(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with Atri Basu who is Cisco's resident philosopher who also holds a master's in computer science. We're going to have to unpack that a little bit. And Necati Cehreli, who's technical lead at Cisco. Welcome, guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, let's get into it. We want you to explain how Cisco validated the Zebrium technology and the proof points that you have that it actually works as advertised. So first Atri, first tell us about Cisco TAC. What does Cisco TAC do? >> So TAC is otherwise it's an acronym for Technical Assistance Center, is Cisco's support arm, the support organization. And the risk of sounding like I'm spouting a corporate line. The easiest way to summarize what TAC does is provide world class support to Cisco customers. What that means is we have about 8,000 engineers worldwide and any of our Cisco customers can either go on our web portal or call us to open a support request. And we get about 2.2 million of these support requests a year. And what these support requests are, are essentially the customer will describe something that they need done some networking goal that they have that they want to accomplish. And then it's TACs job to make sure that that goal does get accomplished. Now, it could be something like they're having trouble with an existing network solution and it's not working as expected or it could be that they're integrating with a new solution. They're, you know, upgrading devices maybe there's a hardware failure anything really to do with networking support and, you know the customer's network goals. If they open up a case for testing for help then TACs job is to respond and make sure the customer's, you know questions and requirements are met. About 44% of these support requests are usually trivial and, you know can be solved within a call or within a day. But the rest of TAC cases really involve getting into the network device, looking at logs. It's a very technical role. It's a very technical job. You need to be conversed with network solutions, their designs, protocols, et cetera. >> Wow. So 56% non-trivial. And so I would imagine you spend a lot of time digging through logs. Is that true? Can you quantify that like, you know, every month how much time you spend digging through logs and is that a pain point? >> Yeah, it's interesting you asked that because when we started on this journey to augment our support engineers workflow with Zebrium solution, one of the things that we did was we went out and asked our engineers what their experience was like doing log analysis. And the anecdotal evidence was that on average an engineer will spend three out of their eight hours reviewing logs either online or offline. So what that means is either with the customer live on a WebEx, they're going to be going over logs, network, state information, et cetera or they're going to do it offline where the customer sends them the logs it's attached to a, you know, a service request and they review it and try to figure out what's going on and provide the customer with information. So it's a very large chunk of our day. You know, I said 8,000 plus engineers and so three hours a day that's 24,000 man hours a day spent on log analysis. Now the struggle with logs or analyzing logs is there by out of necessity, logs are very contrite. They try to pack a lot of information in a very little space. And this is for performance reasons, storage reasons, et cetera, but the side effect of that is they're very esoteric. So they're hard to read if you're not conversant if you're not the developer who wrote these logs or you aren't doing code deep dives. And you're looking at where this logs getting printed and things like that, it may not be immediately obvious or even after a little while it may not be obvious what that log line means or how it correlates to whatever problem you're troubleshooting. So it requires tenure. It requires, you know, like I was saying before it requires a lot of knowledge about the protocol what's expected because when you're doing log analysis what you're really looking for is a needle in a haystack. You're looking for that one anomalous event, that single thing that tells you this shouldn't have happened, and this was a problem right. Now doing that kind of anomaly detection requires you to know what is normal. It requires, you know, what the baseline is. And that requires a very in depth understanding of, you know the state changes for that network solution or product. So it requires time to near and expertise to do well. And it takes a lot of time even when you have that kind of expertise. >> Wow. So thank you, Atri. And Necati, that's almost two days a week for a technical resource. That's not inexpensive. So what was Cisco looking for to sort of help with this and how'd you stumble upon Zebrium? >> Yeah, so, we have our internal automation system which has been running more than a decade now. And what happens is when a customer attach log bundle or diagnostic bundle into the service request we take that from the Sr we analyze it and we represent some kind of information. You know, it can be alerts or some tables, some graph, to the engineer, so they can, you know troubleshoot this particular issue. This is an incredible system, but it comes with its own challenges around maintenance to keep it up to date and relevant with Cisco's new products or a new version of a product, new defects, new issues and all kind of things. And when I mean with those challenges are let's say Cisco comes up with a product today. We need to come together with those engineers. We need to figure out how this bundle works, how it's structured out. We need to select individual logs, which are relevant and then start modeling these logs and get some values out of those logs, using PaaS or some rag access to come to a level that we can consume the logs. And then people start writing rules on top of that abstraction. So people can say in this log I'm seeing this value together with this other value in another log, maybe I'm hitting this particular defect. So that's how it works. And if you look at it, the abstraction it can fail the next time. And the next release when the development or engineer decides to change that log line which you write that rag X or we can come up with a new version which we completely change the services or processes then whatever you have wrote needs to be re-written for the new service. And we see that a lot with products, like for instance, WebEx where you have a very short release cycle that things can change maybe the next week with a new release. So whatever you are writing, especially for that abstraction and for those rules are maybe not relevant with that new release. With that being said we have a incredible rule creation process and governance process around it which starts with maybe a defect. And then it takes it to a level where we have an automation in place. But if you look at it, this really ties to human bandwidth. And our engineers are really busy working on you know, customer facing, working on issues daily and sometimes creating news rules or these PaaS are not their biggest priorities so they can be delayed a bit. So we have this delay between a new issue being identified to a level where we have the automation to detect it next time that some customer faces it. So with all these questions and with all challenges in mind we start looking into ways of actually how we can automate these automation. So these things that we are doing manually how we can move it a bit further and automate. And we had actually a couple of things in mind that we were looking for and this being one of them being this has to be product agnostic. Like if Cisco comes up with a product tomorrow I should be able to take it logs without writing, you know, complex regs, PaaS, whatever and deploy it into this system. So it can embrace our logs and make sense of it. And we wanted this platform to be unsupervised. So none of the engineers need to create rules, you know, label logs, this is bad, this is good. Or train the system like which requires a lot of computational power. And the other most important thing for us was we wanted this to be not noisy at all because what happens with noises when your level of false positives really high your engineers start ignoring the good things between that noise. So they start the next time, you know thinking that this thing will not be relevant. So we want something with a lot more less noise. And ultimately we wanted this new platform or new framework to be easily adaptable to our existing workflow. So this is where we started. We start looking into the, you know first of all, internally, if we can build this thing and also start researching it, and we came up to Zebrium actually Larry, one of the co-founders of Zebrium. We came upon his presentation where he clearly explained why this is different, how this works and it immediately clicked in and we said, okay, this is exactly what we were looking for. We dive deeper. We checked the block posts where Zebrium guys really explain everything very clearly there. They're really open about it. And most importantly, there is a button in their system. And so what happens usually with AI ML vendors is they have this button where you fill in your details and a sales guys call you back and you know, explains the system here. They were like, this is our trial system. We believe in the system you can just sign up and try it yourself. And that's what we did. We took one of our Cisco live DNA Center, wireless platforms. We start streaming logs out of it. And then we synthetically, you know, introduce errors like we broke things. And then we realized that Zebrium was really catching the errors perfectly. And on top of that, it was really quiet unless you are really breaking something. And the other thing we realized was during that first trial is Zebrium was actually bringing a lot of context on top of the logs. During those failures, we worked with couple of technical leaders and they said, "Okay if this failure happens I'm expecting this individual log to be there." And we found out with Zebrium apart from that individual log there were a lot of other things which gives a bit more context around the root cause, which was great. And that's where we wanted to take it to the next level. Yeah. >> Okay. So, you know, a couple things to unpack there. I mean, you have the dart board behind you which is kind of interesting, 'cause a lot of times it's like throwing darts at the board to try to figure this stuff out. But to your other point, Cisco actually has some pretty rich tools with AppD and doing observability and you've made acquisitions like thousand eyes. And like you said, I'm presuming you got to eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne. And so you've got to be tools agnostic. And when I first heard about Zebrium, I was like wait a minute. Really? I was kind of skeptical. I've heard this before. You're telling me all I need is plain text and a timestamp. And you got my problem solved. So, and I understand that you guys said, okay let's run a POC. Let's see if we can cut that from, let's say two days a week down to one day, a week. In other words, 50%, let's see if we can automate 50% of the root cause analysis. And so you funded a POC. How did you test it? You put, you know, synthetic, you know errors and problems in there, but how did you test that, it actually works Necati? >> Yeah. So we wanted to take it to the next level which is meaning that we wanted to back test is with existing SaaS. And we decided, you know, we chose four different products from four different verticals, data center security, collaboration, and enterprise networking. And we find out SaaS where the engineer put some kind of log in the resolution summary. So they closed the case. And in the summary of the SR, they put "I identified these log lines and they led me to the root cause" and we ingested those log bundles. And we tried to see if Zebrium can surface that exact same log line in their analysis. So we initially did it with archery ourself and after 50 tests or so we were really happy with the results. I mean, almost most of them we saw the log line that we were looking for but that was not enough. And we brought it of course to our management and they said, "Okay, let's try this with real users" because the log being there is one thing but the engineer reaching to that log is another take. So we wanted to make sure that when we put it in front of our users, our engineers, they can actually come to that log themselves because, you know, we know this platform so we can, you know make searches and find whatever we are looking for but we wanted to do that. So we extended our pilots to some selected engineers and they tested with their own SaaS. Also due some back testing for some SaaS which are closed in the past or recently. And with a sample set of, I guess, close to 200 SaaS we find out like majority of the time, almost 95% of the time the engineer could find the log they were looking for in Zebrium's analysis. >> Yeah. Okay. So you were looking for 50%, you got the 95%. And my understanding is you actually did it with four pretty well known Cisco products, WebEx client, DNA Center Identity services, engine ISE, and then UCS. Unified pursuit. So you use actual real data and that was kind of your proof point, but Atri, so that sounds pretty impressive. And have you put this into production now and what have you found? >> Well, yes, we've launched this with the four products that you mentioned. We're providing our TAC engineers with the ability, whenever a support bundle for that product gets attached to the support request. We are processing it, using sense and then providing that sense analysis to the TAC engineer for their review. >> So are you seeing the results in production? I mean, are you actually able to reclaim that time that people are spending? I mean, it was literally almost two days a week down to you know, a part of a day, is that what you're seeing in production and what are you able to do with that extra time and people getting their weekends back? Are you putting 'em on more strategic tasks? How are you handling that? >> Yeah. So what we're seeing is, and I can tell you from my own personal experience using this tool that troubleshooting any one of the cases, I don't take more than 15 to 20 minutes to go through the Zebrium report. And I know within that time either what the root causes or I know that Zebrium doesn't have the information that I need to solve this particular case. So we've definitely seen, well it's been very hard to measure exactly how much time we've saved per engineer, right? Again, anecdotally, what we've heard from our users is that out of those three hours that they were spending per day, we're definitely able to reclaim at least one of those hours and what even more importantly, you know, what the kind of feedback that we've gotten in terms of I think one statement that really summarizes how Zebrium's impacted our workflow was from one of our users. And they said, "Well, you know, until you provide us with this tool, log analysis was a very black and white affair, but now it's become really colorful." And I mean, if you think about it log analysis is indeed black and white. You're looking at it on a terminal screen where the background is black and the text is white, or you're looking at it as a text where the background is white and the text is black, but what they're really trying to say is there are hardly any visual cues that help you navigate these logs which are so esoteric, so dense, et cetera. But what Zebrium does is it provides a lot of color and context to the whole process. So now you're able to quickly get to, you know using their Word Cloud, using their interactive histogram, using the summaries of every incident. You're very quickly able to summarize what might be happening and what you need to look into. Like, what are the important aspects of this particular log bundle that might be relevant to you? So we've definitely seen that. A really great use case that kind of encapsulates all of this was very early on in our experiment. There was this support request that had been escalated to the business unit or the development team. And the TAC engineer had really, they had an intuition about what was going wrong because of their experience because of, you know the symptoms that they'd seen. They kind of had an idea but they weren't able to convince the development team because they weren't able to find any evidence to back up what they thought was happening. And it was entirely happenstance that I happened to pick up that case and did an analysis using Zebrium. And then I sat down with a TAC engineer and we were very quickly within 15 minutes we were able to get down to the exact sequence of events that highlighted what the customer thought was happening, evidence of what the sorry not the customer what the TAC engineer thought was a root cause. And then we were able to share that evidence with our business unit and, you know redirect their resources so that we could chase down what the problem was. And that that really shows you how that color and context helps in log analysis. >> Interesting. You know, we do a fair amount of work in theCUBE in the RPA space, the robotic process automation and the narrative in the press when our RPA first started taking off was, oh, it's, you know machines replacing humans, or we're going to lose jobs. And what actually happened was people were just eliminating mundane tasks and the employees actually very happy about it. But what my question to you is was there ever a reticence amongst your team? Like, oh, wow, I'm going to lose my job if the machine's going to replace me or have you found that people were excited about this and what's been the reaction amongst the team? >> Well, I think, you know, every automation and AI project has that immediate gut reaction of you're automating away our jobs and so forth. And there is initially there's a little bit of reticence but I mean, it's like you said once you start using the tool, you realize that it's not your job, that's getting automated away. It's just that your job's becoming a little easier to do and it's faster and more efficient. And you're able to get more done in less time. That's really what we're trying to accomplish here. At the end of the day, Zebrium will identify these incidents. They'll do the correlation, et cetera. But if you don't understand what you're reading then that information's useless to you. So you need the human you need the network expert to actually look at these incidents, but what we are able to skin away or get rid of is all of is all the fat that's involved in our process like without having to download the bundle, which, you know when it's many gigabytes in size and now we're working from home with the pandemic and everything, you're, you know pulling massive amounts of logs from the corporate network onto your local device that takes time and then opening it up, loading it in a text editor that takes time. All of these things are we're trying to get rid of. And instead we're trying to make it easier and quicker for you to find what you're looking for. So it's like you said, you take away the mundane you take away the difficulties and the slog but you don't really take away the work the work still needs to be done. >> Yeah, great. Guys, thanks so much appreciate you sharing your story. It's quite, quite fascinating. Really. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. >> Excellent. >> Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to wrap up with some final thoughts. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube covering Fortinet security summit brought to you by Fortinet. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here at the Fordham het championship security summit. Napa valley has been beautiful and gracious to us all day. We're very pleased to be here. I'm very pleased to welcome a first-timer to the cube. Rupesh Chuck Chuck Xi, VP a T and T cybersecurity and edge solutions at, at and T cybersecurity. Refresh. Welcome. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Lisa, I'm looking forward to our conversation today. >>Me too. First of all, it's we're in Napa we're outdoors. It's beautiful venue, no complaints, right? We're at a golf PGA tournament. Very exciting. Talk to me about the at and T Fordanet relationship. Give me, give me an, a good insight into the partnership. >>Sure, sure. So, as you said, you know, beautiful weather in California, Napa it's my first time. Uh, so it's kind of a new experience for me going back to your question in terms of the relationship between eight P and T and Ford in that, uh, a long lasting, you know, 10 plus years, you know, hand in hand in terms of the product, the technology, the capabilities that we are brought together in the security space for our customers. So a strategic relationship, and I'm so thrilled to be here today as a, Fordanet invited us to be part of the championship. Tommy, >>Talk to me. So your role VP of, and T cybersecurity and edge solutions, give me an, a deep dive into what's in your purview. >>Sure, sure. So I, uh, sort of, you know, run the PNL or the profit and loss center for product management for all of at and T cybersecurity and ed solutions and the whole concept behind putting the teams together is the convergence in networking and security. Um, so, you know, we are supporting the entire customer continuum, whether it's a fortune 50, the fortune 1000 to mid-market customers, to small businesses, to, you know, government agencies, you know, whether it's a local government agency or a school district or a federal agency, et cetera. And my team and I focus on bringing new product and capabilities to the marketplace, you know, working with our sales team from an enablement perspective, go to market strategy. Um, and the whole idea is about, uh, you know, winning in the marketplace, right? So delivering growth and revenue to the business, >>Competitive differentiation. So we've seen so much change in the last year and a half. I know that's an epic understatement, but we've also seen the proliferation at the edge. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing and hearing from customers where that's concerned >>As you stated, right. There's a lot happening in the edge. And sometimes the definition for edge varies when you talk with different people, uh, the way we look at it is, you know, definitely focused on the customer edge, right? So if you think about many businesses, whether I am a, a quick serve restaurant or I'm a banking Institute or a financial services or an insurance agency, or I'm a retail at et cetera, you know, lots of different branches, lots of different transformation taking place. So one way of approaching it is that when you think about the customer edge, you see a lot of virtualization, software driven, a lot of IOT endpoints, et cetera, taking place. So the cyber landscape becomes more important. Now you're connecting users, devices, capabilities, your point of sale system to a multi-cloud environment, and that, you know, encryption of that data, the speed at which it needs to happen, all of that is very important. And as we think ahead with 5g and edge compute and what that evolution revolution is going to bring, it's going to get even more excited because to me, those are kind of like in a playgrounds of innovation, but we want to do it right and keep sort of, you know, cyber and security at the core of it. So we can innovate and keep the businesses safe. >>How do you help customers to kind of navigate edge cybersecurity challenges and them not being synonymous? >>That's a great, great question. You know, every day I see, you know, different teams, different agendas, different kinds of ways of approaching things. And what I tell customers and even my own teams is that, look, we have to have a, a blueprint and architecture, a vision, you know, what are the business outcomes that we want to achieve? What the customer wants to achieve. And then start to look at that kind of technology kind of convergence that is taking place, and especially in the security and the networking space, significant momentum on the convergence and utilize that convergence to create kind of full value stack solutions that can be scaled, can be delivered. So you are not just one and done, but it's a continuous innovation and improvement. And in the security space, you need that, right. It's never going to be one and done. No >>We've seen so much change in the last year. We've seen obviously this rapid pivot to work from home that was overnight for millions and millions of people. We're still in that too. A fair amount. There's a good amount of people that are still remote, and that probably will be permanently there's. Those that are going to be hybrid threat landscape bloated. I was looking at and talking with, um, 40 guard labs and the, the nearly 11 X increase in the last 12 months in ransomware is insane. And the ransomware as a business has exploded. So security is a board level conversation for businesses I assume in any. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree with you, it's a board level conversation. Security is not acknowledged the problem about picking a tool it's about, you know, the business risk and what do we need to do? Uh, you mentioned a couple of interesting stats, right? So we've seen, uh, you know, two things I'll share. One is we've seen, you know, 440 petabytes of data on the at and T network in one average business day. So 440 petabytes of data. Most people don't know what it is. So you can imagine the amount of information. So you can imagine the amount of security apparatus that you need, uh, to Tofino, protect, and defend and provide the right kind of insights. And then the other thing that VOC and along the same lines of what you were mentioning is significant, you know, ransomware, but also significant DDoSs attacks, right? So almost like, you know, we would say around 300% plus said, DDoSs mitigations that we did from last year, you know, year over year. >>So a lot of focus on texting the customer, securing the end points, the applications, the data, the network, the devices, et cetera. Uh, the other two points that I want to mention in this space, you know, again, going back to all of this is happening, right? So you have to focus on this innovation at the, at the speed of light. So, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the software capabilities that are more, forward-looking have to be applied in the security space ever more than ever before, right. Needs these do, we're seeing alliances, right? We're seeing this sort of, you know, crowdsourcing going on of action on the good guys side, right? You see the national security agencies kind of leaning in saying, Hey, let's together, build this concept of a D because we're all going to be doing business. Whether it's a public to public public, to private, private, to private, all of those different entities have to work together. So having security, being a digital trust, >>Do you think that the Biden administrations fairly recent executive order catalyst of that? >>I give it, you know, the president and the, the administration, a lot of, you know, kudos for kind of, and then taking it head on and saying, look, we need to take care of this. And I think the other acknowledgement that it is not just hunting or one company or one agency, right? It's the whole ecosystem that has to come together, not just national at the global level, because we live in a hyper connected world. Right. And one of the things that you mentioned was like this hybrid work, and I was joking with somebody the other day that, and really the word is location, location, location, thinking, network security, and networking. The word is hybrid hybrid hybrid because you got a hybrid workforce, the hybrid cloud, you have a hybrid, you have a hyper-connected enterprise. So we're going to be in this sort of, you know, hybrid for quite some time are, and it has to >>Be secure and an org. And it's, you know, all the disruption of folks going to remote work and trying to get connected. One beyond video conference saying, kids are in school, spouse working, maybe kids are gaming. That's been, the conductivity alone has been a huge challenge. And Affordanet zooming a lot there with links to us, especially to help that remote environment, because we know a lot of it's going to remain, but in the spirit of transformation, you had a session today here at the security summit, talked about transformation, formation plan. We talk about that word at every event, digital transformation, right? Infrastructure transformation, it security. What context, where you talking about transformation in it today? What does it transformation plan mean for your customers? >>That's a great question because I sometimes feel, you know, overused term, right? Then you just take something and add it. It's it? Transformation, network, transformation, digital transformation. Um, but what we were talking today in, in, in the morning was more around and sort of, you know, again, going back to the network security and the transformation that the customers have to do, we hear a lot about sassy and the convergence we are seeing, you know, SD van takeoff significantly from an adoption perspective application, aware to experiences, et cetera, customers are looking at doing things like internet offload and having connectivity back into the SAS applications. Again, secure connectivity back into the SAS applications, which directly ties to their outcomes. Um, so the, the three tenants of my conversation today was, Hey, make sure you have a clear view on the business outcomes that you want to accomplish. Now, the second was work with a trusted advisor and at and T and in many cases is providing that from a trusted advisor perspective. And third, is that going back to the one and done it is not a one and done, right? This is a, is a continuous process. So sometimes we have to be thinking about, are we doing it in a way that we will always be future ready, will be always be able to deal with the security threats that we don't even know about today. So yeah, >>You bring up the term future ready. And I hear that all the time. When you think of man, we really weren't future ready. When the pandemic struck, there was so much that wasn't there. And when I was talking with 49 earlier, I said, you know, how much, uh, has the pandemic been a, uh, a catalyst for so much innovation? I imagine it has been the same thing that >>Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, you know, early days, February, March, where we're all just trying to better understand, right? What is it going to be? And the first thing was, Hey, we're all going to work remote, is it a one week? Is it a two week thing? Right? And then if you're like the CIO or the CSO or other folks who are worried about how am I going to give the productivity tools, right. Businesses in a one customer we work with, again, tobacco innovation was said, Hey, I have 20,000 call center agents that I need to take remote. How do you deliver connectivity and security? Because that call center agent is the bloodline for that business interacting with their end customers. So I think, you know, it is accelerated what would happen over 10 years and 18 months, and it's still unknown, right? So we're still discovering the future. >>There's a, there will be more silver linings to come. I think we'll learn to pick your brain on, on sassy adoption trends. One of the things I noticed in your abstract of your session here was that according to Gardner, the convergence of networking and security into the sassy framework is the most vigorous technology trend. And coming out of 2020, seeing that that's a big description, most vigorous, >>It's a big, big description, a big statement. And, uh, we are definitely seeing it. You know, we saw some of that, uh, in the second half of last year, as the organizations were getting more organized to deal with, uh, the pandemic and the change then coming into this year, it's even more accelerated. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I look at sort of, you know, three things, right? So one is going back to the hybrid work, remote work, work from anywhere, right. So how do you continue to deliver a differentiated experience, highly secure to that workforce? Because productivity, human capital very important, right? The second is that there's a back and forth on the branch transformation. So yes, you know, restaurants are opening back up. Retailers are opening back up. So businesses are thinking about how do I do that branch transformation? And then the third is explosive business IOT. So the IOT end points, do you put into manufacturing, into airports in many industries, we continue to see that. So when you think about sassy and the framework, it's about delivering a, a framework that allows you to protect and secure all of those endpoints at scale. And I think that trend is real. I've seen customer demand, we've signed a number of deals. We're implementing them as we speak across all verticals, healthcare, retail, finance, manufacturing, transportation, government agencies, small businesses, mid-sized businesses. >>Nope, Nope. Not at all. Talk to me about, I'm curious, you've been at, at and T a long time. You've seen a lot of innovation. Talk, talk to me about your perspectives on seeing that, and then what to you think as a silver lining that has come out of the, the acceleration of the last 18 months. >>She and I, I get the question, you know, I've been with at and T long time. Right. And I still remember the day I joined at T and T labs. So it was one of my kind of dream coming out of engineering school. Every engineer wants to go work for a brand that is recognized, right. And I, I drove from Clemson, South Carolina to New Jersey Homedale and, uh, I'm still, you know, you can see I'm still having the smile on my face. So I've, you know, think innovation is key. And that's what we do at, at and T I think the ability to, um, kind of move fast, you know, I think what the pandemic has taught us is the speed, right? The speed at which we have to move the speed at which we have to collaborate the speed at which we have to deliver, uh, to agility has become, you know, the differentiator for all of us. >>And we're focusing on that. I also feel that, uh, you know, there have been times where, you know, product organizations, technology organizations, you know, we struggle with jumping this sort of S-curve right, which is, Hey, I'm holding onto something. Do I let go or not? Let go. And I think the pandemic has taught us that you have to jump the S-curve, you have to accelerate because that is where you need to be in, in a way, going back to the sassy trend, right. It is something that is real, and it's going to be there for the next three to five years. So let's get ready. >>I call that getting comfortably uncomfortable, no businesses safe if they rest on their laurels these days. I think we've learned that, speaking of speed, I wanna, I wanna get kind of your perspective on 5g, where you guys are at, and when do you think it's going to be really impactful to, you know, businesses, consumers, first responders, >>The 5g investments are happening and they will continue to happen. And if you look at what's happened with the network, what at and T has announced, you know, we've gotten a lot of kudos for whatever 5g network for our mobile network, for our wireless network. And we are starting to see that, that innovation and that innovation as we anticipated is happening for the enterprise customers first, right? So there's a lot of, you know, robotics or warehouse or equipment that needs to sort of, you know, connect at a low latency, high speed, highly secure sort of, you know, data movements, compute edge that sits next to the, to the campus, you know, delivering a very different application experience. So we're seeing that, you know, momentum, uh, I think on the consumer side, it is starting to come in and it's going to take a little bit more time as the devices and the applications catch up to what we are doing in the network. And if you think about, you know, the, the value creation that has happened on, on the mobile networks is like, if you think about companies like Uber or left, right, did not exist. And, uh, many businesses, you know, are dependent on that network. And I think, uh, it will carry on. And I think in the next year or two, we'll see firsthand the outcomes and the value that it is delivering you go to a stadium at and T stadium in Dallas, you know, 5g enabled, you know, that the experience is very different. >>I can't wait to go to a stadium again and see it came or live music. Oh, that sounds great. Rubbish. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what a T and T is doing with 49, the challenges that you're helping your customers combat at the edge and the importance of really being future. Ready? >>Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you having me. Thanks for 49 to invite us to be at this event. Yes. >>Thank you for refresh talk. She I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube at the 40 net championship security summits.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE Studios for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Any business that aspires to be a digital business has to invest in multiple new classes of capabilities required to ensure that their business operates as they're promising to their customers. Now, we've identified a number of these, but one of the things we think is especially important here in theCUBE is data protection, data assurance. If your data is going to be a differentiating asset within your business, you have to take steps to protect it and make sure that it's where it needs to be, when it needs to be there and in the form it's required. Now, a lot of companies talk about data protection, but they kind of diminish it down to just backup. Let's just back up the data, back up the volume. But increasingly, enterprises are recognizing that there's a continuum of services that are required to do a good job of taking care of your data, including disaster recovery. So, what we're going to talk about today is one of the differences between backup and restore, and disaster recovery and why disaster recovery is becoming such an important element of any meaningful and rational digital business strategy. Now, to have that conversation, today we're here with Sazzala Reddy who's the CTO at Datrium. Sazzala, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Happy to be here, Peter. >> So, before we go on this question of disaster recovery and why it's so important, let's start with a quick update on Datrium. Where's Datrium today? You've been through a lot of changes this year. >> Yes, right. We kind of have built a bunch of services as a platform. It will include primary storage, back-up, disaster orchestration and encryption mobility. So that last piece of that puzzle was a DR orchestration, we kind of finished that a few months ago, and that's the update, and also now what we're offering concretely is DR services to the Cloud with the VMware Cloud on Amazon. It is transformational, and people really are adopting it quite heavily with us, because it simplifies, that what you just said about the business continuity, and it gives them a chance to shut down the second data center and leverage the Cloud in a very cost-effective way, to have that option for them. >> So, let's talk about that, because when you think about the Cloud, typically you think about, especially as you start to bring together the Cyber Cloud notion of an on-premise versus a Cloud orientation, you think in terms of an on-premise set of resources and you think in terms of effectively mirroring those resources in the Cloud, and a lot of people have pointed out that that can be an extremely expensive way of doing things. So, historically we had a site, we had a disaster recovery site, maybe we even had a third site, and we had to replicate hardware, we had to replicate networking, we had to replicate software and often a sizeable percentage of staff across all those services, so we've been able to do it more effectively by having the Cloud be the target, but still, having to reserve all that CPU, all that network, seemed like an extremely expensive way of doing things if you only need it, when you need it, and ideally, it's not often. >> That's correct, so, Cloud offers us a new way of doing elastic, on-demand pricing, especially for disaster recovery, it is really useful to think about it that way. In a data center to data center DR like you mentioned, you have to buy all the different products for managing your data, you'll buy primary storage, back-up and de-orchestration, all these different pieces. Then you replicate the same thing somewhere else, all these pieces are kind of just complicated. It's called Murphy's Law, you know, imagine that when there's a disaster, everybody's watching you and you're trying to figure out how this is going to work for you, that's when the challenges are, and there's the danger is that until now, disaster recovery has mostly been a disaster. It's never really worked for anybody. So, what Cloud offers you is an opportunity to simplify that and basically get your disaster recovery to be fail proof. >> Well, so, we have the ongoing expense that we're now ameliorating, we're getting rid of, because we are not forcing anyone to reserve all those resources. >> Yeah. >> But one of the biggest problems in disaster recovery has always been, as you said, it's been a disaster. The actual people processes associated with doing or recovering from a disaster in business continuity sense often fails. So, how does doing it in the Cloud, does it mean we can now do more automation in the Cloud from a disaster recovery stand-point? Tell us a little bit about that. >> There are multiple things, not just that the Cloud offers simplicity in that way, you do have to imagine how are you going to build software to help the customer on their journey. The things, like you mentioned, three things people do in a disaster planning kind of thing, one is that they have to do planning, make all these notes, keep it down somewhere and things change. The moment you make these plans, they're broken because somebody did something else. And second thing is they have to do testing, which is time consuming and they're not sure it's going to work for them, and finally when there's a disaster there's panic, everybody's afraid of it. So, to solve that problem, you need to imagine a new software stack, running in the Cloud, in the most cost-efficient way so you can store your data, you can have all these back-ups there in a steady state and not paying very much. And its three costs are pretty low, if you do dedupe on that it's even lower, so that really brings down the cost of steady-state behavior, but then, when you push the button, you, we can bring up VMware servers on the Amazon Cloud on-demand. So you only pay for the VMware server's computer services when you really need them. And when you don't need them anywhere, you fix your data center, you push a button, you bring all the data back and shut down the VMware servers. So, it's like paying for insurance, after you have an accident. That changes the game. The cost efficiencies of doing DR, it suddenly becomes affordable for everybody, and you can shut down a second data center, cut down the amount of work you have to do, and it gives you an opportunity to actually now have a chance to get that fail proof-ness and actually know it's going to work for you or not going to work for you. >> But you're shutting down the other data center, but you're also not recreating in the Cloud, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you've got the data stored there, but you're not paying for all the resources that are associated with that, you're only spinning them up-- >> That's correct. >> in VM form, when there's actually a problem. But I also want to push this a little bit, it suggests also that if you practice, you said test, I'll use the word practice-- >> I did say that. >> As one of the things you need to do. You need to practice your DR. Presumably if you have more of that automated as part of this cloud experience, then pushing that button, certainly there's going to be some human tasks to be performed, but it increases the likelihood that the recovery process in the business continuity sense is more successfully accomplished, is that right? >> Yeah, correct, there are two things in this DR, one is that, do you know it's going to work for you when you actually have a disaster. That's why you think of doing testing, or the, what did you call it, planning-- >> Practice. >> Practice once in a while. The challenge with that is that why even to practice? Like, it takes time and energy for you to do that. You can do it, no problem, but how can we, with software, transform that in such a way that you get notified when actually something is going to go wrong for you. Because we own primary, back-up and DR, all the three legs of the stool in terms of how the DR should be working, we check continuous compliance checks every half an hour so that we can detect if something is going wrong, you have changed some plans, or you have added some new things, or networking is bad, whatever, we will tell you right away, pro-actively, in half an hour, that hey, there's a problem, should go fix it now. So you don't have to like do that much plan, that much of testing continuously anymore, because we are telling you right now there's a problem. That itself is such a game changer, in the sense that it's pro-active, versus being reactive when you're doing something. >> Yeah, it dramatically increases the likelihood that the actual recovery process itself is successful. >> Sazzala: Yes, right. >> Where if you have a bunch of humans doing it, could be more challenging -- >> Sazzala: More fragile. >> And so, as you said, a lot of the scripts, a lot of that automation is now in the solution and also pro-actively, so if something is no longer in compliance, it does not fit the scheme and the model that you've established within the overall DR framework, then you can alert the business that something is no longer compliance or is out of bounds, fix it so that it stays within the overall DR framework, have I got that right? >> Yes, correct, and you can only do this if you own all the pieces, otherwise, again, it's back to the Murphy's Law, you're testing. So every customer is testing DR in different event typologies, everybody's different, right? So then a customer is not the tester of all these pieces fitting together, and different combinations and permutations. Because we have all the three pieces, we are the ones testing it all the time and everybody testing the same thing, so it's the same software running everywhere that makes the probability of success much higher. >> So it's a great story, Sazzala, but where are you? Where is Datrium today in terms of having these conversations with customers, enacting this, turning this into solutions, changing the way that your customers are doing business? >> Right, we have simplified by converging a lot of services into one platform. That itself is a big deal for a lot of customers, nobody wants to manage stuff anymore, they don't have time and patience. So, we give this platform called DVX on-prem, it runs VMware RCLI, it's super efficient. But the next thing, what we're offering today, which is actually very attractive to our customers is that we give them a path to use the Cloud as a DR site without having to pay the cost of it and also without having to worry about it working for them or not working for them. The demos are super simple to operate because once it all works together, there's no complexity anymore, it's all kind of gone away. >> And, there are a lot of companies, as they mention upfront, that are talking about back-up and restore-- >> Yeah. >> As an approximate to this, but it seems like you've taken it a step further. >> Yeah, so, having been in the business for a while, back-up, yes, back-up can live in the Cloud, you can have long-term back-ups, whatever, but remember that back-up is not DR. If you wanted to have a DR, what DR means is that you're recovering from it, if you have back-up only-- >> Back up's a tier. >> Back-up is a tier. Back-up is that, you have to do rehydration. There's two problems with that. Firstly, rehydration will take you two days, everybody's watching you while the data center is down and businesses wants to be up and running, two days to recover, maybe 22 days. I recently was with a customer, they have a petabyte of data, takes 22 days to do recovery of the data. That's like, okay I don't know what business -- >> 22 days? >> 22 days. And then another 100 days to bring the data back. So that's the problem with back-up as a topic itself. And secondly, they're converting, a lot of those back-up vendors are converting VMs into Amazon VMs, nothing wrong with Amazon, it's just that, suddenly in a disaster, you're used to all your VCenter, you're used to your VMware environment, and now you're learning some new platform? It's going to re-factor your VMs into something else. That is a different disaster waiting to happen for you. >> Well, to the point, you don't want disaster recovery in three years when you figure it all out, you want disaster recovery now-- >> Now. >> With what you have now. >> That's correct, that's exactly right. So those conversions of VMs leads to a path of, it's a one-way migration, there's no path out of that, it's like Hotel California, you're getting in, not coming out. It may be good for Amazon, but the customers want to solve a problem, which is a DR problem. So by working with VM via Cloud, they have been very friendly with us, we're super good partners with them and they've enabled us access to some of the things there to enable us to be able to work with them, use their APIs and launch VMware servers on-demand. That to me, is a game changer, and that's why it's such a highly interesting topic for a lot of customers. We see a lot of success with it, we're leading with it now, a lot of people just dying to get away from this DR problem, and have business continuity for their business, and what we're giving them is the simplicity of one product, one bill, and one support call. You can call us for anything, including Amazon, VMware and Datrium, all the pieces and we'll answer all the questions. >> Now I really like the idea, and you pay for it only as, or after the disaster has been recovered from. >> It's like paying for insurance after the-- >> I like that a lot. All right, Sazzala Reddy, CTO of Datrium, once again thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (lively brass band music)

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three days of talking to your customers your partners this contact center is hot it's electric it's electric I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to contact center connector or central or something it's it really all the innovation I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that wow there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered consumer yeah it's incredible how this consumer behavior that's the driver absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice yeah we call it the experience economy it's like you know we're all and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers and when we deal with brands we want to have a great experience all around like not just when we're you know buying or when we're using or but you know from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get and we're really really focused on that so that's the driver and your enterprises have realized that businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do so it's it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know what does it take to get a customer to love your business and it doesn't only take having a great product it takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center it's where all the action happens right it's right at that front line it's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you how do they greet you what is it like do you does the person know who you are do they give you that delightful experience and you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I know us on whatever channel that we want but one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that that really companies of any industry saying I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone so I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about I keep this really simple for people think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting sometimes I would call you sometimes I would text you sometimes I might send you an email they're all different not one or the other is better or worse they're just different if I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not gonna call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car what a minute I'm gonna phone Conny on the phone the call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed so that's really the that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers the fancy word for that is omni-channel you know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver it deliver that out of the box right and we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can we partner with that and do that very effectively yeah Rowen one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening one of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment I have my own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more I know clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that came over we're a market leader in cloud you know that's how we started we're born in the cloud so we don't have any on-premises technology you know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight there's nothing to deploy there's no closets of equipment anywhere it's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution the idea back to your point that you know there's some things are too big for the cloud that's total BS I just say to have to say it that's not true you know what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey you know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud right and so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make and you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're gonna tell and it's not a it's not a lie it's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer and we're essentially we're through the evangelism phase here there's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses it is you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent on the cloud and they are loving it and another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI we've that's been a theme I know that hey I came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience yeah well I'll tell you a little story I was call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about you've heard them all you're never gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going but the big challenge in the context so if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions after you think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center we think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents let them focus on the empathy we say let the Machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart because it's really important that you have the human touch in that experience right that drives that's what people crave in life they don't it's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS nobody likes talking to a computer you want to talk to a human so our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient how we can arm them with real-time interactions and that's all about leveraging data right because the data in this case is voice so de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart data in the enterprise customer voice actual voice like WAV files what's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time take that customer voice convert it into text real time with with high accuracy better than humans can do and we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next right that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8000 calls how do you make every rep like that we are sort of heading down a path to enable that the very first step though is you have to get to the cloud because this technology cannot be done on premises so you know you can dance around that all you want but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach you have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s got the best experience for our customers and you know where we're heading the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before so that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best best-in-class experience right that predictive you never wait you get someone whether it's text whether it's email whether it's chat you get a great answer you get a human touch but you also get the answer you want and whether that's inbound or outbound if its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because I like to say if I have to call support like that's already a problem why am i calling you you know with IOT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data part of what you should be of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are already having a problem with this like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them we should be calling them to figure out how do we can make that experience better so really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users needs is sort of the other side of this so it's both the inbound case I talked about but also that outbound case and and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk data and becoming predictive talk to us about that as a competitive advantage yeah the very first step is lighting that data up we're lighting it up now with machine learning we signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data so very very secure obviously our our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines of reliability is what we're all about so this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step it's really okay take that voice data which is not very useful like you can have agent spot check or supervisors listen in on calls but that doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier the more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text let's then take that text and it becomes computable you can summarize it we can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls you can they can quickly scan down and see what's happened also to be predictive hey we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time we can actually go predict what they might you know what what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data so we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business yeah Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at this show floor you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments we had carfax on good customer of yours started out with the the contact center agents but you know they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound not a traditional contact center you're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 30 years ago was like you know rows of cubes people on headsets like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers it's nurse practitioners it's doctors it's other experts that are interacting with their customers it's education consultants and specialists these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today you know I think about 10 years ago I'll give you an example of this transition 10 years ago I my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it she didn't give up she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk so fast forward to a year ago and we've moved we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go out all right all right I'll get it done so what do I do I think about well last time I did this I got a rack how am I gonna get a rack I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three different companies I call one of them because like this is a big purchase I don't want this huge thing to show up steal blah blah blah my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten years later now zero trips to brick and mortar two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale that's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre agent is I wouldn't have thought of it as you're right these are nurse practitioners it's so diverse speaking of diversity I know that five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies they did not integrate any of them so you call any one of these places there was all different contact centers they didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had we had to sort of to make that a part of the discovery process and global they're in all over the world they're in asia-pacific they're in France and Europe they're here they had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases they had independent technology contracts and almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot so we engaged with them and basically provided we we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many many different businesses and some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever gift bags and you know they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on they don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I you know would use maybe you would go to the VIPs but now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills you know being able to route things in a complex way understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event that event has some you know some VIPs at the event we've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill this is the right person for it to go to they're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time so we saw it in action it was obviously great and what made us made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hello from Orlando and Lisa Martin with Student A Man. We are in the five nine booth at Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. We're excited to welcome back to the cube of one of our alumni, Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and Head of a Eye of five nine. Jonathan. Thanks so much for joining Stew and me on the program on Day one of this big event. >> My absolute pleasure. I'm super excited to be here and super excited talk about my favorite topic, so love to be >> so. This event is has been around for a long time. Twenty eight twenty nine years evolving from PBX to voice con enterprise Connect. You've been to this event about the last ten years or so, least your perspective, and I know you're new at five a. M. But your perspective on the evolution of not just the contact center but customer experience and really thiss changing landscape of how enterprises and people want to communicate with each other. >> Yeah, well, I mean, it's been funny to sort of watch this through this technology. Evolution that manifested the show and in the market for a long time was about hardware by big, bulky iron and we used to have the petting, the hardware, petting zoos, we call it. You have racks of equipment. You could go look at this >> blinky lights and >> cables, you know. And then it moved to software on. We saw that here and now we're deep into the software is a service, as cloud based delivery models and actually a bunch of ways were coming to the tail end of that into this aye aye era. And that's what's all the hotness, and you see tons of that. Almost everyone's put some kind of a eye logo, our branding on their stuff, and there's there is some real meat to it, but but that sort of this interesting evolution and on its in its infancy in the Contact Center. And that's what's sort of exciting about it. >> So let's dig into that a little bit, because a CZ Lisa mentioned you've worked for a couple of the other companies that have big boost here at the show. We've talked about intelligence back in the call center days. Oh, yeah, but, you know, tell us what's different about the Aye aye data. The center of everything is something that way. Definitely believe in something that we hear all over the industry in the cloud shows an A I and everything. Why is this so exciting? What really brought you five nine and gets you've got a storied career? You know what? Why here? Why now? >> What is the technology is finally ready. I mean, technologies like speech recognition. And we've been the industry has been working on that for decades. And it was only in the last five years or so with the sort of creation of practical deep learning that the tech finally got good enough. And and that was because of new algorithms, New date, you know, massive data sets, great hardware that all made it possible. And so that sort of opened up the avenues. And that's why we're seeing products like Alexa and Cirie take off. Is the tech is finally gotten good enough. But what hasn't happened? Yes, it hasn't shown up in the workplace, and that's sort of what's really exciting to me is to take these technologies that have become so pervasive in the consumer world and use them to really re imagine how a lot of these enterprise products work. That's why I came to five nine came to find time to do that. To do that for five nine to do that for the industry. >> So you had a session this morning. Five surprising reasons why a business should move their contact center to the cloud. And we know cost is not the number one. Talk to us about some of those key imperatives that an enterprise in any industry really needs to be able to take advantage of by moving to cloud >> right, so a cost was a unsurprising reasons. So what I did in my session was I said, all right. Five. Unsurprising. Here's ten. Here's ten obvious reasons. So I went through those and cost is one of them. But I know what's surprising. There's a couple of the big ones. Story, really is that if you go to a truce as player, they have lots of customers, and they can actually aggregate data software capabilities across those customers and do things that are impossible on premise. So the two of them, for example, are better reliability. Often people like what you know. I want to go to the cloud. I'm worried about reliability. Well, if you dig into it. You can see that once the technology is matured, the reliability can be much better than it is on premise. Because of the complexity that you could build. Same with security, often viewed is wait. It's more secure in promise. Actually, if you look at what you can do in the cloud, you can spend a lot more money on security and advertise that cost over multiple customers. And then, of course, there's a I, and that's about getting access to training data, but not just training data from one company, but using it across multiple companies to make the I work better for everybody. So those were three the big ones. >> So when you talk about that kind of learning, how do you make sure that there's proper firewalls is, you know, is five nine going to be able to say, Okay, we can take care of everything. But wait, I don't know what my competitors on this I don't want them getting advantage based on you know what my company have. How do you balance? You know, there's the security issues. There's, you know, personal information issues, and they're, you know, competitive dynamics, which you know, is a talking point in the cloud. These absolutely. I mean, >> so that's a That's a paramount consideration to design of this whole thing. So it starts with a basic level of like, opted, like we're just, you know, we can't do this, and we can't use your data to train a model that shared unless you want it. And generally it's a given get like, Oh, you want access to the shared model, then you you provide training data for it. If you don't, you can use a custom one, but it won't be as accurate. But then you don't show your day. That's your choice. So give the customer the option and give them something in return for their data. And, of course, there's other parts of it, like, Well, you know, almost all the time, people aren't actually like looking at your data, its dues to train. These model's ideally without human in the loop having to do that. And so there's other privacy considerations baked in that it's that makes it feel that gives a customer comfort that they're they're able to do this >> without trust is critical, right? We talk about it stew and ideo and the Cuban every show. But that's really essential because, as we know is consumers, we're more and more and more empowered. These days, there were transacting something through chatter, video or Alexa or we're checking on. The status of a mortgage is something We have so much information. They also are very demanding. You want to have this conversation with a business regardless of the channel, and I want them to know what I'm what my issue is so that it can be addressed and resolved quickly. But I also want to make sure that what you're doing is not, you know, in the issue of privacy that we've all faced recently that it's done in a way where this business can actually foster a trusting relationship with me is like, >> Yeah, so the trust goes on many levels, one of which the most important to us is our customers have to trust us, and that's the only thing that gives trust his time. You know, you have to be invested for a long time, and so we've really focused on building this longtime customer trust with our reliability, with our high touch with our customers, and that gets us That's really just what gives us permission to even start to do these things. The other thing to to touch on what you said is that end users contact the contact center. That's one of the areas were actually there is already in the user expectation that my call is being recorded, that what I say can be used for training purposes. So one of the reasons I got into Contact Center was that the privacy issues are much more readily addressed in the contacts and space and other areas where you might be interested to apply this type of technology. I mean, we're talking about having a eyes that are listening in on calls and analyzing what you say. If I were to do that for a regular phone call between me and my friend like people be totally spooked like there's no expectation that that happens. There is an expectation on the contact center, so that's a great place to build and grow these technologies. >> Yeah, I love that because, right, those of us that have, you know, personal assistant at home there's almost an expectation that they're living listening in a little bit. Everybody's had the weight I was talking about that with someone not even on the phone, and all of a sudden I'm getting ads for that. That's not right. So question I have for you, you hired your first data scientist in the group. And one of things we look at is we now have this, you know, great access to data. One of the biggest challenges is okay, I can get the answers if I know the right questions to ask, What are some of the early areas that you're poking at? Any early use cases that you can share as to, you know, where we where we cease? Um, how did you >> do that? One of the first things we're looking at is what I'm calling cross customer analytics. So analytics is old news. Everyone's had that for a while. But what the cloud does is it gives a provider like us date across multiple customers. Now what we can't do is share one customer state is with another. That's a total nut. It's not what I'm talking about. But aggregates are interesting. So, for example, would be intrigued to know this is my first call resolution rate. How does that compare to similarly sized contact centers in my geography right, And that's something where we can produce an aggregate that has total anonymous ation. So no privacy issues, and it gives a customer this piece of insight that they have never, ever had before. Never, and the only way you could do it with enough privacy. Seven of data to produce a useful AGR ee it, and therefore it can only be done at the larger cloud contact centers and thus five nine, as one of the market leaders were wear having enough data to produce this kind of information. So this was an immediate, frankly fairly low hanging piece of fruit. We've started to dive into no product announcements. It's just just looking at data to see what comes out and see if there's interesting meet there. But it's a kind of insights. I'm really excited about >> it. I love that because people are always like, Oh, wait, I need to measure it. But sometimes numbers alone don't tell me anything. You gotta put that into context for me, right? What are my peers? What? One of my industry. You know, what other stuff do I have there? Otherwise, you know, numbers are just numbers. >> Numbers are just numbers. You don't really know how you're doing. You're like a little island, like, you know, your contact center is doing, but is that good? You have no idea. And we'LL be able to unlock that overtime. So very excited about that. >> Yeah. Sorry, Stuart, You guys have about five billion recorded customer conversations, so you can I can think of the massive amount of competitive advantage that's in there. But you also brought out something that I hadn't considered before. And that is whether I'm, you know, interacting with the business because I haven't issue to resolve with my Internet or something. And you're right. We do have this expectation that the call's going to be recorded, but I never think about it is this is actually something it's gonna help me down the line or the fifty other people that aren't calling in. So I thought your comment on privacy being kind of more advanced in the context of her was was point. It was very interesting and not something that I was aware. >> Yeah, it >> has to be right >> exactly. There's there's an expectation that this is what this conversation is about and and there's lots of tools in place for dealing with today. Already with credit card numbers and phone numbers, which do get communicated between a user and the comics in URGENT there's lots of you know, tak and precedent about how to read, act and extract and again all in the contacts and are nowhere else really does that technology exists. So >> yeah, so Jonathan, take us inside the life of the agent, so we know when we're from call centre to Contact Center. It really brought in the role a little bit when I've got a eye in there is their new skill sets. We need tohave. You know, we always talk about, you know, if if you're doing the same thing you were doing five years ago, chances are you might need to be looking for a new job, because by so fast, so in the context center, you know what, What? What is the life of the agent likely to go through over the next couple of years? >> So this is an interesting debate in the lemon, the industry, and there's sort of two thought camps in this one thought camp is the role of A I is to replace the agent. And this, frankly, is fairly traditional thinking. We use terms like Deflection, right, like we want to deflect the call from an agent means we don't want you to connect to a human being or containment, right? How successful were we keeping the call in the I. V. R. And a customer never got to an agent like these air industry terms, and they were. And people view a I is like helping those things. There's a different camp of which you can tell I'm sort of in, which is like, No, no, no, that's sort of the traditional way of thinking about it. And of course, we're gonna have voice spots and I V R is. But really, the question is, how do we deliver the best customer experience possible? That should actually be the guide post, and what's funny is in this industry we know what the best customer experiences. It's that you pick up the phone, you call the comic center. You didn't wait one second. You went right to an agent. They were an expert. They knew exactly what to do. They fixed their problem in twenty seconds, you were done. That's the best experience. The problem is, is no one can afford to deliver that experience today. Well, that's where technology could help. So for me, the central question is, how do we use a >> eye >> to label us to make it cost effective to deliver that experience all the time and that does have an impact on the agents. And it's going to be through assistance technologies that allow the agents to be guided in their interactions and allowing them to be experts quicker and to learn from the best experts in the contact center and change the way they think about training and access to data knowledge. It's going to be a pretty profound change, but it never takes the human out of the loop people. When you pick up the phone to call that Connick Center, it's because you actually want to talk to a person and that human touch, that empathy that you know, someone just tow, you know, vent at a little bit that matters, and we're nowhere anywhere near having an A. I provide that if ever so that's what's going to change >> humans and machines or Jonathan, Thank you so much for stopping by. The Cuban wedding was with me about what's happening at five nine. Contact Centerist Service and the tremendous advantage that data could bring two organizations. >> My pleasure. Thank >> you. Thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin was stewed Minutemen on the program Today Live from Orlando at Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen stew and I will be right back after a short break.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's "The Cube" covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is The Cube coverage of VM World 2018. Always love when we get to dig in with the practitioners here. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is Justin Warren. Welcome to the program first-time guest Andrew Chavez, who is a network and information technology manager with Indian Pueblo Cultural Center out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. >> Out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, that's correct. >> Excellent. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. >> Alright, so first of all, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role. >> Well, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center is kind of a touch point for all the 19 tribes in the state of New Mexico. It's actually one of the only places in the entire world, where 19 tribes, 19 different cultures, really, of Native American people have gotten together, built a cultural center and kind of have formed a gateway in Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico, and the gateways to the Pueblos. So it's kind of a cool place. There's just a mix of a lot of neat people, a lot of the different Pueblo people come in and out. It's culturally just a great place to be, just a wonderful, cool place. And on top of that, they at the Pueblo Cultural Center formed a development corporation. So not only do we have the cultural side, which is really neat, but we have this development side, which is developing the old Indian schools. I don't know if you remember the cultural background of the Indian schools throughout the United States of America. >> Yes. >> They've actually taken some of the land for the Cultural Center and the Indian school and are repurposing it, to really help out the Cultural Center and the 19 tribes as we give back to them. >> So is this nonprofit then? >> We have a nonprofit side and a for-profit side. >> OK, give us a little bit of the scope of the operation. You mentioned the tribes and everything, but is it multiple locations? And your scope of responsibilities. >> It's actually multiple locations, so we are actually housed in the Cultural Center itself, but directly across the street we're building up places like hotels, restaurants, office buildings, things of that nature, to kind of diversify the portfolio of things that we offer to the community at large. That money is given back to the stakeholders, who are are the 19 Pueblos. And I was brought in last year, to kind of take what they were as an IT department, and really improve on what they were doing, what they've already done, and just kind of take what's already been done and make it better, and really be able to not only serve the Pueblo Cultural Center, but I'm working to make a showcase there if we can. >> So, Andrew, maybe you could give us a bit of an idea of how IT supports the mission of the Cultural Center. A lot of people are worried that IT is just a cost center and it sits off on the end there and it's something that you have to pay for. So what are some of the things that IT enables the Cultural Center to do, that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise? >> Well, some of the things that we do is... cultural preservation is really one of the big things that we do. Because we do represent all the 19 tribes of New Mexico, different aspects of each of those tribes, in terms of pottery, paintings, all the very rich nature of the hand-crafted pieces that the Pueblos take care of, are all representative of the Cultural Center. So it's not only putting those, but it's cataloging, archiving them, and help with the preservation and dissemination of that information, right? So, when you walk through our museum, all the things are automated. You can go in and press buttons and hear the different languages, see how the pottery is made, see how a lot of these arts and crafts come together, see the history of the Pueblo people and kind of what happened, and how, really, other cultures have interdispersed themselves and interweaved themselves within the rich history of the Pueblo people of New Mexico. And how this overarching culture has really made a difference in the state. Those preservations and on top of that, it's using technology to be able to, again, disseminate it and show how those things work going forward. >> Great stuff, Andrew. Alright, so all the people that visit probably don't understand all the stuff that's behind the scenes. So, it's like all of us that have worked in IT, people are like "Oh, you do computer stuff, right?" So, take us a little bit behind the curtain and tell us a little bit about what technologies you are using to help enable all of those great things you talked about. >> Well, currently what we're using is, we kind of started really green field. The folks that were there before me had worked in more of a single server, hot closet environment (laughs), some of the ways it used to be. There were a lot of consultants, and the decision was made that, to match a lot of the technology initiatives that are going on with the other Pueblos, the Cultural Center needs to catch up. So that's one of the reasons why I was brought in. So one of the first things we did, is say, what can we start doing? And so, when you pull the curtain back one of the things we really decided on was going to a full virtual environment, and finding the right technology and the right player to help us put together a virtual environment, help us build out a data center, and do some of those things. So that's kind of where we started. We started with a five year plan on that build-out and how to maximize not only the budgets that we have, but push those budgets through proper depreciation. So it was really kind of neat to be able to go to a place that I could kind of just pick and choose the things I needed to move forward, and kind of set the course for us moving forward. >> Alright, so could you tell us about some of the decisions you actually made there? So, what did you choose, and what led you to make that particular choice of technology provider? >> Well, initially I started out, because I had worked in a previous endeavor using a UCS, you know, the three in one solution, you have your OS, you have the host, and then you have the navs that's presented to the host, and that's what originally I was going to do because that's what I knew. But I went out to a conference called TribalNet, and was introduced to Nutanix. And I was aware of Nutanix, but I hadn't delved into it. So I kind of talked to one of the reps out there, Justin, and he kind of talked me through Nutanix. When I got back, I searched out a place in Albuquerque called Ardham Technologies, who sells Nutanix, and sat with them. Now, the old UCS was less expensive, cause it's a little older technology, and we didn't think we could get into a hyperconverged solution, but working with the Nutanix rep and my rep from Ardham, they really found a way to make it affordable for us and get us into the hyperconverged technology, which is where I wanted to go. So it was really, kind of... That was the first big decision I made, and I've been very happy with it. >> Excellent. So, having made that deciison and put it in, what are ome of the things that you've now been able to do, given that this is where you wanted to go, and thought maybe it wasn't going to be possible, but now it is. So what's that enabled you to do, that you were looking forward to being able to do? >> Well, it's been abled for us to consolidate a lot of what we have. We haven't used it to its fullest potential because the implementation's only been in about five months. >> Right. >> But what we've been able to do is take those different single servers and move them into a virtualized environment, and then be able to build out a storage area and place user files, and group files, and all the disparate storage areas that were siloed throughout the environment, put it on one single piece of equipment that we can watch. >> Right. >> It's been able to allow us to move to a backup solution that goes to the cloud and isn't fractured, right? So it puts it all in one single area that we can watch, and gives us a single pane of glass for all our servers, which we didn't have before. It's just made us better at what we do, really, and be able to watch what we're doing a lot better. >> Andrew, it's interesting. We talked for years about hyperconvergence. It's not just about converging into the footprint, but it changes the model, because it's really more of a distributed architecture. I think you've got some geographic locations. Maybe help discuss how that fits together, between multiple locations, multi-cloud. It's not just about taking a couple of servers and putting them down to a smaller footprint, it's giving you more flexibility. >> And you've really hit the nail on the head, for the five year plan, right? So year one, it's like choose the vendor, choose the course, but the five year plan is to be able to geographically disperse what we're doing. Because we're using Nutanix, it allows us to put a three-note cluster over here in a single box, we take another single box and put a two-note cluster over here and geographically disperse it. It also allows us, I talked about depreciation, and this is something that I worked on in other places. What we did, is we bought the Nutanix node that we have now for today, right. We plan on using that and buying a secondary node, and using that for the next three years. As we build up, remember I talked about having the development across the road, as we're building new buildings, we're going to build an alternate data center there, and the third year, we're going to take that piece of equipment and move that to the data center and build out a disaster recovery center. So when we buy the new Nutanix node, those two will now be joined. So, not only are we sharing information between the two locations, and have backups geographically dispersed, but we also have been able to use SRM a lot of different ways, to keep the geographical locations up, keep business continuity, but the other portion that is really interesting to us, is that most technology is about a three year depreciation schedule, right. >> Yeah. >> We've been able to take that three year depreciation schedule, and because we're using the older technology as our backup business continuity center, that takes it out to six year depreciation, which extends the life of what we have and be able, when we buy new equipment, it's the newest, greatest, we have the business continuity equipment. And then of course the nodes talk to each other, so we're doing data duplication across two locations. So really when we're all done, we can have up to four to six sets of backups throughout any portion of the day, so it really protects our data and gives us a continuity that we wouldn't have before. >> As someone who really likes a good financial model and spends a lot of time in spreadsheets, mucking around with that, it's really good to hear someone from an IT arena talking about some of the financial impacts on this, some of the business impacts on this. It shows that what is possible when IT takes an interest in the business issues, and shows, we were talking about this earlier on The Cube, about IT people getting a seat at the table, being able to have that conversation about the five year plan, about what makes IT strategically important to the organization. And it's really great hearing a customer actually talk about IT in that context. >> Well, that's one of the things that I think IT gets lost in and as you know, with CIOs, CFOs, CEOs, IT is always seen as a cost center. And we'd eventually like to not be a cost center. (laughs) We'd like to make money, but we have to be fiscally responsible. We have to be fiscally responsible for a number of reasons where I come from at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, because we do have a responsibility to our shareholders. We have a responsibility to the Native American people that are taking care of us. We need to take care of them. So if we can find the technology that we need, that we can be a showcase, not only in the technological realm, but also how we budget and take care of money, that shows huge commitment to what we're doing. You know, you can't be a showcase unless you're going to be fiscally responsible as well as technologically responsible, so that's what we're trying to do. >> Yeah, and Andrew, the other thing that strikes me from your conversation, you talk about this five year plan. Sometimes we come to the shows and it's like oh wait, I'm worried about lock-in and enterprise license agreement. Talk about what you look for in choosing partners that will be strategic, that will be with you for this kind of engagement. >> Well, I'm looking for, everybody's always looking for cutting edge, right? But you need to have cutting edge with a background, with a roadmap, right? So what I look for in not only a partner that services me locally, but also in the larger vendor partners, for instance Nutanix. I look for somebody who has a roadmap of what they're doing. Here's what we started with. You know, if I have a five year plan, what's your five year plan? What was your five year plan? Where did you come from? Where are you going to? Can you show me what's going to go on over here? And that's one thing that I really liked about Nutanix, is they had here's what got us here, here's how it's changing, here's what we can show you moving forward, and here's how it can help you. And then, you know, my vendor in Albuquerque, I want the same things. Are you growing? Are you stagnant? What's your customer list? And then the last portion of that is really a relationship sell. There are people out there that will go buy from any vendor because that's what the price ensues, but I can't buy on just price because I need pricing and support and be able to, you know, one call (laughs) We used to say one throat to choke, but I don't like using that any more. But you know, somebody you can drive to and have a conversation with. And that's one thing I've really respected about my vendors, and I like from a customer perspective, is people that are real, they come and see you, and then I can reach out to not only my local vendor, but the folks that support them. I do have to say, with Nutanix, I met Justin who is the rep from Nutanix. He got me involved with the sales engineer at that point and they were on site, they worked directly with me and built just a great relationship around this brand new purchase, something I'm not familiar with but it's a foray into a wider world. And it made me really comfortable with my decision. >> Alright. What's the most exciting thing that you're looking forward to? So you've seen the roadmap, you've spoken to the vendors and you have an idea of what your five year plan is. What's the most exciting thing that's going to be coming up in the next few years? >> The biggest thing for me, and it's probably not even a new thing for Nutanix, but it's what Nutanix is built on. It's what you talked about, the geographical separation, the node building and how we can, Okay, you need more compute? We can give you more compute. You need more storage? We can give you more storage. You need to add something over here? We can do that. It's the flexibility it gives me to stick within budget, we don't have to do this huge budget every year, to be able to prop up what we need. We can buy piece by piece and build it out. And again part of that fiscal responsibility is being forward looking and working with a company that's saying hey, we can get you this today. We're going to take care of you, we're going to listen to your needs, we're going to get you what you need, and here's the bolt-on pieces as we move forward. So I think that's the most exciting piece, is being able to grow within that framework. I like to use a word called platforms for what (laughs) we're doing, right? And I think, from an IT perspective, that's what we're doing and from a cultural perspective, the Indian Pueblo cultural perspective, it's having that platform. So if we say from a museum standpoint, we found the latest and greatest software that's going to allow people to do virtual reality, but we need a back end to support it, I can say I got that. (laughs) We've been able to build the platform to put that on. So it's putting that platform in place, building on that platform, us growing into it and then that company growing with us. And that's been something that's been just transformative for us. >> Well, Andrew, you talked about authentic conversations. We really appreciate you sharing your story with us. Be sure to check out IndianPueblo.org for all that they have to offer. I want to check out the museum. You've got a great list of cultural activities there, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, come see us at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. The best time to come is the first week in October for the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We'd love to have you all. >> Alright, for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We still have lots more coverage here from Vmworld 2018. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's "The Cube" covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is The Cube coverage of VM World 2018. Always love when we get to dig in with the practitioners here. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is Justin Warren. Welcome to the program first-time guest Andrew Chavez, who is a network and information technology manager with Indian Pueblo Cultural Center out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. >> Out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, that's correct. >> Excellent. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. >> Alright, so first of all, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role. >> Well, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center is kind of a touch point for all the 19 tribes in the state of New Mexico. It's actually one of the only places in the entire world, where 19 tribes, 19 different cultures, really, of Native American people have gotten together, built a cultural center and kind of have formed a gateway in Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico, and the gateways to the Pueblos. So it's kind of a cool place. There's just a mix of a lot of neat people, a lot of the different Pueblo people come in and out. It's culturally just a great place to be, just a wonderful, cool place. And on top of that, they at the Pueblo Cultural Center formed a development corporation. So not only do we have the cultural side, which is really neat, but we have this development side, which is developing the old Indian schools. I don't know if you remember the cultural background of the Indian schools throughout the United States of America. >> Yes. >> They've actually taken some of the land for the Cultural Center and the Indian school and are repurposing it, to really help out the Cultural Center and the 19 tribes as we give back to them. >> So is this nonprofit then? >> We have a nonprofit side and a for-profit side. >> OK, give us a little bit of the scope of the operation. You mentioned the tribes and everything, but is it multiple locations? And your scope of responsibilities. >> It's actually multiple locations, so we are actually housed in the Cultural Center itself, but directly across the street we're building up places like hotels, restaurants, office buildings, things of that nature, to kind of diversify the portfolio of things that we offer to the community at large. That money is given back to the stakeholders, who are are the 19 Pueblos. And I was brought in last year, to kind of take what they were as an IT department, and really improve on what they were doing, what they've already done, and just kind of take what's already been done and make it better, and really be able to not only serve the Pueblo Cultural Center, but I'm working to make a showcase there if we can. >> So, Andrew, maybe you could give us a bit of an idea of how IT supports the mission of the Cultural Center. A lot of people are worried that IT is just a cost center and it sits off on the end there and it's something that you have to pay for. So what are some of the things that IT enables the Cultural Center to do, that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise? >> Well, some of the things that we do is... cultural preservation is really one of the big things that we do. Because we do represent all the 19 tribes of New Mexico, different aspects of each of those tribes, in terms of pottery, paintings, all the very rich nature of the hand-crafted pieces that the Pueblos take care of, are all representative of the Cultural Center. So it's not only putting those, but it's cataloging, archiving them, and help with the preservation and dissemination of that information, right? So, when you walk through our museum, all the things are automated. You can go in and press buttons and hear the different languages, see how the pottery is made, see how a lot of these arts and crafts come together, see the history of the Pueblo people and kind of what happened, and how, really, other cultures have interdispersed themselves and interweaved themselves within the rich history of the Pueblo people of New Mexico. And how this overarching culture has really made a difference in the state. Those preservations and on top of that, it's using technology to be able to, again, disseminate it and show how those things work going forward. >> Great stuff, Andrew. Alright, so all the people that visit probably don't understand all the stuff that's behind the scenes. So, it's like all of us that have worked in IT, people are like "Oh, you do computer stuff, right?" So, take us a little bit behind the curtain and tell us a little bit about what technologies you are using to help enable all of those great things you talked about. >> Well, currently what we're using is, we kind of started really green field. The folks that were there before me had worked in more of a single server, hot closet environment (laughs), some of the ways it used to be. There were a lot of consultants, and the decision was made that, to match a lot of the technology initiatives that are going on with the other Pueblos, the Cultural Center needs to catch up. So that's one of the reasons why I was brought in. So one of the first things we did, is say, what can we start doing? And so, when you pull the curtain back one of the things we really decided on was going to a full virtual environment, and finding the right technology and the right player to help us put together a virtual environment, help us build out a data center, and do some of those things. So that's kind of where we started. We started with a five year plan on that build-out and how to maximize not only the budgets that we have, but push those budgets through proper depreciation. So it was really kind of neat to be able to go to a place that I could kind of just pick and choose the things I needed to move forward, and kind of set the course for us moving forward. >> Alright, so could you tell us about some of the decisions you actually made there? So, what did you choose, and what led you to make that particular choice of technology provider? >> Well, initially I started out, because I had worked in a previous endeavor using a UCS, you know, the three in one solution, you have your OS, you have the host, and then you have the navs that's presented to the host, and that's what originally I was going to do because that's what I knew. But I went out to a conference called TribalNet, and was introduced to Nutanix. And I was aware of Nutanix, but I hadn't delved into it. So I kind of talked to one of the reps out there, Justin, and he kind of talked me through Nutanix. When I got back, I searched out a place in Albuquerque called Ardham Technologies, who sells Nutanix, and sat with them. Now, the old UCS was less expensive, cause it's a little older technology, and we didn't think we could get into a hyperconverged solution, but working with the Nutanix rep and my rep from Ardham, they really found a way to make it affordable for us and get us into the hyperconverged technology, which is where I wanted to go. So it was really, kind of... That was the first big decision I made, and I've been very happy with it. >> Excellent. So, having made that deciison and put it in, what are ome of the things that you've now been able to do, given that this is where you wanted to go, and thought maybe it wasn't going to be possible, but now it is. So what's that enabled you to do, that you were looking forward to being able to do? >> Well, it's been abled for us to consolidate a lot of what we have. We haven't used it to its fullest potential because the implementation's only been in about five months. >> Right. >> But what we've been able to do is take those different single servers and move them into a virtualized environment, and then be able to build out a storage area and place user files, and group files, and all the disparate storage areas that were siloed throughout the environment, put it on one single piece of equipment that we can watch. >> Right. >> It's been able to allow us to move to a backup solution that goes to the cloud and isn't fractured, right? So it puts it all in one single area that we can watch, and gives us a single pane of glass for all our servers, which we didn't have before. It's just made us better at what we do, really, and be able to watch what we're doing a lot better. >> Andrew, it's interesting. We talked for years about hyperconvergence. It's not just about converging into the footprint, but it changes the model, because it's really more of a distributed architecture. I think you've got some geographic locations. Maybe help discuss how that fits together, between multiple locations, multi-cloud. It's not just about taking a couple of servers and putting them down to a smaller footprint, it's giving you more flexibility. >> And you've really hit the nail on the head, for the five year plan, right? So year one, it's like choose the vendor, choose the course, but the five year plan is to be able to geographically disperse what we're doing. Because we're using Nutanix, it allows us to put a three-note cluster over here in a single box, we take another single box and put a two-note cluster over here and geographically disperse it. It also allows us, I talked about depreciation, and this is something that I worked on in other places. What we did, is we bought the Nutanix node that we have now for today, right. We plan on using that and buying a secondary node, and using that for the next three years. As we build up, remember I talked about having the development across the road, as we're building new buildings, we're going to build an alternate data center there, and the third year, we're going to take that piece of equipment and move that to the data center and build out a disaster recovery center. So when we buy the new Nutanix node, those two will now be joined. So, not only are we sharing information between the two locations, and have backups geographically dispersed, but we also have been able to use SRM a lot of different ways, to keep the geographical locations up, keep business continuity, but the other portion that is really interesting to us, is that most technology is about a three year depreciation schedule, right. >> Yeah. >> We've been able to take that three year depreciation schedule, and because we're using the older technology as our backup business continuity center, that takes it out to six year depreciation, which extends the life of what we have and be able, when we buy new equipment, it's the newest, greatest, we have the business continuity equipment. And then of course the nodes talk to each other, so we're doing data duplication across two locations. So really when we're all done, we can have up to four to six sets of backups throughout any portion of the day, so it really protects our data and gives us a continuity that we wouldn't have before. >> As someone who really likes a good financial model and spends a lot of time in spreadsheets, mucking around with that, it's really good to hear someone from an IT arena talking about some of the financial impacts on this, some of the business impacts on this. It shows that what is possible when IT takes an interest in the business issues, and shows, we were talking about this earlier on The Cube, about IT people getting a seat at the table, being able to have that conversation about the five year plan, about what makes IT strategically important to the organization. And it's really great hearing a customer actually talk about IT in that context. >> Well, that's one of the things that I think IT gets lost in and as you know, with CIOs, CFOs, CEOs, IT is always seen as a cost center. And we'd eventually like to not be a cost center. (laughs) We'd like to make money, but we have to be fiscally responsible. We have to be fiscally responsible for a number of reasons where I come from at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, because we do have a responsibility to our shareholders. We have a responsibility to the Native American people that are taking care of us. We need to take care of them. So if we can find the technology that we need, that we can be a showcase, not only in the technological realm, but also how we budget and take care of money, that shows huge commitment to what we're doing. You know, you can't be a showcase unless you're going to be fiscally responsible as well as technologically responsible, so that's what we're trying to do. >> Yeah, and Andrew, the other thing that strikes me from your conversation, you talk about this five year plan. Sometimes we come to the shows and it's like oh wait, I'm worried about lock-in and enterprise license agreement. Talk about what you look for in choosing partners that will be strategic, that will be with you for this kind of engagement. >> Well, I'm looking for, everybody's always looking for cutting edge, right? But you need to have cutting edge with a background, with a roadmap, right? So what I look for in not only a partner that services me locally, but also in the larger vendor partners, for instance Nutanix. I look for somebody who has a roadmap of what they're doing. Here's what we started with. You know, if I have a five year plan, what's your five year plan? What was your five year plan? Where did you come from? Where are you going to? Can you show me what's going to go on over here? And that's one thing that I really liked about Nutanix, is they had here's what got us here, here's how it's changing, here's what we can show you moving forward, and here's how it can help you. And then, you know, my vendor in Albuquerque, I want the same things. Are you growing? Are you stagnant? What's your customer list? And then the last portion of that is really a relationship sell. There are people out there that will go buy from any vendor because that's what the price ensues, but I can't buy on just price because I need pricing and support and be able to, you know, one call (laughs) We used to say one throat to choke, but I don't like using that any more. But you know, somebody you can drive to and have a conversation with. And that's one thing I've really respected about my vendors, and I like from a customer perspective, is people that are real, they come and see you, and then I can reach out to not only my local vendor, but the folks that support them. I do have to say, with Nutanix, I met Justin who is the rep from Nutanix. He got me involved with the sales engineer at that point and they were on site, they worked directly with me and built just a great relationship around this brand new purchase, something I'm not familiar with but it's a foray into a wider world. And it made me really comfortable with my decision. >> Alright. What's the most exciting thing that you're looking forward to? So you've seen the roadmap, you've spoken to the vendors and you have an idea of what your five year plan is. What's the most exciting thing that's going to be coming up in the next few years? >> The biggest thing for me, and it's probably not even a new thing for Nutanix, but it's what Nutanix is built on. It's what you talked about, the geographical separation, the node building and how we can, Okay, you need more compute? We can give you more compute. You need more storage? We can give you more storage. You need to add something over here? We can do that. It's the flexibility it gives me to stick within budget, we don't have to do this huge budget every year, to be able to prop up what we need. We can buy piece by piece and build it out. And again part of that fiscal responsibility is being forward looking and working with a company that's saying hey, we can get you this today. We're going to take care of you, we're going to listen to your needs, we're going to get you what you need, and here's the bolt-on pieces as we move forward. So I think that's the most exciting piece, is being able to grow within that framework. I like to use a word called platforms for what (laughs) we're doing, right? And I think, from an IT perspective, that's what we're doing and from a cultural perspective, the Indian Pueblo cultural perspective, it's having that platform. So if we say from a museum standpoint, we found the latest and greatest software that's going to allow people to do virtual reality, but we need a back end to support it, I can say I got that. (laughs) We've been able to build the platform to put that on. So it's putting that platform in place, building on that platform, us growing into it and then that company growing with us. And that's been something that's been just transformative for us. >> Well, Andrew, you talked about authentic conversations. We really appreciate you sharing your story with us. Be sure to check out IndianPueblo.org for all that they have to offer. I want to check out the museum. You've got a great list of cultural activities there, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, come see us at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. The best time to come is the first week in October for the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We'd love to have you all. >> Alright, for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We still have lots more coverage here from Vmworld 2018. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat techno music)

>> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018! Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube! We are live at Day One of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we are joined by two guests. We have Shannon Champion, Product Marketing of HCI at Dell EMC, and we have her customer, from Celtic Manor, Chris Stanley, IT Manager. Hey Chris! >> Hi. >> Welcome to the Cube, you guys! >> Thank you, thank you very much! >> And we just timed this perfect music intro for you! >> They knew, they knew! >> So Chris, Celtic Manor, you're based in Wales, talk to us about Celtic Manor, what it is that you do, before we start talking about your IT and Digital Transformations. >> Yeah sure, so we're a collection of hotels, four, in South Wales. Within that four, there is a resort hotel, with a conference center. We offer lots of facilities to our guests, golf courses, spas, all the niceties, bars, restaurants, and as well as the conference business being quite a big side of that. And we've got a lot of growth coming on with new hotels and a new convention center. Yeah, and we've got a staff of around about a thousand at the moment, half of those being PC end-users, and a small IT team of eight supporting all those people. >> So a lot of locations, a lot of stuff, a lot of data. Talk to us about what you're doing with Dell EMC, where did you start from, infrastructure-wise? And where are you now? >> Infrastructure-wise, we've been a Dell Partner probably since 2014. That was, we were the previous vendor before, and now at Dell EMC House, always good news, eh! (chuckles) And, our VxRail journey has begun, probably the last eight months, with a new convention center opening, which is an international one, International Convention Center Wales, a joint venture with the Welsh government there. And it's something that's, whereas we've got a lot of conference business now, we do very well at it, we have to turn away a lot of conference business because we're not big enough. So this facility can offer up to 4,000 people in the main room, 1,500-seat auditorium, as well as other breakout rooms. So sort of 6,000 potential guests on-site. And we needed some technology to support that, so we engaged with Dell EMC, and VxRail was our choice. We briefly evaluated others, but Dell EMC, we had a proven past with a great support and strategic partnership, so it was an easy decision. >> So we're going to get into sort of the details there, but Shannon, let me bring you into the conversation. Last time we really spent any time together was in the 14G Launch. You helped orchestrate a lot of the messaging of that, so give us the update on HCI and VxRail, did that awesome marketing package that you put together, is it living up to the marketplace! (all laughing) >> Well thank you for that softball, Dave! Yes, yeah! So in November we were talking to you about HCI and 14th-generation PowerEdge servers, and how PowerEdge is really designed with software-defined storage in mind, and how that really set itself up well for HCI. And what it does is open up doors to being applicable for even more mainstream workloads and applications because of the power and predictability that provides, and Celtic Manor is a perfect example of that, in terms of, initially, using VxRail to scale quickly and reliably for a majority of their workloads and applications, actually. And now, are moving to VDI where, historically, VDI has really been the entry point for HCI. So it's really exciting to see that sort of flip-flop use case here. >> Right, it was like the obligatory workload or use case, right? >> Chris: We like to be different. (laughing) >> Well, I mean, your business is different, right? >> Yes! >> I wonder if you could start with some of the business drivers, right? I mean, obviously, very competitive industry, but you've got some unique differentiators, right, experiences that you're offering customers is somewhat different. But what's driving your business? Speed, digital disruption, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Organizational growth was a key one. With new hotels and conference centers coming on we were bursting at the seams with our current environment. >> Good problem! >> Yeah, so we're all very good. But it was supporting that for customers going forward as well as our staff, supporting with the systems and reliability that we can, to ensure that we get the businesses doing, you know, its utmost. And then, yeah, going on from there, we offer all these different kinds of facilities on-site, golf, bedrooms, spas, all needing different systems, from booking systems through to your VOIP systems, your big databases, Oracle databases, on these servers. So quite a hard workload on them. And we're looking for something that was easy for us to manage, you know, going forward. >> So Chris in terms of IT transformation, Michael Dell talked this morning about these four transformative elements that a company should take to be successful. Digital, IT, workforce, security, talking about the opportunity for IT innovation, to really convert IT into a profit center. And where IT innovation is successful is where customers are looking at it as a business strategy. Talk to us about the stakeholders, maybe, from the CFO's perspective, of, "Hey, we have a great opportunity here "to capture more business and be more competitive." What was that conversation like, the IT folks to the CFO to get budget and approval to help transform? >> Always a tough conversation. (chuckling) Going from the past experience where we'd initially gone with a converge solution back in 2014 with Dell, that alone saved us a significant amount in power alone, so it was something that paid for itself. >> So the CFO was already like, "Alright guys"-- >> Yeah, you know what you're doing, so yeah. We took that, we could see where our pain points were in the environment we currently had, and with it, all the additional hotels, conference centers, coming on, we were at a key stage where we needed to, from the core, build outwards. So VxRail was and obvious-er choice, I should say, in the end. But it was key to transformation, because it enables us now to look at other methods. It's freed up a lot of time for IT staff, so we're looking at deploying a virtual desktop solution now which we don't currently have. And that could be initially anything from up to 300 virtual desktops, so big load, but we now have the core capacity there to do it. And we're looking at other things for our guests, where we can give them a better experience. So Artificial Intelligence, AI, is very big on the agenda, so we look at everything. There's face recognition systems now that can recognize the guests when they come in, ping a message, we haven't deployed these yet, we're still looking at them. But it's enabled us to look at these now with the power behind us of the 14G service. So it's all, it's a key enabler for us, the VxRail solution. >> Opening up the potential for emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning... >> Yes, very much so. >> How do you differentiate from your HCI competition? What are some of the touchpoints there? >> Well, from a VMware focus perspective, you know, Celtic Manor has deployed VxRail. Our differentiator is that we're the only provider through our strategically-aligned business relationship that is jointly engineered with VMware. And so what that means, from a customer point of view, is a more seamless experience, right. Familiar tools they already know and love, that they use day to day, from a VMware perspective, for day-to-day management. But then also the automation that's built in. Automated deployment, ability to upgrade with one click, seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online, for example. And then have a single point of support. So we take one single call, whether it's hardware or software, for VxRail. If there's an issue, call Dell EMC and a lot of customers find a lot of value in that. >> So, okay, Chris, now I've got to ask you. So you heard that from Dell EMC, but a lot of companies would say, "Well, we get along great with VMware, "we get the SDKs early, "yeah, those guys overplay all that stuff." What, from your perspective, how important is what Shannon just laid out? And how real is it? >> It's very real. And Shannon basically, yeah, all those points there were literally what we were struggling with. We had the one support telephone company to call, imperative to us. We'd been ringing, in the past we'd be ringing Sand Storage, we were ringing ESX, VMware, all blaming each other, and you're going back and forth and you're wasting key time. With one support number now, you know, you've one call, you've got a one-stop-shop to sort it. So that was a big, big call for us. The 14G service as well, we also get the recover points which enables us to have two environments where we can lose one, and one total environment lost, but still operate as a business. So all of these, keeping, giving us uptimes to close to 100% as we can. >> Have your had to test that yet? Or, when I say test, has it actually, have you had to fail over? I mean, you probably tested it, hopefully you tested it, but-- >> We have-- >> Dave: Has it tested you yet, let me put it that way! >> Yeah, we have failed over servers. We haven't failed over a whole cluster, because you hope it's one of the things you hope you never have to do. (Shannon laughing) We've tested the procedure between nodes, as you would, and there is, we have tested recently with the Recover Point software, where we have lost servers, and it's a decision then, do we try to troubleshoot the problem or do we just go back a few minutes when it was working and we just, we gave it an hour to sort it out, it was impacting, so we just rolled back as if it never happened! >> It worked! >> Yeah, which was a nice reaffirmation that what we did was right! >> So Shannon you talked about resiliency, speed. There was an analyst report, recently, that I'd like you to kind of enlighten us on. And kind of look at one of the thing Chris said, in terms of getting back to the business cost savings. How does Celtic Manor's achievement so far kind of align with what you're seeing in terms of customers being able to leverage HCI to be more budget friendly? >> Yeah, so, I think you're referring to our IT Maturity Study. And what we're seeing is that the majority of customers, almost all of them, are telling us that if they don't transform in their industry, then they'll no longer be competitive. So I think all of our customers are kind of coming to that realization. One of the key aspects to that is that a year ago, when we asked the same question, a significantly lower number was mentioned. So I think that just speaks to the speed and the urgency that customers are coming to the realization that it's really important to transform, and we need to do it sooner rather than later. We have a lot of proof points around VxRail, particularly, in terms of the automation. You know, 73% faster to deploy, that means value to customers. That's money that they're saving, directly. And lower serviceability costs overall, over 40% lower. So that translates into real TCO, goes back to the CFO, you know, that helps understand the investment that they're making, lets them reprioritize in other areas of the business that helps them transform and stay innovative in their industry. >> I want to follow up on that last point that Shannon just made. And a lot of times, when you're bringing in some kind of consolidation, the staff says, "Uh oh, "that means I'm going to lose my job, "because I'm really good at revisioning LANs" or whatever it is. How did you address that, was there organizational tension, what did you do with the time that was freed up? >> Yeah, I think it's helped transform the IT team. If anything, it's freed up time, but that time is now taken, it's given us more time to look at innovative products and going forwards. There is, our staff has a tendency to specialize more as opposed to generalize, which is nice. As in, the VxRail has sat there, and it's pretty much doing what you would do with minimal amounts of watching over them, with the remote support, who also watch your environment, if you enable it. If you have any outages there, they can potentially draw your attention to it before you even know. So lots of time's been freed up, and now you can see the staff are embracing it there, they're happy they've got this additional time not to be doing the not-so-important stuff, as we say, although it is very important, to keep it going. But they have more time now to specialize in what they mostly enjoy. So it's brought it on full circle now, so it's really, yeah, we're really seeing some positives. >> And hang out with their families on the weekends. (everyone speaking at once in agreement) So since they're not doing that, and they have more time to innovate, where are you on this data center modernization journey? And where, we talked about VDI, but where do you think you are in that journey? >> With respect to, with VDI, we are imminently doing it. We finished deploying the second VxRail cluster, the five S Series nodes, probably only a couple weeks ago, after a full migration of all the existing VMs. So it's now enabling us to look at VDI, which, ironically, when we get back, the week I get back, we have a meeting with Dell EMC on, do we need another node, all flash, or do we, we have specced within five nodes, some capacity for virtual desktops. But it's, again, something that, with all these additional hotels coming on, the conference centers, virtual desktop is the way to go. Even centralizing the data more so people aren't taking all data off of their laptops, so we're a more secure environment. So again, a great enabler for us, and finally, after four or five years, I get the virtual desktop! Done it the other way around, but-- >> Do you golf? >> I used to golf a lot. >> Okay, so you know what a mulligan is. >> Yeah. >> So, if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? >> Um, what would I do differently? Good question! >> I mean, specific to this project. (chuckling) >> Nothing, really. I think everything pretty much has been done as I would expect. When we first deployed the conference center, the new conference center environment, it was a bit disjointed, because the conference center wasn't built and in full use. It kind of gave us some time to test the environment fully, which we also did with the Dell VxRail test drives, which I know the guys offer you were you can go into a classroom facility for a day and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it. >> Same question, different spin. Advice for your peers. Because obviously you had some successes. What would you tell them, to be successful? >> Just go for it! If you're thinking it, I mean, it is, as far as I can see, it is the future product, and it's not going to go in any other direction. The management side of things is far more simplistic than everything else we've experienced in the past. And it's baked-in VMware so, you know, you have the best chef and the best ingredients with the best thing as opposed to another chef taking the best ingredients and trying to do something. So yeah, it's just seamless integration now, and it gives us a lot of confidence that we have everything there with Dell, and this environment, to go forward and grow even bigger as a business. >> And then we've cued your outro music. >> Perfect! >> Timed that perfectly! Chris, thank you so much for sharing what you're doing at Celtic Manor to innovate, making your IT transformation. Shannon, thank you for sharing what's new with HCI. Dave, thank you for sharing with me the word "mulligan", I just looked it up. In case you don't know what a mulligan is, it is an extra stroke allowed after a poor golf shot. I probably would be like the mulligan queen. >> You get a few. (chuckles) >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube, we are live on Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: New York City, it's the Cube covering CyberConnect 2017 brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage in New York City's Grand Hyatt Ballroom for CyberConnect 2017 presented by Centrify. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube with my co-host this week is Dave Vellante, my partner and co-founder and co-CEO with me in SiliconAngle Media in the Cube. Our next guest is James Scott who is the co-founder and senior fellow at ICIT. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> You guys are putting on this event, really putting the content together. Centrify, just so everyone knows, is underwriting the event but this is not a Centrify event. You guys are the key content partner, developing the content agenda. It's been phenomenal. It's an inaugural event so it's the first of its kind bringing in industry, government, and practitioners all together, kind of up leveling from the normal and good events like Black Hat and other events like RSA which go into deep dives. Here it's a little bit different. Explain. >> Yeah, it is. We're growing. We're a newer think tank. We're less than five years old. The objective is to stay smaller. We have organizations, like Centrify, that came out of nowhere in D.C. so we deal, most of what we've done up until now has been purely federal and on the Hill so what I do, I work in the intelligence community. I specialize in social engineering and then I advise in the Senate for the most part, some in the House. We're able to take these organizations into the Pentagon or wherever and when we get a good read on them and when senators are like, "hey, can you bring them back in to brief us?" That's when we know we have a winner so we started really creating a relationship with Tom Kemp, who's the CEO and founder over there, and Greg Cranley, who heads the federal division. They're aggressively trying to be different as opposed to trying to be like everyone else, which makes it easy. If someone wants to do something, they have to be a fellow for us to do it, but if they want to do it, just like if they want to commission a paper, we just basically say, "okay, you can pay for it but we run it." Centrify has just been excellent. >> They get the community model. They get the relationship that you have with your constituents in the community. Trust matters, so you guys are happy to do this but more importantly, the content. You're held to a standard in your community. This is new, not to go in a different direction for a second but this is what the community marketing model is. Stay true to your audience and trust. You're relied upon so that's some balance that you guys have to do. >> The thing is we deal with cylance and others. Cylance, for example, was the first to introduce machine learning artificial intelligence to get passed that mutating hash for endpoint security. They fit in really well in the intelligence community. The great thing about working with Centrify is they let us take the lead and they're very flexible and we just make sure they come out on top each time. The content, it's very content driven. In D.C., we have at our cocktail receptions, they're CIA, NSA, DARPA, NASA. >> You guys are the poster child of be big, think small. >> Exactly. Intimate. >> You say Centrify is doing things differently. They're not falling in line like a lemming. What do you mean by that? What is everybody doing that these guys are doing differently? >> I think in the federal space, I think commercial too, but you have to be willing to take a big risk to be different so you have to be willing to pay a premium. If people work with us, they know they're going to pay a premium but we make sure they come out on top. What they do is, they'll tell us, Centrify will be like, "look, we're going to put x amount of dollars into a lunch. "Here are the types of pedigree individuals "that we need there." Maybe they're not executives. Maybe they're the actual practitioners at DHS or whatever. The one thing that they do different is they're aggressively trying to deviate from the prototype. That's what I mean. >> Like a vendor trying to sell stuff. >> Yeah and the thing is, that's why when someone goes to a Centrify event, I don't work for Centrify (mumbles). That's how they're able to attract. If you see, we have General Alexander. We've got major players here because of the content, because it's been different and then the other players want to be on the stage with other players, you know what I mean. It almost becomes a competition for "hey, I was asked to come to an ICIT thing" you know, that sort of thing. That's what I mean. >> It's reputation. You guys have a reputation and you stay true to that. That's what I was saying. To me, I think this is the future of how things get done. When you have a community model, you're held to a standard with your community. If you cross the line on that standard, you head fake your community, that's the algorithm that brings you a balance so you bring good stuff to the table and you vet everyone else on the other side so it's just more of a collaboration, if you will. >> The themes here, what you'll see is within critical infrastructure, we try to gear this a little more towards the financial sector. We brought, from Aetna, he set up the FS ISAC. Now he's with the health sector ISAC. For this particular geography in New York, we're trying to have it focus more around health sector and financial critical infrastructure. You'll see that. >> Alright, James, I've got to ask you. You're a senior fellow. You're on the front lines with a great Rolodex, great relationships in D.C., and you're adivising and leaned upon by people making policy, looking at the world and the general layout in which, the reality is shit's happening differently now so the world's got to change. Take us through a day in the life of some of the things you guys are seeing and what's the outlook? I mean, it's like a perfect storm of chaos, yet opportunity. >> It really depends. Each federal agency, we look at it from a Hill perspective, it comes down to really educating them. When I'm in advising in the House, I know I'm going to be working with a different policy pedigree than a Senate committee policy expert, you know what I mean. You have to gauge the conversation depending on how new the office is, House, Senate, are they minority side, and then what we try to do is bring the issues that the private sector is having while simultaneously hitting the issues that the federal agency space is. Usually, we'll have a needs list from the CSWEP at the different federal agencies for a particular topic like the Chinese APTs or the Russian APT. What we'll do is, we'll break down what the issue is. With Russia, for example, it's a combination of two types of exploits that are happening. You have the technical exploit, the malicious payload and vulnerability in a critical infrastructure network and then profiling those actors. We also have another problem, the influence operations, which is why we started the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. We've been asked repeatedly since the elections last year by the intelligence community to tell us, explain this new propaganda. The interesting thing is the synergies between the two sides are exploiting and weaponizing the same vectors. While on the technical side, you're exploiting a vulnerability in a network with a technical exploit, with a payload, a compiled payload with a bunch of tools. On the influence operations side, they're weaponizing the same social media platforms that you would use to distribute a payload here but only the... >> Contest payload. Either way you have critical infrastructure. The payload being content, fake content or whatever content, has an underpinning that gamification call it virality, network effect and user psychology around they don't really open up the Facebook post, they just read the headline and picture. There's a dissonance campaign, or whatever they're running, that might not be critical to national security at that time but it's also a post. >> It shifts the conversation in a way where they can use, for example, right now all the rage with nation states is to use metadata, put it into big data analytics, come up with a psychographic algorithm, and go after critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. You can do anything with those guys. You can spearfish them. The Russian modus operandi is to call and act like a recruiter, have that first touch of contact be the phone call, which they're not expecting. "Hey, I got this job. "Keep it on the down low. Don't tell anybody. "I'm going to send you the job description. "Here's the PDF." Take it from there. >> How should we think about the different nation state actors? You mentioned Russia, China, there's Iran, North Korea. Lay it out for us. >> Each geography has a different vibe to their hacking. With Russia you have this stealth and sophistication and their hacking is just like their espionage. It's like playing chess. They're really good at making pawns feel like they're kings on the chessboard so they're really good at recruiting insider threats. Bill Evanina is the head of counterintel. He's a bulldog. I know him personally. He's exactly what we need in that position. The Chinese hacking style is more smash and grab, very unsophisticated. They'll use a payload over and over again so forensically, it's easy to... >> Dave: Signatures. >> Yeah, it is. >> More shearing on the tooling or whatever. >> They'll use code to the point of redundancy so it's like alright, the only reason they got in... Chinese get into a network, not because of sophistication, but because the network is not protected. Then you have the mercenary element which is where China really thrives. Chinese PLA will hack for the nation state during the day, but they'll moonlight at night to North Korea so North Korea, they have people who may consider themselves hackers but they're not code writers. They outsource. >> They're brokers, like general contractors. >> They're not sophisticated enough to carry out a real nation state attack. What they'll do is outsource to Chinese PLA members. Chinese PLA members will be like, "okay well, here's what I need for this job." Typically, what the Chinese will do, their loyalties are different than in the west, during the day they'll discover a vulnerability or an O day. They won't tell their boss right away. They'll capitalize off of it for a week. You do that, you go to jail over here. Russia, they'll kill you. China, somehow this is an accepted thing. They don't like it but it just happens. Then you have the eastern European nations and Russia still uses mercenary elements out of Moscow and St. Petersburg so what they'll do is they will freelance, as well. That's when you get the sophisticated, carbonic style hack where they'll go into the financial sector. They'll monitor the situation. Learn the ins and outs of everything having to do with that particular swift or bank or whatever. They go in and those are the guys that are making millions of dollars on a breach. Hacking in general is a grind. It's a lot of vulnerabilities work, but few work for long. Everybody is always thinking there's this omega code that they have. >> It's just brute force. You just pound it all day long. >> That's it and it's a grind. You might have something that you worked on for six months. You're ready to monetize. >> What about South America? What's the vibe down there? Anything happening in there? >> Not really. There is nothing of substance that really affects us here. Again, if an organization is completely unprotected. >> John: Russia? China? >> Russia and China. >> What about our allies? >> GCHQ. >> Israel? What's the collaboration, coordination, snooping? What's the dynamic like there? >> We deal, mostly, with NATO and Five Eyes. I actually had dinner with NATO last night. Five Eyes is important because we share signals intelligence and most of the communications will go through Five Eyes which is California, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Those are our five most important allies and then NATO after that, as far as I'm concerned, for cyber. You have the whole weaponization of space going on with SATCOM interception. We're dealing with that with NASA, DARPA. Not a lot is happening down in South America. The next big thing that we have to look at is the cyber caliphate. You have the Muslim brotherhood that funds it. Their influence operations domestically are extremely strong. They have a lot of contacts on the Hill which is a problem. You have ANTIFA. So there's two sides to this. You have the technical exploit but then the information warfare exploit. >> What about the bitcoin underbelly that started with the silk roads and you've seen a lot of bitcoin. Money laundering is a big deal, know your customer. Now regulation is part of big ICOs going on. Are you seeing any activity from those? Are they pulling from previous mercenary groups or are they arbitraging just more free? >> For updating bitcoin? >> The whole bitcoin networks. There's been an effort to commercialize (mumbles) so there's been a legitimate track to bring that on but yet there's still a lot of actors. >> I think bitcoin is important to keep and if you look at the more black ops type hacking or payment stuff, bitcoin is an important element just as tor is an important element, just as encryption is an important element. >> John: It's fundamental, actually. >> It's a necessity so when I hear people on the Hill, I have my researcher, I'm like, "any time you hear somebody trying to have "weakened encryption, back door encryption" the first thing, we add them to the briefing schedule and I'm like, "look, here's what you're proposing. "You're proposing that you outlaw math. "So what? Two plus two doesn't equal four. "What is it? Three and a half? "Where's the logic?" When you break it down for them like that, on the Hill in particular, they begin to get it. They're like, "well how do we get the intelligence community "or the FBI, for example, to get into this iphone?" Civil liberties, you've got to take that into consideration. >> I got to ask you a question. I interviewed a guy, I won't say his name. He actually commented off the record, but he said to me, "you won't believe how dumb some of these state actors are "when it comes to cyber. "There's some super smart ones. "Specifically Iran and the Middle East, "they're really not that bright." He used an example, I don't know if it's true or not, that stuxnet, I forget which one it was, there was a test and it got out of control and they couldn't pull it back and it revealed their hand but it could've been something worse. His point was they actually screwed up their entire operation because they're doing some QA on their thing. >> I can't talk about stuxnet but it's easy to get... >> In terms of how you test them, how do you QA your work? >> James: How do you review malware? (mumbles) >> You can't comment on the accuracy of Zero Days, the documentary? >> Next question. Here's what you find. Some of these nation state actors, they saw what happened with our elections so they're like, "we have a really crappy offensive cyber program "but maybe we can thrive in influence operations "in propaganda and whatever." We're getting hit by everybody and 2020 is going to be, I don't even want to imagine. >> John: You think it's going to be out of control? >> It's going to be. >> I've got to ask this question, this came up. You're bringing up a really good point I think a lot of people aren't talking about but we've brought up a few times. I want to keep on getting it out there. In the old days, state on state actors used to do things, espionage, and everyone knew who they were and it was very important not to bring their queen out, if you will, too early, or reveal their moves. Now with Wikileaks and public domain, a lot of these tools are being democratized so that they can covertly put stuff out in the open for enemies of our country to just attack us at will. Is that happening? I hear about it, meaning that I might be Russia or I might be someone else. I don't want to reveal my hand but hey, you ISIS guys out there, all you guys in the Middle East might want to use this great hack and put it out in the open. >> I think yeah. The new world order, I guess. The order of things, the power positions are completely flipped, B side, counter, whatever. It's completely not what the establishment was thinking it would be. What's happening is Facebook is no more relevant, I mean Facebook is more relevant than the UN. Wikileaks has more information pulsating out of it than a CIA analyst, whatever. >> John: There's a democratization of the information? >> The thing is we're no longer a world that's divided by geographic lines in the sand that were drawn by these two guys that fought and lost a war 50 years ago. We're now in a tribal chieftain digital society and we're separated by ideological variation and so you have tribe members here in the US who have fellow tribe members in Israel, Russia, whatever. Look at Anonymous. Anonymous, I think everyone understands that's the biggest law enforcement honeypot there is, but you look at the ideological variation and it's hashtags and it's keywords and it's forums. That's the Senate. That's congress. >> John: This is a new reality. >> This is reality. >> How do you explain that to senators? I was watching that on TV where they're trying to grasp what Facebook is and Twitter. (mumbles) Certainly Facebook knew what was going on. They're trying to play policy and they're new. They're newbies when it comes to policy. They don't have any experience on the Hill, now it's ramping up and they've had some help but tech has never been an actor on the stage of policy formulation. >> We have a real problem. We're looking at outside threats as our national security threats, which is incorrect. You have dragnet surveillance capitalists. Here's the biggest threats we have. The weaponization of Facebook, twitter, youtube, google, and search engines like comcast. They all have a censorship algorithm, which is how they monetize your traffic. It's censorship. You're signing your rights away and your free will when you use google. You're not getting the right answer, you're getting the answer that coincides with an algorithm that they're meant to monetize and capitalize on. It's complete censorship. What's happening is, we had something that just passed SJ res 34 which no resistance whatsoever, blew my mind. What that allows is for a new actor, the ISPs to curate metadata on their users and charge them their monthly fee as well. It's completely corrupt. These dragnet surveillance capitalists have become dragnet surveillance censorists. Is that a word? Censorists? I'll make it one. Now they've become dragnet surveillance propagandists. That's why 2020 is up for grabs. >> (mumbles) We come from the same school here on this one, but here's the question. The younger generation, I asked a gentleman in the hallway on his way out, I said, "where's the cyber west point? "We're the Navy SEALS in this new digital culture." He said, "oh yeah, some things." We're talking about the younger generation, the kids playing Call of Duty Destiny. These are the guys out there, young kids coming up that will probably end up having multiple disciplinary skills. Where are they going to come from? So the question is, are we going to have a counterculture? We're almost feeling like what the 60s were to the 50s. Vietnam. I kind of feel like maybe the security stuff doesn't get taken care of, a revolt is coming. You talk about dragnet censorship. You're talking about the lack of control and privacy. I don't mind giving Facebook my data to connect with my friends and see my thanksgiving photos or whatever but now I don't want fake news jammed down my throat. Anti-Trump and Anti-Hillary spew. I didn't buy into that. I don't want that anymore. >> I think millennials, I have a 19 year old son, my researchers, they're right out of grad school. >> John: What's the profile like? >> They have no trust whatsoever in the government and they laugh at legislation. They don't care any more about having their face on their Facebook page and all their most intimate details of last night's date and tomorrow's date with two different, whatever. They just don't... They loathe the traditional way of things. You got to talk to General Alexander today. We have a really good relationship with him, Hayden, Mike Rogers. There is a counterculture in the works but it's not going to happen overnight because we have a tech deficit here where we need foreign tech people just to make up for the deficit. >> Bill Mann and I were talking, I heard the general basically, this is my interpretation, "if we don't get our shit together, "this is going to be an f'd up situation." That's what I heard him basically say. You guys don't come together so what Bill talked about was two scenarios. If industry and government don't share and come together, they're going to have stuff mandated on them by the government. Do you agree? >> I do. >> What's going to happen? >> The argument for regulation on the Hill is they don't want to stifle innovation, which makes sense but then ISPs don't innovate at all. They're using 1980s technology, so why did you pass SJ res 34? >> John: For access? >> I don't know because nation states just look at that as, "oh wow another treasure trove of metadata "that we can weaponize. "Let's start psychographically charging alt-left "and alt-right, you know what I mean?" >> Hacks are inevitable. That seems to be the trend. >> You talked before, James, about threats. You mentioned weaponization of social. >> James: Social media. >> You mentioned another in terms of ISPs I think. >> James: Dragnet. >> What are the big threats? Weaponization of social. ISP metadata, obviously. >> Metadata, it really depends and that's the thing. That's what makes the advisory so difficult because you have to go between influence operations and the exploit because the vectors are used for different things in different variations. >> John: Integrated model. >> It really is and so with a question like that I'm like okay so my biggest concern is the propaganda, political warfare, the information warfare. >> People are underestimating the value of how big that is, aren't they? They're oversimplifying the impact of info campaigns. >> Yeah because your reality is based off of... It's like this, influence operations. Traditional media, everybody is all about the narrative and controlling the narrative. What Russia understands is to control the narrative, the most embryo state of the narrative is the meme. Control the meme, control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. Control the belief system, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the population. No guns were fired, see what I'm saying? >> I was explaining to a friend on Facebook, I was getting into a rant on this. I used a very simple example. In the advertising world, they run millions of dollars of ad campaigns on car companies for post car purchase cognitive dissonance campaigns. Just to make you feel good about your purchase. In a way, that's what's going on and explains what's going on on Facebook. This constant reinforcement of these beliefs whether its for Trump or Hillary, all this stuff was happening. I saw it firsthand. That's just one small nuance but it's across a spectrum of memes. >> You have all these people, you have nation states, you have mercenaries, but the most potent force in this space, the most hyperevolving in influence operations, is the special interest group. The well-funded special interests. That's going to be a problem. 2020, I keep hitting that because I was doing an interview earlier. 2020 is going to be a tug of war for the psychological core of the population and it's free game. Dragnet surveillance capitalists will absolutely be dragnet surveillance propagandists. They will have the candidates that they're going to push. Now that can also work against them because mainstream media, twitter, Facebook were completely against trump, for example, and that worked in his advantage. >> We've seen this before. I'm a little bit older, but we are the same generation. Remember when they were going to open up sealex? Remember the last mile for connectivity? That battle was won before it was even fought. What you're saying, if I get this right, the war and tug of war going on now is a big game. If it's not played in one now, this jerry rigging, gerrymandering of stuff could happen so when people wake up and realize what's happened the game has already been won. >> Yeah, your universe as you know it, your belief systems, what you hold to be true and self evident. Again, the embryo. If you look back to the embryo introduction of that concept, whatever concept it is, to your mind it came from somewhere else. There are very few things that you believe that you came up with yourself. The digital space expedites that process and that's dangerous because now it's being weaponized. >> Back to the, who fixes this. Who's the watchdog on this? These ideas you're talking about, some of them, you're like, "man that guy has lost it, he's crazy." Actually, I don't think you're crazy at all. I think it's right on. Is there a media outlet watching it? Who's reporting on it? What even can grasp what you're saying? What's going on in D.C.? Can you share that perspective? >> Yeah, the people that get this are the intelligence community, okay? The problem is the way we advise is I will go in with one of the silos in the NSA and explain what's happening and how to do it. They'll turn around their computer and say, "show me how to do it. "How do you do a multi vector campaign "with this meme and make it viral in 30 minutes." You have to be able to show them how to do it. >> John: We can do that. Actually we can't. >> That sort of thing, you have to be able to show them because there's not enough practitioners, we call them operators. When you're going in here, you're teaching them. >> The thing is if they have the metadata to your treasure trove, this is how they do it. I'll explain here. If they have the metadata, they know where the touch points are. It's a network effect mole, just distributive mole. They can put content in certain subnetworks that they know have a reaction to the metadata so they have the knowledge going in. It's not like they're scanning the whole world. They're monitoring pockets like a drone, right? Once they get over the territory, then they do the acquired deeper targets and then go viral. That's basically how fake news works. >> See the problem is, you look at something like alt-right and ANTIFA. ANTIFA, just like Black Lives Matter, the initiatives may have started out with righteous intentions just like take a knee. These initiatives, first stage is if it causes chaos, chaos is the op for a nation state in the US. That's the op. Chaos. That's the beginning and the end of an op. What happens is they will say, "oh okay look, this is ticking off all these other people "so let's fan the flame of this take a knee thing "hurt the NFL." Who cares? I don't watch football anyway but you know, take a knee. It's causing all this chaos. >> John: It's called trolling. >> What will happen is Russia and China, China has got their 13 five year plan, Russia has their foreign influence operations. They will fan that flame to exhaustion. Now what happens to the ANTIFA guy when he's a self-radicalized wound collector with a mental disorder? Maybe he's bipolar. Now with ANTIFA, he's experienced a heightened more extreme variation of that particular ideology so who steps in next? Cyber caliphate and Muslim brotherhood. That's why we're going to have an epidemic. I can't believe, you know, ANTIFA is a domestic terrorist organization. It's shocking that the FBI is not taking this more serious. What's happening now is Muslim brotherhood funds basically the cyber caliphate. The whole point of cyber caliphate is to create awareness, instill the illusion of rampant xenophobia for recruiting. They have self-radicalized wound collectors with ANTIFA that are already extremists anyway. They're just looking for a reason to take that up a notch. That's when, cyber caliphate, they hook up with them with a hashtag. They respond and they create a relationship. >> John: They get the fly wheel going. >> They take them to a deep web forum, dark web forum, and start showing them how it works. You can do this. You can be part of something. This guy who was never even muslim now is going under the ISIS moniker and he acts. He drives people over in New York. >> They fossilized their belief system. >> The whole point to the cyber caliphate is to find actors that are already in the self-radicalization phase but what does it take psychologically and from a mentoring perspective, to get them to act? That's the cyber caliphate. >> This is the value of data and context in real time using the current events to use that data, refuel their operation. It's data driven terrorism. >> What's the prescription that you're advising? >> I'm not a regulations kind of guy, but any time you're curating metadata like we're just talking about right now. Any time you have organizations like google, like Facebook, that have become so big, they are like their own nation state. That's a dangerous thing. The metadata curation. >> John: The value of the data is very big. That's the point. >> It is because what's happening... >> John: There's always a vulnerability. >> There's always a vulnerability and it will be exploited and all that metadata, it's unscrubbed. I'm not worried about them selling metadata that's scrubbed. I'm worried about the nation state or the sophisticated actor that already has a remote access Trojan on the network and is exfiltrating in real time. That's the guy that I'm worried about because he can just say, "forget it, I'm going to target people that are at this phase." He knows how to write algorithms, comes up with a good psychographic algorithm, puts the data in there, and now he's like, "look I'm only going to promote this concept, "two people at this particular stage of self-radicalization "or sympathetic to the kremlin." We have a big problem on the college campuses with IP theft because of the Chinese Students Scholar Associations which are directly run by the Chinese communist party. >> I heard a rumor that Equifax's franchising strategy had partners on the VPN that were state sponsored. They weren't even hacking, they had full access. >> There's a reason that the Chinese are buying hotels. They bought the Waldorf Astoria. We do stuff with the UN and NATO, you can't even stay there anymore. I think it's still under construction but it's a no-no to stay there anymore. I mean western nations and allies because they'll have bugs in the rooms. The WiFi that you use... >> Has fake certificates. >> Or there's a vulnerability that's left in that network so the information for executives who have IP or PII or electronic health records, you know what I mean? You go to these places to stay overnight, as an executive, and you're compromised. >> Look what happened with Eugene Kaspersky. I don't know the real story. I don't know if you can comment, but someone sees that and says, "this guy used to have high level meetings "at the Pentagon weekly, monthly." Now he's persona non grata. >> He fell out of favor, I guess, right? It happens. >> James, great conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Congratulations on the great work you guys are doing here at the event. I know the content has been well received. Certainly the key notes we saw were awesome. CSOs, view from the government, from industry, congratulations. James Scott who is the co founder and senior fellow of ICIT, Internet Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> James: Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> T is for tech. >> And the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. >> Good stuff. A lot of stuff going on (mumbles), exploits, infrastructure, it's all mainstream. It's the crisis of our generation. There's a radical shift happening and the answers are all going to come from industry and government coming together. This is the Cube bringing the data, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (rippling music) >> Welcome back to The Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who's my cohost for the week. Bob Swanson is here, he's the head of sales for dcVAST out of Chicago. Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE! >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> So, well first of all, the show, how's it going for you? We've now got enough data, it's been a couple of days, a few days perhaps for you. What's the vibe like, what are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's been a great week. This is the very tail end of the event, so a little exhausted. But it's been exciting, there's been a good buzz at the event and we get a lot of our customers here, and just kind of seeing the buzz and the pace of innovation that's goin on here with Veritas, you know, it has been exciting. >> Tell us more about dcVAST. You're focused on IT infrastructure services, but dig a little deeper. Right, yep, so we're headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and you're right, we do infrastructure and cloud services. So we do support-type services with a seven by 24 call center, have different managed service offerings, different cloud offerings, and certainly do consulting and project work as well. >> Yeah, and Bob, so what does multi-cloud mean to your customers? (chuckles) >> It's only natural that if they're not there today, then they're going to be multi-cloud at some point. So, Veritas here is pretty uniquely positioned. to be able to get customers there. It's all about flexibility and data portability. So, I think where infrastructure and storage and data protection is sometimes not that exciting of a conversation, now kind of changing the conversation, the data management, 'cause everybody needs their data to become more productive for them. It changes the conversation, has a little more sizzle. >> Okay, but you know, your primary area of focus is infrastructure services, so that means first and foremost, every year you got to help me lower my costs, right, you've been hearing that, I'm sure, for years, and help me improve my operational efficiency. And you do that, and really attack my labor problem, IT labor problem so I can focus on my business, right? Are those still the big overriding themes? Oh, yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think the public cloud has been probably the most disruptive thing in our space since the internet. And it's making customers re-evaluate all cost and really how they're doing things, and different consumption and financial models. So, the technology is cool, and we like that conversation, but it naturally brings a big financial and cost savings, and do-more-with-less element to all the conversations. >> So what are the big trends that you're seeing in marketplace, what are the conversations like with your customers? >> Yeah, and I'll give you an example. I think customers have different approaches to cloud, right, some cloud-first, everything's got to go. Others maybe want to keep more of their workloads on premise. And in one customer example, where they said, hey, we want to move all non-production out to the cloud and it was a single cloud provider. And they got about 40% of what they were looking to move out there and they reached what they thought their estimated budget was going to be. So at that point, having that portability and having the tool sets to be able to move those workloads around becomes very important from a financial standpoint. >> So, I wonder if we can unpack those. Cloud first, and then these other guys on-prem. The motivation for cloud first, and the type of company. Do they tend to be a smaller companies, or do you see larger companies saying hey, we're going all in? I mean, you've seen some stories in the press, you know, large company, GE's going all to the cloud, okay I'm sure there's still a lot of on-prem going on there. What do you see? >> Yeah, you're right. A lot of small business is certainly, it makes sense for them, any startups too are pretty much born in the cloud now. You're not going to have too many financial backers that are going to want a startup to be spending too much money on data center, or buying hardware. But the established large enterprises, too, are kind of all over the map, but there are already some of them that are taking this cloud first approach. But, the large enterprises and companies that have been around, where it's not kind of a clean slate, naturally it's going to be hybrid and ultimately there's probably a lot of predictable static workloads that are, at the end of the day, going to be cheaper to run on-prem than they are out in the public cloud. Public cloud's great for the stuff that's not predictable, or is very dynamic, so we're seeing, and I am from Chicago and so we say the coasts move faster, maybe, than the Midwest does as well, but we're seeing varying degrees of adoption and strategy. >> But the business in the data center's good right now, I mean, the market's sort of booming, but if you roll back a few years, you guys must have thought, and maybe you're still thinking it, okay, see this cloud that's coming. Like you said, it's one of the most disruptive, if not the most disruptive in a while, and it's aiming right at the heart of your business, infrastructure services. So how have you responded to that, you must be riding the wave now of data center growth and investment, but strategically, what are you thinking about in your firm? >> Yeah, I mean, there's no question. We've had to pivot. But it does create opportunity. And we do need to help our customers be able to be most cost-effectively managing their workload, right, helping them with that. So where there's challenge and change, there's certainly inopportunity. And we've seen it. >> So, but my understanding, your firm also offers managed cloud offerings. That's been one of the things we've looked at is the channel, can they get on board, can they offer that, how is it working with the big cloud providers, and yeah, let's start there. >> Yeah, that's a good question, and a lot of people have a misperception that the cloud is kind of the easy button. (laughter) But at the end of the day-- >> Stu: Maybe 10 years ago we thought that-- >> Dave: You have your hoodie. >> Right, but I mean, people need to realize the same architecture and security considerations are there as they are for on-premise, so it's not the easy button, and you can just kind of set it and forget it. So some people that are underestimating that still need help from a third party like ourselves to be able to help them manage it. >> Could you speak about the maturation of your support services? >> Yeah, we started doing a lot of hardware support years ago when the business was founded in 1989. And at that time, it was a lot of Unix-based engineering workstations and kind of morphed into servers and storage and other data center equipment, and then started doing a lot more software support, which all can be delivered remotely, for the most part. From time to time, you may need to be onsite for something, so that kind of changes the logistical model, and now with the cloud as well, we've just kind of evolved in that direction. >> And how about the Veritas relationship? What's that been like, you know, the Symantec sale, any comments on how that's evolved, and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, we've been a long-time Veritas partner, and really the reason why we first got started with them was because they were relatively platform-agnostic, and supported and endorsed heterogeneity. And in the old Foundation Suite days, which now their InfoScale product, it's obviously had some name changes, it didn't matter what operating system, didn't matter which array vendor you used. And it's good to have friends in the industry and alliances, but there's also some benefit of staying relatively agnostic like Veritas has, and that message resonates now more than ever with all the different cloud providers out there, and just being able to be interoperable with a lot of different technologies. >> What's your customer's reaction been to all the announcements that Veritas has been making here? >> Yeah, yeah, everyone's excited. Now it's getting the word out. And I mentioned pace of innovation earlier, and it seems to have gone from zero to 100, really, really fast. So, that's exciting. It shows commitment, I think, from the new executive leadership team at Veritas, and their backers at Carlyle as well. So, you know, I think it's an exciting time for Veritas, and for us as a partner as well, and our customers. >> And anything you want to see out of those guys? From your perspective, in the partner standpoint, in the voice of the customer, what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, and I mean, the concept of data management, looking at it holistically is important. After people and intellectual property, data's the most valuable asset a company has, and a lot of the intellectual property resides in the form of data as well. So, it's an exciting place to be as we kind of see the industry shift. >> Dave: Cubs or White Sox? >> Bob: Cubbies! >> Hey, well, congratulations on that! >> Yeah, it's been a-- >> Really, really Cubbies, not just White Sox, oh, the Cubbies won it? >> No, Cubbies all the way. >> Hardcore Cubbies fan. >> Diehard, absolutely, yep. >> Well, you're welcome for Theo Epstein. We gave Theo, and Lester, you know. And Lackey. (laughs) >> You know, Theo seems to have the Midas touch, you know, and it's interesting too, you can use sports analogies for a lot of things, and Theo's a guy who was a little disruptive by using data and analytics in his approach to managing a baseball team. >> Right, right, well, good. That's great. It was an exciting World Series last year. Hope it can be as exciting again. Must have been insane in Chicago. >> Absolutely, yep, getting ready for another run this year, hopefully. >> Excellent, well, Bob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks again, gentlemen. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back to wrap up Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (rippling music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is Lenovo Transform. Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappin. (upbeat instrumental) >> Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. I was out the back having a chat. A bit faster than I expected. How are you all doing this morning? (crowd cheers) >> Good? How fantastic is it to be in New York City? (crowd applauds) Excellent. So my name's Rod Lappin. I'm with the Data Center Group, obviously. I do basically anything that touches customers from our sales people, our pre-sales engineers, our architects, et cetera, all the way through to our channel partner sales engagement globally. So that's my job, but enough of that, okay? So the weather this morning, absolutely fantastic. Not a cloud in the sky, perfect. A little bit different to how it was yesterday, right? I want to thank all of you because I know a lot of you had a lot of commuting issues getting into New York yesterday with all the storms. We have a lot of people from international and domestic travel caught up in obviously the network, which blows my mind, actually, but we have a lot of people here from Europe, obviously, a lot of analysts and media people here as well as customers who were caught up in circling around the airport apparently for hours. So a big round of applause for our team from Europe. (audience applauds) Thank you for coming. We have some people who commuted a very short distance. For example, our own server general manager, Cameron (mumbles), he's out the back there. Cameron, how long did it take you to get from Raleigh to New York? An hour-and-a-half flight? >> Cameron: 17 hours. >> 17 hours, ladies and gentleman. That's a fantastic distance. I think that's amazing. But I know a lot of us, obviously, in the United States have come a long way with the storms, obviously very tough, but I'm going to call out one individual. Shaneil from Spotless. Where are you Shaneil, you're here somewhere? There he is from Australia. Shaneil how long did it take you to come in from Australia? 25 hour, ladies and gentleman. A big round of applause. That's a pretty big effort. Shaneil actually I want you to stand up, if you don't mind. I've got a seat here right next to my CEO. You've gone the longest distance. How about a big round of applause for Shaneil. We'll put him in my seat, next to YY. Honestly, Shaneil, you're doing me a favor. Okay ladies and gentlemen, we've got a big day today. Obviously, my seat now taken there, fantastic. Obviously New York City, the absolute pinnacle of globalization. I first came to New York in 1996, which was before a lot of people in the room were born, unfortunately for me these days. Was completely in awe. I obviously went to a Yankees game, had no clue what was going on, didn't understand anything to do with baseball. Then I went and saw Patrick Ewing. Some of you would remember Patrick Ewing. Saw the Knicks play basketball. Had no idea what was going on. Obviously, from Australia, and somewhat slightly height challenged, basketball was not my thing but loved it. I really left that game... That was the first game of basketball I'd ever seen. Left that game realizing that effectively the guy throws the ball up at the beginning, someone taps it, that team gets it, they run it, they put it in the basket, then the other team gets it, they put it in the basket, the other team gets it, and that's basically the entire game. So I haven't really progressed from that sort of learning or understanding of basketball since then, but for me, personally, being here in New York, and obviously presenting with all of you guys today, it's really humbling from obviously some of you would have picked my accent, I'm also from Australia. From the north shore of Sydney. To be here is just a fantastic, fantastic event. So welcome ladies and gentlemen to Transform, part of our tech world series globally in our event series and our event season here at Lenovo. So once again, big round of applause. Thank you for coming (audience applauds). Today, basically, is the culmination of what I would classify as a very large journey. Many of you have been with us on that. Customers, partners, media, analysts obviously. We've got quite a lot of our industry analysts in the room. I know Matt Eastwood yesterday was on a train because he sent a Tweet out saying there's 170 people on the WIFI network. He was obviously a bit concerned he was going to get-- Pat Moorhead, he got in at 3:30 this morning, obviously from traveling here as well with some of the challenges with the transportation, so we've got a lot of people in the room that have been giving us advice over the last two years. I think all of our employees are joining us live. All of our partners and customers through the stream. As well as everybody in this packed-out room. We're very very excited about what we're going to be talking to you all today. I want to have a special thanks obviously to our R&D team in Raleigh and around the world. They've also been very very focused on what they've delivered for us today, and it's really important for them to also see the culmination of this great event. And like I mentioned, this is really the feedback. It's not just a Lenovo launch. This is a launch based on the feedback from our partners, our customers, our employees, the analysts. We've been talking to all of you about what we want to be when we grow up from a Data Center Group, and I think you're going to hear some really exciting stuff from some of the speakers today and in the demo and breakout sessions that we have after the event. These last two years, we've really transformed the organization, and that's one of the reasons why that theme is part of our Tech World Series today. We're very very confident in our future, obviously, and where the company's going. It's really important for all of you to understand today and take every single snippet that YY, Kirk, and Christian talk about today in the main session, and then our presenters in the demo sections on what Lenovo's actually doing for its future and how we're positioning the company, obviously, for that future and how the transformation, the digital transformation, is going ahead globally. So, all right, we are now going to step into our Transform event. And I've got a quick agenda statement for you. The very first thing is we're going to hear from YY, our chairman and CEO. He's going to discuss artificial intelligence, the evolution of our society and how Lenovo is clearly positioning itself in the industry. Then, obviously, you're going to hear from Kirk Skaugen, our president of the Data Center Group, our new boss. He's going to talk about how long he's been with the company and the transformation, once again, we're making, very specifically to the Data Center Group and how much of a difference we're making to society and some of our investments. Christian Teismann, our SVP and general manager of our client business is going to talk about the 25 years of ThinkPad. This year is the 25-year anniversary of our ThinkPad product. Easily the most successful brand in our client branch or client branch globally of any vendor. Most successful brand we've had launched, and this afternoon breakout sessions, obviously, with our keynotes, fantastic sessions. Make sure you actually attend all of those after this main arena here. Now, once again, listen, ask questions, and make sure you're giving us feedback. One of the things about Lenovo that we say all the time... There is no room for arrogance in our company. Every single person in this room is a customer, partner, analyst, or an employee. We love your feedback. It's only through your feedback that we continue to improve. And it's really important that through all of the sessions where the Q&As happen, breakouts afterwards, you're giving us feedback on what you want to see from us as an organization as we go forward. All right, so what were you doing 25 years ago? I spoke about ThinkPad being 25 years old, but let me ask you this. I bet you any money that no one here knew that our x86 business is also 25 years old. So, this year, we have both our ThinkPad and our x86 anniversaries for 25 years. Let me tell you. What were you guys doing 25 years ago? There's me, 25 years ago. It's a bit scary, isn't it? It's very svelte and athletic and a lot lighter than I am today. It makes me feel a little bit conscious. And you can see the black and white shot. It shows you that even if you're really really short and you come from the wrong side of the tracks to make some extra cash, you can still do some modeling as long as no one else is in the photo to give anyone any perspective, so very important. I think I might have got one photo shoot out of that, I don't know. I had to do it, I needed the money. Let me show you another couple of photos. Very interesting, how's this guy? How cool does he look? Very svelte and athletic. I think there's no doubt. He looks much much cooler than I do. Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great honor to obviously introduce our very very first guest to the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, our chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang. or as we like to call him, YY. A big round of applause, thank you. (upbeat techno instrumental) >> Good morning everyone. Thank you, Rod, for your introduction. Actually, I didn't think I was younger than you (mumbles). I can't think of another city more fitting to host the Transform event than New York. A city that has transformed from a humble trading post 400 years ago to one of the most vibrant cities in the world today. It is a perfect symbol of transformation of our world. The rapid and the deep transformations that have propelled us from the steam engine to the Internet era in just 200 years. Looking back at 200 years ago, there was only a few companies that operated on a global scale. The total value of the world's economy was around $188 billion U.S. dollars. Today, it is only $180 for each person on earth. Today, there are thousands of independent global companies that compete to sell everything, from corn and crude oil to servers and software. They drive a robust global economy was over $75 trillion or $1,000 per person. Think about it. The global economy has multiplied almost 450 times in just two centuries. What is even more remarkable is that the economy has almost doubled every 15 years since 1950. These are significant transformation for businesses and for the world and our tiny slice of pie. This transformation is the result of the greatest advancement in technology in human history. Not one but three industrial revolutions have happened over the last 200 years. Even though those revolutions created remarkable change, they were just the beginning. Today, we are standing at the beginning of the fourth revolution. This revolution will transform how we work (mumbles) in ways that no one could imagine in the 18th century or even just 18 months ago. You are the people who will lead this revolution. Along with Lenovo, we will redefine IT. IT is no longer just information technology. It's intelligent technology, intelligent transformation. A transformation that is driven by big data called computing and artificial intelligence. Even the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet is a big leap. Today, we are facing yet another big leap from the mobile Internet to the Smart Internet or intelligent Internet. In this Smart Internet era, Cloud enables devices, such as PCs, Smart phones, Smart speakers, Smart TVs. (mumbles) to provide the content and the services. But the evolution does not stop them. Ultimately, almost everything around us will become Smart, with building computing, storage, and networking capabilities. That's what we call the device plus Cloud transformation. These Smart devices, incorporated with various sensors, will continuously sense our environment and send data about our world to the Cloud. (mumbles) the process of this ever-increasing big data and to support the delivery of Cloud content and services, the data center infrastructure is also transforming to be more agile, flexible, and intelligent. That's what we call the infrastructure plus Cloud transformation. But most importantly, it is the human wisdom, the people learning algorithm vigorously improved by engineers that enables artificial intelligence to learn from big data and make everything around us smarter. With big data collected from Smart devices, computing power of the new infrastructure under the trend artificial intelligence, we can understand the world around us more accurately and make smarter decisions. We can make life better, work easier, and society safer and healthy. Think about what is already possible as we start this transformation. Smart Assistants can help you place orders online with a voice command. Driverless cars can run on the same road as traditional cars. (mumbles) can help troubleshoot customers problems, and the virtual doctors already diagnose basic symptoms. This list goes on and on. Like every revolution before it, intelligent transformation, will fundamentally change the nature of business. Understanding and preparing for that will be the key for the growth and the success of your business. The first industrial revolution made it possible to maximize production. Water and steam power let us go from making things by hand to making them by machine. This transformed how fast things could be produced. It drove the quantity of merchandise made and led to massive increase in trade. With this revolution, business scale expanded, and the number of customers exploded. Fifty years later, the second industrial revolution made it necessary to organize a business like the modern enterprise, electric power, and the telegraph communication made business faster and more complex, challenging businesses to become more efficient and meeting entirely new customer demands. In our own lifetimes, we have witnessed the third industrial revolution, which made it possible to digitize the enterprise. The development of computers and the Internet accelerated business beyond human speed. Now, global businesses have to deal with customers at the end of a cable, not always a handshake. While we are still dealing with the effects of a digitizing business, the fourth revolution is already here. In just the past two or three years, the growth of data and advancement in visual intelligence has been astonishing. The computing power can now process the massive amount of data about your customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, and give you insights you simply could not imagine before. Artificial intelligence can not only tell you what your customers want today but also anticipate what they will need tomorrow. This is not just about making better business decisions or creating better customer relationships. It's about making the world a better place. Ultimately, can we build a new world without diseases, war, and poverty? The power of big data and artificial intelligence may be the revolutionary technology to make that possible. Revolutions don't happen on their own. Every industrial revolution has its leaders, its visionaries, and its heroes. The master transformers of their age. The first industrial revolution was led by mechanics who designed and built power systems, machines, and factories. The heroes of the second industrial revolution were the business managers who designed and built modern organizations. The heroes of the third revolution were the engineers who designed and built the circuits and the source code that digitized our world. The master transformers of the next revolution are actually you. You are the designers and the builders of the networks and the systems. You will bring the benefits of intelligence to every corner of your enterprise and make intelligence the central asset of your business. At Lenovo, data intelligence is embedded into everything we do. How we understand our customer's true needs and develop more desirable products. How we profile our customers and market to them precisely. How we use internal and external data to balance our supply and the demand. And how we train virtual agents to provide more effective sales services. So the decisions you make today about your IT investment will determine the quality of the decisions your enterprise will make tomorrow. So I challenge each of you to seize this opportunity to become a master transformer, to join Lenovo as we work together at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, as leaders of the intelligent transformation. (triumphant instrumental) Today, we are launching the largest portfolio in our data center history at Lenovo. We are fully committed to the (mumbles) transformation. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Thanks YY. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Fantastic, so how about a big round of applause for YY. (audience applauds) Obviously a great speech on the transformation that we at Lenovo are taking as well as obviously wanting to journey with our partners and customers obviously on that same journey. What I heard from him was obviously artificial intelligence, how we're leveraging that integrally as well as externally and for our customers, and the investments we're making in the transformation around IoT machine learning, obviously big data, et cetera, and obviously the Data Center Group, which is one of the key things we've got to be talking about today. So we're on the cusp of that fourth revolution, as YY just mentioned, and Lenovo is definitely leading the way and investing in those parts of the industry and our portfolio to ensure we're complimenting all of our customers and partners on what they want to be, obviously, as part of this new transformation we're seeing globally. Obviously now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado once again, to tell us more about what's going on today, our announcements, obviously, that all of you will be reading about and seeing in the breakout and the demo sessions with our segment general managers this afternoon is our president of the data center, Mr. Kirk Skaugen. (upbeat instrumental) >> Good morning, and let me add my welcome to Transform. I just crossed my six months here at Lenovo after over 24 years at Intel Corporation, and I can tell you, we've been really busy over the last six months, and I'm more excited and enthusiastic than ever and hope to share some of that with you today. Today's event is called "Transform", and today we're announcing major new transformations in Lenovo, in the data center, but more importantly, we're celebrating the business results that these platforms are going to have on society and with international supercomputing going on in parallel in Frankfurt, some of the amazing scientific discoveries that are going to happen on some of these platforms. Lenovo has gone through some significant transformations in the last two years, since we acquired the IBM x86 business, and that's really positioning us for this next phase of growth, and we'll talk more about that later. Today, we're announcing the largest end-to-end data center portfolio in Lenovo's history, as you heard from YY, and we're really taking the best of the x86 heritage from our IBM acquisition of the x86 server business and combining that with the cost economics that we've delivered from kind of our China heritage. As we've talked to some of the analysts in the room, it's really that best of the east and best of the west is combining together in this announcement today. We're going to be announcing two new brands, building on our position as the number one x86 server vendor in both customer satisfaction and in reliability, and we're also celebrating, next month in July, a very significant milestone, which will we'll be shipping our 20 millionth x86 server into the industry. For us, it's an amazing time, and it's an inflection point to kind of look back, pause, but also share the next phase of Lenovo and the exciting vision for the future. We're also making some declarations on our vision for the future today. Again, international supercomputing's going on, and, as it turns out, we're the fastest growing supercomputer company on earth. We'll talk about that. Our goal today that we're announcing is that we plan in the next several years to become number one in supercomputing, and we're going to put the investments behind that. We're also committing to our customers that we're going to disrupt the status quo and accelerate the pace of innovation, not just in our legacy server solutions, but also in Software-Defined because what we've heard from you is that that lack of legacy, we don't have a huge router business or a huge sand business to protect. It's that lack of legacy that's enabling us to invest and get ahead of the curb on this next transition to Software-Defined. So you're going to see us doing that through building our internal IP, through some significant joint ventures, and also through some merges and acquisitions over the next several quarters. Altogether, we're driving to be the most trusted data center provider in the industry between us and our customers and our suppliers. So a quick summary of what we're going to dive into today, both in my keynote as well as in the breakout sessions. We're in this transformation to the next phase of Lenovo's data center growth. We're closing out our previous transformation. We actually, believe it or not, in the last six months or so, have renegotiated 18,000 contracts in 160 countries. We built out an entire end-to-end organization from development and architecture all the way through sales and support. This next transformation, I think, is really going to excite Lenovo shareholders. We're building the largest data center portfolio in our history. I think when IBM would be up here a couple years ago, we might have two or three servers to announce in time to market with the next Intel platform. Today, we're announcing 14 new servers, seven new storage systems, an expanded set of networking portfolios based on our legacy with Blade Network Technologies and other companies we've acquired. Two new brands that we'll talk about for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, a new set of premium premiere services as well as a set of engineered solutions that are going to help our customers get to market faster. We're going to be celebrating our 20 millionth x86 server, and as Rod said, 25 years in x86 server compute, and Christian will be up here talking about 25 years of ThinkPad as well. And then a new end-to-end segmentation model because all of these strategies without execution are kind of meaningless. I hope to give you some confidence in the transformation that Lenovo has gone through as well. So, having observed Lenovo from one of its largest partners, Intel, for more than a couple decades, I thought I'd just start with why we have confidence on the foundation that we're building off of as we move from a PC company into a data center provider in a much more significant way. So Lenovo today is a company of $43 billion in sales. Absolutely astonishing, it puts us at about Fortune 202 as a company, with 52,000 employees around the world. We're supporting and have service personnel, almost a little over 10,000 service personnel that service our servers and data center technologies in over 160 countries that provide onsite service and support. We have seven data center research centers. One of the reasons I came from Intel to Lenovo was that I saw that Lenovo became number one in PCs, not through cost cutting but through innovation. It was Lenovo that was partnering on the next-generation Ultrabooks and two-in-ones and tablets in the modem mods that you saw, but fundamentally, our path to number one in data center is going to be built on innovation. Lastly, we're one of the last companies that's actually building not only our own motherboards at our own motherboard factories, but also with five global data center manufacturing facilities. Today, we build about four devices a second, but we also build over 100 servers per hour, and the cost economics we get, and I just visited our Shenzhen factory, of having everything from screws to microprocessors come up through the elevator on the first floor, go left to build PCs and ThinkPads and go right to build server technology, means we have some of the world's most cost effective solutions so we can compete in things like hyperscale computing. So it's with that that I think we're excited about the foundation that we can build off of on the Data Center Group. Today, as we stated, this event is about transformation, and today, I want to talk about three things we're going to transform. Number one is the customer experience. Number two is the data center and our customer base with Software-Defined infrastructure, and then the third is talk about how we plan to execute flawlessly with a new transformation that we've had internally at Lenovo. So let's dive into it. On customer experience, really, what does it mean to transform customer experience? Industry pundits say that if you're not constantly innovating, you can fall behind. Certainly the technology industry that we're in is transforming at record speed. 42% of business leaders or CIOs say that digital first is their top priority, but less than 50% actually admit that they have a strategy to get there. So people are looking for a partner to keep pace with that innovation and change, and that's really what we're driving to at Lenovo. So today we're announcing a set of plans to take another step function in customer experience, and building off of our number one position. Just recently, Gartner shows Lenovo as the number 24 supply chains of companies over $12 billion. We're up there with Amazon, Coca-Cola, and we've now completely re-architected our supply chain in the Data Center Group from end to end. Today, we can deliver 90% of our SKUs, order to ship in less than seven days. The artificial intelligence that YY mentioned is optimizing our performance even further. In services, as we talked about, we're now in 160 countries, supporting on-site support, 50 different call centers around the world for local language support, and we're today announcing a whole set of new premiere support services that I'll get into in a second. But we're building on what's already better than 90% customer satisfaction in this space. And then in development, for all the engineers out there, we started foundationally for this new set of products, talking about being number one in reliability and the lowest downtime of any x86 server vendor on the planet, and these systems today are architected to basically extend that leadership position. So let me tell you the realities of reliability. This is ITIC, it's a reliability report. 750 CIOs and IT managers from more than 20 countries, so North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa. This isn't anything that's paid for with sponsorship dollars. Lenovo has been number one for four years running on x86 reliability. This is the amount of downtime, four hours or more, in mission-critical environments from the leading x86 providers. You can see relative to our top two competitors that are ahead of us, HP and Dell, you can see from ITIC why we are building foundationally off of this, and why it's foundational to how we're developing these new platforms. In customer satisfaction, we are also rated number one in x86 server customer satisfaction. This year, we're now incentivizing every single Lenovo employee on customer satisfaction and customer experience. It's been a huge mandate from myself and most importantly YY as our CEO. So you may say well what is the basis of this number one in customer satisfaction, and it's not just being number one in one category, it's actually being number one in 21 of the 22 categories that TBR talks about. So whether it's performance, support systems, online product information, parts and availability replacement, Lenovo is number one in 21 of the 22 categories and number one for six consecutive studies going back to Q1 of 2015. So this, again, as we talk about the new product introductions, it's something that we absolutely want to build on, and we're humbled by it, and we want to continue to do better. So let's start now on the new products and talk about how we're going to transform the data center. So today, we are announcing two new product offerings. Think Agile and ThinkSystem. If you think about the 25 years of ThinkPad that Christian's going to talk about, Lenovo has a continuous learning culture. We're fearless innovators, we're risk takers, we continuously learn, but, most importantly, I think we're humble and we have some humility. That when we fail, we can fail fast, we learn, and we improve. That's really what drove ThinkPad to number one. It took about eight years from the acquisition of IBM's x86 PC business before Lenovo became number one, but it was that innovation, that listening and learning, and then improving. As you look at the 25 years of ThinkPad, there were some amazing successes, but there were also some amazing failures along the way, but each and every time we learned and made things better. So this year, as Rod said, we're not just celebrating 25 years of ThinkPad, but we're celebrating 25 years of x86 server development since the original IBM PC servers in 1992. It's a significant day for Lenovo. Today, we're excited to announce two new brands. ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. It's an important new announcement that we started almost three years ago when we acquired the x86 server business. Why don't we run a video, and we'll show you a little bit about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. >> Narrator: The status quo is comfortable. It gets you by, but if you think that's good enough for your data center, think again. If adoption is becoming more complicated when it should be simpler, think again. If others are selling you technology that's best for them, not for you, think again. It's time for answers that win today and tomorrow. Agile, innovative, different. Because different is better. Different embraces change and makes adoption simple. Different designs itself around you. Using 25 years of innovation and design and R&D. Different transforms, it gives you ThinkSystem. World-record performance, most reliable, easy to integrate, scales faster. Different empowers you with ThinkAgile. It redefines the experience, giving you the speed of Cloud and the control of on-premise IT. Responding faster to what your business really needs. Different defines the future. Introducing Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. (exciting and slightly aggressive digital instrumental) >> All right, good stuff, huh? (audience applauds) So it's built off of this 25-year history of us being in the x86 server business, the commitment we established three years ago after acquiring the x86 server business to be and have the most reliable, the most agile, and the most highest-performing data center solutions on the planet. So today we're announcing two brands. ThinkSystem is for the traditional data center infrastructure, and ThinkAgile is our brand for Software-Defined infrastructure. Again, the teams challenge themselves from the start, how do we build off this rich heritage, expanding our position as number one in customer satisfaction, reliability, and one of the world's best supply chains. So let's start and look at the next set of solutions. We have always prided ourself that little things don't mean a lot. Little things mean everything. So today, as we said on the legacy solutions, we have over 30 world-record performance benchmarks on Intel architecture, and more than actually 150 since we started tracking this back in 2001. So it's the little pieces of innovation. It's the fine tuning that we do with our partners like an Intel or a Microsoft, an SAP, VMware, and Nutanix that's enabling us to get these world-record performance benchmarks, and with this next generation of solutions we think we'll continue to certainly do that. So today we're announcing the most comprehensive portfolio ever in our data center history. There's 14 servers, seven storage devices, and five network switches. We're also announcing, which is super important to our customer base, a set of new premiere service options. That's giving you fast access directly to a level two support person. No automated response system involved. You get to pick up the phone and directly talk to a level two support person that's going to have end-to-end ownership of the customer experience for ThinkSystem. With ThinkAgile, that's going to be completely bundled with every ThinkAgile you purchase. In addition, we're having white glove service on site that will actually unbox the product for you and get it up and running. It's an entirely new set of solutions for hybrid Cloud, for big data analytics and database applications around these engineered solutions. These are like 40- to 50-page guides where we fine-tuned the most important applications around virtual desktop infrastructure and those kinds of applications, working side by side with all of our ISP partners. So significantly expanding, not just the hardware but the software solutions that, obviously, you, as our customers, are running. So if you look at ThinkSystem innovation, again, it was designed for the ultimate in flexibility, performance, and reliability. It's a single now-unified brand that combines what used to be the Lenovo Think server and the IBM System x products now into a single brand that spans server, storage, and networking. We're basically future-proofing it for the next-generation data center. It's a significantly simplified portfolio. One of the big pieces that we've heard is that the complexity of our competitors has really been overwhelming to customers. We're building a more flexible, more agile solution set that requires less work, less qualification, and more future proofing. There's a bunch of things in this that you'll see in the demos. Faster time-to-service in terms of the modularity of the systems. 12% faster service equating to almost $50 thousand per hour of reduced downtime. Some new high-density options where we have four nodes and a 2U, twice the density to improve and reduce outbacks and mission-critical workloads. And then in high-performance computing and supercomputing, we're going to spend some time on that here shortly. We're announcing new water-cooled solutions. We have some of the most premiere water-cooled solutions in the world, with more than 25 patents pending now, just in the water-cooled solutions for supercomputing. The performance that we think we're going to see out of these systems is significant. We're building off of that legacy that we have today on the existing Intel solutions. Today, we believe we have more than 50% of SAP HANA installations in the world. In fact, SAP just went public that they're running their internal SAP HANA on Lenovo hardware now. We're seeing a 59% increase in performance on SAP HANA generation on generation. We're seeing 31% lower total cost to ownership. We believe this will continue our position of having the highest level of five-nines in the x86 server industry. And all of these servers will start being available later this summer when the Intel announcements come out. We're also announcing the largest storage portfolio in our history, significantly larger than anything we've done in the past. These are all available today, including some new value class storage offerings. Our network portfolio is expanding now significantly. It was a big surprise when I came to Lenovo, seeing the hundreds of engineers we had from the acquisition of Blade Network Technologies and others with our teams in Romania, Santa Clara, really building out both the embedded portfolio but also the top racks, which is around 10 gig, 25 gig, and 100 gig. Significantly better economics, but all the performance you'd expect from the largest networking companies in the world. Those are also available today. ThinkAgile and Software-Defined, I think the one thing that has kind of overwhelmed me since coming in to Lenovo is we are being embraced by our customers because of our lack of legacy. We're not trying to sell you one more legacy SAN at 65% margins. ThinkAgile really was founded, kind of born free from the shackles of legacy thinking and legacy infrastructure. This is just the beginning of what's going to be an amazing new brand in the transformation to Software-Defined. So, for Lenovo, we're going to invest in our own internal organic IP. I'll foreshadow: There's some significant joint ventures and some mergers and acquisitions that are going to be coming in this space. And so this will be the foundation for our Software-Defined networking and storage, for IoT, and ultimately for the 5G build-out as well. This is all built for data centers of tomorrow that require fluid resources, tightly integrated software and hardware in kind of an appliance, selling at the rack level, and so we'll show you how that is going to take place here in a second. ThinkAgile, we have a few different offerings. One is around hyperconverged storage, Hybrid Cloud, and also Software-Defined storage. So we're really trying to redefine the customer experience. There's two different solutions we're having today. It's a Microsoft Azure solution and a Nutanix solution. These are going to be available both in the appliance space as well as in a full rack solution. We're really simplifying and trying to transform the entire customer experience from how you order it. We've got new capacity planning tools that used to take literally days for us to get the capacity planning done. It's now going down to literally minutes. We've got new order, delivery, deployment, administration service, something we're calling ThinkAgile Advantage, which is the white glove unboxing of the actual solutions on prem. So the whole thing when you hear about it in the breakout sessions about transforming the entire customer experience with both an HX solution and an SX solution. So again, available at the rack level for both Nutanix and for Microsoft Solutions available in just a few months. Many of you in the audience since the Microsoft Airlift event in Seattle have started using these things, and the feedback to date has been fantastic. We appreciate the early customer adoption that we've seen from people in the audience here. So next I want to bring up one of our most important partners, and certainly if you look at all of these solutions, they're based on the next-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor that's going to be announcing very very soon. I want to bring on stage Rupal Shah, who's the corporate vice president and general manager of Global Data Center Sales with Intel, so Rupal, please join me. (upbeat instrumental) So certainly I have long roots at Intel, but why don't you talk about, from Intel's perspective, why Lenovo is an important partner for Lenovo. >> Great, well first of all, thank you very much. I've had the distinct pleasure of not only working with Kirk for many many years, but also working with Lenovo for many years, so it's great to be here. Lenovo is not only a fantastic supplier and leader in the industry for Intel-based servers but also a very active partner in the Intel ecosystem. In the Intel ecosystem, specifically, in our partner programs and in our builder programs around Cloud, around the network, and around storage, I personally have had a long history in working with Lenovo, and I've seen personally that PC transformation that you talked about, Kirk, and I believe, and I know that Intel believes in Lenovo's ability to not only succeed in the data center but to actually lead in the data center. And so today, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile announcement is just so incredibly important. It's such a great testament to our two companies working together, and the innovation that we're able to bring to the market, and all of it based on the Intel Xeon scalable processor. >> Excellent, so tell me a little bit about why we've been collaborating, tell me a little bit about why you're excited about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile, specifically. >> Well, there are a lot of reasons that I'm excited about the innovation, but let me talk about a few. First, both of our companies really stand behind the fact that it's increasingly a hybrid world. Our two companies offer a range of solutions now to customers to be able to address their different workload needs. ThinkSystem really brings the best, right? It brings incredible performance, flexibility in data center deployment, and industry-leading reliability that you've talked about. And, as always, Xeon has a history of being built for the data center specifically. The Intel Xeon scalable processor is really re-architected from the ground up in order to enhance compute, network, and storage data flows so that we can deliver workload optimized performance for both a wide range of traditional workloads and traditional needs but also some emerging new needs in areas like artificial intelligence. Second is when it comes to the next generation of Cloud infrastructure, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile line offers a truly integrated offering to address data center pain points, and so not only are you able to get these pretested solutions, but these pretested solutions are going to get deployed in your infrastructure faster, and they're going to be deployed in a way that's going to meet your specific needs. This is something that is new for both of us, and it's an incredible innovation in the marketplace. I think that it's a great addition to what is already a fantastic portfolio for Lenovo. >> Excellent. >> Finally, there's high-performance computing. In high-performance computing. First of all, congratulations. It's a big week, I think, for both of us. Fantastic work that we've been doing together in high-performance computing and actually bringing the best of the best to our customers, and you're going to hear a whole lot more about that. We obviously have a number of joint innovation centers together between Intel and Lenovo. Tell us about some of the key innovations that you guys are excited about. >> Well, Intel and Lenovo, we do have joint innovation labs around the world, and we have a long and strong history of very tight collaboration. This has brought a big wave of innovation to the marketplace in areas like software-defined infrastructure. Yet another area is working closely on a joint vision that I think our two companies have in artificial intelligence. Intel is very committed to the world of AI, and we're committed in making the investments required in technology development, in training, and also in R&D to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions. So with Intel's comprehensive technology portfolio and Lenovo's development and innovation expertise, it's a great combination in this space. I've already talked a little bit about HPC and so has Kirk, and we're going to hear a little bit more to come, but we're really building the fastest compute solutions for customers that are solving big problems. Finally, we often talk about processors from Intel, but it's not just about the processors. It's way beyond that. It's about engaging at the solution level for our customers, and I'm so excited about the work that we've done together with Lenovo to bring to market products like Intel Omni-Path Architecture, which is really the fabric for high-performance data centers. We've got a great showing this week with Intel Omni-Path Architecture, and I'm so grateful for all the work that we've done to be able to bring true solutions to the marketplace. I am really looking forward to our future collaboration with Lenovo as we have in the past. I want to thank you again for inviting me here today, and congratulations on a fantastic launch. >> Thank you, Rupal, very much, for the long partnership. >> Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Okay, well now let's transition and talk a little bit about how Lenovo is transforming. The first thing we've done when I came on board about six months ago is we've transformed to a truly end-to-end organization. We're looking at the market segments I think as our customers define them, and we've organized into having vice presidents and senior vice presidents in charge of each of these major groups, thinking really end to end, from architecture all the way to end of life and customer support. So the first is hyperscale infrastructure. It's about 20% on the market by 2020. We've hired a new vice president there to run that business. Given we can make money in high-volume desktop PCs, it's really the manufacturing prowess, deep engineering collaboration that's enabling us to sell into Baidu, and to Alibaba, Tencent, as well as the largest Cloud vendors on the West Coast here in the United States. We believe we can make money here by having basically a deep deep engineering engagement with our key customers and building on the PC volume economics that we have within Lenovo. On software-defined infrastructure, again, it's that lack of legacy that I think is propelling us into this space. We're not encumbered by trying to sell one more legacy SAN or router, and that's really what's exciting us here, as we transform from a hardware to a software-based company. On HPC and AI, as we said, we'll talk about this in a second. We're the fastest-growing supercomputing company on earth. We have aspirations to be the largest supercomputing company on earth, with China and the U.S. vying for number one in that position, it puts us in a good position there. We're going to bridge that into artificial intelligence in our upcoming Shanghai Tech World. The entire day is around AI. In fact, YY has committed $1.2 billion to artificial intelligence over the next few years of R&D to help us bridge that. And then on data center infrastructure, is really about moving to a solutions based infrastructure like our position with SAP HANA, where we've gone deep with engineers on site at SAP, SAP running their own infrastructure on Lenovo and building that out beyond just SAP to other solutions in the marketplace. Overall, significantly expanding our services portfolio to maintain our number one customer satisfaction rating. So given ISC, or International Supercomputing, this week in Frankfurt, and a lot of my team are actually over there, I wanted to just show you the transformation we've had at Lenovo for delivering some of the technology to solve some of the most challenging humanitarian problems on earth. Today, we are the fastest-growing supercomputer company on the planet in terms of number of systems on the Top 500 list. We've gone from zero to 92 positions in just a few short years, but IDC also positions Lenovo as the fast-growing supercomputer and HPC company overall at about 17% year on year growth overall, including all of the broad channel, the regional universities and this kind of thing, so this is an exciting place for us. I'm excited today that Sergi has come all the way from Spain to be with us today. It's an exciting time because this week we announce the fastest next-generation Intel supercomputer on the planet at Barcelona Supercomputer. Before I bring Sergi on stage, let's run a video and I'll show you why we're excited about the capabilities of these next-generation supercomputers. Run the video please. >> Narrator: Different creates one of the most powerful supercomputers for the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. A high-performance, high-capacity design to help shape tomorrow's world. Different designs what's best for you, with 25 years of end-to-end expertise delivering large-scale solutions. It integrates easily with technology from industry partners, through deep collaboration with the client to manufacture, test, configure, and install at global scale. Different achieves the impossible. The first of a new series. A more energy-efficient supercomputer yet 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. With over 3,400 Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, each performing over two trillion calculations per second, giving us 11.1 petaflop capacity. Different powers MareNostrum, a supercomputer that will help us better understand cancer, help discover disease-fighting therapies, predict the impact of climate change. MareNostrom 4.0 promises to uncover answers that will help solve humanities greatest challenges. (audience applauds) >> So please help me in welcoming operations director of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Sergi Girona. So welcome, and again, congratulations. It's been a big week for both of us. But I think for a long time, if you haven't been to Barcelona, this has been called the world's most beautiful computer because it's in one of the most gorgeous chapels in the world as you can see here. Congratulations, we now are number 13 on the Top500 list and the fastest next-generation Intel computer. >> Thank you very much, and congratulations to you as well. >> So maybe we can just talk a little bit about what you've done over the last few months with us. >> Sure, thank you very much. It is a pleasure for me being invited here to present to you what we've been doing with Lenovo so far and what we are planning to do in the next future. I'm representing here Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I am presenting high-performance computing services to science and industry. How we see these science services has changed the paradigm of science. We are coming from observation. We are coming from observation on the telescopes and the microscopes and the building of infrastructures, but this is not affordable anymore. This is very expensive, so it's not possible, so we need to move to simulations. So we need to understand what's happening in our environment. We need to predict behaviors only going through simulation. So, at BSC, we are devoted to provide services to industry, to science, but also we are doing our own research because we want to understand. At the same time, we are helping and developing the new engineers of the future on the IT, on HPC. So we are having four departments based on different topics. The main and big one is wiling to understand how we are doing the next supercomputers from the programming level to the performance to the EIA, so all these things, but we are having also interest on what about the climate change, what's the air quality that we are having in our cities. What is the precision medicine we need to have. How we can see that the different drugs are better for different individuals, for different humans, and of course we have an energy department, taking care of understanding what's the better optimization for a cold, how we can save energy running simulations on different topics. But, of course, the topic of today is not my research, but it's the systems we are building in Barcelona. So this is what we have been building in Barcelona so far. From left to right, you have the preparation of the facility because this is 160 square meters with 1.4 megabytes, so that means we need new piping, we need new electricity, at the same time in the center we have to install the core services of the system, so the management practices, and then on the right-hand side you have installation of the networking, the Omni-Path by Intel. Because all of the new racks have to be fully integrated and they need to come into operation rapidly. So we start deployment of the system May 15, and we've now been ending and coming in production July first. All the systems, all the (mumbles) systems from Lenovo are coming before being open and available. What we've been installing here in Barcelona is general purpose systems for our general workload of the system with 3,456 nodes. Everyone of those having 48 cores, 96 gigabytes main memory for a total capacity of about 400 terabytes memory. The objective of this is that we want to, all the system, all the processors, to work together for a single execution for running altogether, so this is an example of the platinum processors from Intel having 24 cores each. Of course, for doing this together with all the cores in the same application, we need a high-speed network, so this is Omni-Path, and of course all these cables are connecting all the nodes. Noncontention, working together, cooperating. Of course, this is a bunch of cables. They need to be properly aligned in switches. So here you have the complete presentation. Of course, this is general purpose, but we wanted to invest with our partners. We want to understand what the supercomputers we wanted to install in 2020, (mumbles) Exascale. We want to find out, we are installing as well systems with different capacities with KNH, with power, with ARM processors. We want to leverage our obligations for the future. We want to make sure that in 2020 we are ready to move our users rapidly to the new technologies. Of course, this is in total, giving us a total capacity of 13.7 petaflops that it's 12 times the capacity of the former MareNostrum four years ago. We need to provide the services to our scientists because they are helping to solve problems for humanity. That's the place we are going to go. Last is inviting you to come to Barcelona to see our place and our chapel. Thank you very much (audience applauds). >> Thank you. So now you can all go home to your spouses and significant others and say you have a formal invitation to Barcelona, Spain. So last, I want to talk about what we've done to transform Lenovo. I think we all know the history is nice but without execution, none of this is going to be possible going forward, so we have been very very busy over the last six months to a year of transforming Lenovo's data center organization. First, we moved to a dedicated end-to-end sales and marketing organization. In the past, we had people that were shared between PC and data center, now thousands of sales people around the world are 100% dedicated end to end to our data center clients. We've moved to a fully integrated and dedicated supply chain and procurement organization. A fully dedicated quality organization, 100% dedicated to expanding our data center success. We've moved to a customer-centric segment, again, bringing in significant new leaders from outside the company to look end to end at each of these segments, supercomputing being very very different than small business, being very very different than taking care of, for example, a large retailer or bank. So around hyperscale, software-defined infrastructure, HPC, AI, and supercomputing and data center solutions-led infrastructure. We've built out a whole new set of global channel programs. Last year, or a year passed, we have five different channel programs around the world. We've now got one simplified channel program for dealer registration. I think our channel is very very energized to go out to market with Lenovo technology across the board, and a whole new set of system integrator relationships. You're going to hear from one of them in Christian's discussion, but a whole new set of partnerships to build solutions together with our system integrative partners. And, again, as I mentioned, a brand new leadership team. So look forward to talking about the details of this. There's been a significant amount of transformation internal to Lenovo that's led to the success of this new product introduction today. So in conclusion, I want to talk about the news of the day. We are transforming Lenovo to the next phase of our data center growth. Again, in over 160 countries, closing on that first phase of transformation and moving forward with some unique declarations. We're launching the largest portfolio in our history, not just in servers but in storage and networking, as everything becomes kind of a software personality on top of x86 Compute. We think we're very well positioned with our scale on PCs as well as data center. Two new brands for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, without the legacy shackles of our competitors, enabling us to move very very quickly into Software-Defined, and, again, foreshadowing some joint ventures in M&A that are going to be coming up that will further accelerate ourselves there. New premiere support offerings, enabling you to get direct access to level two engineers and white glove unboxing services, which are going to be bundled along with ThinkAgile. And then celebrating the milestone of 25 years in x86 server compute, not just ThinkPads that you'll hear about shortly, but also our 20 million server shipping next month. So we're celebrating that legacy and looking forward to the next phase. And then making sure we have the execution engine to maintain our position and grow it, being number one in customer satisfaction and number one in quality. So, with that, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in the breakouts today and talking with many of you, and I'll bring Rod back up to transition us to the next section. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> All right, Kirk, thank you, sir. All right, ladies and gentlemen, what did you think of that? How about a big round of applause for ThinkAgile, ThinkSystems new brands? (audience applauds) And, obviously, with that comes a big round of applause, for Kirk Skaugen, my boss, so we've got to give him a big round of applause, please. I need to stay employed, it's very important. All right, now you just heard from Kirk about some of the new systems, the brands. How about we have a quick look at the video, which shows us the brand new DCG images. >> Narrator: Legacy thinking is dead, stuck in the past, selling the same old stuff, over and over. So then why does it seem like a data center, you know, that thing powering all our little devices and more or less everything interaction today is still stuck in legacy thinking because it's rigid, inflexible, slow, but that's not us. We don't do legacy. We do different. Because different is fearless. Different reduces Cloud deployment from days to hours. Different creates agile technology that others follow. Different is fluid. It uses water-cooling technology to save energy. It co-innovates with some of the best minds in the industry today. Different is better, smarter. Maybe that's why different already holds so many world-record benchmarks in everything. From virtualization to database and application performance or why it's number one in reliability and customer satisfaction. Legacy sells you what they want. Different builds the data center you need without locking you in. Introducing the Data Center Group at Lenovo. Different... Is better. >> All right, ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause, once again (mumbles) DCG, fantastic. And I'm sure all of you would agree, and Kirk mentioned it a couple of times there. No legacy means a real consultative approach to our customers, and that's something that we really feel is differentiated for ourselves. We are effectively now one of the largest startups in the DCG space, and we are very much ready to disrupt. Now, here in New York City, obviously, the heart of the fashion industry, and much like fashion, as I mentioned earlier, we're different, we're disruptive, we're agile, smarter, and faster. I'd like to say that about myself, but, unfortunately, I can't. But those of you who have observed, you may have noticed that I, too, have transformed. I don't know if anyone saw that. I've transformed from the pinstripe blue, white shirt, red tie look of the, shall we say, our predecessors who owned the x86 business to now a very Lenovo look. No tie and consequently a little bit more chic New York sort of fashion look, shall I say. Nothing more than that. So anyway, a bit of a transformation. It takes a lot to get to this look, by the way. It's a lot of effort. Our next speaker, Christian Teismann, is going to talk a lot about the core business of Lenovo, which really has been, as we've mentioned today, our ThinkPad, 25-year anniversary this year. It's going to be a great celebration inside Lenovo, and as we get through the year and we get closer and closer to the day, you'll see a lot more social and digital work that engages our customers, partners, analysts, et cetera, when we get close to that birthday. Customers just generally are a lot tougher on computers. We know they are. Whether you hang onto it between meetings from the corner of the Notebook, and that's why we have magnesium chassis inside the box or whether you're just dropping it or hypothetically doing anything else like that. We do a lot of robust testing on these products, and that's why it's the number one branded Notebook in the world. So Christian talks a lot about this, but I thought instead of having him talk, I might just do a little impromptu jump back stage and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So follow me for a second. I'm going to jaunt this way. I know a lot of you would have seen, obviously, the front of house here, what we call the front of house. Lots of videos, et cetera, but I don't think many of you would have seen the back of house here, so I'm going to jump through the back here. Hang on one second. You'll see us when we get here. Okay, let's see what's going on back stage right now. You can see one of the team here in the back stage is obviously working on their keyboard. Fantastic, let me tell you, this is one of the key value props of this product, obviously still working, lots of coffee all over it, spill-proof keyboard, one of the key value propositions and why this is the number one laptop brand in the world. Congratulations there, well done for that. Obviously, we test these things. Height, distances, Mil-SPEC approved, once again, fantastic product, pick that up, lovely. Absolutely resistant to any height or drops, once again, in line with our Mil-SPEC. This is Charles, our producer and director back stage for the absolute event. You can see, once again, sand, coincidentally, in Manhattan, who would have thought a snow storm was occurring here, but you can throw sand. We test these things for all of the elements. I've obviously been pretty keen on our development solutions, having lived in Japan for 12 years. We had this originally designed in 1992 by (mumbles), he's still our chief development officer still today, fantastic, congratulations, a sand-enhanced notebook, he'd love that. All right, let's get back out front and on with the show. Watch the coffee. All right, how was that? Not too bad (laughs). It wasn't very impromptu at all, was it? Not at all a set up (giggles). How many people have events and have a bag of sand sitting on the floor right next to a Notebook? I don't know. All right, now it's time, obviously, to introduce our next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope I didn't steal his thunder, obviously, in my conversations just now that you saw back stage. He's one of my best friends in Lenovo and easily is a great representative of our legendary PC products and solutions that we're putting together for all of our customers right now, and having been an ex-Pat with Lenovo in New York really calls this his second home and is continually fighting with me over the fact that he believes New York has better sushi than Tokyo, let's welcome please, Christian Teismann, our SVP, Commercial Business Segment, and PC Smart Office. Christian Teismann, come on up mate. (audience applauds) >> So Rod thank you very much for this wonderful introduction. I'm not sure how much there is to add to what you have seen already back stage, but I think there is a 25-year of history I will touch a little bit on, but also a very big transformation. But first of all, welcome to New York. As Rod said, it's my second home, but it's also a very important place for the ThinkPad, and I will come back to this later. The ThinkPad is thee industry standard of business computing. It's an industry icon. We are celebrating 25 years this year like no other PC brand has done before. But this story today is not looking back only. It's a story looking forward about the future of PC, and we see a transformation from PCs to personalized computing. I am privileged to lead the commercial PC and Smart device business for Lenovo, but much more important beyond product, I also am responsible for customer experience. And this is what really matters on an ongoing basis. But allow me to stay a little bit longer with our iconic ThinkPad and history of the last 25 years. ThinkPad has always stand for two things, and it always will be. Highest quality in the industry and technology innovation leadership that matters. That matters for you and that matters for your end users. So, now let me step back a little bit in time. As Rod was showing you, as only Rod can do, reliability is a very important part of ThinkPad story. ThinkPads have been used everywhere and done everything. They have survived fires and extreme weather, and they keep surviving your end users. For 25 years, they have been built for real business. ThinkPad also has a legacy of first innovation. There are so many firsts over the last 25 years, we could spend an hour talking about them. But I just want to cover a couple of the most important milestones. First of all, the ThinkPad 1992 has been developed and invented in Japan on the base design of a Bento box. It was designed by the famous industrial designer, Richard Sapper. Did you also know that the ThinkPad was the first commercial Notebook flying into space? In '93, we traveled with the space shuttle the first time. For two decades, ThinkPads were on every single mission. Did you know that the ThinkPad Butterfly, the iconic ThinkPad that opens the keyboard to its size, is the first and only computer showcased in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, right here in New York City? Ten years later, in 2005, IBM passed the torch to Lenovo, and the story got even better. Over the last 12 years, we sold over 100 million ThinkPads, four times the amount IBM sold in the same time. Many customers were concerned at that time, but since then, the ThinkPad has remained the best business Notebook in the industry, with even better quality, but most important, we kept innovating. In 2012, we unveiled the X1 Carbon. It was the thinnest, lightest, and still most robust business PC in the world. Using advanced composited materials like a Formula One car, for super strengths, X1 Carbon has become our ThinkPad flagship since then. We've added an X1 Carbon Yoga, a 360-degree convertible. An X1 Carbon tablet, a detachable, and many new products to come in the future. Over the last few years, many new firsts have been focused on providing the best end-user experience. The first dual-screen mobile workstation. The first Windows business tablet, and the first business PC with OLED screen technology. History is important, but a massive transformation is on the way. Future success requires us to think beyond the box. Think beyond hardware, think beyond notebooks and desktops, and to think about the future of personalized computing. Now, why is this happening? Well, because the business world is rapidly changing. Looking back on history that YY gave, and the acceleration of innovation and how it changes our everyday life in business and in personal is driving a massive change also to our industry. Most important because you are changing faster than ever before. Human capital is your most important asset. In today's generation, they want to have freedom of choice. They want to have a product that is tailored to their specific needs, every single day, every single minute, when they use it. But also IT is changing. The Cloud, constant connectivity, 5G will change everything. Artificial intelligence is adding things to the capability of an infrastructure that we just are starting to imagine. Let me talk about the workforce first because it's the most important part of what drives this. The millennials will comprise more than half of the world's workforce in 2020, three years from now. Already, one out of three millennials is prioritizing mobile work environment over salary, and for nearly 60% of all new hires in the United States, technology is a very important factor for their job search in terms of the way they work and the way they are empowered. This new generation of new employees has grown up with PCs, with Smart phones, with tablets, with touch, for their personal use and for their occupation use. They want freedom. Second, the workplace is transforming. The video you see here in the background. This is our North America headquarters in Raleigh, where we have a brand new Smart workspace. We have transformed this to attract the new generation of workers. It has fewer traditional workspaces, much more meaning and collaborative spaces, and Lenovo, like many companies, is seeing workspaces getting smaller. An average workspace per employee has decreased by 30% over the last five years. Employees are increasingly mobile, but, if they come to the office, they want to collaborate with their colleagues. The way we collaborate and communicate is changing. Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding. The market of collaboration technology is exceeding the market of personal computing today. It will grow in the future. Conference rooms are being re-imagined from a ratio of 50 employees to one large conference room. Today, we are moving into scenarios of four employees to one conference room, and these are huddle rooms, pioneer spaces. Technology is everywhere. Video, mega-screens, audio, electronic whiteboards. Adaptive technologies are popping up and change the way we work. As YY said earlier, the pace of the revolution is astonishing. So personalized computing will transform the PC we all know. There's a couple of key factors that we are integrating in our next generations of PC as we go forward. The most important trends that we see. First of all, choose your own device. We talked about this new generation of workforce. Employees who are used to choosing their own device. We have to respond and offer devices that are tailored to each end user's needs without adding complexity to how we operate them. PC is a service. Corporations increasingly are looking for on-demand computing in data center as well as in personal computing. Customers want flexibility. A tailored management solution and a services portfolio that completes the lifecycle of the device. Agile IT, even more important, corporations want to run an infrastructure that is agile, instant respond to their end-customer needs, that is self provisioning, self diagnostic, and remote software repair. Artificial intelligence. Think about artificial intelligence for you personally as your personal assistant. A personal assistant which does understand you, your schedule, your travel, your next task, an extension of yourself. We believe the PC will be the center of this mobile device universe. Mobile device synergy. Each of you have two devices or more with you. They need to work together across different operating systems, across different platforms. We believe Lenovo is uniquely positioned as the only company who has a Smart phone business, a PC business, and an infrastructure business to really seamlessly integrate all of these devices for simplicity and for efficiency. Augmented reality. We believe augmented reality will drive significantly productivity improvements in commercial business. The core will be to understand industry-specific solutions. New processes, new business challenges, to improve things like customer service and sales. Security will remain the foundation for personalized computing. Without security, without trust in the device integrity, this will not happen. One of the most important trends, I believe, is that the PC will transform, is always connected, and always on, like a Smart phone. Regardless if it's open, if it's closed, if you carry it, or if you work with it, it always is capable to respond to you and to work with you. 5G is becoming a reality, and the data capacity that will be out there is by far exceeding today's traffic imagination. Finally, Smart Office, delivering flexible and collaborative work environments regardless on where the worker sits, fully integrated and leverages all the technologies we just talked before. These are the main challenges you and all of your CIO and CTO colleagues have to face today. A changing workforce and a new set of technologies that are transforming PC into personalized computing. Let me give you a real example of a challenge. DXC was just formed by merging CSE company and HP's Enterprise services for the largest independent services company in the world. DXC is now a 25 billion IT services leader with more than 170,000 employees. The most important capital. 6,000 clients and eight million managed devices. I'd like to welcome their CIO, who has one of the most challenging workforce transformation in front of him. Erich Windmuller, please give him a round of applause. (audience applauds). >> Thank you Christian. >> Thank you. >> It's my pleasure to be here, thank you. >> So first of all, let me congratulation you to this very special time. By forming a new multi-billion-dollar enterprise, this new venture. I think it has been so far fantastically received by analysts, by the press, by customers, and we are delighted to be one of your strategic partners, and clearly we are collaborating around workforce transformation between our two companies. But let me ask you a couple of more personal questions. So by bringing these two companies together with nearly 200,00 employees, what are the first actions you are taking to make this a success, and what are your biggest challenges? >> Well, first, again, let me thank you for inviting me and for DXC Technology to be a part of this very very special event with Lenovo, so thank you. As many of you might expect, it's been a bit of a challenge over the past several months. My goal was really very simple. It was to make sure that we brought two companies together, and they could operate as one. We need to make sure that could continue to support our clients. We certainly need to make sure we could continue to sell, our sellers could sell. That we could pay our employees, that we could hire people, we could do all the basic foundational things that you might expect a company would want to do, but we really focused on three simple areas. I called it the three Cs. Connectivity, communicate, and collaborate. So we wanted to make sure that we connected our legacy data centers so we could transfer information and communicate back and forth. We certainly wanted to be sure that our employees could communicate via WIFI, whatever locations they may or may not go to. We certainly wanted to, when we talk about communicate, we need to be sure that everyone of our employees could send and receive email as a DXC employee. And that we had a single-enterprise directory and people could communicate, gain access to calendars across each of the two legacy companies, and then collaborate was also key. And so we wanted to be sure, again, that people could communicate across each other, that our legacy employees on either side could get access to many of their legacy systems, and, again, we could collaborate together as a single corporation, so it was challenging, but very very, great opportunity for all of us. And, certainly, you might expect cyber and security was a very very important topic. My chairman challenged me that we had to be at least as good as we were before from a cyber perspective, and when you bring two large companies together like that there's clearly an opportunity in this disruptive world so we wanted to be sure that we had a very very strong cyber security posture, of which Lenovo has been very very helpful in our achieving that. >> Thank you, Erich. So what does DXC consider as their critical solutions and technology for workplace transformation, both internally as well as out on the market? >> So workplace transformation, and, again, I've heard a lot of the same kinds of words that I would espouse... It's all about making our employees productive. It's giving the right tools to do their jobs. I, personally, have been focused, and you know this because Lenovo has been a very very big part of this, in working with our, we call it our My Style Workplace, it's an offering team in developing a solution and driving as much functionality as possible down to the workstation. We want to be able, for me, to avoid and eliminate other ancillary costs, audio video costs, telecommunication cost. The platform that we have, the digitized workstation that Lenovo has provided us, has just got a tremendous amount of capability. We want to streamline those solutions, as well, on top of the modern server. The modern platform, as we call it, internally. I'd like to congratulate Kirk and your team that you guys have successfully... Your hardware has been certified on our modern platform, which is a significant accomplishment between our two companies and our partnership. It was really really foundational. Lenovo is a big part of our digital workstation transformation, and you'll continue to be, so it's very very important, and I want you to know that your tools and your products have done a significant job in helping us bring two large corporations together as one. >> Thank you, Erich. Last question, what is your view on device as a service and hardware utility model? >> This is the easy question, right? So who in the room doesn't like PC or device as a service? This is a tremendous opportunity, I think, for all of us. Our corporation, like many of you in the room, we're all driven by the concept of buying devices in an Opex versus a Capex type of a world and be able to pay as you go. I think this is something that all of us would like to procure, product services and products, if you will, personal products, in this type of a mode, so I am very very eager to work with Lenovo to be sure that we bring forth a very dynamic and constructive device as a service approach. So very eager to do that with Lenovo and bring that forward for DXC Technology. >> Erich, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to work with you, today and going forward on all sides. I think with your new company and our lineup, I think we have great things to come. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure, great pleasure, thank you very much. >> So, what's next for Lenovo PC? We already have the most comprehensive commercial portfolio in the industry. We have put the end user in the core of our portfolio to finish and going forward. Ultra mobile users, like consultants, analysts, sales and service. Heavy compute users like engineers and designers. Industry users, increasingly more understanding. Industry-specific use cases like education, healthcare, or banking. So, there are a few exciting things we have to announce today. Obviously, we don't have that broad of an announcement like our colleagues from the data center side, but there is one thing that I have that actually... Thank you Rod... Looks like a Bento box, but it's not a ThinkPad. It's a first of it's kind. It's the world's smallest professional workstation. It has the power of a tower in the Bento box. It has the newest Intel core architecture, and it's designed for a wide range of heavy duty workload. Innovation continues, not only in the ThinkPad but also in the desktops and workstations. Second, you hear much about Smart Office and workspace transformation today. I'm excited to announce that we have made a strategic decision to expand our Think portfolio into Smart Office, and we will soon have solutions on the table in conference rooms, working with strategic partners like Intel and like Microsoft. We are focused on a set of devices and a software architecture that, as an IoT architecture, unifies the management of Smart Office. We want to move fast, so our target is that we will have our first product already later this year. More to come. And finally, what gets me most excited is the upcoming 25 anniversary in October. Actually, if you go to Japan, there are many ThinkPad lovers. Actually beyond lovers, enthusiasts, who are collectors. We've been consistently asked in blogs and forums about a special anniversary edition, so let me offer you a first glimpse what we will announce in October, of something we are bring to market later this year. For the anniversary, we will introduce a limited edition product. This will include throwback features from ThinkPad's history as well as the best and most powerful features of the ThinkPad today. But we are not just making incremental adjustments to the Think product line. We are rethinking ThinkPad of the future. Well, here is what I would call a concept card. Maybe a ThinkPad without a hinge. Maybe one you can fold. What do you think? (audience applauds) but this is more than just design or look and feel. It's a new set of advanced materials and new screen technologies. It's how you can speak to it or write on it or how it speaks to you. Always connected, always on, and can communicate on multiple inputs and outputs. It will anticipate your next meeting, your next travel, your next task. And when you put it all together, it's just another part of the story, which we call personalized computing. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) Thank you, sir. >> Good on ya, mate. All right, ladies and gentlemen. We are now at the conclusion of the day, for this session anyway. I'm going to talk a little bit more about our breakouts and our demo rooms next door. But how about the power with no tower, from Christian, huh? Big round of applause. (audience applauds) And what about the concept card, the ThinkPad? Pretty good, huh? I love that as well. I tell you, it was almost like Leonardo DiCaprio was up on stage at one stage. He put that big ThinkPad concept up, and everyone's phones went straight up and took a photo, the whole audience, so let's be very selective on how we distribute that. I'm sure it's already on Twitter. I'll check it out in a second. So once again, ThinkPad brand is a core part of the organization, and together both DCG and PCSD, what we call PCSD, which is our client side of the business and Smart device side of the business, are obviously very very linked in transforming Lenovo for the future. We want to also transform the industry, obviously, and transform the way that all of us do business. Lenovo, if you look at basically a summary of the day, we are highly committed to being a top three data center provider. That is really important for us. We are the largest and fastest growing supercomputing company in the world, and Kirk actually mentioned earlier on, committed to being number one by 2020. So Madhu who is in Frankfurt at the International Supercomputing Convention, if you're watching, congratulations, your targets have gone up. There's no doubt he's going to have a lot of work to do. We're obviously very very committed to disrupting the data center. That's obviously really important for us. As we mentioned, with both the brands, the ThinkSystem, and our ThinkAgile brands now, highly focused on disrupting and ensuring that we do things differently because different is better. Thank you to our customers, our partners, media, analysts, and of course, once again, all of our employees who have been on this journey with us over the last two years that's really culminating today in the launch of all of our new products and our profile and our portfolio. It's really thanks to all of you that once again on your feedback we've been able to get to this day. And now really our journey truly begins in ensuring we are disrupting and enduring that we are bringing more value to our customers without that legacy that Kirk mentioned earlier on is really an advantage for us as we really are that large startup from a company perspective. It's an exciting time to be part of Lenovo. It's an exciting time to be associated with Lenovo, and I hope very much all of you feel that way. So a big round of applause for today, thank you very much. (audience applauds) I need to remind all of you. I don't think I'm going to have too much trouble getting you out there, because I was just looking at Christian on the streaming solutions out in the room out the back there, and there's quite a nice bit of lunch out there as well for those of you who are hungry, so at least there's some good food out there, but I think in reality all of you should be getting up into the demo sessions with our segment general managers because that's really where the rubber hits the road. You've heard from YY, you've heard from Kirk, and you've heard from Christian. All of our general managers and our specialists in our product sets are going to be out there to obviously demonstrate our technology. As we said at the very beginning of this session, this is Transform, obviously the fashion change, hopefully you remember that. Transform, we've all gone through the transformation. It's part of our season of events globally, and our next event obviously is going to be in Tech World in Shanghai on the 20th of July. I hope very much for those of you who are going to attend have a great safe travel over there. We look forward to seeing you. Hope you've had a good morning, and get into the sessions next door so you get to understand the technology. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (upbeat innovative instrumental)

Yeah, I'm Aala, They're the co-founder back to back. This is the cube silicon angle.com, Silicon angle dot TV's production of the cube, our flagship telecasts. We go out to the event. That was a great conversation. I was really just, just cool. I could have, we could have probably hit on a few more things, obviously well read. Awesome. Co-founder of Cloudera a. You were, you did a good job teaming up with that co-founder, huh? Not bad on the cube, huh? He's not bad on the cube, isn't he? He, >>He reads the internet. >>That's what I'm saying. >>Anything is going on. >>He's a cube star, you know, And >>Technology. Jeff knows it. Yeah. >>We, we tell you, I'm smarter just by being in Cloudera all those years. And I actually was following what he was saying, Sad and didn't dust my brain. So, Okay, so you're back. So we were talking earlier with Michaels and about the relational database thing. So I kind of pick that up where we left off with you around, you know, he was really excited. It's like, you know, hey, we saw that relational database movement happen. He was part of that. Yeah, yeah. That generation. And then, but things were happening or kind of happening the same way in a similar way, still early. So I was trying to really peg with him, how early are we, like, so, you know, as the curve, you know, this is 1400, it's not the Javit Center yet. Maybe the Duke world, you know, next year might be at the Javit Center, 35,000 just don't go to Vegas. So I'm trying to figure out where we are on that curve. Yeah. And we on the upwards slope, you know, down here, not even hitting that, >>I think, I think, I think we're moving up quicker than previous waves. And actually if you, if you look for example, Oracle, I think it took them 15, 20 years until they, they really became a mature company, VM VMware, which started about, what, 12, 13 years ago. It took them about maybe eight years to, to be a big company, met your company, and I'm hoping we're gonna do it in five. So a couple more years. >>Highly accelerated. >>Yes. But yeah, we see, I mean, I'm, I'm, I've been surprised by the growth. I have been, Right? I've been told, warned about enterprise software and, and that it takes long for production to take place. >>But the consumerization trend is really changing that. I mean, it seems to be that, yeah, the enterprises always last. Why the shorter >>Cycle? I think the shorter cycle is coming from having the, the, the, the right solution for the right problem at the right time. I think that's a big part of it. So luck definitely is a big part of this. Now, in terms of why this is changing compared to a couple of dec decades ago, why the adoption is changing compared to a couple of decades ago. I, I think that's coming just because of how quickly the technology itself, the underlying hardware is evolving. So right now, the fact that you can buy a single server and it has eight cores to 16 cores has 12 hards to terabytes. Each is, is something that's just pushing the, the, the, the limits what you can do with the existing systems and hence making it more likely for new systems to disrupt them. >>Yeah. We can talk about a lot. It's very easy for people to actually start a, a big data >>Project. >>Yes. For >>Example. Yes. And the hardest part is, okay, what, what do I really, what problem do I need to solve? How am I gonna, how am I gonna monetize it? Right? Those are the hard parts. It's not the, not the underlying >>Technology. Yes, Yes, that's true. That's true. I mean, >>You're saying, eh, you're saying >>Because, because I'm seeing both so much. I'm, I'm seeing both. I'm seeing both. And like, I'm seeing cases where you're right. There's some companies that was like, Oh, this Hadoop thing is so cool. What problem can I solve with it? And I see other companies, like, I have this huge problem and, and, and they don't know that HA exists. It's so, And once they know, they just jump on it right away. It's like, we know when you have a headache and you're searching for the medicine in Espin. Wow. It >>Works. I was talking to Jeff Hiba before he came on stage and, and I didn't even get to it cuz we were so on a nice riff there. Right. Bunch of like a musicians playing the guitar together. But like he, we talked about the it and and dynamics and he said something that I thoughts right. On money and SAP is talking the same thing and said they're going to the lines of business. Yes. Because it is the gatekeeper that's, it's like selling mini computers to a mainframe selling client servers from a mini computer team. Yeah. >>There's not, we're seeing, we're seeing both as well. So more likely the, the former one meaning, meaning that yes, line of business and departments, they adopt the technology and then it comes in and they see there's already these five different departments having it and they think, okay, now we need to formalize this across the organization. >>So what happens then? What are you seeing out there? Like when that happens, that mean people get their hands on, Hey, we got a problem to solve. Yeah. Is that what it comes down to? Well, Hadoop exist. Go get Hadoop. Oh yeah. They plop it in there and I what does it do? They, >>So they pop it into their, in their own installation or on the, on the cloud and they show that this actually is working and solving the problem for them. Yeah. And when that happens, it's a very, it's a very easy adoption from there on because they just go tell it, We need this right now because it's solving this problem and it's gonna make, make us much >>More money moving it right in. Yes. No problems. >>Is is that another reason why the cycle's compressed? I mean, you know, you think client server, there was a lot of resistance from it and now it's more much, Same thing with mobile. I mean mobile is flipped, right? I mean, so okay, bring it in. We gotta deal with it. Yep. I would think the same thing. We, we have a data problem. Let's turn it into an >>Opportunity. Yeah. In my, and it goes back to what I said earlier, the right solution for the right problem at the right time. Like when they, when you have larger amounts of unstructured data, there isn't anything else out there that can even touch what had, can >>Do. So Amar, I need to just change gears here a minute. The gaming stuff. So we have, we we're featured on justin.tv right now on the front page. Oh wow. But the numbers aren't coming in because there's a competing stream of a recently released Modern Warfare three feature. Yes. Yes. So >>I was looking for, we >>Have to compete with Modern Warfare three. So can you, can we talk about Modern Warfare three for a minute and share the folks what you think of the current version, if any, if you played it. Yeah. So >>Unfortunately I'm waiting to get back home. I don't have my Xbox with me here. >>A little like a, I'm talking about >>My lines and business. >>Boom. Water warfares like a Christmas >>Tree here. Sorry. You know, I love, I'm a big gamer. I'm a big video gamer at Cloudera. We have every Thursday at five 30 end office, we, we play Call of of Beauty version four, which is modern world form one actually. And I challenge, I challenge people out there to come challenge our team. Just ping me on Twitter and we'll, we'll do a Cloudera versus >>Let's, let's, let's reframe that. Let team out. There am Abalas company. This is the geeks that invent the future. Jeff Haer Baer at Facebook now at Cloudera. Hammerer leading the charge. These guys are at gamers. So all the young gamers out there am are saying they're gonna challenge you. At which version? >>Modern Warfare one. >>Modern Warfare one. Yes. How do they fire in? Can you set up an >>External We'll >>We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Okay. >>Yeah. Just p me on Twitter and We'll, >>We can carry it live actually we can stream that. Yeah, >>That'd be great. >>Great. >>Yeah. So I'll tell you some of our best Hadooop committers and Hadoop developers pitch >>A picture. Modern Warfare >>Three going now Model Warfare three. Very excited about the game. I saw the, the trailers for it looks, graphics look just amazing. Graphics are amazing. I love the Sirius since the first one that came out. And I'm looking forward to getting back home to playing the game. >>I can't play, my son won't let me play. I'm such a fumbler with the Hub. I'm a keyboard controller. I can't work the Xbox controller. Oh, I have a coordination problem my age and I'm just a gluts and like, like Dad, sorry, Charity's over. I can I play with my friends? You the box. But I'm around big gamer. >>But, but in terms of, I mean, something I wanted to bring up is how to link up gaming with big data and analysis and so on. So like, I, I'm a big gamer. I love playing games, but at the same time, whenever I play games, I feel a little bit guilty because it's kind of like wasted time. So it's like, I mean, yeah, it's fun and I'm getting lots of enjoyment on it makes my life much more cheerful. But still, how can we harness all of this, all of these hours that gamers spend playing a game like Modern Warfare three, How can we, how can we collect instrument, all of the data that's coming from that and coming up, for example, with something useful with predicted. >>This is exactly, this is exactly the kind of application that's mainstream is gaming. Yeah. Yeah. Danny at Riot G is telling me, we saw him at Oracle Open World. He's up there for the Java one. He said that they, they don't really have a big data platform and their business is about understanding user behavior rep tons of data about user playing time, who they're playing with. Yeah, Yeah. How they want us to get into currency trading, You know, >>Buy, I can't, I can't mention the names, but some of the biggest giving companies out there are using Hadoop right now. And, and depending on CDH for doing exactly that kind of thing, creating >>A good user experience >>Today, they're doing it for the purpose of enhancing the user experience and improving retention. So they do track everything. Like every single bullet, you fire everything in best Ball Head, you get everything home run, you do. And, and, and in, in a three >>Type of game consecutive headshot, you get >>Everything, everything is being Yeah. Headshot you get and so on. But, but as you said, they are using that information today to sell more products and, and, and retain their users. Now what I'm suggesting is that how can you harness that energy for the good as well? I mean for making money, money is good and everything, but how can you harness that for doing something useful so that all of this entertainment time is also actually productive time as well. I think that'd be a holy grail in this, in this environment if we >>Can achieve that. Yeah. It used to be that corn used to be the telegraph of the future of about, of applications, but gaming really is, if you look at gaming, you know, you get the headset on. It's a collaborative environment. Oh yeah. You got unified communications. >>Yeah. And you see our teenager kids, how, how many hours they spend on these things. >>You got play as a play environments, very social collaborative. Yeah. You know, some say, you know, we we're saying, what I'm saying is that that's the, that's the future work environment with Skype evolving. We're our multiplayer game's called our job. Right? Yeah. You know, so I'm big on gaming. So all the gamers out there, a has challenged you. Yeah. Got a big data example. What else are we seeing? So let's talk about the, the software. So we, one of the things you were talking about that I really liked, you were going down the list. So on Mike's slide he had all the new features. So around the core, can you just go down the core and rattle off your version of what, what it means and what it is. So you start off with say H Base, we talked about that already. What are the other ones that are out there? >>So the projects that we have right there, >>The projects that are around those tools that are being built. Cause >>Yeah, so the foundational, the foundational one as we mentioned before, is sdfs for storage map use for processing. Yeah. And then the, the immediate layer above that is how to make MAP reduce easier for the masses. So how can, not everybody knows how to learn map, use Java, everybody knows sql, right? So, so one of the most successful projects right now that has the highest attach rate, meaning people usually when they install had do installed as well is Hive. So Hive takes sequel and so Jeff Harm Becker, my co-founder, when he was at Facebook, his team built the Hive system. Essentially Hive takes sql so you don't have to learn a new language, you already know sql. And then converts that into MAP use for you. That not only expands the developer base for how many people can use adu, but also makes it easier to integrate Hadoop through all DBC and JDBC integrated with BI tools like MicroStrategy and Tableau and Informatica, et cetera, et cetera. >>You mentioned R too. You mentioned R Program R >>As well. Yeah, R is one of our best partnerships. We're very, very happy with them. So that's, that's one of the very key projects is Hive assisted project to Hive ISS called Pig. A pig Latin is a language that ya invented that you have to learn the language. It's very easy, it's very easy to learn compared to map produce. But once you learn it, you can, you can specify very deep data pipelines, right? SQL is good for queries. It's not good for data pipelines because it becomes very convoluted. It becomes very hard for the, the human brain to understand it. So Pig is much more natural to the human. It's more like Pearl very similar to scripting kind of languages. So with Peggy can write very, very long data pipelines, again, very successful projects doing very, very well. Another key project is Edge Base, like you said. So Edge Base allows you to do low latencies. So you can do very, very quick lookups and also allows you to do transactions. So you can do updates in inserts and deletes. So one of the talks here that had World we try to recommend people watch when the videos come out is the Talk by Jonathan Gray from Facebook. And he talked about how they use Edge Base, >>Jonathan, something on here in the Cube later. Yeah. So >>Drill him on that. So they use Edge Base now for many, many things within Facebook. They have a big team now committed to building an improving edge base with us and with the community at large. And they're using it for doing their online messaging system. The live mail system in Facebook is powered by Edge Base right now. Again, Pro and eBay, The Casini project, they gave a keynote earlier today at the conference as well is using Edge Base as well. So Edge Base is definitely one of the projects that's growing very, very quickly right now within the Hudu system. Another key project that Jeff alluded to earlier when he was on here is Flum. So Flume is very instrumental because you have this nice system had, but Hadoop is useless unless you have data inside it. So how do you get the data inside do? >>So Flum essentially is this very nice framework for having these agents all over your infrastructure, inside your web servers, inside your application servers, inside your mobile devices, your network equipment that collects all of that data and then reliably and, and materializes it inside Hado. So Flum does that. Another good project is Uzi, so many of them, I dunno how, how long you want me to keep going here, But, but Uzi is great. Uzi is a workflow processing system. So Uzi allows you to define a series of jobs. Some of them in Pig, some of them in Hive, some of them in map use. You can define a series of them and then link them to each other and say, only start this job when these other jobs, two jobs finish because I'm waiting for the input from them before I can kick off and so on. >>So Uzi is a very nice framework that will will do that. We'll manage the whole graph of jobs for you and retry things when they fail, et cetera, et cetera. Another good project is where W H I R R and where allows you to very easily start ADU cluster on top of Amazon. Easy two on top of Rackspace, virtualized environ. It's more for kicking off, it's for kicking off Hadoop instances or edge based instances on any virtual infrastructure. Okay. VMware, vCloud. So that it supports all of the major vCloud, sorry, all of the me, all of the major virtualized infrastructure systems out there, Eucalyptus as well, and so on. So that's where W H I R R ARU is another key project. It's one, it's duck cutting's main kind of project right now. Don of that gut cutting came on stage with you guys has, So Aru ARO is a project about how do we encode with our files, the schema of these files, right? >>Because when you open up a text file and you don't know how to what the columns mean and how to pars it, it becomes very hard to work for it. So ARU allows you to do that much more easily. It's also useful for doing rrp. We call rtc remove procedure calls for having different services talk to each other. ARO is very useful for that as well. And the list keeps going on and on Maha. Yeah. Which we just, thanks for me for reminding me of my house. We just added Maha very recently actually. What is that >>Adam? I'm not >>Familiar with it. So Maha is a data mining library. So MAHA takes some of the most popular data mining algorithms for doing clustering and regression and statistical modeling and implements them using the map map with use model. >>They have, they have machine learning in it too or Yes, yes. So that's the machine learning. >>So, So yes. Stay vector to machines and so on. >>What Scoop? >>So Scoop, you know, all of them. Thanks for feeding me all the names. >>The ones I don't understand, >>But there's so many of them, right? I can't even remember all of them. So Scoop actually is a very interesting project, is short for SQL to Hadoop, hence the name Scoop, right? So SQ from SQL and Oops from Hadoop and also means Scoop as in scooping up stuff when you scoop up ice cream. Yeah. And the idea for Scoop is to make it easy to move data between relational systems like Oracle metadata and it is a vertical and so on and Hadoop. So you can very simply say, Scoop the name of the table inside the relation system, the name of the file inside Hadoop. And the, the table will be copied over to the file and Vice and Versa can say Scoop the name of the file in Hadoop, the name of the table over there, it'll move the table over there. So it's a connectivity tool between the relational world and the Hadoop world. >>Great, great tutorial. >>And all of these are Apache projects. They're all projects built. >>It's not part of your, your unique proprietary. >>Yes. But >>These are things that you've been contributing >>To, We're contributing to the whole ecosystem. Yes. >>And you understand very well. Yes. And >>And contribute to your knowledge of the marketplace >>And Absolutely. We collaborate with the, with the community on creating these projects. We employ committers and founders for many of these projects. Like Duck Cutting, the founder of He works in Cloudera, the founder for that UIE project. He works at Calera for zookeeper works at Calera. So we have a number of them on stuff >>Work. So we had Aroon from Horton Works. Yes. And and it was really good because I tell you, I walk away from that conversation and I gotta say for the folks out there, there really isn't a war going on in Apache. There isn't. And >>Apache, there isn't. I mean isn't but would be honest. Like, and in the developer community, we are friends, we're working together. We want to achieve the, there's >>No war. It's all Kumbaya. Everyone understands the rising tide floats, all boats are all playing nice in the same box. Yes. It's just a competitive landscape in Horton. Works >>In the business, >>Business business, competitive business, PR and >>Pr. We're trying to be friendly, as friendly as we can. >>Yeah, no, I mean they're, they're, they're hying it up. But he was like, he was cool. Like, Hey, you know, we know each other. Yes. We all know each other and we're just gonna offer free Yes. And charge with support. And so are they. And that's okay. And they got other things going on. Yes. But he brought up the question. He said they're, they're launching a management console. So I said, Tyler's got a significant lead. He kind of didn't really answer the question. So the question is, that's your core bread and butter, That's your yes >>And no. Yes and no. I mean if you look at, if you look at Cloudera Enterprise, and I mentioned this earlier and when we talked in the morning, it has two main things in it. Cloudera Enterprise has the management suite, but it also has the, the the the support and maintenance that we provide to our customers and all the experience that we have in our team part That subscription. Yes. For a description. And I, I wanna stress the point that the fact that I built a sports car doesn't mean that I'm good at running that sports car. The driver of the car usually is much better at driving the car than the guy who built the car, right? So yes, we have many people on staff that are helping build had, but we have many more people on stuff that helped run Hado at large scale, at at financial indu, financial industry, retail industry, telecom industry, media industry, health industry, et cetera, et cetera. So that's very, very important for our customer. All that experience that we bring in on how to run the system technically Yeah. Within these verticals. >>But their strategies clear. We're gonna create an open source project within Apache for a management consult. Yes. And we sell support too. Yes. So there'll be a free alternative to management. >>So we have to see, But I mean we look at the product, I mean our products, >>It's gotta come down to product differentiation. >>Our product has been in the market for two years, so they just started building their products. It's >>Alpha, It's just Alpha. The >>Product is Alpha in Alpha right now. Yeah. Okay. >>Well the Apache products, it is >>Apache, right? Yeah. The Apache project is out. So we'll see how it does it compare to ours. But I think ours is way, way ahead of anything else out there. Yeah. Essentially people to try that for themselves and >>See essentially, John, when I asked Arro why does the world need Hortonwork? You know, eventually the answer we got was, well it's free. It needs to be more open. Had needs to be more open. >>No, there's, >>It's going to be, That's not really the reason why Warton >>Works. >>No, they want, they want to go make money. >>Exactly. We wasn't >>Gonna say them you >>When I kept pushing and pushing and that's ultimately the closest we can get cuz you >>Just listens. Not gonna >>12 open source projects. Yes. >>I >>Mean, yeah, yeah. You can't get much more open. Yeah. Look >>At management >>Consult, but Airs not shooting on all those. I mean, I mean not only we are No, no, not >>No, no, we absolutely >>Are. No, you are contributing. You're not. But that's not all your projects. There's other people >>Involved. Yeah, we didn't start, we didn't start all of these projects. Yeah, that's >>True. You contributing heavily to all of them. >>Yes, we >>Are. And that's clear. Todd Lipkin said that, you know, he contributed his first patch to HPAC in 2008. Yes. So I mean, you go back through the ranks >>Of your people and Todd now is a committer on Edge base is a committer on had itself. So on a number >>Of you clearly the lead and, and you know, and, but >>There is a concern. But we, we've heard it and I wanna just ask you No, no. So there's a concern that if I build processes around a proprietary management console, Yes. I'm gonna end up being locked into that proprietary management CNA all over again. Now this is so far from ca Yes. >>Right. >>But that's a concern that some people have expressed. And, and, and I think one of the reasons why Port Works is getting so much attention. So Yes. >>Talk about that. It's, it's a very good, it's a very good observation to make. Actually, >>There there is two separate things here. There's the platform where all the data sets and then there's this management parcel beside the platform. Now why did we make the management console why the cloud didn't make the management console? Because it makes our job for supporting the customers much more achievable. When a customer calls in and says, We have a problem, help us fix this problem. When they go to our management console, there is a button they click that gives us a dump of the state, of the cluster. And that's what allows us to very quickly debug what's going on. And within minutes tell them you need to do this and you to do that. Yeah. Without that we just can't offer the support services. There's >>Real value there. >>Yes. So, so now a year from, But, but, but you have to keep in mind that the, the underlying platform is completely open source and free CBH is completely a hundred percent open source, a hundred percent free, a hundred percent Apache. So a year from now, when it comes time to renew with us, if the customer is not happy with our management suite is not happy with our support data, they can, they can go to work >>And works. People are afraid >>Of all they can go to ibm. >>The data, you can take the data that >>You don't even need to take the data. You're not gonna move the data. It's the same system, the same software. Every, everything in CDH is Apache. Right? We're not putting anything in cdh, which is not Apache. So a year from now, if you're not happy with our service to you and the value that we're providing, you can switch. There is no lock in. There is no lock. And >>Your, your argument would be the switching costs to >>The only lock in is happiness. The only lock in is which >>Happiness inspection customer delay. Which by, by the way, we just wrote a piece about those wars and we said the risk of lockin is low. We made that statement. We've got some heat for it. Yes. And >>This is sort of at scale though. What the, what the people are saying, they're throwing the tomatoes is saying if this is, again, in theory at scale, the customers are so comfortable with that, the console that they don't switch. Now my argument was >>Yes, but that means they're happy with it. That means they're satisfied and happy >>With it. >>And it's more economical for them than going and hiding people full-time on stuff. Yeah. >>So you're, you're always on check as, as long as the customer doesn't feel like Oracle. >>Yeah. See that's different. Oracle is very, Oracle >>Is like different, right? Yeah. Here it's like Cisco routers, they get nested into the environment, provide value. That's just good competitive product strategy. Yes. If it they're happy. Yeah. It's >>Called open washing with >>Oracle, >>I mean our number one core attribute on the company, the number one value for us is customer satisfaction. Keeping our people Yeah. Our customers happy with the service that we provide. >>So differentiate in the product. Yes. Keep the commanding lead. That's the strategist. That's the, that's what's happening. That's your goal. Yes. >>That's what's happening. >>Absolutely. Okay. Co-founder of Cloudera, Always a pleasure to have you on the cube. We really appreciate all the hospitality over the beer and a half. And wanna personally thank you for letting us sit in your office and we'll miss you >>And we'll miss you too. We'll >>See you at the, the Cube events off Swing by, thanks for coming on the cube and great to see you and congratulations on all your success. >>Thank >>You. And thanks for the review on Modern Warfare three. Yeah, yeah. >>Love me again. If there any gaming stuff, you know, I.