced a number of things and some silver linings. But that being able to get hands on the day to make sure that you can actually pull insights from it accelerate facilitate drug discovery. That time to value there is absolutely critical. >>Yeah. I'll say if you look at the companies that really, you know, went first and foremost, let's look at Moderna right? Not our customer by the way, but we'll look at Madonna quickly as an example as an example are um, everything they do is automated, right? Everything they do is cloud first. Everything they do is global collaboration networks, you know, with harmonized data etcetera. That is the model we believe Everyone's going to go to in the next 3-5 years. If you look at the fact that Madonna went from sequence to initial vaccine in what, 50, 60 days, that kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to. And so we're going to see many more farmers and biotechs move to that cloud first. Distributed model. All data has to go in somewhere centrally. Everyone has to be able to benefit from it. And we are happy to help them get >>Well that's that, you know, setting setting a new record for pace is key there, but it's also one of those silver linings that has come out of this to show that not only was that critical to do, but it can be done. We have the technology, we have the brain power to be able to put those all user would harmonize those together to drive this. So give me a last question. Give me an insight into some of the things that are ahead for Tetra science the rest of this year. >>Oh gosh, so many things. One of the nice parts about having funding in the bank and having a dedicated team is the ability to do more. So first of course our our enterprise pharma and BioPharma clients, there are plenty more use cases, workflows, instruments. We've just about scratch the surface but we're going to keep growing and growing our our integrations and connectors. First of all right we want to be like a netflix for connectors. You know we just want you to come and say look do they have the connector? No well don't worry. They're going to have it in a month or two. Um so that we can be basically the almost the swiss army knife for every single connector you can imagine. Then we're going to be developing a lot more data apps so things that you can use to derive value from your data out. And then again, we're going to be looking at helping to educate everybody. So how is cloud useful? Why go to the system with harmonization? How does this influence your compliance? How can you do bi directional communication? There's lots of ways you can use. Once you have harmonized centralized data, you can do things with it to influence your order and drive times down again from days and weeks, two minutes and seconds. So let's get there. And I think we're going to try doing that over the next year. >>That's awesome. Never a dull moment. And I, you should partner with your marketing folks because we talked about, you talked about data plumbing the secret sauce and becoming the netflix of connectors. These are three gems that you dropped on this this morning mike. This has been awesome. Thank you for sharing with us what teacher science is doing, how you're really helping to fast track a lot of the incredibly important research that we're all really um dependent on and helping to heal the world through data. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Haley says I'm a real quickly. It's a team effort. The entire Tetro science team deserves credit for this. I'm just lucky enough to be able to speak to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity. >>And she about cheers to the whole touch of science team. Keep up the great work guys. Uh for mike Roselli, I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. >>Mhm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The last 10 months have forced upon us a new digital reality. If you weren't a digital business, you were basically out of business. Hello everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to share with you some fresh data from ETR on CIO spending, which is giving us a lot of optimism for 2021. We'll also set forth our thinking on the new digital economy, and really talk a little bit about where we see some of the opportunities and some of the spending and how those shifts are going to occur in the near term and midterm and even long term. Let's bring up sort of the first set of talking points that I want to share with you. 2020 has been a year of instant pivots, as we all know, and it's forced us to march toward a new digital reality, digital transformation, as everybody talks about, has been compressed by two to three years, but it's really been a Petri dish for everybody. Now, earlier this year, and we've been consistent since we first came out with this forecast of minus four to five percent in IT spending this year. The survey data suggests that, and even though Q3 saw a big bounce back in spending in GDP, we've still really maintained that -4 to -5%. We're seeing a comeback in the lockdown and the virus, and as such, we, you know, maintain that conservative forecast. Our current 2% growth for 2021 appears to be conservative based on the latest data we have. It could be as high as four to 5% growth in 2021. And we'll update that formally in January, but hold that thought. As part of that, as I said, we've seen accelerated digital business initiatives, led to really strong pockets in many sectors. We've seen that in video conferencing, in laptops, obviously, we've seen that in certain security sectors that we've detailed, like identity access management, like endpoint, like cloud security, cloud itself, and we've seen a big trend toward application modernization. So those sectors of the business, including those other data sectors, we certainly see the ascendancy of Snowflake, Snowflake closed the day on Friday, evaluation of Snowflake on Friday was now above that of ServiceNow, Snowflake's valuation is currently around the same, just slightly under that of IBM's, think about that. A company that was formed in 2015 is now as valuable almost as IBM, a 100 plus year old company. That's quite amazing to think about, why is that? It's because data now is at the center of the universe, and that's obviously what Snowflake's transformation is all about. The pace of the vaccine distribution appears to be accelerated. But as I said earlier, winter is coming in the Northern Hemisphere, and that's causing some concern. But overall, ETR survey data suggests that there's really positive signs in recovery, and we'll get into that. Companies are learning to leverage the cloud, cloud migration was a big priority in the last 10 months, that, including security, and people are realizing that, "Wow, we can actually change the operating model with cloud and it's helping with our agility." And we're going to show you some data that really supports that. As I kind of alluded to earlier, COVID created this massive digital business proof of concept, and the learnings from that experiment are going to get operationalized in 2021. And it's going to be a rapid year of invention and reinvention. And so that's why we think IT spending could snap back dramatically in 2021. Now ETR, when it does its surveys, will oftentimes do drill downs. And I want to share now with you, the next slide shows some drill downs from the COVID study, ETR since early this year, since March has been doing COVID studies, we've been reporting on that extensively, ETR was really the first to report that whole work from home pivot really, really early on in the cycle. So we use that as sort of a harbinger of things to come. This slide asked organizations in the past 12 months, "What is your thinking on when spending is going to bounce back to 2019 levels?" And that's really what's shown in this chart. So, you know, pre-COVID levels really was the question. "When does your organization expect IT budgets to return to pre-COVID levels?" You can see here on the left-hand side, 11% have said they increased budgets since the start of COVID. And those are the ones that are really in the best position. Certain e-commerce companies, those where COVID was actually a tailwind. 24% said, "We're already back to those 2019 pre-COVID levels." And then you can see as well, approximately 30% say that within 12 months they'll be back. 22% say within 24 months. And I know that's a big chunk of the economy in the CIO spend base, but only 4% that it's going to be more than two years. So a very large portion of the survey base, which is over 1400, suggest that there's optimism in the near term. Now, what we want to show you in the next chart is the factors that really enabled the organizations to be agile and resilient during COVID-19. Now it's no surprise that 84% said that being prepared for a remote workforce. Now, were it not for technology, we really would not have been able to respond to COVID in the way in which we have. And I think everybody really understands that. 44% said business continuity plans as we've reported in the past, many people told us their business continuity was far too DR-focused, they've shifted that focus in the last 10 months, really toward being able to pivot their businesses, and identify new opportunities. And so, that's something that we feel is going to carry through into 2021 and beyond. 39% said C-suite flexibility, I think this is a really important point, where the C-suite recognized the importance of investing in technology, and really understanding that it's now a strategic enabler, of course always has been, but now more than ever. You can see also that 30% said budget flexibility enabled them, and that is a function of we've got low interest rates, many many corporations if not most corporations improved their balance sheets by tapping corporate debt. And only 27% said emerging technologies, I shouldn't say "only", 27% cited emerging technologies as a primary factor that enabled their business resiliency, and I would argue that many of that emerging technologies probably falls into that 84% on that left-hand bar. So overall, you can see that the priorities of CIOs have shifted in the last 10 months, and it's not just going to snap back to where we were pre-COVID. As we've said many times, and many believe, these are permanent changes. Now, you may be asking, "Okay, where is the action going? Where are people spending? What are they adopting as new technologies?" And that's really what we want to show you here in this next slide. So what this slide does, you may recall the net score methodology that ETR uses. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. Basically, what it does is it breaks down those companies that are spending more, or a company, it breaks down the percentage of that company that's spending more versus spending less on a particular technology. So it's really, there's several components to it, one is new adoptions, the other is spending more, the other is flat, spending less, or retiring. So what we're isolating here in this chart is the new adoptions. And you can see here, that we've highlighted a few areas, container orchestration and container platforms. You can see those high, and we're showing three survey bases, October 19, July 20, which is the blue, and October 20, which is the yellow. And yes, while the spending is down from some of the previous highs, you can see the elevated levels of container orchestration, container platforms, machine learning and AI, and robotic process automation. What is that telling you? It says that people are modernizing their applications portfolios, they're applying machine learning and machine intelligence to get more value from data, AI plus data plus cloud is that new innovation cocktail that we've talked about a lot. And then we've also talked about the automation mandate, that we haven't seen the productivity improvements in the US and Europe over the last two decades that we would've liked to seen, so there really is an automation mandate, that's what the RPA adoption is all about. So really trying to drive those productivity gains. Now interestingly, you may look at this slide and say "Wow, look at how low cloud is. We hear all the time that cloud migration is a big priority, why is cloud so low?" So let's bring up the next chart and address that. This chart takes that increased spend portion of the net score, and remember I said it's broken down adoptions, spend more, spend less, et cetera, this is the increased spend, the spend more. Now look at cloud computing, it's up in the 46% range, that's 46% of the customers that responded in the cloud computing sector said they're increasing spending on cloud. So how do you interpret that from the previous slide? They're already in the cloud, that's why the new adoptions was low, 'cause everybody's doing some form of cloud, but this is a real tell sign. People are dramatically increasing their spending in cloud relative to some of these other areas, of course, same with container orchestration, container platforms, all about developer productivity, write once, run anywhere type of thing, it hedges for multicloud, bringing on-prem infrastructure into the cloud or on-prem apps into the cloud, that's what sort of you're seeing there with container. So this is the sort of 40% club, cloud computing, containers, machine learning and AI up at 40% spending more, and then again, robotic process automation. So, that sort of explains the cloud component, and you can see the container, the container orchestration and the automation piece also at very elevated levels. Let me wrap here by talking about some factors to watch, and I'll highlight them on this slide. Look, the propensity toward a lockdown definitely creates uncertainty and caution, you've got a new administration, there seems to be more of a willingness to lock down, the slowdown the economy, there's still uncertainty around fiscal stimulus, although it looks like that's going to be addressed hopefully in the near term. But there's still uncertainty around that. While that does potentially dampen spend for Q4, because of that uncertainty, it also creates further pent-up demand. As I said before, there's been 10 months of learnings from this forced march to digital transformations, and that is informing 2021 tactical plans, and then even longer term plans, long term planning has changed. When you talk to the C-suite and the conversation's going on at boards of directors, speed and the ability to turn on a dime, they're now fundamental principles that are being designed into businesses. This is a mainstay of the digital economy, we are entering a new era of digital business, and there's going to be the haves and the have nots. And the have nots are going to disappear, and the haves are going to do better. As I say, boards and CEOs, they got a glimpse of the future in 2021, but it was forced on them, it really wasn't planned. But it was an awesome Petri dish and experiment to understand what works, what doesn't, and they're now going to double down on those things that are sure bets. And those that don't act, as I say, they're going to be out of business. At the macro, yes, you've got, again, haves and have nots, and the have nots are going to potentially dampen, you're going to see companies that really got hurt, are going to constrict spending, no question, and that could dampen spending at the macro. But in our view, the survivors are going to prop up spending in 2021, it could be significantly above our initial estimates of 2%, could be as high as double that, maybe even four to 5% in 2021. So we're going to continue to watch that, we'll continue to check out the survey data, we'll have a complete update in the January survey, and in the meantime, we'll continue to report on the latest trends, both from the CUBE community, and also from ETR. So that's it for now, thanks for watching, don't forget, all these episodes are available on podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on SiliconAngle.com and Wikibon.com, check out ETR+ for all the survey action, and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts, you can also reach me @DVellante on Twitter, or you can email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR, thanks for watching, everybody, see you next time. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> All right, you're continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 virtual event. We get the pleasure of covering this show like no other AWS reinvent. We are pulling in from the other side of the world Tomer Levy, CEO of Logz.io. First time Cuber so we're going to ease them into it but it's going to be a great conversation. I'm Keith Townsend at CTO advisor. Tomer, welcome to the show. >> Keith, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. >> You know what? We love having founders here on theCUBE. We have a long history of having deep conversations with builders and we're probably the show for builders. AWS reinvent is virtual. However, I think the spirit of re-invent is highlighted in companies like this. We've seen a lot of observability companies sprout up around the industry. AWS is a big, big magnet for these types of solutions. What's the assets Logz.io and how are you guys differentiating yourselves in this crowded space? >> Yeah, absolutely Keith you see observability is so fundamental to building applications on AWS that as companies develop more applications, they have to have solid observability. And we have a mission and our mission is to enable develop engineers and any engineer out there to use open source to run their observability. So when we were developers we wanted to use open source but we had to compromise on a proprietary solution. We decided to build the company so engineers can use the observability tools they're already using for logging, for metrics, for tracing, Whatever they're already using we want to enable them to use that at scale on AWS. So it's easy to use, it's super smart and the data is coordinated. And I think fundamentally it's what we're doing very differently in the market. There is no other company in the market today that takes the best open sources and bring them together as one super strong platform and we're proud to be that company. >> Well, when you say there's no other company doing open source the way that you guys are doing it, that really intrigues me especially as we look at this from the angle of Cooper Netties, the CEO of the leading virtualization company called Kubernetes, the doubts home of the internet. How do you see the intersection of opensource observability in kubernetes especially in the public cloud? >> Yeah, for sure. People say that kubernetes is almost the operating system of the future and why do people use kubernetes? They use it to make sure they can run multiple microservices. They can take their application which used to be a monolith and put it in a distributed way. So it becomes so much harder to monitor or to troubleshoot even to secure applications. So the way we built Logz.io was really designed for companies that are moving into the cloud, companies moving into kubernetes, into microservices and by having logs and metrics and traces all work together through the best open sources. I think we can help customers really get the visibility and just accelerate the software delivery. Just provide better service to their customers. >> So Levy, walk me through that journey. What is it like for a developer to come from their traditional open source roots and enter the cloud where they're melding public cloud services in AWS alongside their tools that they're using in observability. How do you help ease that transition? >> Yeah, absolutely Keith because one of the main drivers for companies adopting tools like Logz.io is actually the migration to AWS. So imagine now migration to a new ground, what do you have to think about first? Do I have the glasses? Can I see what's going on? Like when I see what's going on, I feel more confident. So if I'm now using, let's call it elk or using the open-source Grafana or using tools like Jaeger, which are all open sources too that we offer as part of our platform. So when I use these tools I'm using them to get visibility into my own application, my own infrastructure. So Logz.io faster transition to Logz.io is super easy. This is the whole notion of having an open source compatible platform. So I want to move to Loz.io, everything that worked with my open source currently still works with Logz.io but now when you move to the cloud Logz.io on AWS, we have a very strong relationship so all the services are automatically monitored. You have pre-configured dashboard, everything is interconnected so just when I jump into the AWS platform I immediately get visibility of my existing apps and of the AWS infrastructure. And that eventually helped me become confident, grow and deliver faster on AWS. >> So again this is a conference full of builders but you used the term devOps. We're starting to see a bleeding of DevOps and builders or operations and builders come together. One of the big trans and DevOps and observability is AI and machine learning. What are some of the features of AI and Machine Learning you guys are bringing to bear to this market? >> Yeah, listen I'm a big believer in AI. You know, the amount of data that companies like Logz.io have to ingest and our customers have to process. It's just something a human being cannot possibly understand. It's like billions and millions of lines of data. So this is where we bring machines to help humans. I'll give you one example, right? If you're a DevOps engineer and you see an issue in your logs, what do you do? You usually copy that and putting it into Google and you'll end up on stack overflow, maybe on GitHub, maybe on another website. What we have done is we've scraped the web and we have learned from any user on our platform. So we actually know which log line is important and which one is not. So when companies send a log line, our AI automatically scans it and says, "Hey, here are the billion log lines. No one cares about but here is one that you should really look at right now because either you know half a million people that were searching for it. There are 7,000 alerts on this and it just happened to you. Keith look, maybe you should jump in and look at that". This is where AI makes us just better operate or better DevOp people and not kind of try to replace us. >> So I'm a technical founder, you're a technical founder, theCUBE loves supporting founders. One of the advantages of being the CEO of your company is that you get to decide the culture and the mission of your company. Talk to me about the people side of your organization and how you're making a change for the better. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, it is a privilege and to the privilege to start and come with a mission that you want to change something in the world and we were just two developers, a staff, my co-founder and myself having to use a product we didn't want to use and you know still really wanted to use an open source product. So we said let's build the company around that and this is kind of set the mission for the company as the company evolved, so is our mission. It evolves from logging to monitoring, to tracing and we also added a cloud SIEM solution all based on open source. So we're going to DevOps engineers and any engineers and we tag any engineer we tell them, "Hey, you can use the best open source tools in the cloud is one platform without compromising". And that's something that really is very differentiated today and I'm very humbled and excited to be part of this journey and I think the team at Logz.io is as well. >> You know I'm always intrigued about this journey to the cloud. Security is one of these things that intrigues me especially as we look at something as mature in the way open source. We often associate open source with public cloud, cloud native but open source is as old as technology itself. So there is a lot of practices that we bring from legacy, traditional infrastructures into the public cloud. So talk to me about that transition of security and security models? How does observability help to either take our existing tools and migrate them to the public cloud or adopt all new cloud native tools in the public cloud? >> Yeah, for sure. I think security is probably together with observability. One of the top priority that when you think about CTOs and VP of Engineering and CSOs, they're concerned about. So we've taken the observability path and bringing better glasses to our users and then on the security side there's a whole market called the SIEM market where companies look at detecting threats, investigating them and most of these tools were that companies use our legacy, incumbents and for design on their own premises world. And are not really a fit for the dynamic world of kubernetes and the cloud. And this is when we decided a couple of years ago to launch a product in that space and today this product is extremely successful. We have customers protecting their AWS environments across the board. So basically with one product for observability, you can with a single checkbox enable security and then you can detect threats. You can look at kind of the common pitfalls of AWS environment and how you can avoid them. And eventually when you see a threat, you can use our tool to investigate and find the root cause in a tool which was designed on AWS for AWS. And it's really designed for the kind of the native cloud environment rather than the on-premise as well. >> Now, is there an integration between the AI ML law of management and the threat management solutions from our observability perspective? >> Yeah, for sure. This is the beauty, it's all one data platform. So customers ship their data, loads, metrics and traces into one place and then we start to look at how can we provide more value on the data, right? How can we look at the logs from an operational perspective and tell you, "Hey, your production might be going down because of a production risks or maybe we can provide you threat intelligence". We can enrich the data and tell you, "Hey, we think you're undergoing an attack right now". So this is all done by users and it is all enraged by AI that provides more visibility, more enrichment of the data and just advice on where to look. >> So Tomer levy, CEO, founder of Logz.io. You're now a few belong. Thank you for joining the show. I hope you have a very successful AWS reinvent. Speaking of AWS reinvent, theCUBE's nonstop coverage of AWS reinvent continues. Watch some of the world's greatest builders, innovators get challenged on their vision and for us to understand and appreciate the work that's been done in this dynamic community. Continue to watch this coverage and more. Talk to you next interview on the CUBE's coverage, of AWS reinvent 2020. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of workplace next made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >>Hello, everyone. We're here covering workplace next on the Cube For years, you know, we've talked about new ways to work, and it was great thought exercise. And then overnight the pandemic heightened the challenges of creating an effective work force. Most of the executives that we talked to in our survey say that productivity actually has improved since the work from Home Mandate was initiative. But, you know, we're talking not just about productivity, but the well being of our associates and managing the unknown. We're going to shift gears a little bit now. We've heard some interesting real world examples of how organizations are dealing with the rapid change in workplace, and we've heard about some lessons to take into the future. But now we're going to get more practical and look at some of the tools that are available to help you navigate. The changes that we've been discussing and with me to talk about these trends related to the future of work are are are Qadoura, who's the vice president of worldwide sales and go to market for Green Lake at HP Sadat Malik is the VP of I O t and Intelligent Edge at HP and Satish Yarra Valley is the global cloud and infrastructure practice Head at Whip Probe guys welcomes. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having us. >>You're very welcome. Let me start with Sadat. You're coming from Austin, Texas here. So thank you. Stay crazy. As they say in Austin, for the uninitiated, maybe you could talk a little bit about h p E point. Next. It's a strategic component of H p. E. And maybe tell us a little bit about those services. >>Thank you so much for taking the time today. Appreciate everybody's participation here. So absolutely so point Next is HP Services on. This is the 23,000 strong organization globally spread out, and we have a very strong ecosystem of partners that be leveraged to deliver services to our customers. Um, our organization differentiates itself in the market by focusing on digital digital transformation journeys for our customers. For customers looking toe move to a different way off, engaging with its customers, transforming the way its employees work, figuring out a different way off producing the products that it sells to. His customers are changing the way it operationalize these things. For example, moving to the cloud going to a hybrid model, we help them achieve any of these four transformation outcomes. So point next job is toe point. What is next in this digital transformation journey and then partner with our customers to make that happen? So that's what we do. >>Thank you for that. I mean, obviously, you're gonna be seeing a lot of activity around workplace with shift from work from home, changes in the network changes in security. I mean the whole deal. What are some of your top takeaways that you can share with our audience? >>Yeah, they're >>so a lot has been happening in the workplace arena lately. So this is not new, right? This is not something that all of a sudden side happening when Kobe 19 hit, uh, the digital workplace was already transforming before over 19 happened. What over 19 has done is that it has massively accelerated the pace at which this change was happening. So, for example, right remote work was already there before over 19. But now everybody is working remotely so, in many ways, the solution that we have for remote work. They have been strained to appoint, never seen before. Networks that support these remote work environments have been pushed to their limits. Security was already there, right? So security was a critical piece off any off the thinking, any of the frameworks that we had. But now security is pivotal and central. Any discussion that we're having about the workplace environment data is being generated all across the all across the environment that we operated, right? So it's no longer being generated. One place being stored. Another. It's all over the place now. So what Kobe, 19 has done is that the transformation that was already underway in the digital workplace, it has taken that and accelerated it massive. The key take away for me is right that we have to make sure that when we're working with our customers, our clients, we don't just look at the technology aspect of things. We have to look at all the other aspect as well the people in the process aspect off this environment. It is critical that we don't assume that just because the technology is there to address these challenges that I just mentioned. Our people and our processes would be able to handle that as well. We need to bring everybody along. Everybody has different needs, and we need to be able to cater to those needs effectively. So that's my biggest take away. Make sure that the process and the people aspect of things was hand in glove with the technology that we were able to bring to bear here. >>Got it. Thank you. So, ah, let's go to San Francisco, bringing our war to the conversation. You're one of your areas of focus is is HP Green Lake. You guys were early on with the as a service model. Clearly, we've seen Mawr interest in cloud and cloud like models. I wonder if you could just start by sharing. What's Green Lake all about? Where does it fit into this whole workplace? Next, Uh, conversation that we're having? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um HP Green lake effectively is the cloud that comes to your data center to your Coehlo or to your edge, right? We saw with Public Cloud. The public cloud brought a ton of innovations, um, into the sort of hyper scale model. Now, with HP. What we've done is we've said, Look, customers need this level of innovation and this level of, you know, pay as you go economics the, you know, management layer the automation layer not just in a public cloud environment, but also in our customers data center or to the other potential edges or Coehlo scenarios. And what we've done is we've brought together Asada just mentioned the best of our point next services our software management layer as well as H. P. E s rich portfolio of hardware to come together to create that cloud experience. Um, of course, we can't do this without the rich ecosystem around us as well. And so everything from you know, some of our big S I partners like we bro, who also have the virtual desktop expertise or virtual desk that then come together to start helping us launch some of these new workloads supported cloud services such as D. D i eso for my perspective, v. D. I is the most important topic for a lot of our customers right now, especially in sectors like financial services, um, advanced engineering scenarios and health care where they need access to those, uh to their data centers in a very secure way and in a highly cost optimized way as well. >>Well, okay. Thank you. And then let's let's bring in, uh, petition talk a little bit about the ecosystem. I mean, we're pro. That's really kind of your wheelhouse. We've been talking a lot on the cube about moving from an industry of point products to platforms and now ecosystem innovation, Uh, are are mentioned VD I we saw that exploding eso teach. Maybe you could weigh in here and and share with us what you're seeing in the market and specifically around ecosystem. >>As we all know, the pandemic has redefined the way we collaborate to support this collaboration. We have set up huge campuses and office infrastructure In summary, our industry has centralized approach. Now, the very premise of the centralization bringing people together for work has changed. This evolving workspace dynamics have triggered the agency to reimagine the workspace strategy. CEO, CEO S and C H R ose are all coming together to redefine the business process and find new ways off engaging with customers and employees as organizations embrace work from home for the foreseeable future. Customer need to create secure by design workspaces for remote working environments. With the pro virtual disk platform, we can help create such seamless distal workspaces and enable customers to connect, collaborate and communicate with ease from anywhere securely. They're consistent user experience. Through this platform led approach, we are able to utter the market demands which are focused on business outcomes. >>Okay, and this is the specifics of this hard news that you're talking about Video on demand and Citrix coming together with your ecosystem. H p E were pro and again, the many partners that you work with is that correct? >>Well, actually, Dave, we see a strong playoff ecosystem partners coming together to achieve transformative business outcomes. As Arbor said earlier, HP and Wipro have long standing partnership, and today's announcement around HP Green Lake is an extension off this collaboration, where we provide leverage HP Green Leg Andre Pro, which elders platform to offer video as a service in a paper user model. Our aim is to enable customers fast track there. It is still works based transformation efforts by eliminating the need to support upfront capital investments and old provisioning costs while allowing customers to enjoy the benefit off compromise, control, security and compliance. Together, we have implemented our solution across various industry segments and deliver exceptional customer experiences by helping customer businesses in their workspace. Transformation journeys by defining their workspace strategy with an intelligent, platform led approach that enables responsiveness, scalability and resilience. It's known that Wipro is recognized as a global leader in the distal workspace and video I, with HP being a technology leader, enabling us with high level of program ability on integration capabilities. We see tremendous potential to jointly address the industry challenges as we move forward. >>Excellent. Uh, sad. I wanna come back to you. We talk a lot about the digital business, the mandate for digital business, especially with the pandemic. Let's talk about data. Earlier this year, HP announced the number of solutions that used data to help organizations work more productively safely. You know, the gamut talk about data and the importance of data and what you guys were doing there specifically, >>Yeah, that's a great question. So that is fundamental to everything that we're doing in the workplace arena, right? So from a technology perspective that provides us with the wherewithal to be able to make all the changes that we want to make happen for the people in the process side of things. So the journey that we've been on this past year is a very interesting one. Let me share with the audience a little bit of what's been going on on the ground with our customers. Um, what's what's been happening in the field? So when the when Kobe 19 hit right, a lot of our customers were subjected to these shutdown, which were very pervasive, and they had to stop their operations. In many cases, they had to send their employees home. So at that point, HB stepped in the point. Next organization stepped in and helped these customers set up remote work out options, which allowed them to keep their businesses going while they handle these shutdowns. Fast forward. Six months and the shutdown. We're starting to get lifted and our customers were coming back to us and saying to us that Hey, we would now like to get a least a portion off our workforce back to the normal place of work. But we're concerned that if we do that, it's gonna jeopardize their safety because off the infection concerned that were there. So what we did was that we built a cities or five solutions using various types of video analytics and data analysis analysis technologies that allowed these customers to make that move. So these five solutions, uh, let me walk, walk our customers and our clients and audience through those. The first two of these solutions are touchless entry and fever detection. So this is the access control off your premise, right? So to make sure that whoever is entering the building that's in a safe manner and any infection concerned, we stop it at the very get go once the employees inside the workplace, the next thing that we have is a set of two solutions. What one is social distance tracing and tracking, and the other one is workplace alerting. What these two solutions do is that they use video analytics and data technology is to figure out if there is a concern with employees adhering to the various guidelines that are in place on alerting the employees and the employers if there is any infringement happening which could risk overall environment. Finally, we realized right that irrespective off how much technology and process we put in place. Not everybody will be able to come into the normal place of work. So what we have done is that the first solution that we have is augmented reality and visual remote guidance. This solution uses a our technologies allow. People were on site to take advantage of the expertise that resides offsite to undertake complex task task, which could be as complex as overhauling a machine on ah factory floor using augmented reality where somebody off site who's an expert in that machine is helping somebody on site data has become central to a lot of the things that we do. But as I said, technology is one aspect of things. So ultimately the people process technology continuum has to come together to make these solutions real for our customers. >>Thank you, Arwa. We just have just about 30 seconds left and I wonder if you could close on. We're talking about cloud hybrid. Uh, everybody's talking about hybrid. We're talking about the hybrid workplace. What do you see for the for the future over the next 2345 years? >>Absolutely. And I think you're right, Dave. It is, ah, hybrid world. It's a multi cloud world. Ultimately, what our customers want is the choice and the flexibility to bring in the capabilities that drive the business outcomes that they need to support. And that has multiple dimensions, right? It's making sure that they are minimizing their egress costs, right. And many of our on Prem solutions do give them that flexibility. It is the paper use economics that we talked about. It is about our collective capability as an ecosystem to come together. You know, with Citrix and NVIDIA with R s I partner we pro and the rich heritage of HP es services as well as hardware to bring together these solutions that are fully managed on behalf of our customers so that they can focus their staff their i t capabilities on the products and services they need to deliver to their customers. >>Awesome. Guys, I wish we had more time. We got to go day volonte for the cube. Keep it right there. Lots of great more content coming your way. >>Yeah,

(vibrant music) >> Everyone, welcome to our Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here for a digital conversation. Part of our new digital events, part of our new structure of bringing people into the studio and also doing remotes. We'd love to do that in the era of the travel bans, but it's always great to have local Silicon Valley executives and startups here. Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry IO is here with me. Former VM-ware industry executive, CEO of Sentry IO hot startup. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you can drive in. You don't have to fly anywhere. It's all good. No wearing masks. The coronavirus is crazy. I'm so glad we have you at this studio and get this content acquisition. Thanks for coming in. I want to get your take on your company before we get into the industry thing. I think you look at some of the most successful categories that just came out of nowhere. You know, you look at AIOps for instance in driving, you know, observability. But what is observability? That beginning, that comes with public page or do the list just goes on and on. The cloud has created this agile market where real time and then a lot of automation is going on so whether it's error logs like a Splunk does and that's scaled up. You get to doing something variation with software code that's not just something breaks, a phone rings. There's a lot a going on. You're this really kind of the tailwind here for you with cloud scale. What does Sentry doing? What's their secret sauce? >> So, the simplest way I would put it is we help you measure and monitor your code in production in close to real time. So what does that mean? You look at all, all of the companies that we talk about, whether it's a John Deere on one end or a Spotify on the other. They're all getting more digital in nature, which means they all trying to interact with their customers more often, building apps with an interface with an API. And as we all know, through our own personal experiences, if you don't get a great experience, you simply move on. So, you pull up your app, you pull up Uber, it's not working, let me look at Lyft. Right? That's the kind of consumer behavior that's starting to take in. >> So-- >> Meaning you don't really know as the owner of the app if they're abandoning or not, it's just down sales or? >> Correct. And so, what we do is we help developers monitor how the usages of their code in production. So, as users hit editors, a checkout button is not working or a user is having a bad experience on a mobile phone, whereas the same application on a browser looks fine. We in real time giving notification saying X number of users on this type of device, on this type of interface are having issues. And not just that, it's an alert, it's an alert that says this is the issue, this is the line of code where the issue's taking place, this is the potential commit that you did in your getRepository, which is causing it. So, it's the full kind of metadata around the issue. Which typically would be, what, two days? I take it as filed. Support me, look at it. Hey, customer has an issue, let's reproduce it. Well the customer is gone. So this is all done in real-- >> Or it could be a complete blindspot too. You don't know, right? This is the thing. This is why I love this whole digital transformation role where instrumentation is re-imagining how everything's being done. So for instance, you could see a code push and you go, okay, it's in production. And then why are sales down? Why is usage down? And then you've got to do a postmortem. >> Correct. >> No one called, just going what the hell happened? Fingers are blaming. He did it! Here you're trying to get to the point where you can see that error earlier or before or after, during as it work. >> It's almost in real time. Close to real time. As the user has the error immediately through either PagerDuty, Slack, email, whichever your communication medium is. You get to know a user or a set of users are having an issue. You click it, you go to this portal. All the metadata is right there. So, it's in real time. And so to exactly your point, it's not after the fact. >> Yeah. >> Right, it's happening. And so, the CTO of tackled.io, said it best, it's a startup that helps companies get on to marketplaces. He said, "Hey, we found issues before our customers even filed a issue against us." So, you know, this helps us deliver true customer experience, as a development team. >> So, on the developers that target profile get that and they're coding away. They don't have time to do research. They'll be like, "Oh, I better bolt on some instrumentation here." That's been the successful move. Look at like what Datadog has done in DevOps. Just the easy onboarding, free use it. Is that the same model you guys are taking this free land, adopt then expand. So, is it a freemium, could you explain the business model? >> Yeah, so, a Sentry is a open source. And so customers can take the piece of software that we have as is, fully functional and run it themselves on their data center on their cloud, or they can choose a SaaS version from us and we offer kind of like a free version and then you pay for the plan. So, what we typically see is customers turn it on, developers turn it on and they like it. And then, the best score I got recently was, one CEO who said, "Hey, you know, I don't send you that many events, but I see the value of what you do, so I decided to pay you." Right, so, they went from free to paid. And that's kind of typical pattern that we see. And the best thing about this is, it takes you approximately four lines of code to get started. Four lines of code in your code and you get started getting the benefits of Sentry. >> What's good sign for monetization when you got the paying it forward literally with cash. I want to ask you the difference between the open source version because I saw in the origination story it's really interesting. They were at jobs and they saw this side project grow into a real opportunity. And it's always good to see the open source not die, right. So, this been maintain the project. When would someone use the open sources? Is that the hardcore folks or, so SaaS, obviously makes sense. It's easier if you're doing a lot of the extra support and whatnot on top of it. But what's the use case for the folks who are going to bring it in house loaded on their cloud? >> I think we'll leave it to our customers to decide that. And we've seen, folks who say, "Hey, you know, we have, we're going to try it out, it's a small, we have got a good DevOps practice. We're going to get it up and running." Here's what happened with one of my teams at VMware. The engineer in charge looked at it and said, "It's not worth my time given what the price on SaaS is." Right, so, like our smallest plan is $29, which satisfies most startups or small software projects. And his point was like, "Hey, you know, it's almost better for me to start and using that versus--" >> Well they weren't using NSX. I'm sure Pat Gels would be like, "Get shipped the next product." Well this is the trade off, right? I mean, so that's what's beautiful of open source. You want to bring it in and make it work for yourself. That trade off has to be economically there. >> Correct. >> So you have a nice balance of if you're hardcore, no problem. >> Please use-- >> Use it, contribute, be part of the team. But if you want ease of use and all the bells and whistles and the speed. >> I think it comes down to what we are starting to see, which is, how much do you care about getting to value faster and where is your value? Is it in kind of running and operating all these pieces of software or is it in, you know, getting value to your end customer? So, if you are focused on building your business, we are this value add that kind of gets you there faster. So, stop focusing on kind of building the infrastructure. Start delivering kind of the value to the business. >> So I'm going to ask you, so, are you the CEO? So the founders who I've not met. I look forward to interviewing them. They seem pretty cool. I'm sure they probably say, "Oh this guy from VMware, he's probably the big company guy." 'Cause they were like, we're going to Dropbox now. Engineers, I could almost imagine their, what they're like. Probably skeptical, this is VMware guy. How did you get through the interview process? Obviously, you're the CEO, you made it. Were they skeptical ? What worked? Why you, why'd you go there? >> You know, the best thing about this transition is Chris and David. So, David was the CEO. He is now the CTO. He's the founder creator along with Chris. And it was his decision, to bring someone into the company, given that we are seeing this, you know, we are now at 20000 plus customers and he felt like he wanted to kind of go back to building and creating and bring a partner in crime. So, that was the good part. I would say like, we started talking and we are at the same energy level, you know? So, I think it just worked out in the way we communicated. And you've known me for a bit. I'm kind of hands on. I like, you know, to kind of get into things and build businesses. So, I think the profile matched out and both of us took our time. So it was, a long dating process, where we got to know each other. Not just as, you know, what we do for work. But, you know, how we operate and had coffee and lunch and dinner and--- >> Well, it is a dating, dating and marriage is always thinking, but the founders are, it's a tough move to make. I mean, for founders to be self-aware, to bring in someone else. But also the fit has to be there. And a lot of entrepreneurs just check the box and try to hire someone too fast that could fail or gets jammed down by the VCs, you know. So, the founders are pretty kind of reluctant. So, that's interesting that you did that. >> Yeah, he's been thinking. You know, the thing about David is he's super thoughtful and hopefully you'll get to see him soon. He's been thinking about this for a bit. And he took his time. And he worked through the process and that's why I said it felt like we were not just talking about, me joining as a CEO, as much as us getting to know each other and building this for the long run. And so we really took our time on both ends--- >> And he want to to get back on the engine of the business? He's a developer, right? He's like the code. >> Just don't want to, >> It was-- >> 20000 customers, you going to get hiring people. It's HR issues. This probably, I don't want to do that. >> That and you know it was kind of the personality thing, right? Grit and grind, you know. We kind of, can somebody come in and have the passion, the same that he believes in what we do. And he saw that and I saw that in him and I'm like, this is a great opportunity that I cannot forego. >> So talk about the, I say love modern, the modern startups because, you know, you're on the right side of history when you got cloud at your tailwind and kind of DevOps, like vibe you get going on with, I know it's not DevOps, but it's common like cloud scale and the agility. How are you guys organized? You guys have virtual teams. You have a central office. Is there a physical place? Do people come in? What's the, how is the company's philosophy on work environment? >> So, we actually have three locations. One in San Francisco, which is the headquarters, where we are located. And then in Vienna, Austria, where one of the early engineers and pioneers live. And so we built around that person and that location. >> No one's complaining about that. >> No. >> Vienna's not a bad place there-- >> Not a bad place. I haven't visited yet. (laughs) I am looking forward to it. I was supposed to be there in April, but, given the circumstances, I'm postponing it. And we recently started this past year in Toronto. And so, we are--- >> So three strong areas for tech talent for sure. >> And then we do have some employees working from home. So, we try and hire the best, and then we accommodate. But we do try to kind of cluster around these three locations. >> So, I got to get your take as the CEO, obviously we're all grappling with this, work at home, Covid 19, the coronavirus, is impacting. Everything's being canceled here in Silicon Valley. I would say Seattle has more of a hotspot than our area. Mostly China as China. What's the view that you guys are taking right now? You're telling people who work at home. Obviously, events are being canceled. Places where people doing Biz Dev, KubeCon was canceled, Dell Technology World is can-- I mean everything's being canceled. How's that affecting your business and what's your philosophy? How are you guys are executing through this tough time? >> I think as a company we've kind of taken the step for having people work from home and we did it on a location by location basis. So, for folks in San Francisco, especially because folks who are commuting on public transportation and other things. We wanted to make our team feel comfortable. And so we've instituted a work from home policy, for, I think we said two weeks, but I think it's going to keep going until we get a clear signal from the government, both locally and at the federal level. So that's kind of where we are as a team. And then what we noticed was the Austrian government kind of had similar regulations of everyone's working from home. Slack, you know, Google Hangouts. We spending a lot of time on video, making sure we are connected as a team. And you know, just that spirit of how we operate and talk to each other continues. As a business, we are a bottoms up business. So, what I mean by that is folks sign up, they use the product. And developers are right now globally still fully functional. The only difference being they're now working from home. So we feel like as a business, we'll be fine. And we are ensuring that our customers through this transition and through this period of kind of unknowns are able to continue to be successful for their customers. >> It's funny, I was talking with someone, it's like there's going to be some, obviously, sectors, like events are going to take a big hit. South by got canceled, Coachella's being canceled. All the tech events are being canceled. That's why we're going to be doing our stuff at the studio with virtual events, for theCUBE. But certain things are going to be different. You going to see pregnancy, boom. You know, nine months later, people are going to be having kids cause they're home alone or divorces depending on how you look at it. But productivity, developer wise has been talked about as actually developers want to just crank out some code. They don't have to come into the office. You can be more, I mean you can still be productive. Developers have been doing this for decades. >> I think-- >> At least if they are more. >> You know, I think you, you know, I think there might be a scenarios of adjustment, a period of adjustment. And then folks will get comfortable. So, it's super important to create that engagement model. Whether, do you have the tooling to keep the team engaged. And there companies that are completely remote. And so we're making sure we learn from their best practices around that. But I do believe that, for tech companies or even for manufacturing companies focused on building software, developers are going to be productive. >> Okay, so a baby boom's coming, divorce rate's going to go up and productivity is skyrocketing. (both laugh) >> For developers. >> For developers. Well, I mean it's a good time. Okay, can I get your take on the industry now. Honestly, putting all the coronavirus aside, we saw a surge in public cloud check. Done. And ask you when your VMware with NSX coming in and becoming the engine with software defined networking as part of the Series piece. You're starting to see hybrid clear as day. It's going to happen. Multi clouds on the horizon. So, you now have a three wave cloud game going on. Wave one, done. Wave two is hybrid. Wave three maybe bigger than them all with multicloud. Do you agree with that trend analysis and what's your take on that? >> So, this is where I'll probably kind of look back at my time at VMware. I think, you know, definitely see the multicloud wave catching on. But I would use the word multicloud as in, not a app spread across three clouds as much as, you know, a company choosing to have a certain assets in AWS, certain assets in Azure, certain in Google. So, I don't see yet this idea of an app being stretched across the three clouds but definitely, while I was-- >> VMware tried that. (both laugh) >> While I was at VMware and in talking to customers, we definitely saw adoption of multiple clouds. And that's where when I was working with the cloud health team, this idea of managing cost and security across three clouds became very common as a pattern that came up. You definitely see that as a kind of directional thing that a lot of organizations are doing. >> Yeah, the idea of just rapidly shifting up workloads based on pricing, all that stuff. I think it's aspirational at best because development teams are now just getting their groove on with hybrid and operation, cloud operations. So, I can see a day where if you can manage the latency network issues, maybe some day, but I mean, come on, really? I think about how hard that is, just latency alone. >> And the issue is like, architecturally you have to make really good choices to get there. So, I think you might see that in like kind of tech software firms. We're thinking about, how do I stay cloud neutral? But for the most part, if you want to take the full value of AWS or full value of GCP, you want to go deeper in there. And use all their services. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight. Let's riff on that a little bit because one of the things I was talking to Dave Alante and Stu Miniman about was, if you look at the multicloud, I don't think it's going to come from a vendor. I think if you look at the success of the Facebooks of the world, even Dropbox where your founders came from, early on, they had to just basically build it from cloud native, from ground up. And all the hyper scalers use open source. They built all their stuff. No one was selling them anything. They just did it. So, I think you'll see smart architectural moves, but that'll be the unicorn. That'll not be the standard. That'll be the exception, not the rule. I don't think you can sell multicloud, in my opinion, yet, or I don't think that'll even be possible. But I think someone will come out and say, make those architectural decisions saying, "I have an architecture that works multicloud because we architect it that way." >> Yup, yup. And I think that's kind of the more, kind of from an engineering standpoint, I think you'll see more of that. I think from a, you know, from a kind of solution standpoint, you will see folks saying, "I will help you manage or secure or build into each of the clouds and give you kind of common pattern versus the latter of it." And engineering team says, "Here's a way to architect for multicloud." >> You know, we pay a lot of attention to the next gen kind of psychologies. Obviously, we do a lot of coding on with our cube cloud that's coming out now. But, how do you see the founders you're working with and that in this new peer group that's developing. I call it, the next gen entrepreneur, technical entrepreneur. As they look at the vast resources of cloud and all of the data opportunities there and mobility, internet things and all this stuff going on. What is the general mindset right now of these kinds of entrepreneurs from a technology perspective? How are they looking at the problem space? What's your take on this new landscape as an entrepreneur? >> Yeah, I'll give you kind of what got me super excited about Sentry. Like how, why did I think about that? Which is if you look at 2000 to 2010, we did software defined infrastructure. Things started moving into software. 2010 to 2020 was, as you correctly wanted a cloud, hybrid, everything became kind of as a service. I think this next decade will be about data. So, companies using the data to get a competitive advantage or figuring out, you know, how to stay ahead, whether it's competitively or even to win a market. And the other aspect of this is because everything is so, as a service, API centric, I think it's going to explode how we develop things. And I think this is going to be truly now the decade for the developer, who's going to make deeper choices, greater choices, buying decisions. And so, with data kind of exploding, and the management of it and getting insights out of it is one aspect of it. And, you know, as somebody who's looking at Sentry, we do a lot of that, right? Which is how are customers using it? What are they using? What languages? And everything else that goes with that. But on the other end, developers are going to start kind of using things and create a whole new set of use cases that's going to change the way we think about it. So I think there's a whole set of elements around how to use this infrastructure to build new applications, creative products, that is going to be a massive boom. >> I think that's a great point. I think that's great insight. Because you think about observability, which I was just joking earlier on about, but I think the relevance observability is network management applied to value real time, right? Because if you can instrument everything, the smart people are going to saying, "Hey, I can just instrument this and get the data I need rather than dealing with this hassle process we had before." So, it brings up that kind of philosophy of kill the old to bring in the new or something new that kills the old. So, it's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's very relevant. But I want to get your, question as a CEO now, you've got, you're at the helm, helm of a company is technical. And talking about architecture, what's your architecture for the venture? What's your plans? How do you see the, you said you're going to come and build this next level growth. What's your architecture look like? Are you going to, do more of the same? Any new things that we see? What are you going to... What's your plan? >> Fundamentally, you know, we as a kind of set of users in the world today, have spent a lot of time monitoring, as I told you earlier, machines, systems and applications, right? And so there's a lot of successful companies doing that. But if you fundamentally believe that this is the decade where you're going to write more code than we've ever before or refresh more applications than we've ever before. Our focus is code and how it does whether it's in a staging environment, in a canary deployment, or in production. How do we measure code and monitor code in production. And the impact of that code to the end users. So it could be errors and now increasingly code performance. So you will see us kind of venture into this idea of helping developers. Not only find issues that they run into production like we talked about before, but also be able to say, looks like over the past three releases, our logins per second have gone down progressively by 10%. Why is that happening? Where is that happening? Which team made that change? So, you will see us kind of really double down on this idea of measuring and monitoring code going forward, complimenting how we measure monitor systems, machines and applications today. >> Yeah, I mean, code has got to be managed, as people more, people contribute. It's like a compiler for the compiler. (laughs) >> It's like if code fails, your business-- >> Code for the code. >> Yeah. >> Meta three meta meta as they say, but code for the code. But that's, it's basically code management in a way, right? It's the code data. You're leveraging that code relationship to the application. >> And so we talk about applications a lot. And so we write code, we store code, you know, in a getRepository. Now there's a whole set of elements around securing it. We deploy it. What about measuring and monitoring it? That is the element where we focus and kind of bring that whole cycle together. Helping that application developer be successful. >> What's it like for you going from VMware to the startup? What's the biggest, coolest thing that's happened? >> It's been a great transition. You know, and I always say this to folks who ask me for career advice. They say, always choose the people you work with and the people you work for. And I've been fortunate enough to do that and I think this transition has been great for that reason alone. Which is I've had the time to get to know the team at Sentry. They got to know me and it's just been, it's been fantastic. I think the velocity of and the pace at which I can make changes, has been the most fun part of it. >> And you've got like 25, 20000 paying customers 50000 total customers roughly in that range. Pretty sizeable. Employee count, how many employees do you have? >> 100 plus employees and-- >> Still small, still small. >> Yeah, still small. And we're going to probably double this year, give or take. And you know, it's 20000 customers from every startup. I've spoken to a startups, over 100 startups in two months. And it's amazing to see their reaction and their love for Sentry. >> And funding, how many rounds of funding have you guys done? >> We just finished Series C, in September of last year. 40 million, any Accel growth. So, we feel really good about where we are. With the revenue ramp that we've seen, we're in great shape. >> And pretty good numbers in terms of a head count too, very leveraged SaaS model. Get the developers. >> Yes. >> Great. Well, we're going to be entertaining a lot of developers at DockerCon this year. DockerCon used to be an event for Docker. Now they sold half the business to Mirantis. They're focusing on Docker developers. We have an event here. We're doing a virtual event. So, a lot more developer action coming. We'll talk more about that. Love to meet your founders, have them come in too. We want to thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Milin Desai, CEO of sentry.io, former VMware executive with a great hot startup, Series C funded, growing here in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and in Austria. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)