>> (upbeat music) From San Francisco it's the CUBE covering VMware radio 2019, brought to you by VM ware. >> Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin with John Furrier in our exclusive coverage of VM ware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. John and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube Rajiv Ramaswami, COO of products and cloud services Rajiv, Welcome back >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh thank you glad to be here as always >> Lisa Martin: 15th annual radio a lot of research a lot of innovation. Give our viewers an idea of some of the historical products and services that have come out of the radio and the innovation programs at VMware has been doing for a long time >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah I mean, I'm excited about Radio right I mean many of our key innovations came out of Radio. Very early back in the days the fundamental concepts of vSphere replication and disaster recovery came out of Radio papers, a long time ago. Some of the innovations within vSAN were showcased at the radio many many years ago. So across the board, I would say many of the products you know are key portions of the products were deployed I mean in the form of Radio papers over the years and if you look at this year for example you know we can see how things have changed with the times as VMware is evolved, so does Radio along the way. So this year, I was struck by the number of papers on machine learning and AI right, it's forward-looking of course everything we do here and it's just now ML is now across many of our products and that's being you know seen in Radio and of course, what we see at Radio is always more forward-looking than what's actually in the products. So that's an area I see a lot of work and another area I see a lot of work on is Kubernetes and the cloud native and then of course the traditional areas of how to optimize storage, networking and even when it comes to networking and so forth, papers on cloud networking and how you know we can optimize for networking in the cloud So in general, I mean the trend here is a reflection of what we are probably likely to do in the next several years >> John Furrier: One of your jobs as Chief Operating Officer I see, to operate them on the product side of the business generate that kind of enablement for the sales team and ultimately customers right. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yes >> John Furrier: So you've got to kind of mind the farm here >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: kind of cultivate and see what's organically growing out of VMware from the top engineering and stuff top papers. what's the process? how do you go attack the all the action because there's a lot of forward-looking stuff there's a lot of pie in the sky is a lot of cool different stuff that looks weird >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: but sometimes that weird stuff looks is actually going to be the future so you got to have a broad perspective, how do you act this? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, in fact I would say one of our biggest jobs is portfolio management. We have to look at balance our investments across this range that you talked about right so at any point in time we will have a set of technologies and products that we incubating these are relatively new sometimes new areas for us sometimes extensions to existing areas that we are incubating and these are of course businesses that don't drive much revenue right now but over times yes hopefully well right and then there are businesses, I'll give you examples of each of these now there are businesses that are in growth mode where we've already established a good product market fit we know that we can scale this business and its a different set of investments and in that growth category and then there are relatively mature businesses that we know we need to run efficiently in fact they need to generate cash that we can go back and invest into these other right and then there are things that we want to get out of and diverse so we look at our R&D portfolio along those and at any point in time there's stuff in everyone of these buckets to give you some examples of what's in each of these today obviously we have a big focus in cloud native most of that is incubation at that point right not substantial revenue, yet a big you know we've acquired Heptio for example last year to bolster our own internal efforts so a lot of work a lot of effort being put into that with the idea of building a future business in a significant way some of our more recent growth business were are now very much in the scale category you look at VSAN, you look in a EXSi, you look at VeloCloud as part of the overall networking portfolio these are all in the scale category right they have substantial revenues are growing very nicely we're investing some of our other bigger businesses like vSphere which is our classic you know foundation for everything we do Yes, I would say in the mature, you know category and then over by an large we've reduced investments and some small businesses, I mean if we were to look at historically vCloud Air that the business we got out of right so these we do along the way otherwise >> John Furrier: a good call, or you quit call >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah so in fact one of Raghu's and my biggest jobs really is to figure out how much we put in each of the these buckets, make sure you're placing enough in the future of best category while also making sure your delivering on the numbers for the day >> John Furrier: I love that's exactly what I was going at this about the future bets >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: what is on the business side one of the I asked Pat Gels, I'll ask you the same thing but different context, you know this is an engineering celebration as well as kind of competition internally I guess kind of proud to be people are proud to be here kind of an elite status but engineers want to work for a company and solving hard problems >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: also retention and attraction thing. what are some of the hard problems that you're trying to deal with on business side? you're operating some of the core products and it sounds easy to say abstraction layer make things look easy, but these are hard problems what are the hard problems that you're solving that need to come out of this world? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah and some of these are better not this product they cut across every aspect of the company so far example we as a company are trying to move towards more of a cloud oriented business model right so that's why are group is called products and cloud services and those are combined in the sense that everything that we build up the product over time most of its get software also as a service and the underlying code base and the technologies are all the same great example for example is our VMware cloud offerings right they are all built on VMware cloud foundation which is offered as a software package for our customers who want to build private clouds its also available as a service from us as well as familiar for our partners. Now, for us the notion of transforming our company to be able to do both right just products from moving products to also to being delivering cloud services has a profound impact across every function R&D for sure, go to market in terms of how you align the Salesforce to sell that all our systems that are necessary to transact that business so that's a pretty big transformation that we are going through right now. >> John Furrier: That's a lot of software that needs to be code and automation is not easy >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: that's why machine learning problem is hot here >> Rajiv Ramaswami: absolutely yes >> Lisa Martin: What is that balance when you are looking at innovations that come out of not just radio but the other innovation programs that VMware has about managing the balance between the R&D investment and the investment that's going to be needed on the sales and marketing side to get the product or service the solution out on the market to start really dialing up this as a big revenue contributor. How do you look at that as you talk about that portfolio a minute ago and when something becomes like say it comes out of radio and it's well, this is a really good idea, but how are you looking at balancing the R&D investment versus what you know you're going to have to do to get it to market? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah and by the way that's a great point there because, you know too often engineers think about hey I've the coolest product let me go build it they don't think about how it needs to be sold and the how it needs to be sold is equally important the front more important than how you build it right. So in our world so when we do our planning on an annual basis for example we look at a holistic plan that covers the entire gamut right which means R&D, sales and marketing right and when within sales and marketing, investment across what our core sales team needs to do what our specialist sales teams you know For example some of these newer products will require specialist to sell they might be targeting different buyers within the customer base right, so we have to align our R&D and go to market investments together to create a full plan for the year and we do that for pretty much every product in our portfolio >> John Furrier: what I going to ask, I want to ask you a business question I know R&D is going to be key you guys did a great job, so Congratulations but one of the things that we're seeing in the market is new shifts in the landscape of either tech enablement or trends like kubernetes or 5G gives companies an opportunity to reset their architecture >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: and you now see with virtualization some of the things that you guys are doing we're seeing couple pivot points for customers now one cloud native, kubernetes >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: software - defined, your on-premise cloud operations, not C private cloud [Rajiv Ramaswami] yeah >> John Furrier: cloud and then like 5G >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: a little bit of you know networking these are major trends >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: how should companies start thinking? okay I have an opportunity as a catalyst to shift what what's your take on that trend advice to those customers because they might be able to do wholesale changes or migration >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, look from a customer perspective right, every one of them is going through this transformational journey and depending on you know where they are right, so if you take Telco's for example that's where the 5G applies primarily, I mean they have they go through this big capital cycles of investment that are geared towards massive technology generation size so last generation was 4G LTE and now the next thing is 5G and that is big new capital cycle and there's an opportunity at that time for them to fundamentally re-architect how they deployed their infrastructure and that's what they are doing with network function virtualization is 5G and so if 5G and we kind of go hand-in-hand together and its an opportunity too for them to go deploy a new infrastructure that is much more virtualized much more using standard hardware running everything in virtualized applications what's right the network function than they could before >> John Furrier: so the edge now is more dynamic than it was years ago so we look at 4G. What we have, what year that was, but I mean that even with healthy there's many many years ago the edge was not built out now you have a programmable intelligent, the edge market >> Rajiv Ramaswami: exactly >> John Furrier: how is 5G going to impact the Telco's? because this might be the right time for them to actually have a real business model. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, well look I think 5G's offers them to try out many different models for example given that many the 5G radios are much more shorter range right, so your going to deploy more smaller cell sizes that means for example there's a new business model possible where you deploy radio multiple operators are sharing that radio, right where as traditionally today you know your base station so AT&T has their own, Verizon has their own tomorrow you could be okay you could have a bunch of >> John Furrier: basing radio service provider >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah in the buildings right here that and that could be shared by all the providers so its a completely different business model so those are the kind of things that 5G enables >> Lisa Martin: are there any projects that are being featured here talked about here at radio 2019 along the spirit of and NFP,5G >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh yeah there's a bunch of projects I mean on the floor right, you can go in fact even in the posters that you're sitting around here you'll see a lot of projects in 5G we have some nascent efforts on this what we call networks slicing for example >> Lisa Martin: and what is that? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: so the ability are going to share the network that you deploy a single network infrastructure and you are able to slice that into chunks and have different people use those chunks >> John Furrier: and I think that points out a trend that we've been reporting least on the queue and ways people say don't move data around move compute to the edge or software-based virtualization. You're putting basically virtualization on the radio's >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes exact software exact edge yeah, >> John Furrier: so when you look at the marketplace when you say okay VMware, it's got a transfer over one of the things that's come up a lot we've heard on the cube is a VMware's great, they don't know networking though now of course if NSX is didn't win now we know where that comes from multiple competitors. But talk about the networking aspect of what you're doing? because, the investment in this era that's the first real SDN company there's been some SDN around before but you guys not only do SDM you got networking, you got compute, security, talk about networking in the innovations there >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah let me talk about the division for networking and then also how its part of all the solutions right not necessarily just a stand alone sale so networking fundamentally you know it used to be about connect, for example it used to be about connecting in the campus, your laptops and desktops into the network right it was called workgroups and then campus networking or your land campus LAN then it became Wi-Fi came in there right and the in data center it was about connecting servers to storage and servers to other servers right all about this box mentality in the branch it was about putting in a branch router and providing a network connection through that right, but if you look at fundamentally what networking is evolved to now it's about connecting, what connecting users applications and data and these could be anywhere, right. you use this could be anywhere you could be sitting in a Starbucks shop accessing your applications that are sitting in a cloud someplace not even running through your enterprise network so the notion of a classic network has changed completely. so the network now is much more, it's really a virtual network because, you don't you know its not physical plumbing anymore that matter yes you need the physical plumbing the physical plumbing is going to be provided by multiple people that you as an enterprise do not even necessarily control. You might control your campus LAN you might control your data center, but you don't control the could right, you don't control running over a service partner networked into the edge of the branch and so fundamentally now the new networking layer has to be a layer of software that really delivers and connects and secures these applications users and data and that's really the concept of SDN that's evolved into what we call the virtual cloud Network and that fundamentally is our focus and for us we're not really burdened by the fact that we have an underlying physical network business that we have to go protect and we have to go build. >> John Furrier: your software company >> Rajiv Ramaswami: we're software company >> John Furrier: so you know like Cisco you (mumbles) switches and routers that's if you don't have one on the top of them >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah it doesn't matter what do you have underneath right everything runs on top and so that's the fundamental philosophy now when you look at how this is now starting to get deployed of course you know and you're seeing, we started out with the data center and we started you know focusing on virtual machines connecting virtual machines now we now extend that to connecting containers. Right, you can you need to network containers right applications running in containers they need to be networked you need to network base metal machines you still have some of those leftovers right, so you've got a network do's and then you have to network applications running well >> John Furrier: its not a software question, I want to ask this is the trend who was seeing hyper convergence is proven >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: glass multiple things into one thing and reduces one footprint and some easier to manage the 5G and these shifts and technologies cause some give people that operating reset they're our architecture a lot of people say okay Cisco's got gear, I got UCS and other thing >> Rajiv Ramaswami: sure >> John Furrier: so how it collapse that in well? they want me to not do that you guys are kind of a different approach or do you then Cisco? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: so this is exactly what we do right so now you take the networking that we've got with virtual floor networking and you actually integrate that as part of a solution with our VML foundation okay and now what, are you have a full solution that can be deployed on any hardware right, can be Cisco UCS hardware, can be del hardware or it can be HP hardware so you essentially have a software foundation that includes compute storage, networking automation all put together in a solution that you can deploy on Prem and you can deploy in the cloud >> John Furrier: that's like super hyper convergence >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes and in fact hyper-converged now it's not just about storage and compute anymore right that's how it started out. Its our compute storage networking all put together available not just on Prem, in a hardware appliance software that can be run on anything and extended it into the cloud that's really the new hyper-converged >> John Furrier: and that's new chanak's is plan actually, they are moving from a hardware, trying to do software. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah we've always been there right. We started out with software and we've expanded that to the hybrid cloud right. Think about where we're at now we've got you know we mark Loudon AWS, we've got our four thousand plus VM cloud provider partners and increasingly more and more users >> John Furrier: so, you are saying copied you guys basically >> Rajiv Ramaswami: absolutely >> John Furrier: okay >> Lisa Martin: imitation is the highest form of flattery (laughing) >> Lisa Martin: question for you in terms of customers. You know we we're I'm sure going to hear some phenomenal successful customers at vmworld, which is just around the corner, how our customer is going to benefit from the innovation? and this is we talked about the competition, competitive nature of radio, but also the fact that one of these guys and gals are doing this in their spare time so this is really deep-rooted passionate projects we expect customers in any industry to be able to benefit from this and say the next nine to twelve months? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah look I mean at the end of the day you know these are complex systems and software that we have provide and deploy all right and a lot of innovations as under the covers and we have to translate that into value propositions that resonate with the customer that they can go deploy so what's the customer trying to do right? so think about it from a customer lens in so the customer is trying to say, well okay I'm on this journey I've got for example figure out how to have a completely you know dynamic infrastructure where I can run my applications and those could be if my existing applications modern applications that I'm building and they need to be able to run flexibly anywhere I want to be able to run them on Prem I want to be able to run them in the cloud give me an infrastructure that can solve that problem and that's really what we do with our hybrid cloud solution so the and so we have solved that problem for the customer then the customer's next problem is going to be around saying that well I want that flexibility I want to use AWS, I want to use Azure, I want to use Google and every one of these has a silo by itself I've got to retrain all my people to come manage every one of these separately VMware can you help us with that and we provided consistent operations and management's control planes that work across everyone of these clubs but allowing them to solve that problem easily and networking and security we already talked about right there's notion of being able to connect the absence users and data so converting all these innovations into you know solutions that customers can use is really what we do well >> John Furrier: you know we like to put pressure on you guys and ask the tough questions we've got to say you guys have done a great job, over the past couple of years on the product tech site a lot, a lot of clarity on vCloud air get that out of the way amazon relationship now that you got vCloud foundation, things are coming together the numbers are up >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: Boss happy everyone's happy. What's next? What's the big next journey chapter and wave you ridin? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: look I think we're still early days when it comes to the two big transformational seems to be around right. cloud in containers I think we've got all of our solutions in the market now. We have to scale and build them past talked about this mission of how to you know make these cloud delivered service bigger chunk of our portfolio going forward and then containers in kubernetes I think is a big big cloud native with a big new area for us a lot more to go when it comes to networking in times transforming networking insecurity. I do expect us to be doing more and more there in that front and on the inducer I thin on there which we didn't cover much about here there's a fundamentally massive opportunity for us with modern management on Windows right with our partnership with Dell and taking really work space one into every windows machine that's out there and you also saw that partnership announcement with Microsoft last week at deltek world a couple of weeks ago so all of that I think you know There is a lot for us to execute >> John Furrier: I just want an alienware monitor the curve monitors are so good. I want one of those. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh yeah those are beautiful monitors, elite. >> Lisa Martin: Well an impressive trajectory that you have no doubt the queue will be following closely, Rajiv thank you so much for joining me on the cube VMware radio 2019 we appreciate your time >> Rajiv Ramaswami: oh thank you Lisa, thank you John glad to be here again thank you >> Lisa Martin: our pleasure for John Fourier, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from San Francisco at VMware radio 2019. Thanks for watching (high intensity music)

>> Host: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019! Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin in San Francisco, at VMware Radio 2019. This is a really cool internal R&D innovation off-site with about 1800 engineers across many business units at VMware, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the VP of the sustainability strategy at VMware, Nicola Acutt. Nicola, it's great to have you back on theCUBE! >> Thank you, Lisa, it's wonderful to be here and welcome back to Radio! >> This is only the second year that press has been allowed so this is an exclusive for theCUBE, we appreciate being here. So, sustainability. It's a word that is talked about so globally in so many industries, but it has different meanings. When I think of sustainability, the first thing that comes to my mind is energy, but it's more than that. What is sustainability to VMware? >> Great, thank you Lisa. And you're right, sustainability means a lot of things to different people. In its holistic sense, we think of sustainability as the capacity to endure, the ability to endure over time, and it has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions and of course it has economic dimensions. The way we think about sustainability at VMware is through the lens of innovation, because we really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation, and so we're really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the office of the CTO. >> So talk a little bit more about that, with the sustainability strategy being within the office of the CTO. What sort of superpowers does that give VMware to amplify what it's doing and really also, in the eyes of your customers and partners, leverage sustainability as a differentiator? >> Yeah, I love that you used the word superpowers. I think of it exactly that. For me, it's about how do we connect our tech superpowers with this vision and foresight around solving really challenging problems? So for us, how we approach that problem, is really in three dimensions. So we think about sustainability and innovation around our operation, so that's walking the talk, first and foremost, right, getting things right internally, and from an innovation perspective, that's not just about innovation in terms of energy management, you used the energy example, right, but it's also about processes. How do we think about our engineering processes, to make sure that our engineering productivity is as efficient as possible. Yesterday our chief research officer David Tennenhouse made a comment to our 18,000 engineers that it's two sides of the same coin when we're talking about innovation for good, we also have to talk about good engineering so it's both, right? So that's one. Innovation in our operations. The second lens that we think about is innovation in terms of what we do, our products and how our products serve our customers and help them achieve their sustainability goals. Also at Radio we were really pleased this year to announce a new product initiative called CAM, the Carbon Awareness Meter, and this is a product feature in Skyline which will be available to our customers later on this year, which will allow them, through the Skyline platform, to derive almost real-time carbon scores and provide them with more information, more transparency into what's happening in their infrastructure, and then serve up information that can make choices around whether it's virtual machine density or opportunities to optimize their hardware, and then also even provide them information about the grid that their data center is operating on, and that then, we hope, will empower them, our huge customer base, to think about what they can do possibly as a result. >> Oh absolutely, I can't imagine what having that insight into their own grid will allow them to do in terms of resource optimization, to be able to use resources better, to identify new products and services. I'm curious about CAM, though, being announced at Radio 2019. Was this a product, or an idea that spun out of a past Radio event, since this is the 15th annual? >> I'm so glad you asked that question. Exactly why I think this is such an exciting announcement, not only is it a really cool product feature, but it tells the story of innovation at VMware and the path that an idea can track through from an idea in someone's head to a product in our customer's system. So that journey at VMware started with this idea going back, gosh, more than three years. In fact it was round about the time that we introduced sustainability to the office of the CTO and this was a challenge we put out to engineers around how can we innovate around sustainability? It first was discussed as a tech talk and then the idea came to Radio, here, as one of these poster papers. It was then also a birds of a feather, a talk, a breakout talk. Later on, the idea then gained more momentum, it was funded as part of X-Labs which is one of our innovation programs. In fact it was so popular it got funded a second time and developed, and now it has graduated from the office of the CTO and the innovation programs into the BU. So that's a great example of this journey that our innovators, our engineers, can take with an idea, from concept to impact. >> One of the things Ray O'Farrell mentioned to John Furrier and me this morning was that this year's Radio, he said, it's kind of surprising that there's a lot of projects around proposals around collaboration. So talk about how CAM was developed, I mean, the spirit of different BUs collaborating, different minds, different engineering minds coming together with ideas that really over time and through not just Radio but the other innovation programs, you mentioned X-Labs, that this idea became something that is now enabling your customers to make big decisions and save a considerable amount of resources. How does collaboration between BUs really get VMware's innovation culture dialed way up? >> That's actually really important, this concept of collaboration. The way I think about it is connecting dots, and a key role that the office of the CTO plays is to do just that, to create the spaces like this event, which you increase the probability that people are going to have a conversation or people are thinking about something and you give them a platform to share that idea and that's where the spark comes from. You hear it in the conversations, you hear it in the energy, but that is critical. I don't think you can create a culture of innovation without creating a culture of collaboration. >> Absolutely, they're hand-in-hand. So you talked about CAM. What are some of the technological changes, improvements that VMware has made to its technologies to become, to really deliver on your sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to our roots, right? The very beginning of VMware, and the legacy of our core product and our core innovation has been a massive contribution to the computing field of course, and to industry and to the world, but it's also been a great, what I call one of the greatest positive externalities in terms of saving energy and resources. So that was a great start to build on, and the announcement of the CAM project today was another step in that journey to now be really intentional about connecting sustainability with innovation, just like we do with quality and with security, and really thinking about this as part of what we do. So what that journey looks like is continuing to invest in, I talked about operational innovation, I talked about our product, the third area of our strategy is really around future bets and the products that are currently off road map but on our radar. You've probably heard, a great example of that is our work on blockchain, and so we're being intentional about developing that software to be energy efficient, number one. You'll hear more about that, I hope, later in the year. We have an intern coming in the summer to help the team work on the sustainability dimensions of our blockchain approach. We just did a demo actually at Radio this week, there was a live demo on stage with our blockchain team testing out a use case in sustainability and sustainable supply to our supply chain custody, with the example of ocean plastics and making sure that we were able to really track that supply chain and blockchain was a really powerful application for a solution like that. So that's just an example of where we're thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products, as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society. >> Right, globally and environmentally, we look at within the data center, outside the data center from the core to the edge. Where does code sustainability fit in, and how does that facilitate reducing carbon footprint at VMware, enabling that for your customers, how does that factor into becoming more efficient and more aware globally and societally as well? >> Right, well it starts with what you do, right? For us, writing code is the core of all of the applications, everything, all of the powerful things that we can do starts with the integrity of the code, and so at Radio we have one of our sessions with principal engineers and the sustainability team is working on a project to define what does that mean for us? So, it's about efficiency, it's about really thinking about how do we optimize? How do we design and pay attention to the very core of what we do? From the get-go, as a priority. >> Last question, from the customer's perspective, what is one of the many VMware customer stories that comes to mind when you think about VMware as an enabler, as a catalyst for helping an organization really dramatically reduce carbon footprint, leverage your technology for their sustainability? >> Such a great question, and y'know something interesting, I'll tell you a story. We recently looked at some of the companies that are making very serious commitments to sustainability, putting their money where their mouth is and, for example, organizations that are committing to being carbon neutral, to being RE100 which is renewable energy 100 powering their organizations through clean power, as well as committing to science-based targets around their operations, and when we looked at the data it was absolutely fascinating to see that many of VMware's best and biggest customers are in that category of leaders and so for us that represents a billion dollars of revenue so this is important, not just to us but to our customers, and so this is a journey. We're working within the office of the CTO with our field teams to really help connect the dots more intentionally and to drive additional value for our customers through their use of our products and their relationship with VMware as a solution provider. >> And it just shows and speaks to the great synergies that VMware has developed over its history with its customers. Nicola, thank you so much for joining me at Radio 2019, and sharing with our audience the massive impact, both internally and externally, that VMware's sustainability strategy is having on the world. Thank you! >> Thank you, Lisa, absolute pleasure. >> Likewise! I'm Lisa Martin, with John Furrier joining me at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering the 15th Annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the Computer History Museum for the 15th annual ACG SV Awards. And in Mountain View California excited to welcome to the Cube for the first time, John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet and the co-founder of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. JOHN, it's truly a pleasure to have you on the Cube today. >> Well delighted to be here, Lisa. >> So I was doing some research on you. And I see Marc Andreessen has called you the godfather of Silicon Valley. >> Marc very generous (loughs) >> so I thought I was pretty cool I'm going to sit down with the godfather tonight. (loughs) >> I have not done that yet. So you are keynoting the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight. Talk to us a little bit about the takeaways that the audience is going to hear from you tonight. >> Well, they're going to hear some things about leadership the importance of leadership, obviously the importance of innovation. We're in the middle of Silicon Valley innovation is a big thing. And the role that technology plays in our lives and how we should be thinking about that, and how do we ensure the technology is something that serves the public good. >> Definitely. So there's about I think over 230 attendees expected tonight over 100 sea levels, the ACG SV Is has been it's it's much more than a networking organization. there's a lot of opportunities for collaboration for community. Tell me a little bit about your experience with that from a collaboration standpoint? >> Well, I think collaboration is a critical ingredient. I mean, for so many years, you look at the collaboration is gone. Just take between between the universities, my own Stanford and Silicon Valley and how that collaboration has developed over time and lead the founding of great companies, but also collaboration within the valley. This is the place to be a technology person in the whole world it's the best place partly because of this collaboration, and this innovative spirit that really is a core part of what we are as a place. >> I agree. The innovative spirit is one of the things that I enjoy, about not only being in technology, but also living in Silicon Valley. You can't go to a Starbucks without hearing a conversation or many conversations about new startups or cloud technology. So the innovative spirit is pervasive here. And it's also one that I find in an in an environment like ASG SV. You just hear a lot of inspiring stories and I was doing some research on them in the last 18 months. Five CEO positions have been seated and materialized through ACG SV. Number of venture deals initiated several board positions. So a lot of opportunity in this group here tonight. >> Right, well I think that's important because so much of the leadership has got to come by recruiting new young people. And with the increase in concerned about diversity and our leadership core and our boards, I think building that network out and trying to stretch it a little bit from the from perhaps the old boys network of an earlier time in the Valley is absolutely crucial. >> Couldn't agree more. So let's now talk a little bit about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. Tell us a little bit about it. When was it founded? >> So we are we are in our very first year, actually, this year, our first year of scholars, we founded it in 2016. The motivation was, I think, an increasing gap we perceived in terms of the need for great leadership and what was available. And it was in government. It was in the nonprofit world, it was in the for profit world. So I being a lifelong educator said, What can we do about this? Let's try to recruit and develop a core of younger people who show that they're committed to the greater good and who are excellent, who are innovative, who are creative, and prepare them for leadership roles in the future. >> So you're looking for are these undergraduate students? >> They are graduate students, so they've completed their undergraduate, it's a little hard to tell when somebody's coming out of high school, what their civic commitment is, what their ability to lead is. But coming out of coming out of undergraduate experience, and often a few years of work experience, we can tell a lot more about whether somebody has the potential to be a future leader. >> So you said, found it just in 2016. And one of the things I saw that was very interesting is projecting in the next 50 years, there's going to be 5000 Knight-Hennessy scholars at various stages of their careers and government organizations, NGOs, as you mentioned, so looking out 50 years you have a strong vision there, but really expect this organization to be able to make a lasting impact. >> That's what our goal is lasting impact over decades, because people who go into leadership positions often take a decade or two to rise to that position. But that's what our investment is our investment is in the in the future. And when I went to Phil Knight who's my co-founder and donor, might lead donor to the program, he was enthusiastic. His view was that we had a we had a major gap in leadership. And we needed to begin training, we need to do multiple things. We need to do things like we're doing tonight. But we also need to think about that next younger generation is up and coming. >> Some terms of inspiring the next generation of innovative diversity thinkers. Talk to me about some of the things that this program is aimed at, in addition to just, you know, some of the knowledge about leadership, but really helping them understand this diverse nature in which we now all find ourselves living. >> So one of the things we do is we try to bring in leaders from all different walks of life to meet and have a conversation with our scholars. This morning, we had the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in town, Michelle Bachelet, and she sat down and talked about how she thought about her role as addressing human rights, how to move things forward in very complex situations we face around the world with collapse of many governments and many human rights violations. And how do you how do you make that forward progress with a difficult problem? So that kind of exposure to leaders who are grappling with really difficult problems is a critical part of our program. >> And they're really seeing and experiencing real world situations? >> Absolutely. They're seeing them up close as they're really occurring. They see the challenges we had, we had Governor Brown and just before he went out of office here in California, to talk about criminal justice reform a major issue in California and around the country. And how do we make progress on that on that particular challenge? >> So you mentioned a couple of other leaders who the students I've had the opportunity to learn from and engage with, but you yourself are quite the established leader. You went to Stanford as a professor in 1977. You are a President Emeritus you were president of Stanford from 2000 to 2016. So these students also get the opportunity to learn from all that you have experienced as it as a professor of Computer Science, as well as in one of your current roles as chairman of Alphabet. Talk to us a little bit about just the massive changes that you have seen, not just in Silicon Valley, but in technology and innovation over the last 40 plus years. >> Well, it is simply amazing. When I arrived at Stanford, there was no internet. The ARPANET was in its young days, email was something that a bunch of engineers and scientists use to communicate, nobody else did. I still remember going and seeing the first demonstration of what would become Yahoo. Well, while David Filo and Jerry Yang had it set up in their office. And the thing that immediately convinced me Lisa was they showed me that their favorite Pizza Parlor would now allow orders to go online. And when I saw that I said, the World Wide Web is not just about a bunch of scientists and engineers exchanging information. It's going to change our lives and it did. And we've seen wave after wave that with Google and Facebook, social media rise. And now the rise of AI I mean this this is a transformative technology as big as anything I think we've ever seen. In terms of its potential impact. >> It is AI is so transformative. I was I was in Hawaii recently on vacation and Barracuda Networks was actually advertising about AI in Hawaii and I thought that's interesting that the people that are coming to to Hawaii on vacation, presumably, people have you know, many generations who now have AI as a common household word may not understand the massive implications and opportunities that it provides. But it is becoming pervasive at every event we're at at the Cube and there's a lot of opportunity there. It's it's a very exciting subject. Last question for you. You mentioned that this that the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program is really aimed towards graduate students. What is your advice to those BB stem kids in high school right now who are watching this saying, oh, John, what, what? How do you advise me to be able to eventually get into a program like this? >> Well, I think it begins by really finding your passion, finding something you're really dedicated to pushing yourself challenging yourself, showing that you can do great things with it. And then thinking about the bigger role you want to have with technology. In the after all, technology is not an end in itself. It's a tool to make human lives better and that's the sort of person we're looking for in the knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, >> Best advice you've ever gotten. >> Best advice ever gotten is remember that leadership is about service to the people in the institution you lead. >> It's fantastic not about about yourself but really about service to those. >> About service to others >> JOHN, it's been a pleasure having you on the Cube tonight we wish you the best of luck in your keynote at the 15th annual ACG SV Awards and we thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. I've enjoyed it. Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube on the ground. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat music) >> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 15th annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well, I'm here with one of the board members of ACG SV, Ashley Tarver, big data evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. >> Lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? >> It's a great networking event. >> It is. >> 'Cause so many people have showed up. >> There's over 230 people. >> Oh, easily. >> Expected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACG SV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, just the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed, the merger, a couple months ago, what's going on there? >> It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with a company called Hortonworks. And the two companies together, we're about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers, it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge-to-AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in the cloud, a hybrid cloud environment, so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. >> As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid, multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically, companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way, but also enable access to data from decades ago. >> Yeah, most anybody's who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple in-points, edge devices, and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge. So, having the ability to do that in a. You can do it now with the way we're doing it, the way your company wants to do it. So if you're already in the cloud, you can stay there, if you wanted to keep it on the premise. So there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table. So hopefully, it becomes a little easier for our customers. >> So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy still on prem, and you're talking to them in your role as the big data evangelist, where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI, you got to go to the cloud to do it? >> Absolutely. I mean, AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us, it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist, you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately. And as soon as you can do that, you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own, and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. >> Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic, but since we're low on time here, we are at the 15th annual GROW! Awards. ACG SV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACG SV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? >> Well, it's really exciting 'cause in Silicon Valley, it's unique 'cause it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location of the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends, and as a result, you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So, it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-circle events, which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup, you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance. And so, the ability to do networking like at an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively, it all plays a really important role at ACG. >> Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Mountain View California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual ACG SV Grow! Awards. This is a event with nearly 300 attendees, about 100 plus C-levels, and I'm excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Hannah Kain, the CEO of Alom. Hannah, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. >> And here you are, and I are, in the lobby where there is a lot of innovation and collaboration going on right here, so thank you for joining me in this energetic time at the event. >> Oh, I absolutely love it. You can feel the energy of Silicon Valley here. >> Yeah, you're right, you can. So tell me about, you are the CEO and founder of Alom. Tell me about your company, what you guys do, what makes you different. >> So, we do supply chain excellence. We execute and plant supply chains for very large corporations out of 19 locations globally. We are headquartered right here in Silicon Valley. Using technology to help our customers be agile and get the products to the right place exactly when their customers need it, and protect their brand, do their risk management that makes sure they do everything right in the supply chain. It's super exciting, and no other place is technology used better than in the supply chain. >> So, you founded Alom in the 90s. You have seen a tremendous amount of technology innovation. I mean, things change faster than we can even keep track sometimes. Tell me a little bit about what has been a facilitator of you as the CEO being headquartered in Silicon Valley, and being able to take advantage of technology to grow and scale your business. >> I think back in the 90s, nobody really realized the potential of technology in supply chain. I mean, supply chain wasn't even a word. And so, I always thought that supply chain could be done much differently than it was done in the old days, and that technology would be the big facilitator of it. So right now, we have much more visibility in supply chain. We can see where products are, et cetera, but we've also increased the complexity of the supply chains, driven down the cost of products, but also at the same point of time, driven up the complexity with components being shipped all over the world and assembled in one place and distributed to another place. So, there's a lot of complexity that only technology can resolve. So, being in Silicon Valley, which is the first place of technology, is just fantastic when you're in supply chain. It really leverages innovation that's taking place. >> And you can, like we said when we started, you can feel the energy of the innovation going on here. I read on your LinkedIn profile that you are passionate about excellence, technology, collaboration, and community. The last two, collaboration and community, really underscore the association for corporate growth in Silicon Valley. Tell me about your involvement in ACG SV and what makes this event worthy of your time. >> So, I do believe in collaboration. I think collaboration is a core value in Silicon Valley. I believe that collaborative companies and collaborative people are going to win in the marketplace and also have more fun while doing it, creating much more value. And so, in ACG Silicon Valley, there's just a lot of collaboration, lots of different points of view, but also a lot of very focused, dedicated business people. And so, we get together and get ideas from each other, but also send business to and from each other, and use each other as resources. And I also believe, apart from collaboration, being resourceful is a real winner. You need to be resourceful and be able to make things happen and figure out a way to navigate new landscapes. And that's what having these great contacts in ACG and other associations in Silicon Valley really do for me. >> So last question, Hannah, for you as a female CEO, a leader in technology, what advice would you give to the subsequent generations of women in technology who aspire to be leaders like yourself? >> I think they should be leaders like themselves, not like me, but like themselves. I think you need to be authentic. Bring your own strength to every situation, and I think that's what I really wish for the new generation. That many of the women have paved the way such that the new generation can really be themselves and contribute. And I'd say, focus on what you can contribute and what you can do for the greater community and for business as such. >> I love that advice, Hannah. Authenticity is such a value. Well, thank you so much for spending some time here with us in this energetic 15th Annual Grow! Awards. We appreciate your time. >> Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you. >> You're watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, thanks for your time. >> [Upbeat Tech Music]

>> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin, on the ground with theCUBE at the 15th annual ACG SV Grow Awards, Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, is what that stands for. Can you hear the energy and the innovation going on back here? It's amazing tonight. I'm very pleased to welcome to theCUBE, one of tonight's winners from Arista Technologies Kenneth Duda, the CTO, SVP of software engineering, and one of the founders of Arista Technologies. Kenneth, thank you so much and congratulations! >> Thank you so much, we're honored by the award. >> Well, it's been amazing. Outstanding Growth Award winner, congratulations. I was just looking at some of the recent earnings from Arista, nice Q4 earnings from FY-18. >> Thank you. >> Above the guidance, stock price rising this year. Last month Goldman Sachs added Arista to its conviction buy list. You guys are on nice trajectory, tell me about that. >> Well, it's just been a fantastic journey, you just don't get this many chances to participate in something like Arista from the ground up. Our growth has been driven in no small part thanks to the incredible growth of cloud computing. Cloud computing is changing the world and the cloud data centers need a different kind of network infrastructure. They need something that scales, meet their needs, and is customizable to integrate with all of their management systems, automation, and we've been able to provide that and be part of that journey, it's been incredibly gratifying. >> So you specifically talk with customers a lot, I was reading about one of your recent big wins in Canada, CBC Radio Canada facility in Montreal, but talk to me about what's some of the things now that you're hearing from customers especially those customers who are still in the process of transforming and transitioning workloads to the cloud. What are some of the things that surprise you about where customers are in any industry in this journey. >> Right, well, so I spend most of my time talking to the enterprise customers because there are so many of them and what we've learned there is a couple of things. One is they are very impacted by cloud. Cloud's a big deal, they're moving somewhere closer to the cloud, they're also building their own internal environments in a more cloud-like fashion and, as such, benefit from Arista's approach. But the most interesting thing I've learned is that neither of those is the most important thing. The most important thing is the network has got to work and it might sound strange, but networking gear isn't always reliable and what we've been able to achieve through our architectural approach and through our focus on automated testing has enabled us to produce a higher quality product which has been a major attractor of the enterprise customer. So you need to cover all those bases to succeed in this business. >> You're right, that network is absolutely essential. When anything goes down, whether it's a Facebook outage, it's world news. Tell me, what is the Arista advantage? >> The key advantage is the quality of our products. It's the fact that we have built an architecture that is more resilient to software and hardware errors. It's the way we test. We've made a tremendous investment in automated testing, so that our product has gone through hundreds of thousands of tests before it ever sees a customer. But actually the most important element behind quality, is the culture of your company, what do you believe? What's important to you? What gets you up in the morning? What are you thinking about and talking about to your employees? What's the most important thing, is it profitability? Is it making a deal, is it hitting a schedule? Or is it making sure the network works? We are 100% focused on that and it's been really gratifying to see the impact that's had. >> So last question, and thank you for speaking over the drum noise going on behind us, by the way, to get people into the auditorium. In terms of culture and the impact, what do you think this award means to your peers, your teams at Arista? >> Oh, it's just such an affirmation of the journey we've come through so far and the journey we still have ahead of us. We're very grateful for the award. >> So, I see so much momentum coming into 2019. What are some of the exciting things we can expect from Arista this year that you might be able to share with us? >> I think we're seeing a real transition from network designers focusing on the control plane of their network first to focusing on the management of the network first because management is actually the key to smooth operations. Our cloud vision product addresses that need. We're really excited about that transformation. >> Well, Kenneth, again, congratulations to Arista and yourself and your teams on the Outstanding Growth Award from ACG SV. We also thank you for spending some time with us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, it was my pleasure. >> I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE. (energetic music)

>> (Announcer) From Mountain View, California it's the Cube. Covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual Grow! Awards for the Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, ACG SV. That's a mouthful. I'm here with one of the ACG SV board members, Zac Mutrux, the District Sales Manager at Insperity. Hey, Zack, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm pleased to be here. >> So before we talk about what you're doing here at the 15th Annual Grow! Awards, tell our audience about Insperity. I was reading, I love taglines. >> Yes. >> And I see on your homepage, Insperity is obsessed with delivery HR mastery. Wow. >> Oh yeah. >> Obsessed and mastery. Those two words just jumped out. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do. >> Impressive, isn't it? Well, we actually just adjusted our tagline to HR that makes a difference. And that's really what it's all about. We feel like companies that are growing, if they're going to make it from good to the best, it has everything to do with the people. Attracting the best people and keeping them, developing them over time, and that's exactly what we do with our clients. >> So Insperity has been in business since 1986, and if I think of today's modern workforce, highly mobile, distributed, there's the whole on-demand industry. You guys have seen a tremendous amount of change that now can be massively influenced, and your customers can, using technology. Give me a little bit of that historical perspective on Insperity's inception and today's workforce, and how you're helping them attract and retain the best talent. >> Oh, absolutely. Well, when the company started it was in a maybe a 200 square foot room with one telephone between the two co-founders. There's no such thing as email. So, absolutely, there's been immense technological changes and there continues to be. I think that's one of the things that has been responsible for Insperity's success is its adoption of technology. Today we are as much a technology company as we are an employee benefits company, or an HR consulting company. It's really about creating a positive experience for the employees. That's part of being a competitive employer. >> Well it has to be a positive experience, right? For your customers. Because acquiring great talent is one thing, retaining them is another. And I want to kind of pivot off the retention there for a second. As the District Sales Manager, I was asking you before we went live, tell me maybe one of your favorite stories, and you said, "Wow". One of the great things, you guys are coming off great growth and FY18 revenue growth. One of the great things that Insperity has been really successful at is customer retention. And that's hard. You're proud of this. Tell us about that statistic that you mentioned, and how it is that Insperity is evolving and innovating over the last few decades to keep that retention number as phenomenal as it is. >> Well, Insperity's been named one of the most admired corporations in the country, actually, five years in a row by Fortune magazine. And that's the kind of press that you can't buy. One of the accolades that I'm most proud of is that in the past year our own employees named us one of the top 100 companies to work for in the United States. Which is, I think, the proof that we really know what we're doing with our clients. Because there are a lot of different companies out there, various competitors, and almost none of them are on that list. So, it's living our values and expressing through our service team, our extraordinary service team, that, I think, keeps our clients coming back to us year after year. About 85% renew. That's been consistent. A high level of client retention for the past three years. Even more extraordinary is that we've been growing both top line and bottom line revenue at the same time. So there's just a testament to our leadership, to our co-founder and CEO, Paul Sarvadi, and to the best of team-- >> But it sounds like it's a lot of symbiotic relationships between the internal retention at Insperity that is maybe leading through to your customers seeing, hey, there's not a high turnover here. These people are doing, they love what they're doing. They're working for a good company. So there's probably a lot of symbiotic behaviors. >> Well, that's exactly right. I think you really hit the nail of the head. It's about culture. It's a culture that starts from the top with leadership, and it filters down throughout the organization. And we're not looking to do business with every single company. We're looking to do business with the companies that believe the things that we believe. That is, companies that have high levels of commitment, trust, communication. They do better financially then companies that don't have those things. >> And along those lines, mentioning just before we wrap here, we are at the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight, where they're honoring two award winners. The Outstanding Growth Award winner is Arista Networks. And the Emerging Growth winner is Adesto Technologies. I'm excited to talk to them later. But I wanted to get a little bit of perspective on you've been involved as a board member of ACSG since last year. Tell me a little bit about what makes ACG SV worthy of your time. >> Oh, absolutely. That's a great question. It's just an extraordinary community, I think, of the top leaders in Silicon Valley come together. The monthly Key Notes add a lot of value. It's an intimate setting and there's real conversations that are taking place on topics that are relevant to today's professionals. So for me to be able to engage and hopefully add some value as a board member is privilege. >> And you can hear probably a lot of those conversations going on right behind Zac and me tonight. Zac, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time. >> Oh, right, thank you, Lisa. >> For the Cube, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground. Thanks for watching. (pop electronic music)

>> From Mountainview, California, it's The Cube, covering the 15th annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at the 15th annual ACG SV Grow! Awards. At the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, can you hear the buzz of 230 plus attendees behind me? I'm very pleased to welcome one of the ACG SV board members Dr. Shampa Banerjee, technology executive, and chief product officer at Eros Digital. Shampa, thank you so much for giving us some of your time this evening. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure. >> So lots of great, innovative, and inspiring conversations, no doubt, going on behind us. >> I'm trying to listen to it. >> Yeah, so talk to us a little bit about Eros Digital, who you are, what you do. >> So Eros International is the largest studio in India. It produces or distributes around 60 to 70 percent of the films made in India, Bollywood films. So I run the streaming platform, the Netflix for Bollywood, that's what I call it. >> The Netflix for Bollywood, I love it. Now, tell us more about that. >> So, you know, it's a streaming platform, a lot of the titles are from what we produce. A lot of the titles we lease from other production houses, and that is the entire technology platform, and then how do you get to the, we connect the consumers, rather, to the entertainment, right? So we like to help them discover, we help them indulge in the whole experience, and then as they keep coming to us more and more, we personalize the experience for them, so that's really what we give them. >> You know, personalization is so key. We expect it right in our lives, and whatever it is that we're doing, we're engaging with an Amazon or a Netflix or at Eros for example, we kind of now expect that. We're sort of demanding consumers, right? We expect them to know what I want, just what I want, don't give me any things that I don't want, so is that one of the things that you've seen, maybe surprising in your career, is this increasing demand for personalization? >> Absolutely, because, you know, there's so much content out there, so much information, and unless there's a filtering mechanism that makes sense for you, people don't want to, you know, it's very hard for them, so they want you to do the work for them. It's entertainment, right? So absolutely. Everyone kind of expects it. It's not said. It's not explicit, but that's the expectation. >> And obviously, with the goal of delighting and retaining those customers, you as the chief product officer have to listen and react to that. >> I spent, I'll tell you a short story. I spent once a month going through all the customers' comments in different platforms, right? And one of the stories I read was this 17-year-old French gal in Paris, she loves watching Bollywood because she was suffering from leukemia and after she gets a treatment, she comes home, she wants to watch something that makes her happy, and we had some issues with that subtitles, and she was having a problem watching our movies and she begged "Please bring them back". And I ran out of my office, went to my team, and I said, "Guys, this is who we wake up for every day. We give her joy, we give her pleasure." So to me, that's how listening to the customers to me is primary, to me they are my biggest stakeholder, and I've told the CEO and founder that, look at the end of the day, I leave and argue with you if it doesn't serve my customers. That's what I believe, listening to the customers, listening to them, understanding, of course, we do a lot of data collection and we look at what we are doing and the patterns, and based on that we make modifications, we test different things to see what makes sense, what's working, and what's not working, because people don't always tell you, and even if you ask them, they're shy to tell you. But then you can see what they're doing, and that's an indicator. >> Well that makes you feel really good, seeing and hearing and feeling the impact that you're making, and speaking of impact, you have been, in the last minute or so that we have, you've been on the board of ACG SV for about the last five years. We're here tonight to honor Arista as the Outstanding Growth Award winner and (mumbles) Technology as the Emerging Growth winner, but really quickly, what makes ACG SV worth your time? >> So ACG honestly is a fantastic organization and you know, living in the Bay Area, there are many organizations, there are many events that are always going on, you know. ACG has been a place where I've seen it's a very, very, very, very diverse organization, of course I still wish there were more females, you know, but it's a very diverse organization, people of all ages, people from different walks of life, from different kinds of companies, you know, and people are very, very collaborative and help each other to do business. I've become personal friends with many of them, but the main thing is, you know, you come here, if you're new to the Valley especially, whether as a company or as an individual, this is one of the best places to come to because it's not too large, it's not too small, it has the right number of people, and it helps you quickly on board. They'll introduce you to people, introduce you to events, they give you what you need to kind of get started. So to me it's like, when I joined, I joined before I was on the board, almost, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, and I've seen this whole thing transform and it's just an excellent, supportive, the people are very open-minded, great ideas, and it's just an excellent organization, love it. So it's worth my time, you know, to take the extra hours, and I would love to see it get even bigger and more diverse and more interesting. >> Well it sounds like, I love how you kind of described ACG SV as being that Goldilocks type of organization, not too big, not too small, just right, but we thank you so much. I wish we had more time to talk, as a female in technology, but we'll have to have you back at the studio on The Cube! >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much for your time. For The Cube, I am Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (music)