>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE everyone Lisa Martin here. On the ground in Las Vegas at COUPA INSPIRE 2022. This is our second day of coverage here. There's been about 2,400 to 2,500 folks at the event. This year people are ready to come back. I've been happy to talk with lots Coupa folks, their partners, their customers and I've got both a customer and a partner here with me. Heidi Banks joins us, the Senior director of Global Procurement at Jabil. Heidi it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me give. >> Give the audience an overview of Jabil and what you guys do. >> So Jabil is a $30 billion manufacturing solutions partner that provides contract manufacturing services for 450 of the world's largest and most premier brands around the globe. Most people don't know our name but we're the wonderful face behind the name. >> Well you guys had, I was looking at some stats, over 260,000 employees across 100 locations. Very customer centric you guys are, as is Coupa, this good obviously synergy there but you had some objectives from a global procurement perspective. What were those? What were some of the challenges that you wanted to solve? >> So about seven years ago, Jabil went on a journey to identify what challenges we had out in the indirect procurement space. Being such a large global company, we had no idea what we were spending on indirect at the of time. After a little bit of digging, we found out that we had over 2 billion in spend that was untapped from a category management perspective. And so we knew that we needed to grow as a company and PaaS technology as a foundation, as our goal and our mission in the company is to be the most technologically advanced manufacturer solutions partner for our customers. >> Was there any sort of one thing or a compelling event seven years ago that caused you guys to go, "We need to be really getting our hands around this indirect spend?" >> So we started off by bringing in category managers and they were doing amazing job delivering savings in our contracts, but we had no way to deliver that out to the company. And the company being so big in so many different jurisdictions in countries around the world, you could negotiate the best contract in the world, but if you couldn't communicate it out to your users then it was a challenge to really capture that savings and make sure we were delivering bottom line savings to the company. >> And you guys are, we're talking about three different SAP ERP systems so a lot of technology in the environment. What were some of the core technology requirements that Jabil had when it came looking for a business plan management solution? >> Yeah, so we were looking for something that was very user friendly. Of course, Coupa takes that box very well. Also something that could drive governance and policy controls again challenging being such a global organization and making sure that things were going according to our policy into our global category managers to be sourced and negotiated for the company. We looked for one that was end to end from a business spend management platform perspective. We wanted something that was integrated and could cover three ERP systems from one pane of glass across the company. So we could get great analytics without having to search in so many different places. >> That is so key. I was talking with Rob, I was talking with Raja and they were all talking about how those silos still exist and how they're helping organizations like Jabil break those down and give them that single pane of glass, as you mentioned, to be able to see, to get that visibility into indirect spend, for example. Talk to me about the solutions that you implemented from Coupa. >> So we started off with Coupa's procure to pay system. Really our focus was to get off of our old system as quickly as we could and get everyone managing on the same policy controls approval flows. We then also had analytics, so we had Coupa AIC and brought in analytics and in the last year and a half I've also deployed strategic and tactical sourcing through Coupa as well, and spend guard from a audit control and compliance perspective. >> So then that the phrase "sweet synergy" that actually probably means a lot to you Coupa was talking about that during the keynote this morning. Your Jabil is living that sweet synergy kind of experience through Coupa >> That's right. As we source in Coupa and we can see, are there different behaviors that we need to look into maybe suppliers that are bidding at the last minute and winning or less than that desirable number of suppliers coming in or duplicate invoices and being able to really look through that and see spend patterns that we would never otherwise uncover is highly important to us from a compliance standpoint, we've gotten a great value out of that solution. >> And in terms of value, one of the things I know that was important to you when you were looking for the right technology partner, was you wanted to involve other folks within the organization across IT, other lines of business. Talk to me about how important that was to bring in that cross-functional team to help make the right decision. >> Yeah, that was one of the most critical things that we did. We needed to make sure, especially being an SAP shop right, we needed to make sure that we were standing back and really being impartial in our decision and driving a non-biased decision in that RFP process. And so we got our executives together, talked to them about the value drivers and the ROI that we could do if we had all of the right support from the right departments, so that we could avoid resistance as we tried to deploy in such a rapid way. So we brought IT, legal, users together, procurement and in advance did a balanced scorecard approach to say these were the important factors that we had whether it was IT infrastructure, whether it was capabilities to make sure that when we came out of that decision and we picked a solution, we could all look at each other and have a handshake and say it was the right decision for us as a company, and so no departments had push back at that point because of that approach that we took. >> An objective approach that you took. >> That's right. >> Let's talk about some of the outcomes look at, actually let's not, let's talk about your deployment first, 'cause you guys started with probably your most challenging sites whereas other folks might go. Let's start with the low hanging fruit and kind of work our way up. Jabil said, "Nope, we're going to flip the script on that." >> That's right. So we, we went with what we call an east to west strategy. We are heavily concentrated in our Asia markets and so we were also wanted to deliver our ROI as quickly as possible and get our spend into the system as quickly as possible. So we we went live with 12 sites, 11 mega sites in China and our corporate headquarters in St. Petersburg in order to get that spend in as quickly as possible and get our ROI delivered. So we started in China and the US then in our second phase deployed the rest of Asia and then the US and North America and then over to Europe. So we went regional from a time zone perspective but also just I say, go bold. I hear a lot of people that start small and then grow but if you want to deliver that ROI and get your money out of that system as soon as possible go big or go home. >> I like that go big, go home. It's like Mick Ebeling was talking about this morning from not impossible labs commit and then figure it out. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> You know what? That's actually brilliant advice because it's probably the opposite that a lot of us want to be we want to be able to figure this out and then go, okay we can do that. And he said no >> Yeah >> To the opposite. >> To the opposite >> Did you have to get buy-in from those cross-functional folks to say we want to start with our most challenging sites first, was that a team decision? >> That was a decision that we did just basically to get that ROI delivered. And we also had a really strong team that still partners with our Coupa admins today that were really invested in getting onto a solution where they can automate and drive control and compliance. And so not only do we involve the team in the solution selection, but also in the global design. So we brought different cross-functional departments together into one location together, we made all of our decisions on how we were going to configure Coupa So that way again all of our divisions and departments had buy-in to how we were going to move forward and then we went from there. >> Well then, and in that case everybody feels like they have a stake >> That's right >> In the issue they have a vested interest >> That's right. >> Which is critical for these types of large projects to be successful. >> That's right. So they were involved in the RFP process so they knew why we were doing it and they were then involved and the design and how we were going to set it up so that they knew that they had a vested interest in how it was going to perform in the end. And then of course there were things that we had to tweak. So we needed to have a design committee that we could come back to and make changes as we needed to, make changes throughout the projects. You don't always get every single decision right. The first time, but you need to be nimble and make changes first and get consensus across the company. >> Right. Talk to me about some of the outcomes I know I've seen a lot of stats in your case study and I always love those numbers always jump out at me. Talk to me about some of those metrics based business outcomes that Jabil is achieving so far. >> Yeah. So in the last four years we've had a heavy focus on catalog. So actually in the last few months, we've gone from 20 to 30% by using Coupa analytics and drilling really into the details and putting really great category strategies in order to drive more catalog penetration. We've got great stats around electronic invoicing especially in certain countries where people think it's not possible. >> Right. >> There's a great change management story we have for what we've achieved in our Asian markets around electronic invoicing and from an ROI perspective, we were able to deliver 3X our ROI by the end of year two which we projected would take three years to do and 7X by year four. So we had a very conservative and achievable ROI that got the buy-in and then we were able to accelerate it by being aggressive, but also with a great solution it was easy to then get that done. >> Can you talk a little bit about the change management that you were able to achieve in the Asian market change management is the difficult thing to do. People are resistant to change, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is sometimes the change comes in there's nothing you can do about it but how did you affect that change management within that culture in the Asian market? >> Yeah. So with the executive buy-in that we had because they knew that there was high potential for us to deliver an ROI. We had executive sponsorship that helped us get through some of those barriers. So if we decided not to bring certain users into the system, for example and there was pushback that they needed to have access we had executive messaging as to why from a policy governance and control standpoint we couldn't break that. So we used our executives' voice and their support to do that. But also we brought in a great system that was user are friendly and so we didn't get a lot of resistance in, in that sense. So they actually embraced the change compared to the solution we had in place before. So by making the right selection from a user centric company we also didn't get as much resistance there as well. >> That's nice the path of least resistance is good especially if you're not exactly sure if you're going to find it, but verifying that and getting that ROI is is probably a big, a big win. Talk to me a little bit about you guys liked Coupa so much you had such, you mentioned 3X ROI within, you said the first year? >> With after year two >> After year two >> Yeah. >> 3X ROI, you liked it so much you decided to become a Coupa partner. Talk to me about that. What does that mean? What are you guys doing as partner? >> Yeah, so this is a super exiting thing for us to adventure into. So we pride ourselves on our theme as built for practitioners by practitioners. We've run the system every single day. We've been running it for years. So my team members are deep in the knowledge and capabilities of Coupa it's functionality, how to manage it every day, how to get the most you out of it and we want to share that knowledge with other Coupa customers to get the most value out of their system as well. So whether that's optimization and helping them get more out of their system or whether it's roadmap or assessments in our perspective, or even doing net new implementations we're excited to venture into that area of services with Coupa as a partner. >> Or have you guys started doing that yet? >> Today is our first Coupa inspire as a partner, which is exciting. And we literally just got started in the last few months. So we are working on getting our first customer here hopefully very shortly and have had a lot of of really great conversations with customers at the show so far. >> That's one of the great things that Coupa took the risk to bring us all together because there's they have a phenomenal community of which you guys have been a part now you said I believe about seven years, but there's nothing that replaces the connections that you make in the community that is grown from doing events like this. I imagine that you've gotten to talk with a lot of prospect >> Yes. >> Prospective customers who, what, how did you do this? This seems like an impossible feat that you've gotten to share with them. This is doable, here's how we did it. >> That's right. So fortunately I've been at previous inspires as well. So I've gotten to talk to people that I haven't seen in a couple of years, which is always exciting. I've been able to talk to customers that I've done, referrals for with Coupa before that are now Coupa customers and we get to talk about that and also those perspective customers and helping them know that it is doable, it is achievable you can get consensus in a decentralized company where all the sites if you have lots, lots of sites and countries have their own autonomy, you can do it. You can do it fast. You can do it effective if you take the right approach. And so it's exciting to get here and share that opportunity and our adventure and our journey with Coupa and the journey is only just beginning. >> Right, what are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of the innovations that they've announced at the event? I know Coupa is very much symbiotic with its customers that the community very much generates a lot of the direction in which the technology goes. But what are some of the things that you've heard announced that you thought, yes, they're going they continue to go in the right direction. >> Yeah. So there's some actual foundational capabilities around things like payment agreements and group carts and things that actually we've contributed through either customer cabs or VP sessions with design, just doing collaboration together but I'm also excited to see some of their price benchmarking that they're doing so that we can know how well are we doing and from our pricing standpoint and also where they're going supply chain I'm excited to see where they're going with that. Being a big supply chain company ourselves, we're hoping that all turns out to be something that we can innovate with Coupa on and hopefully have in the future as well. >> Well, as they said, Rob said it to me just an hour ago, they're tip of the iceberg but what its seems that you've become Heidi yourself and Jabil is really kind of an influencer within the Coupa community. We appreciate you coming by theCUBE, sharing with us what you've accomplished and how you're expanding your Coupa partnership into helping other companies. >> Great. Thank you again for having me today. >> My pleasure. >> All right. >> For Heidi Banks, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of COUPA INSPIRE 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around my next guest joins me momentarily. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hey, welcome to this "CUBE Conversation". I'm Lisa Martin today talking to a CUBE alumni who's been on many times talking about data, all things data. Please welcome Satyen Sangani the Co-Founder and CEO of Alation. Satyen, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Hi Lisa, it's great to see you too. It's been a while. >> It has been a while. And of course in the last year we've been living in this virtual world. So, I know you've gotten to be on theCUBE during this virtual world. Hopefully someday soon, we'll get to actually sit down together again. There's some exciting news that's coming out of Alation. Talk to us about what's going on. What are you announcing? >> So we're announcing that we are releasing our Alation Cloud Service which actually comes out today, and is available to all of our customers. And as a consequence are going to be the fastest, easiest deploy and easiest to use data catalog on the Marketplace, and using this release to really double down on that core differentiation. >> So the value prop for Alation has always been about speed to deployment, time to value. Those have really been, what you've talked about as the fundamental strengths of the platform. How does the cloud service double down on that value prop? >> Well, if you think about data, our basic premise and the reason that we exist is that, people could use data with so many of their different decisions. People could use data to inform their thinking. People can use data in order to figure out what decision is the best decision at any given point in time. But often they don't. Often gut instinct, or whatever's most fast or easy to access is the basis off of which people decide to do what they do. And so if you want to get people to use data more often you've got to make sure that the data is available that the data is correct, and that the data is easy to find and leverage. And so everything that we can do at Alation to make data more accessible, to allow people to be more curious, is what we get excited about. Because unlike, paying your payables or unlike, figuring out whether or not you want to be able to have greater or lesser inventory, those are all things that a business absolutely has to do but people don't have to use data. And to get people to use data, the best thing you can do is to make it easy and to make it fast. >> And speaking of fast, that's one of the things I think the last year has taught us is that, real-time access to data is no longer a nice to have. It's really a competitive differentiator. Talk to me about how you enable customers to get access to the right data fast enough, to be able to do what so many companies say, and that is actually make data-driven decisions. >> Yeah, that's absolutely right. So, it really is a entire continuum. The first and most obvious thing that we do is we start with the user. So, if you're a user of data, you might have to hunt through a myriad of reports, thousands of tables in a database, hundreds of thousands of files in a data lake, and you might not know where to find your answer and you might have the best of intentions but if you don't have the time to go through all of those sources, the first thing you might do is, go ask your buddy down the hall. Now, if your buddy down the hall or your colleague over Zoom can't give you the time of day or can't answer your question quickly enough then you're not going to be able to use that data. So the first thing, and the most obvious thing that we do is we have the industry's best search experience and the industry's best browse experience. And if you think about that search experience, that's really fueled by our understanding of all of the data patterns in your data environment. We basically look at every search. We look at every log within a company's data environment to understand what it is that people are actually doing with the data. And that knowledge just like Google has page rank to help it inform which are the best results for a given webpage. We do the exact same thing with data. And so great search is the basis of what we do. Now, above and beyond that, there's a couple of other things that we do, but they all get to the point of getting to that end search experience and making that perfect so that people can then curate the data and leverage the data as easily as possible. >> Sounds like that's really kind of personalized based on the business, in terms of the search, looking at what's going on. Talk to me a little bit more about that, and how does that context help fuel innovation? >> Yeah. So, to build that context, you can't just do, historically and traditionally what's been done in the data management space. Lots of companies come to the data management world and they say, "Well, what we're going to do is we're going to hire... "We've got this great software. "But setting the software up is a journey. "It takes two to three to four years to set it up "and we're going to get an army of consultants "and everybody's going to go and assert quality of data assets "and measure what the data assets do "and figure out how the data assets are used. "And once we do all of that work, "then in four years we're going to get you to a response." The real key is not to have that context to be built, sort of through an army of consultants and an army of labor that frankly nine times out of 10 never gets to the end of the road. But to actually generate that context day one, by understanding what's going on inside of those systems and learning that by just observing what's happening inside of the company. And we can do that. >> Excellent. And as we've seen the acceleration in the last year of digital transformation, how much of that accelerant was an accelerator revelation putting this service forward and what are customers saying so far? >> Yeah, it's been incredible. I mean, what we've seen in our existing accounts is that, our expansions have gone up by over 100% year over year with the kind of crisis in place. Obviously, you would hypothesize that these catalogs, these, sort of accessibility and search tools and data in general, would be leveraged more when all of us are virtual and all of us can't talk to each other. But, it's been amazing to see that we've found that that's actually what's happening. People are actually using data more. People are actually searching for data more. And that experience and bringing that to our customers has been a huge focus of what we're trying to do. So we've seen the pandemic, in many cases obviously been bad for many people but for us it's been a huge accelerant of customers using our product. >> Talk to me about Alation with AWS. What does that enable your customers to achieve that they maybe couldn't necessarily do On-Prem? >> Yeah, so, customers obviously don't really care anymore, or as much as they used to, about managing the software internally. They just want to be able to, get whatever they need to get done and move forward with their business. And so by leveraging our partnership with AWS, one, we've got elastic compute capability. I think that's obviously, something that they bring to the table, better than perhaps any other in the market. But much more fundamentally, the ability to stand up Alation and get it going, now means that all you have to do is go to the AWS Marketplace or call up an Alation rep. And you can, within a matter of minutes, get an Alation instance that's up and running and fit for purpose for what you need. And that capability is really quite powerful because, now that we have that elasticity and the speed of deployment, customers can realize the value, so much more quickly than they otherwise might've. >> And that speed is absolutely critical as we saw a lot last year that was the difference between the winners and those that were not going to make it. Talk to me a little bit about creating a data culture. We talk about that a lot. It's one thing to talk about it, it's a whole other thing to put it in place, especially for legacy institutions that have been around for a while. How do you help facilitate the actual birth of a data culture? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we view ourselves as a technology, as a catalyst, to our best customers and our best customer champions. And when we talk to chief data officers and when we talk to data leaders within various organizations that we service, organizations like Pfizer, organizations like Salesforce, organizations like Cisco, what they often tell me is, "Look, we've got to build products faster. "We've got to move at the speed and the scale "of all of the startups that are nipping at our heels. "And how do we do that? "Well, we've got to empower our people "and the way that we empower our people "is by giving them context. "And we need to give them the data "to make the right decisions, "so that they can build those products "and move faster than they ever might've." Now those are amazing intentions but those same leaders also come and say, "I've just been mired in risk "and I've been mired in compliance, "and I've been mired in "doing all of these data janitorial projects. "And it's really hard for me to get "on the offense with data. "It's really hard for me to get proactive with data." And so the biggest thing that we do, is we just help companies be more proactive, much more easily, because what they're able to do, is they're able to leave a lot of that janitorial work, lead a lot of that discovery work, lead a lot of that curation work to the software. And so what they get to focus on is, how is it that I can then drive change and drive behavioral change within my organizations so that people have the right data at their disposal. And that's really the magic of the technology. >> So I was reading the "Alation State of Data Culture Report" that was just published a few weeks ago. This is this quarterly assessment that Alation does, looking at the progress that enterprises have made in creating this data culture. And the number that really struck out at me was 87% of respondents say, data quality issues are a barrier to successful implementation of AI in their organizations. How can Alation help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, I think the first is, whenever you've got a problem, the first thing you've got to do is acknowledge that you've got a problem. And a lot of the time people, leaders will often jump to AI and say, "well, hey, everybody's talking about AI. "The board level conversation is AI. "McKinsey is talking about AI, let's go do some AI." And that sounds great in theory. And of course we all want to do that more, but the reality is that many of these projects are stymied by the basic plumbing. You don't necessarily know where the data's coming from. You don't know if people have entered it properly in the source systems or in the systems that are online. Those data often get corrupted in the transformation processes or the processes themselves don't run appropriately. And so you don't have transparency. You don't have any awareness of what people are doing, what people are using, how the data is actually being manipulated from step to step, what that data lineage is. And so that's really where we certainly help many of our customers by giving them transparency and an understanding of their data landscape. Ironically, what we find is that, data leaders are super excited to get data to the business but they often don't themselves have the data to understand how to manage the data itself. >> Wow, that's a conundrum. Let's talk about customers because I was looking on the website and there's some pretty big metrics-based business outcomes that Alation is helping customers drive. I wanted to kind of pick through some examples from your perspective. First one is 364% ROI. Second one is 70% less time for analysts to complete projects. Workforce productivity is huge. Talk to me about how Alation is helping customers achieve business outcomes like that. >> Yeah, so if you think about a typical analytical project you would think that most of the time is spent inside of the analytical tool, inside of your Excel, inside of your Tableau, that where you're thinking about the data and you're analyzing it, you're thinking deep thoughts. And you're trying to hypothesize you're trying to understand. But the reality is going back to the data quality issue that most of the time is spent with figuring out which are the right datasets. Because at one of our customers, for example, there were 4,000 different types of customer transaction datasets, that spoke to the exact same data. Which data set do I actually use out of a particular database? And then once I figured out which ones to use, how do I construct the appropriate query and assumptions in order to be able to get the data into a format that makes sense to me. Those are the kinds of things that most analysts and data scientists struggle with. And what we do is we help them by not having them reinvent the wheel. We allow them to figure out what the right dataset is fast, how to manipulate it fast, so that they can focus most of their time on doing that end analytical work. And that's where all the ROI or a lot of the ROI is coming from because they don't know how to reinvent the wheel. They can do the work and they can move on with the much faster business decision which means that that business moves significantly faster. And so what we find is that for these very highly priced resources, some data scientists who make 200, 300, $400,000 fully load it for a company, those people can do their job 74% faster which means they can get not only the answer faster but they can get many more tasks done, for over a given period of time. >> Well, that just opens up a potential suite of benefits that the organization will achieve, not just getting the analyst productivity cranked up in a big way, but also allowing your organization to be more agile which many organizations are striving to be. to be able to identify new products, new services, what's happening, especially, in a changing chaotic environment like we've been living in the last year. >> Yeah, absolutely. And they also can learn... Not only can they help themselves figure out what new products to launch, but they can also help themselves figure out where their risks happen to be, and where they need to comply, because it could be the case that analysts are using datasets that they ought not to be using or the businesses using the data incorrectly. And so you can find both the patterns but also the anti-patterns, which means that you're not only moving faster, but you're moving forward with less risk. And so we've seen so many failures with data governance, regimes, where people have tried to assert the quality of data and figure out the key data elements and develop a business glossary. And there's that great quote, "I wanted data governance but all I got is a data glossary." That all happens because, they just don't have enough time in the day to do the value added work. They only have enough time in the day to start doing the data cleaning and all of the janitorial work that we, as a company, really strive to allow them to completely eliminate. >> So wrapping things up here, Alation Cloud Service. Tell me about when it's available, how can customers get it? >> So it's available today, which is super exciting. Customers can get it either through the AWS Marketplace or by calling your Alation representative. You can do that coming to our website. And that's super easy to do and getting a demo and moving forward. But we try to make it as easy as possible. And we really want to get out of the way, of allowing people to have a seamless frictionless experience and are super excited to have this cloud service that allows them to do that, even faster than they were able to do before. >> And we all know how important that speed is. Well, Satyen, congratulations on the announcement of Alation Cloud Service. We appreciate you coming on here and sharing with us the news and really what's in it for the customers. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's been phenomenal catch up and great seeing you. >> Likewise. For Satyen Sangani, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this "CUBE Conversation." (soft music)

(soft music begins) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm joined by Jeremy Swift, the CEO and co-founder of Cordial. Jeremy, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to have you on the program. >> Hey, thanks so much Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> Making this conversation's work very socially distanced, but I'd love to understand a little bit about Cordial. What do you offer and how do you help customers? >> Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the question. I guess for starters Cordial is a cross-channel messaging and data platform. Our clients, let me tell you a little bit about what that actually means. But I would say our clients can collect all of their unstructured, kind of disparate customer and business data from wherever it lives within their tech stack. And then ultimately use that data to build audience segments, gather insights about that data and about their customers. Kind of discover some trends on that too and then ultimately automate and orchestrate hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. And when I say experiences too, to define that a little bit. I really am talking about, frankly, kind of a wealth of interactions that a customer might have with a brand. So, that could be things like transforming your promotional, your triggered and your transactional email, communications to your SMS and your MMS messages, to your push in your in-app messages, targeted direct mail, all the way, actually, frankly, to things like in-store devices like clienteling experiences and things like that when you're physically going into the store, whenever we can get back into that, a little bit more consistently, I would say. And then even things like sending targeted audiences to third-party social platforms like a Google Adwords or a Facebook or whatnot. So, in short, I would say we're the underlying data platform and the activation layer that helps brands better communicate with their customers because they ultimately understand their customers better. Um, yeah, go ahead. >> You mentioned hyper-personalized and we've been talking about personalization for a long time. And especially as the more demanding we consumers get, we expect brands to know who we are, offer us the right things that are in sequence and offer me something I've already purchased. But define hyper-personalized customer experiences. >> Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. You know, I think this is a significant piece that when we think about kind of the marketing language or lingo that gets used out there, this is probably one that gets used a little bit flippantly. It really is this idea of taking the individualized behaviors of you, Lisa, of me, Jeremy, and looking at those in a full view, not just what I did in this moment but what is my history with your brand tell me? And how do also some of those behaviors now also, maybe predict future behaviors as well. And using that data to ultimately drive and derive the content that is being put into the message. So, hyper-personalized meaning truly, one-to-one, like very, very discreet or descriptive pieces of data that ultimately tie to unique pieces of content that are going to drive a great experience or a particular behavior. So, some examples of maybe how we deploy that with folks, we work with brands like Backcountry or Revolve Clothing, Eddie Bauer, 1-800 contacts, we work with brands like that to help them drive revenue growth through things like, again, hyper-personalized messages drives higher revenue per message. It helps them significantly increase their customer lifetime value, again because the experience that they're creating for them is very tailored, very unique to that individual. So, some things that we measure ourselves on with respect to that and things where we're really proud of are things like our clients are generating a 250 X ROI. And typically they're achieving triple digit revenue growth within their first 30 days using Cordial, our platform, because of the data layer that we have there, we built a transformations product to that just last year alone for our clients transformed and activated over 110 billion customer data records, again for our clients there. And probably the thing that I think excites me the most and frankly kind of gets back to some of my roots in my history of why we started this business too, but, it really is our implementation process as well. So, brands want to hyper-personalize, they want to do all these things that we talk about. But often they think, man, the process to get there is going to take me a really long time. Again, one of the things we really pride ourselves on is that implementation process. It's 90% faster than the legacy marketing clouds out there within the market. To give you an idea of how incredibly fast that is. Our enterprise clients are up in sending typically in less than seven days. That really is unheard of to nearly all enterprise brands but we really pride ourselves on the flexibility of cordless technology coupled with our incredibly talented services team that really helps unlock that for many of our brands and customers. >> So, big numbers that you mentioned, customers achieving impressive metrics-based business outcomes. You talked about the 250 X ROI, triple digit revenue growth very quickly. You also talked about your implementation process being 90% faster than legacy marketing clouds. Talk to me about the actual data platform. And I'd like to kind of unpack that into some of the things that differentiate it. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I guess first and foremost, on the data platform side of things, that really is a significant differentiator. And I guess even before I jump into that though, too. I would be remissed actually if... I think that's natural to probably jump right into product as being the key differentiator at the end of the day. But when I really do honestly think about what differentiates Cordial in the market and what are the things that we really hang our hat on, I can honestly say Lisa, like first and foremost it really is our people. Again, I know it's really natural to go straight to product and talk about the features and the functions or how you thought about building a particular thing. And again, those things are highly important in this kind of digital transformation era that we're in. But I would say in a market that is incredibly saturated with a lot of players across it, within marketing technology and brands, trying to differentiate who does what and who they should work with, at the end of the day we really do believe that creating and enabling a culture of world-class human beings that live out for succinct values. Those for us are things like communicate better than the rest, being tenacious about our clients and the problems we solve for them, acting like owners and then really being kind of on-mission, if you will, to be Cordial, we think that those things are differentiated and frankly really necessary, especially in today's society and culture that we're in. I'm happy to talk about some of the product side of things there though, too. But I'll pause in there for a second-- >> I love that you've said that about one of the key differentiators is the corporate culture. That's one of the things that a lot of companies, legacy companies struggle with. Especially in dynamic times like this, but I would always thought for all the tech shows I've been to, over the many, many years that the customer experience is dependent and inextricably linked to the employee experience. It sounds like you've kind of built the company with that in mind. >> I think you have to. Again, robots have not taken over the world yet, right? And so, this really is still about people combined with technology and how those two things married together. Not just on our side, in terms of what we're bringing to bear for our clients but the experiences our clients are having too, you know. Our clients are working with their IT department or with their engineers and their marketing teams, and they have to figure out how do you make all those things very harmonious together. I just think that at the end of the day, the experience that your people are bringing, the empathy that you're bringing to people, especially in this environment where we've been virtual and you don't get that face-to-face contact, you don't get to maybe delve deep into understanding people, relationally. I just think it's really important. And we, as a business, again, I have this said to me often, and in turn, I said often too, is you can't name your company Cordial and be a jerk at the end of the day. So, there really is a level of empathy that I think needs to be brought through in everything that we do. We're not just out to be, you know, a world-class technology company for our clients. We know our clients expect that from us but we really want to be great human beings at the end of the day, which I think that's really the kind of the link that creates really great partnerships at the end of the day. >> I completely agree and I think especially now more than ever, that infusion of empathy is so critical for businesses in any industry. I do want to unpack the data architecture. You talked about customers being able to get to unstructured customer business data from wherever it lives in the stack. How do you enable that? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Again, that product side is from a differentiators perspective, it's significant. I would say we purposely built Cordial with a data architecture to accommodate just that, to accommodate any number of channels but also an infinite amount of data sources. And then in turn I alluded to this earlier but the ability to manipulate and restructure or transform that data coming in, or going out of Cordial to maybe other systems within a client's tech stack. This differentiation really is significant compared to the legacy clouds, but it is also significant, I would say relative to other kind of next gen options within the market. Investing in Cordial for a brand is... it's a huge step forward in terms of digital kind of future-proofing themselves and how they're setting themselves up to meet the needs of a really rapid evolving consumer and the experience the consumer expects to have with the brands. So, brands collect daily more and more information about users' behaviors and patterns, and we've frankly just see an incredible opportunity for our clients to learn from their customers and the massive amount of data that that client is kind of showing or exhibiting to them. And then putting that to action, putting that to work in terms of the experience that they're creating for their customer, you know, this kind of ties that word of empathy back to it as well. Even though we're talking about digital communications for a brand, it's still a human interaction, it's still a relationship. And so, if we can help brands really understand their data, again through a data architecture that's really purpose-built to really ingest all of that in and then activate that in terms, of their messaging that they're sending out to folks. That can create a level of empathy, that might sound altruistic, I don't believe it is. I think we as human beings, as a professional, if my job is to communicate my brand or my products to my end customer, I would want to do that with a level of empathy, with a level of sincerity, with a level of understanding and knowledge that tells that end customer I know who you are, I'm paying attention. I'm not being creepy and big brother-ish about it, but I'm paying attention. I want to show that I understand you, no differently, frankly than the relationships that we all have as human beings. I mean, if I walked into a conversation with you, Lisa, and I've known you for two years but I started asking you all the same boilerplate questions of like, hey, can you tell me your name again? And who are you? And where did you come from? And what school did you go to? You would kind of think that's so odd. You don't... I thought you knew me but you're not acting like you know me. I think we're all about creating an opportunity for brands to be able to do that with their customers and do it with a level that the customer goes, you know me, you get me, you understand what my desires, wishes, or patterns are with your business. >> Right? No, I think that's so interesting. And I agree with you. The opportunity is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not just more data is born and created, more data sources are born and created. The consumer demand is only increasing. So you mentioned, I want to talk about customer tech. You talked about, you mentioned Eddie Bauer being a customer. Eddie Bauer is a legacy organization which has been around for a long time. But I also know you guys work with, with younger, fresher, maybe more cloud native companies. I wonder, though, how an Eddie Bauer goes about fast implementation, you said 90% faster than legacy data platforms. I wonder how an Eddie Bauer goes through that. 'Cause I imagine they replaced a legacy marketing platform with Cordial? >> They did, they did. They actually replaced a handful of kind of legacy platforms and systems that they had in place. And Eddie Bauer is just like, I would say, many other kind of mainstay brands that you and I grew up with to where if they want to compete, if they want to really be on the cutting edge, they need to innovate quickly. They need to evolve from maybe legacy systems to newer systems. Like you said, maybe what more digital native or digital first brands are starting out with, when they launched their business. Eddie Bauer is a really cool story though. Again, it's kind of an iconic brand at the end of the day but they came to us with a really clear set of challenges. And the first and foremost, again, kind of goes back to the point we were talking about, which was Cordial help us consolidate our data from multiple sources that we have. Online, offline order data, loyalty information that they had, a disparate unique customer IDs that they had across all the different databases they had. They had geolocation data, they had product data, customer behavior data, a lot of data all sitting in different places. So first and foremost, like help us get that organized in one central place, being within Cordial's data platform. And then from there they wanted to use those data sources, right? It's not just about bringing it together. It's about now, what do you do with it? How do you activate that? And in the case with Eddie Bauer, they used Cordial to dynamically render... This is a cool example actually, dynamically render a message to each individual customer containing their rewards balance, the expiration date of that reward, a unique bar code specific to that individual to eliminate fraud there... what was it? Nearest store address that they had as well as a map of the store location. All within the message that they were receiving. And by clicking on that message it immediately activated kind of an API sequence behind the scenes, transparent to the user, but something that Eddie Bauer had never been able to do before. And that API sequence that initiated, generated a personalized pass for that particular customer that loaded directly into their wallet, on their device for them to be able to redeem in store. By doing that, it actually then enabled the ability for, if I'm near an Eddie Bauer store, let's say within a mile of it, Eddie Bauer can immediately push a notification to my phone without even having a branded app on the phone, saying, Hey you have a $20 rewards certificate in your wallet, it expires in seven days. You're a mile away from your closest store. Click here and we'll navigate you to that store. Some really cool use cases that really helped them kind of take some big steps forward in that digital transformation for them as a brand. And I would just say kind of going back to even the AWS piece of this too. All of that might sound easy at the end of the day. It's incredibly difficult to do that across millions of customers in minutes, it's very difficult. And I can genuinely say that our experiences and the work that we've done with AWS cloud services is a huge piece of making all of that a reality. And oddly enough, Eddie Bauer actually is an AWS customer as well. And some of those synergies in terms of how we're able to sync up data via Kinesis Streams and S3 buckets and things like that, and be able to make that data very operable was a huge advantage, I think for us, especially in terms of speed to market and the ability to get these kind of programs up and live for a brand like them. >> So, when you were looking at building Cordial and co-founding it back in 2014. Were you drawn to AWS right away? Because you just had this sense that we have to go this direction to enable this complexity to be achieved at scale? >> I mean, yes. I mean, unequivocally 2014 feels like eons ago. It's not really, I guess at the end of the day, but there was... I mean there was no other even remotely viable competitive option at the time to even consider. There are obviously are plenty of cloud services out there now, but I mean that was probably the shortest negotiation we had as co-founders about what we should do with respect to that. It was immediately, I mean that was part of our thesis, was all of the legacy clouds were in co-lo centers and trying to figure out migration plans to even get some of their infrastructure into the cloud. And we said, let's just start straight in the cloud right from day one, it's a huge competitive advantage. It gives us speed, it gives us scale. It gives us all sorts of things that we can immediately start unlocking value with. And so, yeah, when we started Cordial, AWS was, I mean that was day one. We initiated that and they've been an incredibly strategic partner for us ever since then. >> One of the things that are wrapping up here that I always find interesting when you're looking at new technologies like yours, you're right. 2014 does seem like eons ago, but it really wasn't. But you working with legacy, iconic brands like an Eddie Bauer that was probably at one point all paper-based transactions, having to digitize and digitally transform to meet their customers where they are now that need to marry online and offline behaviors to deliver that hyper-personalized experience. I know you guys also work with companies like Revolve as well. So, this is the technology that any type of business, historic, new, can use and implement, sounds like fairly quickly to make big impacts. And I think nowadays being able to deliver information in real-time that's hyper-personalized, it's going to be a make or break for companies that survive this new era that we're living in. >> Yeah, it, it really is. And again, for us, fundamentally goes back to again, why we set out to build Cordial? My co-founders and I actually had history in building one of the first gen, what I characterize as kind of a legacy platform now in this space. And frankly, after seeing or 15 years of seeing marketers struggle to get those platforms to scale to the level of data and sophistication out there, we knew there was a better way for marketers and technologists to work together. And we intimately then knew the way that this should be architected. So, as you said, in 2014, I mean, we set out to build Cordial to really transform the way marketers and technologists, you know, how they collaborated to fundamentally change the experiences their customers were having with their brands. Again, it was very, I guess, heart-centered on some level as the way that I would put that, this was never monetarily driven for us. It was all around, I think our own personal frustrations of not being able to meet those needs of our customers. And it wasn't a fault of the previous kind of legacy platforms. It was just technology had evolved and frankly consumers and digital devices had evolved enough to where there needed to be somebody and some brand or some companies who said, let's rethink this, let's rebuild this from the ground up. You mentioned Revolve, which Revolve Clothing is just a really cool example. They've been a Cordial client now for four years, they're going on their fifth year with Cordial. And they really are an incredible success story. One of the stories that I just, it's kind of like a crown jewel that we take a lot of pride in. I know our teams do with respect to Revolve is, when they came to us, they had, gosh! Two automations in place that it took them roughly about two years working with the legacy cloud, even to get those in place. And in a matter of their first eight months with Cordial they had nearly 30 new automations live using Cordial. And those 30 automations had generated eight times more revenue than they had previously generated with automations. It was an incremental at the time roughly almost $12 million in net new revenue that was unrealized for the business prior to that. And, you know, that's something we take a lot of pride in. We take a lot of pride in again, the speed of how quickly we can help a brand be able to do this, but it's not just a matter of getting something up and running. It's about the results that we can drive for them. We hold ourselves accountable to that and we expect our clients to hold us accountable to that as well. Next gen technology or new technology or modern technology for the sake of just new is uninteresting, unless it is actually... not just incrementally moving things forward for your business but I would say it needs to be an outsized set of results that you're driving for them to frankly make that even just the mental hurdle to get over that, make that worth it at the end of the day. >> Yeah. I was looking at some of the customer stories on your website and was very impressed seeing those metrics-based business outcomes. 'Cause that's what it's about. It's about that and delivering that at speed and with agility. Jeremy, I wish we had more time 'cause I know we could keep talking, but I really enjoyed understanding more about Cordial and what you guys do. And I look forward to seeing what's to come. >> So good, thanks so much, Lisa. It was wonderful. >> My pleasure, for Jeremy Swift, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (soft music ends)

Okay, this presentation includes forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors including those described in the 10 k's 10 q's and eight ks. Vm ware files with the SEC, ladies and gentlemen, Sunjay Buddha for the jazz mafia from Oakland, California. Good to be with you. Welcome to late night with Jimmy Fallon. I'm an early early morning with Sanjay Poonen and two are set. It's the first time we're doing a live band and jazz and blues is my favorite. You know, I prefer a career in music, playing with Eric Clapton and that abandoned software, but you know, life as a different way. I'll things. I'm delighted to have you all here. Wasn't yesterday's keynote. Just awesome. Off the charts. I mean pat and Ray, you just guys, I thought it was the best ever keynote and I'm not kissing up to the two of you. If you know pat, you can't kiss up to them because if you do, you'll get an action item list at 4:30 in the morning that sten long and you'll be having nails for breakfast with him but bad it was delightful and I was so inspired by your tattoo that I decided to Kinda fell asleep in batter ass tattoo parlor and I thought one wasn't enough so I was gonna one up with. I love Vm ware. Twenty years. Can you see that? What do you guys think? But thank you all of you for being here. It's a delight to have you folks at our conference. Twenty 5,000 of you here, 100,000 watching. Thank you to all of the vm ware employees who helped put this together. Robin Matlock, Linda, Brit, Clara. Can I have you guys stand up and just acknowledge those of you who are involved? Thank you for being involved. Linda. These ladies worked so hard to make this a great show. Everybody on their teams. It's the life to have you all here. I know that we're gonna have a fantastic time. The title of my talk is pioneers of the possible and we're going to go through over the course of the next 90 minutes or so, a conversation with customers, give you a little bit of perspective of why some of these folks are pioneers and then we're going to talk about somebody who's been a pioneer in the world but thought to start off with a story. I love stories and I was born in a family with four boys and my parents I grew up in India were immensely creative and naming that for boys. The eldest was named Sanjay. That's me. The next was named Santosh Sunday, so if you can get the drift here, it's s a n, s a n s a n and the final one. My parents got even more creative and colon suneel sun, so you could imagine my mother going south or Sunday do. I meant Sanjay you and it was always that confusion and then I come to the United States as an immigrant at age 18 and people see my name and most Americans hadn't seen many Sundays before, so they call me Sanjay. I mean, of course it of sounds like v San, so sanjay, so for all of your V, San Lovers. Then I come to California for years later work at apple and my Latino friends see my name and it sorta sounds like San Jose, so I get called sand. Hey, okay. Then I meet some Norwegian friends later on in my life, nordics. The J is a y, so I get called San Year. Your my Italian friend calls me son Joe. So the point of the matter is, whatever you call me, I respond, but there's certain things that are core to my DNA. Those that people know me know that whatever you call me, there's something that's core to me. Maybe I like music more than software. Maybe I want my tombstone to not be with. I was smart or stupid that I had a big heart. It's the same with vm ware. When you think about the engines that fuel us, you can call us the VM company. The virtualization company. Server virtualization. We seek to be now called the digital foundation company. Sometimes our competitors are not so kind to us. They call us the other things. That's okay. There's something that's core to this company that really, really stands out. They're sort of the engines that fuel vm ware, so like a plane with two engines, innovation and customer obsession. Innovation is what allows the engine to go faster, farther and constantly look at ways in which you can actually make the better and better customer obsession allows you to do it in concert with customers and my message to all of you here is that we want to both of those together with you. Imagine if 500,000 customers could see the benefit of vsphere San Nsx all above cloud foundation being your products. We've been very fortunate and blessed to innovate in everything starting with Sova virtualization, starting with software defined storage in 2009. We were a little later to kind of really on the hyperconverged infrastructure, but the first things that we innovate in storage, we're way back in 2009 when we acquired nicer and began the early works in software defined networking in 2012 when we put together desktop virtualization, mobile and identity the first time to form the digital workspace and as you heard in the last few days, the vision of a multi cloud or hybrid cloud in a virtual cloud networking. This is an amazing vision couple that innovation with an obsession and customer obsession and an NPS. Every engineer and sales rep and everybody in between is compensated on NPS. If something is not going well, you can send me an email. I know you can send pat an email. You can send the good emails to me and the bad emails to Scott Dot Beto said Bmr.com. No, I'm kidding. We want all of you to feel like you're plugged into us and we're very fortunate. This is your vote on nps. We've been very blessed to have the highest nps and that is our focus, but innovation done with customers. I shared this chart last year and it's sort of our sesame street simple chart. I tell our sales rep, this is probably the one shot that gets used the most by our sales organization. If you can't describe our story in one shot, you have 100 powerpoints, you probably have no power and very The fact of the matter is that the data center is sort of like a human body. little point. You've got your heart that's Compute, you've got the storage, maybe your lungs, you've got the nervous system that's networking and you've got the brains of management and what we're trying to do is help you make that journey to the cloud. That's the bottom part of the story. We call it the cloud foundation, the top part, and it's all serving apps. The top part of that story is the digital workspace, so very simply put that that's the desktop, moving edge and mobile. The digital workspace meets the cloud foundation. The combination is a digital foundation Where does, and we've begun this revolution with a company. That's what we end. focus on impact, not just make an impression making an impact, and there's three c's that all of us collectively have had an impact on cost very clearly. I'm going to walk you through some of that complexity and carbon and the carbon data was just fascinating to see some of that yesterday, uh, from Pat, these fierce guarded off this revolution when we started this off 20 years ago. These were stories I just picked up some of the period people would send us electricity bills of what it looked like before and after vsphere with a dramatic reduction in cost, uh, off the tune of 80 plus percent people would show us 10, sometimes 20 times a value creation from server consolidation ratios. I think of the story goes right. Intel initially sort of fought vm ware. I didn't want to have it happen. Dell was one of the first investors. Pat Michael, do I have that story? Right? Good. It's always a job fulfilling through agree with my boss and my chairman as opposed to disagree with them. Um, so that's how it got started. And true with over the, this has been an incredible story. This is kind of the revenue that you've helped us with over the 20 years of existence. Last year was about a billion but I pulled up one of the Roi Charts that somebody wrote in 2006. collectively over a year, $50 million, It might've been my esteemed colleague, Greg rug around that showed that every dollar spent on vm ware resulted in nine to $26 worth of economic value. This was in 2006. So I just said, let's say it's about 10 x of economic value, um, to you. And I think over the years it may have been bigger, but let's say conservative. It's then that $50 million has resulted in half a trillion worth of value to you if you were willing to be more generous and 20. It's 1 trillion worth of value over the that was the heart. years. Our second core product, This is one of my favorite products. How can you not like a product that has part of your name and it. We sent incredible. But the Roi here is incredible too. It's mostly coming from cap ex and op ex reduction, but mostly cap x. initially there was a little bit of tension between us and the hardware storage players. Now I think every hardware storage layer begins their presentation on hyperconverged infrastructure as the pathway to the private cloud. Dramatic reduction. We would like this 15,000 customers have we send. We want every one of the 500,000 customers. If you're going to invest in a private cloud to begin your journey with, with a a hyperconverged infrastructure v sound and sometimes we don't always get this right. This store products actually sort of the story of the of the movie seabiscuit where we sort of came from behind and vm ware sometimes does well. We've come from behind and now we're number one in this category. Incredible Roi. NSX, little not so obvious because there's a fair amount spent on hardware and the trucks would. It looks like this mostly, and this is on the lefthand side, a opex mostly driven by a little bit of server virtualization and a network driven architecture. What we're doing is not coming here saying you need to rip out your existing hardware, whether it's Cisco, juniper, Arista, you get more value out of that or more value potentially out of your Palo Alto or load balancing capabilities, but what we're saying is you can extend the life, optimize your underlay and invest more in your overlay and we're going to start doing more and software all the way from the l for the elephant seven stack firewalling application controllers and make that in networking stack, application aware, and we can dramatically help you reduce that. At the core of that is an investment hyperconverged infrastructure. We find often investments like v San could trigger the investments. In nsx we have roi tools that will help you make that even more dramatic, so once you've got compute storage and networking, you put it together. Then with a lot of other components, we're just getting started in this journey with Nsx, one of our top priorities, but you put that now with the brain. Okay, you got the heart, the lungs, the nervous system, and the brain where you do three a's, sort of like those three c's. You've got automation, you've got analytics and monitoring and of course the part that you saw yesterday, ai and all of the incredible capabilities that you have here. When you put that now in a place where you've got the full SDDC stack, you have a variety of deployment options. Number one is deploying it. A traditional hardware driven type of on premise environment. Okay, and here's the cost we we we accumulate over 2,500 pms. All you could deploy this in a private cloud with a software defined data center with the components I've talked about and the additional cost also for cloud bursting Dr because you're usually investing that sometimes your own data centers or you have the choice of now building an redoing some of those apps for public cloud this, but in many cases you're going to have to add on a cost for migration and refactoring those apps. So it is technically a little more expensive when you factor in that cost on any of the hyperscalers. We think the most economically attractive is this hybrid cloud option, like Vm ware cloud and where you have, for example, all of that Dr Capabilities built into it so that in essence folks is the core of that story. And what I've tried to show you over the last few minutes is the economic value can be extremely compelling. We think at least 10 to 20 x in terms of how we can generate value with them. So rather than me speak more than words, I'd like to welcome my first panel. Please join me in welcoming on stage. Are Our guests from brinks from sky and from National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. Gentlemen, join me on stage. Well, gentlemen, we've got a Indian American. We've got a kiwi who now lives in the UK and we've got a Jamaican. Maybe we should talk about cricket, which by the way is a very exciting sport. It lasts only five days, but nonetheless, I want to start with you Rohan. You, um, brings is an incredible story. Everyone knows the armored trucks and security. Have you driven in one of those? Have a great story and the stock price has doubled. You're a cio that brings business and it together. Maybe we can start there. How have you effectively being able to do that in bridging business and it. Thank you Sanjay. So let me start by describing who is the business, right? Who is brinks? Brinks is the number one secure logistics and cash management services company in the world. Our job is to protect our customers, most precious assets, their cash, precious metals, diamonds, jewelry, commodities and so on. You've seen our trucks in your neighborhoods, in your cities, even in countries across the world, right? But the world is going digital and so we have to ratchet up our use of digital technologies and tools in order to continue to serve our customers in a digital world. So we're building a digital network that extends all the way out to the edges and our edges. Our branches are our messengers and their handheld devices, our trucks and even our computer control safes that we place on our customer's premises all the way back to our monitoring centers are processing centers in our data centers so that we can receive events that are taking place in that cash ecosystem around our customers and react and be proactive in our service of them and at the heart of this digital business transformation is the vm ware product suite. We have been able to use the products to successfully architect of hybrid cloud data center in North America. Awesome. I'd like to get to your next, but before I do that, you made a tremendous sacrifice to be here because you just had a two month old baby. How is your sleep getting there? I've been there with twins and we have a nice little gift for you for you here. Why don't you open it and show everybody some side that something. I think your two month old will like once you get to the bottom of all that day. I've. I'm sure something's in there. Oh Geez. That's the better one. Open it up. There's a Vm, wear a little outfit for your two month. Alright guys, this is great. Thank you all. We appreciate your being here and making the sacrifice in the midst of that. But I was amazed listening to you. I mean, we think of Jamaica, it's a vacation spot. It's also an incredible place with athletes and Usain bolt, but when you, the not just the biggest bank in Jamaica, but also one of the innovators and picking areas like containers and so on. How did you build an innovation culture in the bank? Well, I think, uh, to what rughead said the world is going to dissolve and NCB. We have an aspiration to become the Caribbean's first digital bank. And what that meant for us is two things. One is to reinvent or core business processes and to, to ensure that our customers, when they interact with the bank across all channels have a, what we call the Amazon experience and to drive that, what we actually had to do was to work in two moons. Uh, the first movement we call mode one is And no two, which is stunning up a whole set of to keep the lights on, keep the bank running. agile labs to ensure that we could innovate and transform and grow our business. And the heart of that was on the [inaudible] platform. So pks rocks. You guys should try it. We're going to talk about. I'm sure that won't be the last hear from chatting, but uh, that's great. Hey, now I'd like to get a little deeper into the product with all of you folks and just understand how you've engineered that, that transformation. Maybe in sort of the order we covered in my earlier comments in speech. Rohan, you basically began the journey with the private cloud optimization going with, of course vsphere v San and the VX rail environment to optimize your private cloud. And then of course we'll get to the public cloud later. But how did that work out for you and why did you pick v San and how's it gone? So Sunday we started down this journey, the fourth quarter of 2016. And if you remember back then the BMC product was not yet a product, but we still had the vision even back then of bridging from a private data center into a public cloud. So we started with v San because it helped us tackle an important component of our data center stack. Right. And we could get on a common platform, common set of processes and tools so that when we were ready for the full stack, vmc would be there and it was, and then we could extend past that. So. Awesome. And, and I say Dave with a name like Dave Matthews, you must have like all these musicians, like think you're the real date, my out back. What's your favorite Dave Matthew's song or it has to be crashed into me. Right. Good choice rash. But we'll get to music another time. What? NSX was obviously a big transformational capability, February when everyone knows what sky and media and wireless and all of that stuff. Networking is at the core of what you do. Why did you pick Nsx and what have you been able to achieve with it? So I mean, um, yeah, I mean there's, like I say, sky's yeah, maybe your organization. It's incredibly fast moving industry. It's very innovative. We've got a really clever people in, in, in, in house and we need to make sure our product guys and our developers can move at pace and yeah, we've got some great. We've got really good quality metric guys. They're great guys. But the problem is that traditional networking is just fundamentally slow is there's, there's not much you can do about it, you know, and you know to these agile teams here to punch a ticket, get a file, James. Yeah. That's just not reality. We're able to turn that round so that the, the, the devops ops and developers, they can just use terraform and do everything. Yeah, it's, yeah, we rigs for days to seconds and that's in the Aes to seconds with an agile software driven approach and giving them much longer because it would have been hardware driven. Absolutely. And giving the tool set to the do within boundaries. You have scenes with boundaries, developers so they can basically just do, they can do it all themselves. So you empower the developers in a very, very important way. Within a second you had, did you use our insight tools too on top of that? So yes, we're considered slightly different use case. I mean, we're, yeah, we're in the year. You've got general data protection regulations come through and that's, that's, that's a big deal. And uh, and the reality is from what an organization's compliance isn't getting right? So what we've done been able to do is any convenience isn't getting any any less, using vr and ai and Nsx, we're able to essentially micro segment off a lot of Erica our environments which have a lot, much higher compliance rate and you've got in your case, you know, plenty of stores that you're managing with visa and tens of thousands of Vms to annex. This is something at scale that both of you have been able to achieve about NSX and vsn. Pretty incredible. And what I also like with the sky story is it's very centered around Dev ops and the Dev ops use case. Okay, let's come to your Ramon. And obviously I was, when I was talking to the Coobernetti's, uh, you know, our Kubernetes Platform, team pks, and they told me one of the pioneer and customers was National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. I was like, wow, that's awesome. Let's bring you in. And when we heard your story, it's incredible. Why did you pick Coobernetti's as the container platform? You have many choices of what you could have done in terms of companies that are other choices. Why did you pick pks? So I think, well, what happened to, in our interviews cases, we first looked at pcf, which we thought was a very good platform as well. Then we looked at the integration you can get with pqrs, the security, the overland of Nsx, and it made sense for us to go in that direction because you offered 11 team or flexibility on our automation that we could drive through to drive the business. So that was the essence of the argument that we had to make. So the key part with the NSX integration and security and, and the PKS. Uh, and while we've got a few more chairs from the heckler there, I want you to know, Chad, I've got my pks socks on. That's how much I had so much fear. And if he creates too much trouble with security, we can be emotional. I'm out of the arena, you know. Anyway. Um, I wanted to put this chart up because it's very important for all of you, um, and the audience to know that vm ware is making a significant commitment to Coobernetti's. Uh, we feel that this is, as pat talked about it before, something that's going to be integrated into everything we do. It's going to become like a dial tone. Um, and this is just the first of many things you're going to see a vm or really take this now as a consistent thing. And I think we have an opportunity collectively because a lot of people think, oh, you know, containers are a threat to vm ware. We actually think it's a headwind that's going to become a tailwind for us. Just the same way public cloud has been. So thank you for being one of our pioneer and early customers. And Are you using the kubernetes platform in the context of running in a vsphere environment? Yes, we are. We're onto Venice right now. Uh, we have. Our first application will be a mobile banking APP which will be launched in September and all our agile labs are going to be on pbs moving forward medic. So it's really a good move for us. Dave, I know that you've, not yet, I mean you're looking in the context potentially about is your, one of the use cases of Nsx for you containers and how do you view Nsx in that? Absolutely. For us that was the big thing about t when it refresh rocked up is that the um, you know, not just, you know, Sda and on a, on vsphere, but sdn on openstack sdn into their container platform and we've got some early visibility of the, uh, of the career communities integration on there and yeah, it was, it was done right from the start and that's why when we talked to the pks Yeah, it's, guys again, the same sort of thing. it's, it's done right from the start. And so yeah, certainly for us, the, the NSX, everywhere as they come and control plane as a very attractive proposition. Good. Ron, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how you viewed the public, because you mentioned when we started off this journey, we didn't have Mr. Cloud and aws, we approached to when we were very early on in that journey and you took a bet with us, but it was part of your data center reduction. You're kind of trying to almost to obliterate one data center as you went from three to one. Tell us that story and how the collaboration worked out on we amber cloud. What's the use case? So as I said, our vision was always to bridge to a So we wanted to be able to use public cloud environments to incubate new public cloud, right? applications until they stabilize to flex to the cloud. And ultimately disaster recovery in the cloud. That was the big use case for us. We ran a traditional data center environment where, you know, we run across four regions in the world. Each region had two to three data centers. One was the primary and then usually you had a disaster recovery center where you had all your data hosted, you had certain amount of compute, but it was essentially a cold center, right? It, it sat idle, you did your test once a year. That's the environment we were really looking to get out of. Once vmc was available, we were able to create the same vm ware environment that we currently have on prem in the cloud, right? The same network and security stack in both places and we were actually able to then decommission our disaster recovery data center, took it off, it's took it off and we move. We've got our, our, all of our mission critical data now in the, uh, in the, uh, aws instance using BMC. We have a small amount of compute to keep it warm, but thanks to the vm ware products, we have the ability now to ratchet that up very quickly in a Dr situation, run production in the cloud until we stabilized and then bring that workload back. Would it be fair to tell everybody here, if you are looking at a Dr or that type of bursting scenario, there's no reason to invest in a on premise private cloud. That's really a perfect use case of We, I know certainly we had breaks. this, right? Sorry. Exactly. Yeah. We will no longer have a, uh, a physical Dr a center available anywhere. So you've optimized your one data center with the private cloud stack will be in cloud foundation effectively starting off a decent and you've optimized your hybrid cloud journey, uh, with we cloud. I know we're early on in the journey with Nsx and branch, so we'll come back to that conversation may next year we discover new things about this guy I just found out last night that he grew up in the same town as me in Bangalore and went to the same school. So we will keep a diary of the schools at rival schools, but the last few years with the same school, uh, Dave, as you think about the future of where you want to this use case of network security, what are some of the things that are on your radar over the course of the next couple of months and quarters? So I think what we're really trying to do is, um, you know, computers, this is a critical thing decided technology conference, computers and networks are a bit boring, but rather we want to make them boring. We want to basically sweep them away from so that our people, our customers, our internal customers don't have to think about it were the end that we can make him, that, that compliance, that security, that whole, that whole framework around it. Um, regardless of where that work, right live as living on premise, off premise, everywhere you know. And, and even Aisha potentially out out to the edge. How big were your teams? Very quickly, as we wrap up this, how big are the teams that you have working on network is what was amazing. I talked to you was how nimble and agile you're with lean teams. How big was your team? The, the team during the, uh, the SDDC stack is six people. Six, six. Eight. Wow. There's obviously more that more. And we're working on that core data center and your boat to sleep between five and seven people. For it to brad to both for the infrastructure and containers. Yes. Rolling on your side. It's about the same. Amazing. Well, very quickly maybe 30 seconds. Where do you see the world going? Rolling. So, you know, it brings, I pay attention to two things. One is Iot and we've talked a little bit about that, but what I'm looking for there as digital signals continue to grow is injecting things like machine learning and artificial intelligence in line into that flow back so we can make more decisions closer to the source. Right. And the second thing is about cash. So even though cash volume is increasing, I mean here we are in Vegas, the number one cash city in the US. I can't ignore the digital payments and crypto currency and that relies on blockchain. So focusing on what role does blockchain play in the global world as we go forward and how can brings, continue to bring those services, blockchain and Iot. Very rare book. Well gentlemen, thank you for being with us. It's a pleasure and an honor. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for three guests. Well, um, thank you very much. So as you saw there, it's great to be able to see and learn from some of these pioneering customers and the hopefully the lesson you took away was wherever your journey is, you could start potentially with the private cloud, embark on the journey to the public cloud and then now comes the next part which is pretty exciting, which is the journey off the desktop and removal what digital workspace. And that's the second part of this that I want to explore with a couple of customers, but before I do that, I wanted to set the context of why. What we're trying to do here also has economic value. Hopefully you saw in the first set of charts the economic value of starting with the heart, the lungs, any of that software defined data center and moving to the ultimate hybrid cloud had economic value. We feel the same thing here and it's because of fundamental shift that started off in the last seven, 10 years since iphone. The fact of the matter is when you look at your fleet of your devices across tablets, phones and laptops today is a heterogeneous world. Twenty years ago when the company started, it was probably all Microsoft devices, laptops now phones, tablets. It's a mixture and it was going to be a mixture for the rest of them. I think for the foreseeable time, with very strong, almost trillion market cap companies and in this world, our job is to ensure that heterogeneous digital workspace can be very easily managed and secured. I have a little soft corner for this business because the first three years of my five years here, I ran this business, so I know a thing about these products, but the fact of the matter is that I think the opportunity here is if you think about the 7 billion people in the world, a billion of them are working for some company or the other. The others are children or may not be employed or retired and every one of them have a phone today. Many of them phones and laptops and they're mixed and our job is to ensure that we bring simplicity to this place. You saw a little bit that cacophony yesterday and Pat's chart, and unfortunately a lot of today's world of managing and securing that disparate is a mountain of morass. Okay? No offense to any of the vendors named in there, but it shouldn't be your job to be that light piece of labor at the top of the mountain to put it all together, which costs you potentially at least $50 per user per month. We can make the significantly cheaper with a unified platform, workspace one that has all of those elements, so how have we done that? We've taken those fundamental principles at 70 percent, at least reduction of simplicity and security. A lot of the enterprise companies get security, right, but we don't get simplicity all always right. Many of the consumer companies like right? But maybe it needs some help and facebook, it's simplicity, security and we've taken both of those and said it is possible for you to actually like your user experience as opposed to having to really dread your user experience in being able to get access to applications and how we did this at vm ware, was he. We actually teamed with the Stanford Design School. We put many of our product managers through this concept of design thinking. It's a really, really useful concept. I'd encourage every one of you. I'm not making a plug for the Stanford design school at all, but some very basic principles of viability, desirability, feasibility that allow your product folks to think like a consumer, and that's the key goal in undoing that. We were able to design of these products with the type of simplicity but not compromise at all. Insecurity, tremendous opportunity ahead of us and it gives me great pleasure to bring onstage now to guests that are doing some pioneering work, one from a partner and run from a customer. Please join me in welcoming Maria par day from dxc and John Market from adobe. Thank you, Maria. Thank you Maria and John for being with us. Maria, I want to start with you. A DXC is the coming together of two companies and CSC and HP services and on the surface on the surface of it, I think it was $50,000, 100,000. If it was exact numbers, most skeptics may have said such a big acquisition is probably going to fail, but you're looking now at the end of that sort of post merger and most people would say it's been a success. What's made the dxc coming together of those two very different cultures of success? Well, first of all, you have to credit a lot of very creative people in the space. One of the two companies came together, but mostly it is our customers who are making us successful. We are choosing to take our customers the next generation digital platform. The message is resonating, the cultures have come together, the individuals have come together, the offers have come together and it's resonating in the marketplace, in the market and with our customers and with our partners. So you shouldn't have doubted it. I, I wasn't one of the skeptics, maybe others were. And my understanding is the d and the C Yes. If, and dxc is the digital and customer. if you look at the logo, it's, it's more of an infinity, so digital transformation for customers. But truthfully it's um, we wanted to have a new start to some very powerful companies in the industry and it really was a instead of CSC and HP, a new logo and a new start. And I think, you know, if this resonates very well with what I started off my keynote, which is talking about innovation and customers focused on digital and Adobe, obviously not just a household name, customers, John, many of folks who use your products, but also you folks have written the playbook on a transformation of on premise going cloud, right? A SAS products and now we've got an incredible valuations relative. How has that affected the way you think in it in terms of a cloud first type of philosophy? Uh, too much of how you implement, right? From an IT perspective, we're really focused on the employee experience. And so as we transitioned our products to the cloud, that's where we're working towards as well from an it, it's all about innovation and fostering that ability for employees to create and do some amazing products. So many of those things I talked about like design thinking, uh, right down the playbook, what adobe does every day and does it affect the way in which you build, sorry, deploy products 92. Yeah, I mean fundamentally it comes down to those basics viability and the employee experience. And we've believe that by giving employees choice, we're enabling them to do amazing work. Rhonda, Maria, you obviously you were in the process of rolling out some our technology inside dxc. So I want to focus less on the internal implementation as much as what you see from other clients I shared sort of that mountain of harassed so much different disparate tools. Is that what you hear from clients and how are you messaging to them, what you think the future of the digital workspaces. And I joined partnership. Well Sanjay, your picture was perfect because if you look at the way end user compute infrastructure had worked for years, decades in the past, exactly what we're doing with vm ware in terms of automation and driving that infrastructure to the cloud in many ways. Um, companies like yours and mine having the courage to say the old way of on prem is the way we made our license fees, the way move made our professional services in the past. And now we have to quickly take our customers to a new way of working, a fast paced digital cloud transformation. We see it in every customer that we're dealing with everyday of the week What are some of the keyboard? Every vertical. I mean we're, we're seeing a lot in the healthcare and in a variety of verticals. industry. I'm one of the compelling things that we're seeing in the marketplace right now is the next gen worker in terms of the GIG economy. I'm employees might work for one company at 10:00 in the morning and another company at We have to be able to stand those employees are 10 99 employees up very 2:00 in the afternoon. quickly, contract workers from around the world and do it securely with governance, risk and compliance quickly. Uh, and we see that driving a lot of the next generation infrastructure needs. So the users are going from a company like dxc with 160,000 employees to what we think in the future will be another 200, 300,000 of 'em, uh, partners and contract workers that we still have to treat with the same security sensitivity and governance of our w two employees. Awesome. John, you were one of the pioneer and customers that we worked with on this notion of unified endpoint management because you were sort of a similar employee base to Vm ware, 20,000 odd employees, 1000 plus a and you've got a mixture of devices in your fleet. Maybe you can give us a little bit of a sense. What percentage do you have a windows and Mac? So depending on the geography is we're approximately 50 percent windows 50 slash 50 windows and somewhat similar to how vm ware operates. What is your fleet of mobile phones look like in terms of primarily ios? We have maybe 80 slash 20 or 70 slash 20 a apple and Ios? Yes. Tablets override kinds. It's primarily ios tablets. So you probably have something in the order of, I'm guessing adding that up. Forty or 50,000 devices, some total of laptops, tablets, phones. Absolutely split 60 slash 60,000. Sixty thousand plus. Okay. And a mixture of those. So heterogeneities that gear. Um, and you had point tools for many of those in terms of managing secure in that. Why did you decide to go with workspace one to simplify that, that management security experience? Well, you nailed it. It's all about simplification and so we wanted to take our tools and provide a consistent experience from an it perspective, how we manage those endpoints, but also for our employee population for them to be able to have a consistent experience across all of their devices. In the past it was very disconnected. It was if you had an ios device, the experience might look like this if you had a window is it would look like go down about a year ago is to bring that together again, this. And so our journey that we've started to simplicity. We want to get to a place where an employee can self provision their desktop just like they do their mobile device today. And what would, what's your expectations that you go down that journey of how quickly the onboarding time should, should be for an employee? It should be within 15, 20 minutes. We need to, we need to get it very rapid. The new hire orientation process needs to really be modified. It's no longer acceptable from everything from the it side ever to just the other recruiting aspects. An employee wants to come and start immediately. They want to be productive, they want to make contributions, and so what we want to do from an it perspective is get it out of the way and enable employees to be productive as And the onboarding then could be one way you latch him on and they get workspace quickly as possible. one. Absolutely. Great. Um, let's talk a little bit as we wrap up in the next few minutes, or where do you see the world going in terms of other areas that are synergistic, that workspace one collaboration. Um, you know, what are some of the things that you hear from clients? What's the future of collaboration? We're actually looking towards a future where we're less dependent on email. So say yes to that real real time collaboration. DXC is doing a lot with skype for business, a yammer. I'll still a lot with citrix, um, our tech teams and our development teams use slack and our clients are using everything, so as an integrator to this space, we see less dependent on the asynchronous world and a lot more dependence on the synchronous world and whatever tools that you can have to create real time. Um, collaboration. Now you and I spoke a little last night talking about what does that mean to life work balance when there's always a demanding realtime collaboration, but we're seeing an uptick in that and hopefully over the next few years a slight downtick in, in emails because that is not necessarily the most direct way to communicate all the time. And, and in that process, some of that sort of legacy environment starts to get replaced with newer tools, whether it's slack or zoom or we're in a similar experience. All of the above. All of the above. Are you finding the same thing, John Environment? Yeah, we're moving away. There's, I think what you're going to see transition is email becomes more of the reporting aspect, the notification, but the day to day collaboration is me to products like slack are teams at Adobe. We're very video focused and so even though we may be a very global team around the world, we will typically communicate over some form of video, whether it be blue jeans or Jabber or Blue Jeans for your collaboration. Yeah. whatnot. We've internally, we use Webex and, and um, um, and, and zoom in and also a lot of slack and we're happy to announce, I think at the work breakouts, we'll hear about the integration of workspace one with slack. We're doing a lot with them where I want to end with a final question with you. Obviously you're very passionate about a cause that we also love and I'm passionate about and we're gonna hear more about from Malala, which is more women in technology, diversity and inclusion and you know, especially there's a step and you are obviously a role model in doing that. What would you say to some of the women here and others who might be mentors to women in technology of how they can shape that career? Um, I think probably the women here are already rocking it and doing what you need to do. So mentoring has been a huge part of my career in terms of people mentoring me and if not for the support and I'm real acceptance of the differences that I brought to the workplace. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be sitting here today. So I think I might have more advice for the men than the women in the room. You're all, you have daughters, you have sisters, you have mothers and you have women that you work every day. Um, whether you know it or not, there is an unconscious bias out there. So when you hear things from your sons or from your daughters, she's loud. She's a little odd. She's unique. How about saying how wonderful is that? Let's celebrate that and it's from the little go to the top. So that would be, that would be my advice. I fully endorse that. I fully endorse that all of us men need to hear that we have put everyone at Vm ware through unconscious bias that it's not enough. We've got to keep doing it because it's something that we've got to see. I want my daughter to be in a place where the tech world looks like society, which is not 25, 30 percent. Well no more like 50 percent. Thank you for being a role model and thank you for both of you for being here at our conference. It's my pleasure. Thank you Thank you very much. Maria. Maria and John. So you heard you heard some of that and so that remember some of these things that I shared with you. I've got a couple of shirts here with these wonderful little chart in here and I'm not gonna. Throw it to the vm ware crowd. Raise your hand if you're a customer. Okay, good. Let's see how good my arm is. There we go. There's a couple more here and hopefully this will give you a sense of what we are trying to get done in the hybrid cloud. Let's see. That goes there and make sure it doesn't hit anybody. Anybody here in the middle? Right? There we go. Boom. I got two more. Anybody here? I decided not to bring an air gun in. That one felt flat. Sorry. All. There we go. One more. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, but this is what we're trying to get that diagram once again is the cloud foundation. Folks. The bottom part, done. Very simply. Okay. I'd love a world one day where the only The top part of the diagram is the digital workspace. thing you heard from Ben, where's the cloud foundation? The digital workspace makes them cloud foundation equals a digital foundation company. That's what we're trying to get done. This ties absolutely a synchronously what you heard from pat because everything starts with that. Any APP, a kind of perspective of things and then below it are these four types of clouds, the hybrid cloud, the Telco Cloud, the cloud and the public cloud, and of course on top of it is device. I hope that this not just inspired you in terms of picking up a few, the nuggets from our pioneers. The possible, but every one of the 25,000 view possible, the 100,000 of you who are watching this will take people will meet at all the vm world and before forums. the show on the road and there'll be probably 100,000 We want every one of you to be a pioneer. It is absolutely possible for that to happen because that pioneering a capability starts with every one of you. Can we give a hand once again for the five customers that were onstage with us? That's great.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCube covering PentahoWorld 2017, brought to you buy Hitachi Ventara. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of PentahoWorld, brought to you of course by Hitachi Ventara. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost James Kobielus. We are joined by Stephano Celati. He is a Pentaho Solutions consultant at BNova. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, Stephano. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I should say congratulations are in order because you are here to accept the Pentaho Excellence Award for the ROI category on behalf of LAZIOcrea. Tell us about the award. >> Yes, as I was saying, I'm really proud of this award because it is something that is related to public administration savings, which is a good thing, first of all for me as a citizen, let's say. This project is about healthcare spending. In Italy the National Healthcare Services allows the drugstore to sell medicines to total or partial reimbursement by NHS itself. And they also have the possibility to replace the medicine with a generic drug which normally costs less to the people and also to the health service itself. So a couple of years ago (speaks in foreign language) which is the political area to which Rome belongs just to explain, launched a new project to monitor, analyze and inspect the spending flow in drugs. So we partnered with LAZIOcrea to create a business analytics platform based on Pentaho obviously, and which collects all the data coming from the prescriptions and store it in an analytical database that is Vertica, and uses PDI/ETL tools to store this data. >> That's for Pentaho Data Integration. >> Yes, PDI is Pentaho Data Integration, good point. And after that we present the data in terms of reporting, analysis, dashboards, to all the people that are interested in this data. So we talk about regional managers, we talk about auditors, and also to local district users which are in charge of managing the expenditure for drugs. The outcome of this project was real impressive because we had an expenditure fell by 3.6%, which in a region where we have more than 200 million prescriptions every year means 34 million Euros in a years. >> Rebecca: Wow. >> So it was really huge result. We were very happy about that. And it was so simple because simply monitoring better the expenditure, monitoring how they deliver the drugs out, what kind of medicine they prescribe and targeting what pharmacies sell to the end user just gave these impressive results. And this year they are forecasting for 41 million Euros in savings more, so it's a huge result. It's something that is for us really a good result. >> So here in the U.S., I mean we have problems very similar to what you just described in Italy. And just putting the transparency around the data would be a huge revelation for the United States, too. How big a departure was it in Italy? >> Well, it was a really a big problem to start because they didn't have any system to collect all this data. So they had to set up everything from scratch, let's say, just by acquiring the paper where the physician writes the recipe, so it was not that easy to build it from scratch. But after that the region has had the opportunity to monitor this data and also to publish this data, which is something that in Italy is really relevant in this moment because we are talking about open government, we are talking about open data, and so again, the result was really impressive. >> Do you see any follow on opportunities to use this data for other purposes other than the initial application? >> Yes, we already experienced a different usage of this data because during the last major earthquake we have in 2016 in this area, those guys from LAZIOcrea were able to produce a list of mostly the drugs in that area just in a couple of hours, just by using the ETL and setting up this list that somehow help the first aid units in giving the right assistance on time. And next steps will be about hyper prescriptions because we want to monitor if there are any doctors that prescribe drugs that are not really necessary. And we also try to move our inspection also to hospitals because when you do a surgery, you get medicine, you get a lot of assistance in the hospital. So we want also to monitor that kind of the aspect, which is again in charge of the health system. >> To make sure that the right medicines are being distributed to the right regions at the right time for the intent to likely-- >> Yes, this could also lead to something that is a correlation analysis, meaning what is your pain and what are you assuming so that they can have an historical data they can use to prescribe better medicines. >> But the anecdote he was sharing about the earthquake too is really compelling too, if you think about a public health crisis and outbreak of some sort, to be able to get drugs quickly to those in needs, it's really astonishing. >> Again, this morning we were talking about data lake. This is a sort of data lake. We found several ways to use that data, to fish them back from the data, let's say from the lake, and it's really impressive what you can do if you have the right information and you know how to use it. >> How do you see the market developing over the next year, next five years? >> Yes, the problem in Italy is that the market is not so responsive to innovation like others, let's say U.S. or U.K. and Europe. So for this reason my company Bnova set up annual event which is called Big Data Tech, and the purpose of this event is to spread knowledge about big data systems, products, architecture and so on, which helps companies in knowing better what they can do with these platforms. So in the next month we see a lot of opportunities. Generically speaking data mining field, we start talking about predictive analysis, we start talking about smart cities and other stuff like that. So again, we will need maybe to enter in a new phase of let's say (mumbling) because companies like BNova and others that operate in this field of business analytics need to put to general knowledge what other innovative companies are doing. So in the next month we will for sure move to newer architectures, new technology, and we will have to support all the companies with this kind of stuff. >> In terms of the new technology you're moving to, is there a role for the internet of things, both in your plans and really in terms of the Italian market. What sort of potential applications are there for IOT related perhaps to the use of it with health data going forward in Italy? >> Yes, also for healthcare, but in Italy the IOT team is a parallel line that is growing thanks to a governmental initiative which is called Industry 4.0, which encourages the usag of interconnected machines, connected to the internet, so classical approach of the IOT field. So with this new approach and the government sustain we believe that the IOT will have a big improvement in the next years. Again, we are talking about Italy, so we are not so fast in growing. But again, we are starting to talk about smart cities for energy saving, sustainable energy and other stuff in which the IOT plays a key role. So as far as our business is concerned, that is business analytics, so on top of that we see a lot of opportunities coming from predictive analysis, which means to prevent the maintenance of a machine, for example, or to use virtual reality to simulate a laboratory test and other stuff. So with these opportunities for sure the usage of data mining tools, such Wake Up when we're talking about Pentaho Solutions, could be a great advantage because you will apply the knowledge to your data. So you will not only analyze the data, but you will also extract some sort of knowledge from the data which can help companies. >> Of course, Italy is where the renaissance began, and it just sounds like you, I mean renaissance use of analytics to help the Italian people and the Italian economy to continue to grow and innovate. >> Stephano: Yes, yes. >> So I want to see not a data lake, a data colosseum, that should be on your to do list. >> I want a data gallery with lots of data masterpieces hanging on the walls all around Italy. >> Exactly. >> You'll be the new Leonardo and Michelangelo. >> Stefano , I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on theCube. >> Thank you for having me. >> I am Rebecca Knight for Jim Kubielus. We will have more from PentahoWorld just after this.