(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's day long coverage of Women in Data Science 2023. Live from Stanford University, I'm Lisa Martin. We've had some amazing conversations today with my wonderful co-host, as you've seen. Tracy Zhang joins me next for a very interesting and inspiring conversation. I know we've been bringing them to you, we're bringing you another one here. Dr. Irene Dankwa-Mullan joins us, the Chief Medical Officer at Marti Health, and a speaker at WIDS. Welcome, Irene, it's great to have you. >> Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much for this opportunity. >> So you have an MD and a Master of Public Health. Covid must have been an interesting time for you, with an MPH? >> Very much so. >> Yeah, talk a little bit about you, your background, and Marti Health? This is interesting. This is a brand new startup. This is a digital health equity startup. >> Yes, yes. So, I'll start with my story a little bit about myself. So I was actually born in Ghana. I finished high school there and came here for college. What would I say? After I finished my undergraduate, I went to medical school at Dartmouth and I always knew I wanted to go into public health as well as medicine. So my medical education was actually five years. I did the MPH and my medical degree, at the same time, I got my MPH from Yale School of Public Health. And after I finished, I trained in internal medicine, Johns Hopkins, and after that I went into public health. I am currently living in Maryland, so I'm in Bethesda, Maryland, and that's where I've been. And really enjoyed public health, community health, combining that aspect of sort of prevention and wellness and also working in making sure that we have community health clinics and safety net clinics. So a great experience there. I also had the privilege, after eight years in public health, I went to the National Institute of Health. >> Oh, wow. >> Where I basically worked in clinical research, basically on minority health and health disparities. So, I was in various leadership roles and helped to advance the science of health equity, working in collaboration with a lot of scientists and researchers at the NIH, really to advance the science. >> Where did your interest in health equity come from? Was there a defining moment when you were younger and you thought "There's a lot of inequities here, we have to do something about this." Where did that interest start? >> That's a great question. I think this influence was basically maybe from my upbringing as well as my family and also what I saw around me in Ghana, a lot of preventable diseases. I always say that my grandfather on my father's side was a great influence, inspired me and influenced my career because he was the only sibling, really, that went to school. And as a result, he was able to earn enough money and built, you know, a hospital. >> Oh wow. >> In their hometown. >> Oh my gosh! >> It started as a 20 bed hospital and now it's a 350 bed hospital. >> Oh, wow, that's amazing! >> In our hometown. And he knew that education was important and vital as well for wellbeing. And so he really inspired, you know, his work inspired me. And I remember in residency I went with a group of residents to this hospital in Ghana just to help over a summer break. So during a summer where we went and helped take care of the sick patients and actually learned, right? What it is like to care for so many patients and- >> Yeah. >> It was really a humbling experience. But that really inspired me. I think also being in this country. And when I came to the U.S. and really saw firsthand how patients are treated differently, based on their background or socioeconomic status. I did see firsthand, you know, that kind of unconscious bias. And, you know, drew me to the field of health disparities research and wanted to learn more and do more and contribute. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, I was curious. Just when did the data science aspect tap in? Like when did you decide that, okay, data science is going to be a problem solving tool to like all the problems you just said? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So while I was at the NIH, I spent eight years there, and precision medicine was launched at that time and there was a lot of heightened interest in big data and how big data could help really revolutionize medicine and healthcare. And I got the opportunity to go, you know, there was an opportunity where they were looking for physicians or deputy chief health officer at IBM. And so I went to IBM, Watson Health was being formed as a new business unit, and I was one of the first deputy chief health officers really to lead the data and the science evidence. And that's where I realized, you know, we could really, you know, the technology in healthcare, there's been a lot of data that I think we are not really using or optimizing to make sure that we're taking care of our patients. >> Yeah. >> And so that's how I got into data science and making sure that we are building technologies using the right data to advance health equity. >> Right, so talk a little bit about health equity? We mentioned you're with Marti Health. You've been there for a short time, but Marti Health is also quite new, just a few months old. Digital health equity, talk about what Marti's vision is, what its mission is to really help start dialing down a lot of the disparities that you talked about that you see every day? >> Yeah, so, I've been so privileged. I recently joined Marti Health as their Chief Medical Officer, Chief Health Officer. It's a startup that is actually trying to promote a value-based care, also promote patient-centered care for patients that are experiencing a social disadvantage as a result of their race, ethnicity. And were starting to look at and focused on patients that have sickle cell disease. >> Okay. >> Because we realize that that's a population, you know, we know sickle cell disease is a genetic disorder. It impacts a lot of patients that are from areas that are endemic malaria. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And most of our patients here are African American, and when, you know, they suffer so much stigma and discrimination in the healthcare system and complications from their sickle cell disease. And so what we want to do that we feel like sickle cell is a litmus test for disparities. And we want to make sure that they get in patient-centered care. We want to make sure that we are leveraging data and the research that we've done in sickle cell disease, especially on the continent of Africa. >> Okay. >> And provide, promote better quality care for the patients. >> That's so inspiring. You know, we've heard so many great stories today. Were you able to watch the keynote this morning? >> Yes. >> I loved how it always inspires me. This conference is always, we were talking about this all day, how you walk in the Arrillaga Alumni Center here where this event is held every year, the vibe is powerful, it's positive, it's encouraging. >> Inspiring, yeah. >> Absolutely. >> Inspiring. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a movement, WIDS is a movement. They've created this community where you feel, I don't know, kind of superhuman. "Why can't I do this? Why not me?" We heard some great stories this morning about data science in terms of applications. You have a great application in terms of health equity. We heard about it in police violence. >> Yes. >> Which is an epidemic in this country for sure, as we know. This happens too often. How can we use data and data science as a facilitator of learning more about that, so that that can stop? I think that's so important for more people to understand all of the broad applications of data science, whether it's police violence or climate change or drug discovery or health inequities. >> Irene: Yeah. >> The potential, I think we're scratching the surface. But the potential is massive. >> Tracy: It is. >> And this is an event that really helps women and underrepresented minorities think, "Why not me? Why can't I get involved in that?" >> Yeah, and I always say we use data to make an make a lot of decisions. And especially in healthcare, we want to be careful about how we are using data because this is impacting the health and outcomes of our patients. And so science evidence is really critical, you know? We want to make sure that data is inclusive and we have quality data. >> Yes. >> And it's transparent. Our clinical trials, I always say are not always diverse and inclusive. And if that's going to form the evidence base or data points then we're doing more harm than good for our patients. And so data science, it's huge. I mean, we need a robust, responsible, trustworthy data science agenda. >> "Trust" you just brought up "trust." >> Yeah. >> I did. >> When we talk about data, we can't not talk about security and privacy and ethics but trust is table stakes. We have to be able to evaluate the data and trust in it. >> Exactly. >> And what it says and the story that can be told from it. So that trust factor is, I think, foundational to data science. >> We all see what happened with Covid, right? I mean, when the pandemic came out- >> Absolutely. >> Everyone wanted information. We wanted data, we wanted data we could trust. There was a lot of hesitancy even with the vaccine. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so public health, I mean, like you said, we had to do a lot of work making sure that the right information from the right data was being translated or conveyed to the communities. And so you are totally right. I mean, data and good information, relevant data is always key. >> Well- >> Is there any- Oh, sorry. >> Go ahead. >> Is there anything Marti Health is doing in like ensuring that you guys get the right data that you can put trust in it? >> Yes, absolutely. And so this is where we are, you know, part of it would be getting data, real world evidence data for patients who are being seen in the healthcare system with sickle cell disease, so that we can personalize the data to those patients and provide them with the right treatment, the right intervention that they need. And so part of it would be doing predictive modeling on some of the data, risk, stratifying risk, who in the sickle cell patient population is at risk of progressing. Or getting, you know, they all often get crisis, vaso-occlusive crisis because the cells, you know, the blood cell sickles and you want to avoid those chest crisis. And so part of what we'll be doing is, you know, using predictive modeling to target those at risk of the disease progressing, so that we can put in preventive measures. It's all about prevention. It's all about making sure that they're not being, you know, going to the hospital or the emergency room where sometimes they end up, you know, in pain and wanting pain medicine. And so. >> Do you see AI as being a critical piece in the transformation of healthcare, especially where inequities are concerned? >> Absolutely, and and when you say AI, I think it's responsible AI. >> Yes. >> And making sure that it's- >> Tracy: That's such a good point. >> Yeah. >> Very. >> With the right data, with relevant data, it's definitely key. I think there is so much data points that healthcare has, you know, in the healthcare space there's fiscal data, biological data, there's environmental data and we are not using it to the full capacity and full potential. >> Tracy: Yeah. >> And I think AI can do that if we do it carefully, and like I said, responsibly. >> That's a key word. You talked about trust, responsibility. Where data science, AI is concerned- >> Yeah. >> It has to be not an afterthought, it has to be intentional. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And there needs to be a lot of education around it. Most people think, "Oh, AI is just for the technology," you know? >> Yeah, right. >> Goop. >> Yes. >> But I think we're all part, I mean everyone needs to make sure that we are collecting the right amount of data. I mean, I think we all play a part, right? >> We do. >> We do. >> In making sure that we have responsible AI, we have, you know, good data, quality data. And the data sciences is a multi-disciplinary field, I think. >> It is, which is one of the things that's exciting about it is it is multi-disciplinary. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And so many of the people that we've talked to in data science have these very non-linear paths to get there, and so I think they bring such diversity of thought and backgrounds and experiences and thoughts and voices. That helps train the AI models with data that's more inclusive. >> Irene: Yes. >> Dropping down the volume on the bias that we know is there. To be successful, it has to. >> Definitely, I totally agree. >> What are some of the things, as we wrap up here, that you're looking forward to accomplishing as part of Marti Health? Like, maybe what's on the roadmap that you can share with us for Marti as it approaches the the second half of its first year? >> Yes, it's all about promoting health equity. It's all about, I mean, there's so much, well, I would start with, you know, part of the healthcare transformation is making sure that we are promoting care that's based on value and not volume, care that's based on good health outcomes, quality health outcomes, and not just on, you know, the quantity. And so Marti Health is trying to promote that value-based care. We are envisioning a world in which everyone can live their full life potential. Have the best health outcomes, and provide that patient-centered precision care. >> And we all want that. We all want that. We expect that precision and that personalized experience in our consumer lives, why not in healthcare? Well, thank you, Irene, for joining us on the program today. >> Thank you. >> Talking about what you're doing to really help drive the volume up on health equity, and raise awareness for the fact that there's a lot of inequities in there we have to fix. We have a long way to go. >> We have, yes. >> Lisa: But people like you are making an impact and we appreciate you joining theCUBE today and sharing what you're doing, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you- >> Thank you for having me here. >> Oh, our pleasure. For our guest and Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin from WIDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference brought to you by theCUBE. Stick around, our show wrap will be in just a minute. Thanks for watching. (light upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got a great remote guest coming in. Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow hot startup in AI, computer vision. Really interesting topic in this wave of AI next gen hitting. Joseph, thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I love the startup tsunami that's happening here in this wave. RoboFlow, you're in the middle of it. Exciting opportunities, you guys are in the cutting edge. I think computer vision's been talked about more as just as much as the large language models and these foundational models are merging. You're in the middle of it. What's it like right now as a startup and growing in this new wave hitting? >> It's kind of funny, it's, you know, I kind of describe it like sometimes you're in a garden of gnomes. It's like we feel like we've got this giant headstart with hundreds of thousands of people building with computer vision, training their own models, but that's a fraction of what it's going to be in six months, 12 months, 24 months. So, as you described it, a wave is a good way to think about it. And the wave is still building before it gets to its full size. So it's a ton of fun. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the most exciting areas in computer science. I wish I was in my twenties again, because I would be all over this. It's the intersection, there's so many disciplines, right? It's not just tech computer science, it's computer science, it's systems, it's software, it's data. There's so much aperture of things going on around your world. So, I mean, you got to be batting all the students away kind of trying to get hired in there, probably. I can only imagine you're hiring regiment. I'll ask that later, but first talk about what the company is that you're doing. How it's positioned, what's the market you're going after, and what's the origination story? How did you guys get here? How did you just say, hey, want to do this? What was the origination story? What do you do and how did you start the company? >> Yeah, yeah. I'll give you the what we do today and then I'll shift into the origin. RoboFlow builds tools for making the world programmable. Like anything that you see should be read write access if you think about it with a programmer's mind or legible. And computer vision is a technology that enables software to be added to these real world objects that we see. And so any sort of interface, any sort of object, any sort of scene, we can interact with it, we can make it more efficient, we can make it more entertaining by adding the ability for the tools that we use and the software that we write to understand those objects. And at RoboFlow, we've empowered a little over a hundred thousand developers, including those in half the Fortune 100 so far in that mission. Whether that's Walmart understanding the retail in their stores, Cardinal Health understanding the ways that they're helping their patients, or even electric vehicle manufacturers ensuring that they're making the right stuff at the right time. As you mentioned, it's early. Like I think maybe computer vision has touched one, maybe 2% of the whole economy and it'll be like everything in a very short period of time. And so we're focused on enabling that transformation. I think it's it, as far as I think about it, I've been fortunate to start companies before, start, sell these sorts of things. This is the last company I ever wanted to start and I think it will be, should we do it right, the world's largest in riding the wave of bringing together the disparate pieces of that technology. >> What was the motivating point of the formation? Was it, you know, you guys were hanging around? Was there some catalyst? What was the moment where it all kind of came together for you? >> You know what's funny is my co-founder, Brad and I, we were making computer vision apps for making board games more fun to play. So in 2017, Apple released AR kit, augmented reality kit for building augmented reality applications. And Brad and I are both sort of like hacker persona types. We feel like we don't really understand the technology until we build something with it and so we decided that we should make an app that if you point your phone at a Sudoku puzzle, it understands the state of the board and then it kind of magically fills in that experience with all the digits in real time, which totally ruins the game of Sudoku to be clear. But it also just creates this like aha moment of like, oh wow, like the ability for our pocket devices to understand and see the world as good or better than we can is possible. And so, you know, we actually did that as I mentioned in 2017, and the app went viral. It was, you know, top of some subreddits, top of Injure, Reddit, the hacker community as well as Product Hunt really liked it. So it actually won Product Hunt AR app of the year, which was the same year that the Tesla model three won the product of the year. So we joked that we share an award with Elon our shared (indistinct) But frankly, so that was 2017. RoboFlow wasn't incorporated as a business until 2019. And so, you know, when we made Magic Sudoku, I was running a different company at the time, Brad was running a different company at the time, and we kind of just put it out there and were excited by how many people liked it. And we assumed that other curious developers would see this inevitable future of, oh wow, you know. This is much more than just a pedestrian point your phone at a board game. This is everything can be seen and understood and rewritten in a different way. Things like, you know, maybe your fridge. Knowing what ingredients you have and suggesting recipes or auto ordering for you, or we were talking about some retail use cases of automated checkout. Like anything can be seen and observed and we presume that that would kick off a Cambrian explosion of applications. It didn't. So you fast forward to 2019, we said, well we might as well be the guys to start to tackle this sort of problem. And because of our success with board games before, we returned to making more board game solving applications. So we made one that solves Boggle, you know, the four by four word game, we made one that solves chess, you point your phone at a chess board and it understands the state of the board and then can make move recommendations. And each additional board game that we added, we realized that the tooling was really immature. The process of collecting images, knowing which images are actually going to be useful for improving model performance, training those models, deploying those models. And if we really wanted to make the world programmable, developers waiting for us to make an app for their thing of interest is a lot less efficient, less impactful than taking our tool chain and releasing that externally. And so, that's what RoboFlow became. RoboFlow became the internal tools that we used to make these game changing applications readily available. And as you know, when you give developers new tools, they create new billion dollar industries, let alone all sorts of fun hobbyist projects along the way. >> I love that story. Curious, inventive, little radical. Let's break the rules, see how we can push the envelope on the board games. That's how companies get started. It's a great story. I got to ask you, okay, what happens next? Now, okay, you realize this new tooling, but this is like how companies get built. Like they solve their own problem that they had 'cause they realized there's one, but then there has to be a market for it. So you actually guys knew that this was coming around the corner. So okay, you got your hacker mentality, you did that thing, you got the award and now you're like, okay, wow. Were you guys conscious of the wave coming? Was it one of those things where you said, look, if we do this, we solve our own problem, this will be big for everybody. Did you have that moment? Was that in 2019 or was that more of like, it kind of was obvious to you guys? >> Absolutely. I mean Brad puts this pretty effectively where he describes how we lived through the initial internet revolution, but we were kind of too young to really recognize and comprehend what was happening at the time. And then mobile happened and we were working on different companies that were not in the mobile space. And computer vision feels like the wave that we've caught. Like, this is a technology and capability that rewrites how we interact with the world, how everyone will interact with the world. And so we feel we've been kind of lucky this time, right place, right time of every enterprise will have the ability to improve their operations with computer vision. And so we've been very cognizant of the fact that computer vision is one of those groundbreaking technologies that every company will have as a part of their products and services and offerings, and we can provide the tooling to accelerate that future. >> Yeah, and the developer angle, by the way, I love that because I think, you know, as we've been saying in theCUBE all the time, developer's the new defacto standard bodies because what they adopt is pure, you know, meritocracy. And they pick the best. If it's sell service and it's good and it's got open source community around it, its all in. And they'll vote. They'll vote with their code and that is clear. Now I got to ask you, as you look at the market, we were just having this conversation on theCUBE in Barcelona at recent Mobile World Congress, now called MWC, around 5G versus wifi. And the debate was specifically computer vision, like facial recognition. We were talking about how the Cleveland Browns were using facial recognition for people coming into the stadium they were using it for ships in international ports. So the question was 5G versus wifi. My question is what infrastructure or what are the areas that need to be in place to make computer vision work? If you have developers building apps, apps got to run on stuff. So how do you sort that out in your mind? What's your reaction to that? >> A lot of the times when we see applications that need to run in real time and on video, they'll actually run at the edge without internet. And so a lot of our users will actually take their models and run it in a fully offline environment. Now to act on that information, you'll often need to have internet signal at some point 'cause you'll need to know how many people were in the stadium or what shipping crates are in my port at this point in time. You'll need to relay that information somewhere else, which will require connectivity. But actually using the model and creating the insights at the edge does not require internet. I mean we have users that deploy models on underwater submarines just as much as in outer space actually. And those are not very friendly environments to internet, let alone 5g. And so what you do is you use an edge device, like an Nvidia Jetson is common, mobile devices are common. Intel has some strong edge devices, the Movidius family of chips for example. And you use that compute that runs completely offline in real time to process those signals. Now again, what you do with those signals may require connectivity and that becomes a question of the problem you're solving of how soon you need to relay that information to another place. >> So, that's an architectural issue on the infrastructure. If you're a tactical edge war fighter for instance, you might want to have highly available and maybe high availability. I mean, these are words that mean something. You got storage, but it's not at the edge in real time. But you can trickle it back and pull it down. That's management. So that's more of a business by business decision or environment, right? >> That's right, that's right. Yeah. So I mean we can talk through some specifics. So for example, the RoboFlow actually powers the broadcaster that does the tennis ball tracking at Wimbledon. That runs completely at the edge in real time in, you know, technically to track the tennis ball and point the camera, you actually don't need internet. Now they do have internet of course to do the broadcasting and relay the signal and feeds and these sorts of things. And so that's a case where you have both edge deployment of running the model and high availability act on that model. We have other instances where customers will run their models on drones and the drone will go and do a flight and it'll say, you know, this many residential homes are in this given area, or this many cargo containers are in this given shipping yard. Or maybe we saw these environmental considerations of soil erosion along this riverbank. The model in that case can run on the drone during flight without internet, but then you only need internet once the drone lands and you're going to act on that information because for example, if you're doing like a study of soil erosion, you don't need to be real time. You just need to be able to process and make use of that information once the drone finishes its flight. >> Well I can imagine a zillion use cases. I heard of a use case interview at a company that does computer vision to help people see if anyone's jumping the fence on their company. Like, they know what a body looks like climbing a fence and they can spot it. Pretty easy use case compared to probably some of the other things, but this is the horizontal use cases, its so many use cases. So how do you guys talk to the marketplace when you say, hey, we have generative AI for commuter vision. You might know language models that's completely different animal because vision's like the world, right? So you got a lot more to do. What's the difference? How do you explain that to customers? What can I build and what's their reaction? >> Because we're such a developer centric company, developers are usually creative and show you the ways that they want to take advantage of new technologies. I mean, we've had people use things for identifying conveyor belt debris, doing gas leak detection, measuring the size of fish, airplane maintenance. We even had someone that like a hobby use case where they did like a specific sushi identifier. I dunno if you know this, but there's a specific type of whitefish that if you grew up in the western hemisphere and you eat it in the eastern hemisphere, you get very sick. And so there was someone that made an app that tells you if you happen to have that fish in the sushi that you're eating. But security camera analysis, transportation flows, plant disease detection, really, you know, smarter cities. We have people that are doing curb management identifying, and a lot of these use cases, the fantastic thing about building tools for developers is they're a creative bunch and they have these ideas that if you and I sat down for 15 minutes and said, let's guess every way computer vision can be used, we would need weeks to list all the example use cases. >> We'd miss everything. >> And we'd miss. And so having the community show us the ways that they're using computer vision is impactful. Now that said, there are of course commercial industries that have discovered the value and been able to be out of the gate. And that's where we have the Fortune 100 customers, like we do. Like the retail customers in the Walmart sector, healthcare providers like Medtronic, or vehicle manufacturers like Rivian who all have very difficult either supply chain, quality assurance, in stock, out of stock, anti-theft protection considerations that require successfully making sense of the real world. >> Let me ask you a question. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but it's more developer focused. What are some of the developer profiles that you're seeing right now in terms of low-hanging fruit applications? And can you talk about the academic impact? Because I imagine if I was in school right now, I'd be all over it. Are you seeing Master's thesis' being worked on with some of your stuff? Is the uptake in both areas of younger pre-graduates? And then inside the workforce, What are some of the devs like? Can you share just either what their makeup is, what they work on, give a little insight into the devs you're working with. >> Leading developers that want to be on state-of-the-art technology build with RoboFlow because they know they can use the best in class open source. They know that they can get the most out of their data. They know that they can deploy extremely quickly. That's true among students as you mentioned, just as much as as industries. So we welcome students and I mean, we have research grants that will regularly support for people to publish. I mean we actually have a channel inside our internal slack where every day, more student publications that cite building with RoboFlow pop up. And so, that helps inspire some of the use cases. Now what's interesting is that the use case is relatively, you know, useful or applicable for the business or the student. In other words, if a student does a thesis on how to do, we'll say like shingle damage detection from satellite imagery and they're just doing that as a master's thesis, in fact most insurance businesses would be interested in that sort of application. So, that's kind of how we see uptick and adoption both among researchers who want to be on the cutting edge and publish, both with RoboFlow and making use of open source tools in tandem with the tool that we provide, just as much as industry. And you know, I'm a big believer in the philosophy that kind of like what the hackers are doing nights and weekends, the Fortune 500 are doing in a pretty short order period of time and we're experiencing that transition. Computer vision used to be, you know, kind of like a PhD, multi-year investment endeavor. And now with some of the tooling that we're working on in open source technologies and the compute that's available, these science fiction ideas are possible in an afternoon. And so you have this idea of maybe doing asset management or the aerial observation of your shingles or things like this. You have a few hundred images and you can de-risk whether that's possible for your business today. So there's pretty broad-based adoption among both researchers that want to be on the state of the art, as much as companies that want to reduce the time to value. >> You know, Joseph, you guys and your partner have got a great front row seat, ground floor, presented creation wave here. I'm seeing a pattern emerging from all my conversations on theCUBE with founders that are successful, like yourselves, that there's two kind of real things going on. You got the enterprises grabbing the products and retrofitting into their legacy and rebuilding their business. And then you have startups coming out of the woodwork. Young, seeing greenfield or pick a specific niche or focus and making that the signature lever to move the market. >> That's right. >> So can you share your thoughts on the startup scene, other founders out there and talk about that? And then I have a couple questions for like the enterprises, the old school, the existing legacy. Little slower, but the startups are moving fast. What are some of the things you're seeing as startups are emerging in this field? >> I think you make a great point that independent of RoboFlow, very successful, especially developer focused businesses, kind of have three customer types. You have the startups and maybe like series A, series B startups that you're building a product as fast as you can to keep up with them, and they're really moving just as fast as as you are and pulling the product out at you for things that they need. The second segment that you have might be, call it SMB but not enterprise, who are able to purchase and aren't, you know, as fast of moving, but are stable and getting value and able to get to production. And then the third type is enterprise, and that's where you have typically larger contract value sizes, slower moving in terms of adoption and feedback for your product. And I think what you see is that successful companies balance having those three customer personas because you have the small startups, small fast moving upstarts that are discerning buyers who know the market and elect to build on tooling that is best in class. And so you basically kind of pass the smell test of companies who are quite discerning in their purchases, plus are moving so quick they're pulling their product out of you. Concurrently, you have a product that's enterprise ready to service the scalability, availability, and trust of enterprise buyers. And that's ultimately where a lot of companies will see tremendous commercial success. I mean I remember seeing the Twilio IPO, Uber being like a full 20% of their revenue, right? And so there's this very common pattern where you have the ability to find some of those upstarts that you make bets on, like the next Ubers of the world, the smaller companies that continue to get developed with the product and then the enterprise whom allows you to really fund the commercial success of the business, and validate the size of the opportunity in market that's being creative. >> It's interesting, there's so many things happening there. It's like, in a way it's a new category, but it's not a new category. It becomes a new category because of the capabilities, right? So, it's really interesting, 'cause that's what you're talking about is a category, creating. >> I think developer tools. So people often talk about B to B and B to C businesses. I think developer tools are in some ways a third way. I mean ultimately they're B to B, you're selling to other businesses and that's where your revenue's coming from. However, you look kind of like a B to C company in the ways that you measure product adoption and kind of go to market. In other words, you know, we're often tracking the leading indicators of commercial success in the form of usage, adoption, retention. Really consumer app, traditionally based metrics of how to know you're building the right stuff, and that's what product led growth companies do. And then you ultimately have commercial traction in a B to B way. And I think that that actually kind of looks like a third thing, right? Like you can do these sort of funny zany marketing examples that you might see historically from consumer businesses, but yet you ultimately make your money from the enterprise who has these de-risked high value problems you can solve for them. And I selfishly think that that's the best of both worlds because I don't have to be like Evan Spiegel, guessing the next consumer trend or maybe creating the next consumer trend and catching lightning in a bottle over and over again on the consumer side. But I still get to have fun in our marketing and make sort of fun, like we're launching the world's largest game of rock paper scissors being played with computer vision, right? Like that's sort of like a fun thing you can do, but then you can concurrently have the commercial validation and customers telling you the things that they need to be built for them next to solve commercial pain points for them. So I really do think that you're right by calling this a new category and it really is the best of both worlds. >> It's a great call out, it's a great call out. In fact, I always juggle with the VC. I'm like, it's so easy. Your job is so easy to pick the winners. What are you talking about its so easy? I go, just watch what the developers jump on. And it's not about who started, it could be someone in the dorm room to the boardroom person. You don't know because that B to C, the C, it's B to D you know? You know it's developer 'cause that's a human right? That's a consumer of the tool which influences the business that never was there before. So I think this direct business model evolution, whether it's media going direct or going direct to the developers rather than going to a gatekeeper, this is the reality. >> That's right. >> Well I got to ask you while we got some time left to describe, I want to get into this topic of multi-modality, okay? And can you describe what that means in computer vision? And what's the state of the growth of that portion of this piece? >> Multi modality refers to using multiple traditionally siloed problem types, meaning text, image, video, audio. So you could treat an audio problem as only processing audio signal. That is not multimodal, but you could use the audio signal at the same time as a video feed. Now you're talking about multi modality. In computer vision, multi modality is predominantly happening with images and text. And one of the biggest releases in this space is actually two years old now, was clip, contrastive language image pre-training, which took 400 million image text pairs and basically instead of previously when you do classification, you basically map every single image to a single class, right? Like here's a bunch of images of chairs, here's a bunch of images of dogs. What clip did is used, you can think about it like, the class for an image being the Instagram caption for the image. So it's not one single thing. And by training on understanding the corpora, you basically see which words, which concepts are associated with which pixels. And this opens up the aperture for the types of problems and generalizability of models. So what does this mean? This means that you can get to value more quickly from an existing trained model, or at least validate that what you want to tackle with a computer vision, you can get there more quickly. It also opens up the, I mean. Clip has been the bedrock of some of the generative image techniques that have come to bear, just as much as some of the LLMs. And increasingly we're going to see more and more of multi modality being a theme simply because at its core, you're including more context into what you're trying to understand about the world. I mean, in its most basic sense, you could ask yourself, if I have an image, can I know more about that image with just the pixels? Or if I have the image and the sound of when that image was captured or it had someone describe what they see in that image when the image was captured, which one's going to be able to get you more signal? And so multi modality helps expand the ability for us to understand signal processing. >> Awesome. And can you just real quick, define clip for the folks that don't know what that means? >> Yeah. Clip is a model architecture, it's an acronym for contrastive language image pre-training and like, you know, model architectures that have come before it captures the almost like, models are kind of like brands. So I guess it's a brand of a model where you've done these 400 million image text pairs to match up which visual concepts are associated with which text concepts. And there have been new releases of clip, just at bigger sizes of bigger encoding's, of longer strings of texture, or larger image windows. But it's been a really exciting advancement that OpenAI released in January, 2021. >> All right, well great stuff. We got a couple minutes left. Just I want to get into more of a company-specific question around culture. All startups have, you know, some sort of cultural vibe. You know, Intel has Moore's law doubles every whatever, six months. What's your culture like at RoboFlow? I mean, if you had to describe that culture, obviously love the hacking story, you and your partner with the games going number one on Product Hunt next to Elon and Tesla and then hey, we should start a company two years later. That's kind of like a curious, inventing, building, hard charging, but laid back. That's my take. How would you describe the culture? >> I think that you're right. The culture that we have is one of shipping, making things. So every week each team shares what they did for our customers on a weekly basis. And we have such a strong emphasis on being better week over week that those sorts of things compound. So one big emphasis in our culture is getting things done, shipping, doing things for our customers. The second is we're an incredibly transparent place to work. For example, how we think about giving decisions, where we're progressing against our goals, what problems are biggest and most important for the company is all open information for those that are inside the company to know and progress against. The third thing that I'd use to describe our culture is one that thrives with autonomy. So RoboFlow has a number of individuals who have founded companies before, some of which have sold their businesses for a hundred million plus upon exit. And the way that we've been able to attract talent like that is because the problems that we're tackling are so immense, yet individuals are able to charge at it with the way that they think is best. And this is what pairs well with transparency. If you have a strong sense of what the company's goals are, how we're progressing against it, and you have this ownership mentality of what can I do to change or drive progress against that given outcome, then you create a really healthy pairing of, okay cool, here's where the company's progressing. Here's where things are going really well, here's the places that we most need to improve and work on. And if you're inside that company as someone who has a preponderance to be a self-starter and even a history of building entire functions or companies yourself, then you're going to be a place where you can really thrive. You have the inputs of the things where we need to work on to progress the company's goals. And you have the background of someone that is just necessarily a fast moving and ambitious type of individual. So I think the best way to describe it is a transparent place with autonomy and an emphasis on getting things done. >> Getting shit done as they say. Getting stuff done. Great stuff. Hey, final question. Put a plug out there for the company. What are you going to hire? What's your pipeline look like for people? What jobs are open? I'm sure you got hiring all around. Give a quick plug for the company what you're looking for. >> I appreciate you asking. Basically you're either building the product or helping customers be successful with the product. So in the building product category, we have platform engineering roles, machine learning engineering roles, and we're solving some of the hardest and most impactful problems of bringing such a groundbreaking technology to the masses. And so it's a great place to be where you can kind of be your own user as an engineer. And then if you're enabling people to be successful with the products, I mean you're working in a place where there's already such a strong community around it and you can help shape, foster, cultivate, activate, and drive commercial success in that community. So those are roles that tend themselves to being those that build the product for developer advocacy, those that are account executives that are enabling our customers to realize commercial success, and even hybrid roles like we call it field engineering, where you are a technical resource to drive success within customer accounts. And so all this is listed on roboflow.com/careers. And one thing that I actually kind of want to mention John that's kind of novel about the thing that's working at RoboFlow. So there's been a lot of discussion around remote companies and there's been a lot of discussion around in-person companies and do you need to be in the office? And one thing that we've kind of recognized is you can actually chart a third way. You can create a third way which we call satellite, which basically means people can work from where they most like to work and there's clusters of people, regular onsite's. And at RoboFlow everyone gets, for example, $2,500 a year that they can use to spend on visiting coworkers. And so what's sort of organically happened is team numbers have started to pull together these resources and rent out like, lavish Airbnbs for like a week and then everyone kind of like descends in and works together for a week and makes and creates things. And we call this lighthouses because you know, a lighthouse kind of brings ships into harbor and we have an emphasis on shipping. >> Yeah, quality people that are creative and doers and builders. You give 'em some cash and let the self-governing begin, you know? And like, creativity goes through the roof. It's a great story. I think that sums up the culture right there, Joseph. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for this great conversation. I really appreciate it and it's very inspiring. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, John. >> Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow. Hot company, great culture in the right place in a hot area, computer vision. This is going to explode in value. The edge is exploding. More use cases, more development, and developers are driving the change. Check out RoboFlow. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(soft music) >> We're in Las Vegas at The Venetian for our continued coverage here of re:Invent '22, AWS's big show going on. Great success off to a wonderful start. We're in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And we're going to talk about public health and the cloud, how those have come together in the great state of North Carolina. Charles Carter is going to help us do that. He's assistant secretary for technology services with the state of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. Charles, good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on "theCUBE". >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for making the time. So first off, let's talk about what you do on the homefront before what you're doing here and where you're going. But in terms of kind of what your plan has been, what your journey has been from a cloud perspective and how you've implemented that and where you are right now in your journey. >> Sure, so we started. When I got there, we didn't have a cloud footprint at all. There was a- >> Host: Which was how long ago? >> I got there in 2016, so about six years. >> Host: Six, seven years, yeah. >> Yeah, five, six years. So anyways, we started off with our first module within our Medicaid expansion. And that was the first time that we went into the cloud. We worked with AWS to do our encounter processing system. And it was an incredible success. I think the ease of use was really kind of something that people weren't quite ready for. But it was really exciting to see that. And the scalability, to be able to turn that on and cover the entirety of North Carolina was awesome. So once we saw that and get a little taste of it, then we really wanted to start implementing it throughout DHHS. And we marshaled in a cloud-only cloud-first strategy where you had to actually get an exemption not to go to the cloud. And that was a first for our state. So that was really kind of the what launched us. But then COVID hit. And once COVID came in, that took us to a new level. COVID forced us to build technologies that enabled a better treatment, a better care, a better response from our team. And so we were able to stand up platforms in 48 hours. We were able to stand up COVID vaccine management systems in six weeks. And none of that would've been possible without the cloud. >> So forced your hand in a way because all of a sudden you've got this extraordinarily remote workforce, right, and people trying to- And you're doing different tasks that were totally unexpected, right, prior to that. What kind of a shock to the system was that from I get from an IT perspective? >> Yeah, so from a state government perspective, for example, you never hear you have all the money you need and you have to do it quickly. It just doesn't work like that. But this was a rare moment in time where you had this critical need. The entire country and our state population was kind of on edge. How do we move through this? How do we factor our lives into this new integration? What is this virus? Is it spreading in my county, in my city, my zip code? Where is it? And that kind of desperation really kind of focused everybody in on build me technologies that can get me the data that I need to make good healthcare decisions, good clinical decisions. And so that was our challenge. Cloud enabled it because it can scale so quickly. We can set up things, we can exchange data. We can move data around a lot easier. And the security is better from our perspective. So that COVID experience really kind of pushed us, you know, if you will, out the door. And we're never going back because it's just too good. >> Yeah, was that the aha moment then in a way because you had to do so much so fast and before capabilities that maybe you didn't have or maybe hadn't tapped? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean what was the accelerant there? Was COVID that big, or was it somebody who had to make a decision to say, this is where we're going with this, somebody in your shoes or somebody with whom you work? >> Yeah, no, I mean cloud at the end of the day, we knew that in order to do what we needed to do we couldn't do it on-prem. It wasn't an option. So if we wanted to build these capabilities, if we wanted to bring in technologies that really brought data to our key, our governor, our secretary, to make good decisions on behalf of our residents in North Carolina, then we were going to have to build things quickly. And the only way you can do that is in the cloud. So it was when they came back and said, "We need these things," there's only one answer. That's a good thing about technology. It's pretty binary, so it was either go with what we had, which wasn't adequate, or build to what we knew we could do and pretty short order. And because of that, we were able to actually usher in a huge expansion of cloud footprint within DHHS. And now we've actually been able to implement it in other departments simply because of our expertise. And that's been a huge asset for the state of North Carolina as a whole. >> So what's your measuring stick then for value in terms of identifying benefit? 'Cause it's not really about cost. This is about service, I assume, right? >> Right. >> So, you know, how do you quantify the values and the benefits that you're deriving from this migration over to the cloud? >> So from our perspective, it hits several different areas. I mean, you can start in security. We know that if we're in the cloud the tools that can manage and give us visibility in the cloud are 10 times better than an on-prem environment. And so if we can take a lot of these legacy systems and move them to the cloud, we'll be in a better security posture. So we have that piece of it. The other part of it is the data aspect of it, being able to- We're 33 divisions strong, right? We have a large footprint. We have a lot of siloed data elements. And cloud allows us to start integrating those data sets in a much more usable fashion so that we can see that if Charles Carter's in one area in division, a specific division with DHHS, is he somewhere else? And if he is somewhere else, then how do we provide a better clinical care for that individual? And those are conversations that we can't really have if we don't move to the cloud. So those types of- And of course there's always the OKRs, the actual measurements that you apply to things that we're doing. But at the end of the day, can we get the requirements from our business partners, bring those requirements to bear in technology, and really enable the indoctrination of these requirements throughout our clinical and healthcare kills? >> What about they're always pillars here, right? Governance, huge pillar, security, huge pillar, especially in your world, right? >> Yeah. >> So making that move over to the cloud and still recognizing that these are essentials that you have to have in place, I wouldn't say adjustments, but what kind of, I guess, recognition have you had toward that and making sure that you're still very true to those principles that are vital in the terms of public health? >> It is a great question because our secretary at the time and our governor, Roy Cooper, were very focused on enabling transparency. We had to be very transparent with what we were doing because the residents in North Carolina were just really kind of, "What's going on?" It was a scary time for a lot of us. So transparency was a key element towards our success. And in order to do that, you've got to have proper security. You got to have proper governance. You've got to have proper builds within technology that really enable that kind of visibility. One of the things that we did very early on was we set up a governance structure for our cloud environments so that as we wanted to and stand up an easy-to environment or we wanted to do some sort of work within a cloud or stand up in a different environment, we were able actually to set up a framework for how do you introduce that. Are you doing it correctly? Do you have the proper security on it? Do you have the funding for it? Like all the steps that you need to really kind of build into the scaffolding around a lot of these efforts we had to put in place and pretty quickly to get them going. But once we did that, the acceptance and the adoption of it was just tremendous. I mean, it was a light on for all of our business partners 'cause they understood I can either build on-prem, in which case I won't be able to get what I want in any kind of reasonable time period. Or I can build on cloud. And I can have it in some cases in 48 hours. >> Right, tomorrow. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it was a huge difference. >> So where are you there? I mean, this is just not like a really big old lift and shift and we're all done and this is great. Cloud's taken care of all of our needs. Where are you in terms of the journey that you're undertaking? And then ultimately where do you want to go, like how far? What kind of goals have you set for yourself for the next two, three years down the road? >> Yeah, so this is an exciting part because we have actually- Like I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud-first cloud-only strategy, right? There's no reasons for us to be on-prem. It's just a matter of us kind of sunsetting legacy systems and bringing on cloud performance. We hope to be a 60% of our applications, which we have over 400 applications. So it's pretty large footprint. But we're wanting to migrate all of that to the cloud by 2025. So if we can achieve that, I think we'll be well on our way. And the momentum will carry forward for us to do that. We've actually had to do a reorganization of our whole IT structure. I think this is an important part to maintain that momentum because we've reorganized our staff, reorganized ourselves so that we can focus more on how do you adopt cloud, how do you bring in platforms which are all cloud-based, how do you use data within those systems? And that has allowed us to kind of think differently about our responsibilities, who's accountable for what, and to kind of keep those, that momentum going. So we've got some big projects that are on right now. Some of them are lift and shift, like you mentioned. We have a project with kind of a clumsy, monolithic system. It's called (indistinct). We're trying to migrate that to the cloud. We're in the process of doing that. And it's an excellent demonstration of capability once we pull that off. And then of course any new procurement that we put out there no one's making anything for on-prem anymore. Everyone's making their SaaS products for cloud-based experiences. Or if we're going to build or just use integrators then we'll build that in house. But all of it's based on cloud. >> And you mentioned SaaS. How much of this stuff are you doing on your own? And how much are you doing through managed services? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have over 400 applications. So we had a pretty large footprint, right? >> Big, it's huge, right. >> So we're only who we are, and we can only build so much. So we're kind of taking- We did a application rationalization effort, which kind of identified some threats to our systems. Like maybe they're older things, FoxPro, kind of older languages that we're using. And in some cases we got people who are retiring. And there's not many people who can support that anymore. So how do we take those and migrate them to the cloud, either put them on a Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics platform and really kind of upgrade those systems? So we're in the process of kind of analyzing those elements. But yeah, that's kind of the exciting launch, if you will, of kind of taking the existing visibility of our applications and then applying it to what we're capable of with the cloud. >> And if you had advice that you could give to your colleagues who are in public health or just in public, the public sector- And your resources, they're finite. This is kind of what you have to deal with. And yet you have needs, and you're trying to stay current. You've got talent challenges, right? You've got rev or spending challenges. So if you could sit down your colleagues in a room and say, "Okay, this has been our experience. Here's what I would keep an eye out for," what kind of headlights would you beat for them? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest aha that I'd like to share with my contemporaries out there is that you've got a great ability to lower your costs, to excite your own personnel because they want to work on the new stuff. We've actually set up a whole professional development pathway within our organization to start getting people certified on AWS, certified on other platforms, to get them ready to start working in those environments. And so all of that work that we're been doing is coming together and allowing us to maintain the momentum. So what I'd recommend to people is, A, look at your own individual staff. I don't think you need to go outside to find the talent. I think you can train the talent that you have interior. I think you've got to aggressively pursue modernization because modernization enables a lot more. It's less expensive. It enables quicker adoption of business requirements and modern business requirements. And then lastly, focus on your data sharing because what you're going to find in the platforms and in the clouds is that there is a lot more opportunities for data integrations and conjoining disparate data sources. So if you can do those elements, you'll find that your capabilities on the business side are much more, much greater on the other end. >> Don't be scared, right, jump in? (laughing) >> Definitely don't be scared. Don't be, the water's warm. (host laughing) Come on in, you're fine, you're fine. (laughing) >> No little toe dipping in there. You're going to dive into the deep end, let her rip. >> Exactly, just go right in, just go right in. >> Well, it sounds like you've done that with great success. >> I'm very happy with it. >> Congratulations on that. And wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, Charles. All right, back with more. You are watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. theCUBE of course the leader, as you know, in tech coverage. (soft music)

>>Now welcome back to the Cube as we continue our coverage here. AWS Reinvent 2022, going out here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of attendees. That exhibit Hall is full. Let me tell you, it's been something else. Well, here in the executive summit, sponsored by Accenture. Accenture rather. We're gonna talk about Baptist Health, what's going on with that organization down in South Florida with me. To do that, I have Tony Abro, who's the SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer. I have Ashley Lane, the managing director of the Accenture Healthcare Practice, and on the far end Poop Kumar, who is the VP and cto Baptist Health Florida won and all. Welcome. Thank you. First off, let's just talk about Baptist Health, the size of your footprint. One and a half million patient visits a year, not a small number. >>That was probably last year's number, but okay. >>Right. But not a small number about your footprint and, and what, I guess the client base basically that you guys are serving in it. >>Absolutely. So we are the largest organization in South Florida system provider and the 11 hospitals soon to be 12, as you said, it's probably about 1.8 million by now. People were, were, were supporting a lot of other units and you know, we're focusing on the four southern counties of South Florida. Okay. >>So got day Broward. Broward, yep. Down that way. Got it. So now let's get to your migration or your cloud transformation. As we're talking about a lot this week, what's been your, I guess, overarching goal, you know, as you worked with Accenture and, and developed a game plan going forward, you know, what was on the front end of that? What was the motivation to say this is the direction we're going to go and this is how we're gonna get there? >>Perfect. So Baptist started a digital transformation initiative before I came about three years ago. The board, the executive steering committee, decided that this is gonna be very important for us to support us, to help our patients and, and consumers. So I was brought in for that digital transformation. And by the way, digital transformation is kind of an umbrella. It's really business transformation with technology, digital technologies. So that's, that's basically where we started in terms of consumer focused and, and, and patient focus. And digital is a big word that really encompasses a lot of things. Cloud is one of, of course. And, you know, AI and ML and all the things that we are here for this, this event, you know, and, and we've started that journey about two years ago. And obviously cloud is very important. AWS is our main cloud provider and clearly in AWS or any club providers is not just the infrastructure they're providing, it's the whole ecosystem that provides us back value into, into our transformation. And then somebody, I think Adam this morning at the keynote said, this is a team sport. So with this big transformation, we need all the help and that we can get to mines and, and, and hands. And that's where Accenture has been invaluable over the last two years. >>Yeah, so as a team sport then depu, you, you've got external stakeholders, otherwise we talked about patience, right? Internal, right. You've, you've got a whole different set of constituents there, basically, but it takes that team, right? You all have to work together. What kind of conversations or what kind of actions, I guess have you had with different departments and what different of sectors of, of the healthcare business as Baptist Health sees it in order to bring them along too, because this is, you know, kind of a shocking turn for them too, right? And how they're gonna be doing business >>Mostly from an end user perspective. This is something that they don't care much about where the infrastructure is hosted or how the services are provided from that perspective. As long as the capabilities function in a better way, they are seemingly not worried about where the hosting is. So what we focus on is in terms of how it's going to be a better experience for, from them, from, from their perspective, right? How is it going to be better responsiveness, availability, or stability overall? So that's been the mode of communication from that perspective. Other than that, from a, from a hosting and service perspective, the clientele doesn't care as much as the infrastructure or the security or the, the technology and digital teams themselves. >>But you know, some of us are resistant to change, right? We're, we're just, we are old dogs. We don't like new tricks and, and change can be a little daunting sometimes. So even though it is about my ease of use and my efficiency and why I can then save my time on so and so forth, if I'm used to doing something a certain way, and that's worked fine for me and here comes Tony and Depo and here comes a, >>They're troublemaker >>And they're stir my pot. Yeah. So, so how do you, the work, you were giving advice maybe to somebody watching this and say, okay, you've got internal, I wouldn't say battles, but discussions to be held. How did you navigate through that? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And Baptist has been a very well run system, very successful for 60 something odd years. Clearly that conversation did come, why should we change? But you always start with, this is what we think is gonna happen in the future. These are the changes that very likely will happen in the future. One is the consumer expectations are the consumer expectations in terms of their ability to have access to information, get access to care, being control of the process and their, their health and well-being. Everything else that happens in the market. And so you start with the, with that, and that's where clearly there are, there are a lot of signs that point to quite a lot of change in the ecosystem. And therefore, from there, the conversation is how do we now meet that challenge, so to speak, that we all face in, in, in healthcare. >>And then from there, you kind of designed the, a vision of where we want to be in terms of that digital transformation and how do we get there. And then once that is well explained and evangelized, and that's part of our jobs with the help of our colleagues who have, have been doing this with others, then is the, what I call a tell end show. We're gonna say, okay, in this, in this road, we're gonna start with this. It's a small thing and we're gonna show you how it works in terms of, in terms of the process, right? And then as, as you go along and you deliver some things, people understand more, they're on board more and they're ready for for more. So it's iterative from small to larger. >>The proof is always in the place, right? If you can show somebody, so actually I, I obviously we know about Accenture's role, but in terms of almost, almost what Tony was just saying, that you have to show people that it works. How, how do you interface with a client? And when you're talking about these new approaches and you're suggesting changes and, and making these maybe rather dramatic proposals, you know, to how they do things internally, from Accenture's perspective, how do you make it happen? How, how do you bring the client along in this case, batches >>Down? Well, in this case, with Tony and Depu, I mean, they have been on this journey already at another client, right? So they came to Baptist where they had done a similar journey previously. And so it wasn't really about convincing >>Also with Accenture's >>Health, also with Accenture's Health, correct. But it wasn't about telling Tony Dupe, how do we do this? Or anything like that. Cuz they were by far the experts and have, you know, the experience behind it. Well, it's really like, how do we make sure that we're providing the right, right team, the right skills to match, you know, what they wanted to do and their aspirations. So we had brought the, the healthcare knowledge along with the AWS knowledge and the architects and you know, we said that we gotta, you know, let's look at the roadmap and let's make sure that we have the right team and moving at the right pace and, you know, testing everything out and working with all the different vendors in the provider world specifically, there's a lot of different vendors and applications that are, you know, that are provided to them. It's not a lot of custom activity, you know, applications or anything like that. So it was a lot of, you know, working with other third party that we really had to align with them and with Baptist to make sure that, you know, we were moving together at speed. >>Yeah, we've heard about transformation quite a bit. Tony, you brought it up a little bit ago, depu, just, if you had to define transformation in this case, I mean, how big of a, of a, of a change is that? I mean, how, how would you describe it when you say we're gonna transform our, you know, our healthcare business? I mean, I think there are a lot of things that come to my mind, but, but how do you define it and, and when you're, when you're talking to the folks with whom you've got to bring along on this journey? >>So there's the transformation umbrella and compos two or three things. As Tony said, there is this big digital transformation that everybody's talking about. Then there is this technology transformation that powers the digital transformation and business transformation. That's the outcome of the digital transformation. So I think we, we started focusing on all three areas to get the right digital experience for the consumers. We have to transform the way we operate healthcare in its current state or, or in the existing state. It's a lot of manual processes, a lot of antiquated processes, so to speak. So we had to go and reassess some of that and work with the respective business stakeholders to streamline those because in, it's not about putting a digital solution out there with the anti cured processes because the outcome is not what you expect when you do that. So from that perspective, it has been a heavy lifting in terms of how we transform the operations or the processes that facilitates some of the outcomes. >>How do you know it's working >>Well? So I I, to add to what Deep was saying is I think we are fortunate and that, you know, there are a lot of folks inside Baptist who have been wanting this and they're instrumental to this. So this is not a two man plus, you know, show is really a, you know, a, a team sport. Again, that same. So in, in that, that in terms of how do we know it works well when, when we define what we want to do, there is some level of precision along the way. In those iterations, what is it that we want to do next, right? So whatever we introduce, let's say a, a proper fluid check in for a patient into a, for an appointment, we measure that and then we measure the next one, and then we kind of zoom out and we look at the, the journey and say, is this better? >>Is this better for the consumer? Do they like it better? We measure that and it's better for the operations in terms of, but this is the interesting thing is it's always a balance of how much you can change. We want to improve the consumer experience, but as deeply said, there's lot to be changed in, in the operations, how much you do at the same time. And that's where we have to do the prioritization. But you know, the, the interesting thing is that a lot of times, especially on the self servicing for consumers, there are a lot of benefits for the operations as well. And that's, that's where we're in, we're in it together and we measure. Yeah, >>Don't gimme too much control though. I don't, I'm gonna leave the hard lifting for you. >>Absolutely, absolutely right. Thank you. >>So, and, and just real quick, Ashley, maybe you can shine some light on this, about the relationship, about, about next steps, about, you know, you, you're on this, this path and things are going well and, and you've got expansion plans, you want, you know, bring in other services, other systems. Where do you want to take 'em in the big picture in terms of capabilities? >>Well, I, I mean, they've been doing a fantastic job just being one of the first to actually say, Hey, we're gonna go and make an investment in the cloud and digital transformation. And so it's really looking at like, what are the next problems that we need to solve, whether it's patient care diagnosis or how we're doing research or, you know, the next kind of realm of, of how we're gonna use data and to improve patient care. So I think it's, you know, we're getting the foundation, the basics and everything kind of laid out right now. And then it's really, it's like what's the next thing and how can we really improve the patient care and the access that they have. >>Well, it sure sounds like you have a winning accommodation, so I I keep the team together. >>Absolutely. >>Teamwork makes the dream >>Work. Absolutely. It is, as you know. So there's a certain amount of, if you look at the healthcare industry as a whole, and not, not just Baptist, Baptist is, you know, fourth for thinking, but entire industry, there's a lot of catching up to do compared to whatever else is doing, whatever else the consumers are expecting of, of an entity, right? But then once we catch up, there's a lot of other things that we were gonna have to move on, innovate for, for problems that we maybe we don't know we have will have right now. So plenty of work to do. Right. >>Which is job security for everybody, right? >>Yes. >>Listen, thanks for sharing the story. Yeah, yeah. Continued success. I wish you that and I appreciate the time and expertise here today. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be back with more. You're watching the Cube here. It's the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And the cube, as I love to remind you, is the leader in tech coverage.

>>Good evening everyone and welcome back to Sparkly Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are here with the cube covering AWS Reinvent for the 10th year in a row. John Furrier has been here for all 10. John, we are in our last session of day one. How does it compare? >>I just graduated high school 10 years ago. It's exciting to be, here's been a long time. We've gotten a lot older. My >>Got your brain is complex. You've been a lot in there. So fast. >>Graduated eight in high school. You know how it's No. All good. This is what's going on. This next segment, wrapping up day one, which is like the the kickoff. The Mondays great year. I mean Tuesdays coming tomorrow big days. The announcements are all around the kind of next gen and you're starting to see partnering and integration is a huge part of this next wave cuz API's at the cloud, next gen cloud's gonna be deep engineering integration and you're gonna start to see business relationships and business transformation scale a horizontally, not only across applications but companies. This has been going on for a while, covering it. This next segment is gonna be one of those things that we're gonna look at as something that's gonna happen more and more on >>Yeah, I think so. It's what we've been talking about all day. Without further ado, I would like to welcome our very exciting guest for this final segment, trust from single store. Thank you for being here. And we also have him on from IBM Data and ai. Y'all are partners. Been partners for about a year. I'm gonna go out on a limb only because their legacy and suspect that a few people, a few more people might know what IBM does versus what a single store does. So why don't you just give us a little bit of background so everybody knows what's going on. >>Yeah, so single store is a relational database. It's a foundational relational systems, but the thing that we do the best is what we call us realtime analytics. So we have these systems that are legacy, which which do operations or analytics. And if you wanted to bring them together, like most of the applications want to, it's really a big hassle. You have to build an ETL pipeline, you'd have to duplicate the data. It's really faulty systems all over the place and you won't get the insights really quickly. Single store is trying to solve that problem elegantly by having an architecture that brings both operational and analytics in one place. >>Brilliant. >>You guys had a big funding now expanding men. Sequel, single store databases, 46 billion again, databases. We've been saying this in the queue for 12 years have been great and recently not one database will rule the world. We know that. That's, everyone knows that databases, data code, cloud scale, this is the convergence now of all that coming together where data, this reinvent is the theme. Everyone will be talking about end to end data, new kinds of specialized services, faster performance, new kinds of application development. This is the big part of why you guys are working together. Explain the relationship, how you guys are partnering and engineering together. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think so ibm, right? I think we are mainly into hybrid cloud and ai and one of the things we are looking at is expanding our ecosystem, right? Because we have gaps and as opposed to building everything organically, we want to partner with the likes of single store, which have unique capabilities that complement what we have. Because at the end of the day, customers are looking for an end to end solution that's also business problems. And they are very good at real time data analytics and hit staff, right? Because we have transactional databases, analytical databases, data lakes, but head staff is a gap that we currently have. And by partnering with them we can essentially address the needs of our customers and also what we plan to do is try to integrate our products and solutions with that so that when we can deliver a solution to our customers, >>This is why I was saying earlier, I think this is a a tell sign of what's coming from a lot of use cases where people are partnering right now you got the clouds, a bunch of building blocks. If you put it together yourself, you can build a durable system, very stable if you want out of the box solution, you can get that pre-built, but you really can't optimize. It breaks, you gotta replace it. High level engineering systems together is a little bit different, not just buying something out of the box. You guys are working together. This is kind of an end to end dynamic that we're gonna hear a lot more about at reinvent from the CEO ofs. But you guys are doing it across companies, not just with aws. Can you guys share this new engineering business model use case? Do you agree with what I'm saying? Do you think that's No, exactly. Do you think John's crazy, crazy? I mean I all discourse, you got out of the box, engineer it yourself, but then now you're, when people do joint engineering project, right? They're different. Yeah, >>Yeah. No, I mean, you know, I think our partnership is a, is a testament to what you just said, right? When you think about how to achieve realtime insights, the data comes into the system and, and the customers and new applications want insights as soon as the data comes into the system. So what we have done is basically build an architecture that enables that we have our own storage and query engine indexing, et cetera. And so we've innovated in our indexing in our database engine, but we wanna go further than that. We wanna be able to exploit the innovation that's happening at ibm. A very good example is, for instance, we have a native connector with Cognos, their BI dashboards right? To reason data very natively. So we build a hyper efficient system that moves the data very efficiently. A very other good example is embedded ai. >>So IBM of course has built AI chip and they have basically advanced quite a bit into the embedded ai, custom ai. So what we have done is, is as a true marriage between the engineering teams here, we make sure that the data in single store can natively exploit that kind of goodness. So we have taken their libraries. So if you have have data in single store, like let's imagine if you have Twitter data, if you wanna do sentiment analysis, you don't have to move the data out model, drain the model outside, et cetera. We just have the pre-built embedded AI libraries already. So it's a, it's a pure engineering manage there that kind of opens up a lot more insights than just simple analytics and >>Cost by the way too. Moving data around >>Another big theme. Yeah. >>And latency and speed is everything about single store and you know, it couldn't have happened without this kind of a partnership. >>So you've been at IBM for almost two decades, don't look it, but at nearly 17 years in how has, and maybe it hasn't, so feel free to educate us. How has, how has IBM's approach to AI and ML evolved as well as looking to involve partnerships in the ecosystem as a, as a collaborative raise the water level together force? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think when we initially started ai, right? I think we are, if you recollect Watson was the forefront of ai. We started the whole journey. I think our focus was more on end solutions, both horizontal and vertical. Watson Health, which is more vertically focused. We were also looking at Watson Assistant and Watson Discovery, which were more horizontally focused. I think it it, that whole strategy of the world period of time. Now we are trying to be more open. For example, this whole embedable AI that CICE was talking about. Yeah, it's essentially making the guts of our AI libraries, making them available for partners and ISVs to build their own applications and solutions. We've been using it historically within our own products the past few years, but now we are making it available. So that, how >>Big of a shift is that? Do, do you think we're seeing a more open and collaborative ecosystem in the space in general? >>Absolutely. Because I mean if you think about it, in my opinion, everybody is moving towards AI and that's the future. And you have two option. Either you build it on your own, which is gonna require significant amount of time, effort, investment, research, or you partner with the likes of ibm, which has been doing it for a while, right? And it has the ability to scale to the requirements of all the enterprises and partners. So you have that option and some companies are picking to do it on their own, but I believe that there's a huge amount of opportunity where people are looking to partner and source what's already available as opposed to investing from the scratch >>Classic buy versus build analysis for them to figure out, yeah, to get into the game >>And, and, and why reinvent the wheel when we're all trying to do things at, at not just scale but orders of magnitude faster and and more efficiently than we were before. It, it makes sense to share, but it's, it is, it does feel like a bit of a shift almost paradigm shift in, in the culture of competition versus how we're gonna creatively solve these problems. There's room for a lot of players here, I think. And yeah, it's, I don't >>Know, it's really, I wanted to ask if you don't mind me jumping in on that. So, okay, I get that people buy a bill I'm gonna use existing or build my own. The decision point on that is, to your point about the path of getting the path of AI is do I have the core competency skills, gap's a big issue. So, okay, the cube, if you had ai, we'd take it cuz we don't have any AI engineers around yet to build out on all the linguistic data we have. So we might use your ai but I might say this to then and we want to have a core competency. How do companies get that core competency going while using and partnering with, with ai? What you guys, what do you guys see as a way for them to get going? Because I think some people probably want to have core competency of >>Ai. Yeah, so I think, again, I think I, I wanna distinguish between a solution which requires core competency. You need expertise on the use case and you need expertise on your industry vertical and your customers versus the foundational components of ai, which are like, which are agnostic to the core competency, right? Because you take the foundational piece and then you further train it and define it for your specific use case. So we are not saying that we are experts in all the industry verticals. What we are good at is like foundational components, which is what we wanna provide. Got it. >>Yeah, that's the hard deep yes. Heavy lift. >>Yeah. And I can, I can give a color to that question from our perspective, right? When we think about what is our core competency, it's about databases, right? But there's a, some biotic relationship between data and ai, you know, they sort of like really move each other, right? You >>Need, they kind of can't have one without the other. You can, >>Right? And so the, the question is how do we make sure that we expand that, that that relationship where our customers can operationalize their AI applications closer to the data, not move the data somewhere else and do the modeling and then training somewhere else and dealing with multiple systems, et cetera. And this is where this kind of a cross engineering relationship helps. >>Awesome. Awesome. Great. And then I think companies are gonna want to have that baseline foundation and then start hiring in learning. It's like driving the car. You get the keys when you're ready to go. >>Yeah, >>Yeah. Think I'll give you a simple example, right? >>I want that turnkey lifestyle. We all do. Yeah, >>Yeah. Let me, let me just give you a quick analogy, right? For example, you can, you can basically make the engines and the car on your own or you can source the engine and you can make the car. So it's, it's basically an option that you can decide. The same thing with airplanes as well, right? Whether you wanna make the whole thing or whether you wanna source from someone who is already good at doing that piece, right? So that's, >>Or even create a new alloy for that matter. I mean you can take it all the way down in that analogy, >>Right? Is there a structural change and how companies are laying out their architecture in this modern era as we start to see this next let gen cloud emerge, teams, security teams becoming much more focused data teams. Its building into the DevOps into the developer pipeline, seeing that trend. What do you guys see in the modern data stack kind of evolution? Is there a data solutions architect coming? Do they exist yet? Is that what we're gonna see? Is it data as code automation? How do you guys see this landscape of the evolving persona? >>I mean if you look at the modern data stack as it is defined today, it is too detailed, it's too OSes and there are way too many layers, right? There are at least five different layers. You gotta have like a storage you replicate to do real time insights and then there's a query layer, visualization and then ai, right? So you have too many ETL pipelines in between, too many services, too many choke points, too many failures, >>Right? Etl, that's the dirty three letter word. >>Say no to ETL >>Adam Celeste, that's his quote, not mine. We hear that. >>Yeah. I mean there are different names to it. They don't call it etl, we call it replication, whatnot. But the point is hassle >>Data is getting more hassle. More >>Hassle. Yeah. The data is ultimately getting replicated in the modern data stack, right? And that's kind of one of our thesis at single store, which is that you'd have to converge not hyper specialize and conversation and convergence is possible in certain areas, right? When you think about operational analytics as two different aspects of the data pipeline, it is possible to bring them together. And we have done it, we have a lot of proof points to it, our customer stories speak to it and that is one area of convergence. We need to see more of it. The relationship with IBM is sort of another step of convergence wherein the, the final phases, the operation analytics is coming together and can we take analytics visualization with reports and dashboards and AI together. This is where Cognos and embedded AI comes into together, right? So we believe in single store, which is really conversions >>One single path. >>A shocking, a shocking tie >>Back there. So, so obviously, you know one of the things we love to joke about in the cube cuz we like to goof on the old enterprise is they solve complexity by adding more complexity. That's old. Old thinking. The new thinking is put it under the covers, abstract the way the complexities and make it easier. That's right. So how do you guys see that? Because this end to end story is not getting less complicated. It's actually, I believe increasing and complication complexity. However there's opportunities doing >>It >>More faster to put it under the covers or put it under the hood. What do you guys think about the how, how this new complexity gets managed or in this new data world we're gonna be coming in? >>Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. It's the world is becoming more complex, technology is becoming more complex and I think there is a real need and it's not just from coming from us, it's also coming from the customers to simplify things. So our approach around AI is exactly that because we are essentially providing libraries, just like you have Python libraries, there are libraries now you have AI libraries that you can go infuse and embed deeply within applications and solutions. So it becomes integrated and simplistic for the customer point of view. From a user point of view, it's, it's very simple to consume, right? So that's what we are doing and I think single store is doing that with data, simplifying data and we are trying to do that with the rest of the portfolio, specifically ai. >>It's no wonder there's a lot of synergy between the two companies. John, do you think they're ready for the Instagram >>Challenge? Yes, they're ready. Uhoh >>Think they're ready. So we're doing a bit of a challenge. A little 32nd off the cuff. What's the most important takeaway? This could be your, think of it as your thought leadership sound bite from AWS >>2023 on Instagram reel. I'm scrolling. That's the Instagram, it's >>Your moment to stand out. Yeah, exactly. Stress. You look like you're ready to rock. Let's go for it. You've got that smile, I'm gonna let you go. Oh >>Goodness. You know, there is, there's this quote from astrophysics, space moves matter, a matter tells space how to curve. They have that kind of a relationship. I see the same between AI and data, right? They need to move together. And so AI is possible only with right data and, and data is meaningless without good insights through ai. They really have that kind of relationship and you would see a lot more of that happening in the future. The future of data and AI are combined and that's gonna happen. Accelerate a lot faster. >>Sures, well done. Wow. Thank you. I am very impressed. It's tough hacks to follow. You ready for it though? Let's go. Absolutely. >>Yeah. So just, just to add what is said, right, I think there's a quote from Rob Thomas, one of our leaders at ibm. There's no AI without ia. Essentially there's no AI without information architecture, which essentially data. But I wanna add one more thing. There's a lot of buzz around ai. I mean we are talking about simplicity here. AI in my opinion is three things and three things only. Either you use AI to predict future for forecasting, use AI to automate things. It could be simple, mundane task, it would be complex tasks depending on how exactly you want to use it. And third is to optimize. So predict, automate, optimize. Anything else is buzz. >>Okay. >>Brilliantly said. Honestly, I think you both probably hit the 32nd time mark that we gave you there. And the enthusiasm loved your hunger on that. You were born ready for that kind of pitch. I think they both nailed it for the, >>They nailed it. Nailed it. Well done. >>I I think that about sums it up for us. One last closing note and opportunity for you. You have a V 8.0 product coming out soon, December 13th if I'm not mistaken. You wanna give us a quick 15 second preview of that? >>Super excited about this. This is one of the, one of our major releases. So we are evolving the system on multiple dimensions on enterprise and governance and programmability. So there are certain features that some of our customers are aware of. We have made huge performance gains in our JSON access. We made it easy for people to consume, blossom on OnPrem and hybrid architectures. There are multiple other things that we're gonna put out on, on our site. So it's coming out on December 13th. It's, it's a major next phase of our >>System. And real quick, wasm is the web assembly moment. Correct. And the new >>About, we have pioneers in that we, we be wasm inside the engine. So you could run complex modules that are written in, could be C, could be rushed, could be Python. Instead of writing the the sequel and SQL as a store procedure, you could now run those modules inside. I >>Wanted to get that out there because at coupon we covered that >>Savannah Bay hot topic. Like, >>Like a blanket. We covered it like a blanket. >>Wow. >>On that glowing note, Dre, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. We hope to have both single store and IBM back on plenty more times in the future. Thank all of you for tuning in to our coverage here from Las Vegas in Nevada at AWS Reinvent 2022 with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Cube Live, AWS Reinvent 2022. This is our first day of three and a half days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, it's getting louder and louder behind us. People are back. They're excited. >>You know what somebody told me today? Hm? They said that less than 15% of the audience is developers. I'm like, no way. I don't believe it. But now maybe there's a redefinition of developers because it's all about the data and it's all about the developers in my mind. And that'll never change. >>It is. And one of the things we're gonna be talking about is app modernization. As customers really navigate the journey to do that so that they can be competitive and, and meet the demands of customers. We've got an alumni back with us to talk about that. AJ Patel joins us, the SVP and GM Modern Apps and Management business group at VMware. Aj, welcome back. Thank >>You. It's always great to be here, so thank you David. Good to see >>You. Isn't great. It's great to be back in person. So the VMware Tansu team here back at Reinvent on the Flow Shore Flow show floor. There we go. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing together, innovating with aws. >>Yeah, so it's, it's great to be back after in person after multiple years and the energy level continues to amaze me. The partnership with AWS started on the infrastructure side with VMware cloud on aws. And when with tanza, we're extending it to the application space. And the work here is really about how do you make developers productive To your earlier point, it's all about developers. It's all about getting applications in production securely, safely, continuously. And tanza is all about making that bridge between great applications being built, getting them deployed and running, running and operating at scale. And EKS is a dominant Kubernetes platform. And so the better together story of tanu and EKS is a great one for us, and we're excited to announce some sort of innovations in that area. >>Well, Tanu was so front and center at VMware Explorer. I wasn't at in, in VMware Explorer, Europe. Right. But I'm sure it was a similar kind of focus. When are customers choosing Tanu? Why are they choosing Tanu? What's, what's, what's the update since last August when >>We, you know, the market settled into three main use cases. One is all about developer productivity. You know, consistently we're all dealing with skill set gap issues. How do we make every developer productive, modern developer? And so 10 is all about enabling that develop productivity. And we can talk quite a bit about it. Second one is security's front and center and security's being shifted left right into how you build great software. How do you secure that through the entire supply chain process? And how do you run and operationalize secure at runtime? So we're hearing consistently about making secure software supply chain heart of what our solution is. And third one is, how do I run and operate the modern application at scale across any Kubernetes, across any cloud? These are the three teams that are continuing to get resonance and empowering. All of this is exciting. David is this formation of platform teams. I just finished a study with Bain Consulting doing some research for me. 40% of our organization now have some form of a central team that's responsive for, for we call platform engineering and building platforms to make developers productive. That is a big change since about two years ago even. So this is becoming mainstream and customers are really focusing on delivering in value to making developers productive. >>Now. And, and, and the other nuance that I see, and you kinda see it here in the ecosystem, but when you talk about your customers with platform engineering, they're actually building their, they're pointing their business. They gonna page outta aws, pointing their businesses to their customers, right? Becoming software companies, becoming cloud companies and really generating new forms of revenue. >>You know, the interesting thing is, some of my customers I would never have thought as leading edge are retailers. Yeah. And not your typical Starbucks that you get a great example. I have an auto parts company that's completely modernizing how they deliver point of sale all the way to the supply chain. All built on ES at scale. You're typically think of that a financial services or a telco leading the pack. But I'm seeing innovation in India. I'm seeing the innovation in AMEA coming out of there, across the board. Every industry is becoming a product company. A digital twin as we would call it. Yeah. And means they become software houses. Yeah. They behave more like you and I in this event versus a, a traditional enterprise. >>And they're building their own ecosystems and that ecosystem's generating data that's generating more value. And it's just this cycle. It's, >>It's a amazing, it's a flywheel. So innovation continues to grow. Talk about really unlocking the developer experience and delivering to them what they need to modernize apps to move as fast and quickly as they want to. >>So, you know, I think AWS coin this word undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you think of a typical developer today, how much effort does he have to put in before he can get a single line of code out in production? If you can take away all the complexity, typically security compliance is a big headache for them, right? Developer doesn't wanna worry about that. Infrastructure provisioning, getting all the configurations right, is a headache for them. Being able to understand what size of infrastructure or resource to use cost effectively. How do you run it operationally? Cuz the application team is responsible for the operational cost of the product or service. So these are the un you know, heavy lifting that developers want to get away from. So they wanna write great code, build great experiences. And we've always talked about frameworks a way to abstract with the complexity. And so for us, there's a massive opportunity to say, how do I simplify and take away all the heavy lifting to get an idea into production seamlessly, continuously, securely. >>Is that part of your partnership? Because you think about a aws, they're really not about frameworks, they're about primitives. I mean, Warner Vos even talks about that in his, in his speech, you know, but, but that makes it more challenging for developers. >>No, actually, if you look at some of their initial investments around proton and et cetera work, they're starting to do, they're recognized, you know, PS is a bad, bad word, but the outcomes a platform as a service offers is what everybody wants. Just talking to the AWS leaders, responsible area, he actually has a separate build team. He didn't know what to call the third team. He has a Kubernetes team, he has a serverless team and has a build team. And that build team is everything above Kubernetes to make the developer productive. Right. And the ecosystem to bring together to make that happen. So I think AWS is recognizing that primitives are great for the elite developers, but if they want to get the mass scale and adoption in the business, it, if you will, they're gonna have to provide richer set of building blocks and reduce the complex and partnership like ours. Make that a reality. And what I'm excited about is there's a clear gap here, and t's the best platform to kind of fill that gap. Well, >>And I, I think that, you know, they're gonna double down triple, I just wrote about this double down, triple down on the primitives. Yes. They have to have the best, you know, servers and storage and database. And I think the way they, they, I call it taping the seams is with the ecosystem. Correct. You know, and they, nobody has a, a better ecosystem. I mean, you guys are, you know, the, the postage child for the ecosystem and now this even exceeds that. But partnering up, that's how they >>Continue to, and they're looking for someone who's open, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the first question is, you know, are you proprie or open? Because one of the things they're fighting against is the lock in. So they can find a friendly partner who is open source, led, you know, upstream committing to the code, delivering that innovation, and bring the ecosystem into orchestrated choreography. It's like singing a music, right? They're running a, running an application delivery team is like running a, a musical orchestra. There's so many moving parts here, right? How do you make them sing together? And so if Tan Zoo and our platform can help them sing and drive more of their services, it's only more valuable for them. And >>I think the partners would generally say, you know, AWS always talking about customer obsession. It's like becomes this bromine, you go, yeah, yeah. But I actually think in the field, the the sellers would say, yeah, we're gonna do what the customer, if that means we're gonna partner up. Yeah. And I think AWS's comp structure makes it sort >>Of, I learned today how, how incentives with marketplaces work. Yeah. And it is powerful. It's very powerful. Yeah. Right. So you line up the sales incentive, you line up the customer and the benefits, you line up bringing the ecosystem to drive business results and everybody, and so everybody wins. And which is what you're seeing here, the excitement and the crowd is really the whole, all boats are rising. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. And it's driven by the fact that customers are getting true value out of it. >>Oh, absolutely. Tremendous value. Speaking of customers, give us an example of a customer story that you think really articulates the value of what Tanzi was delivering, especially making that developer experience far simpler. What are some of those big business outcomes that that delivers? >>You know, at Explorer we had the CIO of cvs and with their acquisition of Aetna and CVS Health, they're transforming the, the health industry. And they talked about the whole covid and then how they had to deliver the number of, you know, vaccines to u i and how quickly they had to deliver on that. It talked about Tanu and how they leverage, leverage a Tanza platform to get those new applications out and start to build that. And Ro was basically talking about his number one prior is how does he get his developers more productive? Number to priority? How does he make sure the apps are secure? Number three, priority, how does he do it cost effectively in the world? Particularly where we're heading towards where, you know, the budgets are gonna get tighter. So how do I move more dollars to innovation while I continue to drive more efficiency in my platform? And so cloud is the future. How does he make the best use of the cloud both for his developers and his operations team? Right? >>What's happening in serverless, I, in 2017, Andy Chassy was in the cube. He said if AWS or if Amazon had to build all over again, they would build in, in was using serverless. And that was a big quote. We've mined that for years. And as you were talking about developer productivity, I started writing down all the things developers have to do. Yep. With it, they gotta, they gotta build a container image. They said they gotta deploy an EC two instance. They gotta allocate memory, they gotta fence off the apps in a virtual machine. They gotta run the, you know, compute against the app goes, they gotta pay for all that. So, okay, what's your story on, what's the market asking for in terms of serverless? Because there's still some people who want control over the run time. Help us sift through that. >>And it really comes back to the application pattern or the type you're running. If it's a stateless application that you need to spin up and spin down. Serverless is awesome. Why would I wanna worry about scaling it up in, I wanna set up some SLAs, SLIs service level objectives or, or, or indicators and then let the systems bring the resources I need as I need them. That's a perfect example for serverless, right? On the other hand, if you have a, a more of a workflow type application, there's a sequence, there's state, try building an application using serverless where you had to maintain state between two, two steps in the process. Not so much fun, right? So I don't think serverless is the answer for everything, but many use cases, the scale to zero is a tremendous benefit. Events happen. You wanna process something, work is done, you quietly go away. I don't wanna shut down the server started up, I want that to happen magically. So I think there's a role of serverless. So I believe Kubernetes and servers are the new runtime platform. It's not one or the other. It's about marrying that around the application patterns. I DevOps shouldn't care about it. That's an infrastructure concern. Let me just run application, let the infrastructure manage the operations of it, whether it's serverless, whether it's Kubernetes clusters, whether it's orchestration, that's details right. I I I shouldn't worry about it. Right. >>So we shouldn't think of those as separate architectures. We should think of it as an architecture, >>The continuum in some ways Yeah. Of different application workload types. And, and that's a toolkit that the operator has at his disposal to configure and saying, where does, should that application run? Should I want control? You can run it on a, a conveyance cluster. Can I just run it on a serverless infrastructure and and leave it to the cloud provider? Do it all for me. Sure. What, what was PAs? PAs was exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. Write the code once you do the rest. Yeah. Okay. Those are just elements of that. >>And then K native is kinda in the middle, >>Right? K native is just a technology that's starting to build that capability out in a standards way to make serverless available consistently across all clouds. So I'm not building to a, a lambda or a particular, you know, technology type. I'm building it in a standard way, in a standard programming model. And infrastructure just >>Works for me on any cloud. >>The whole idea portability. Consistency. >>Right. Powerful. Yep. >>What are some of the things that, that folks can expect to learn from VMware Tan to AWS this week at the >>Show? Yeah, so there's some really great announcements. First of all, we're excited to extend our, our partnership with AWS in the area of eks. What I mean by that is we traditionally, we would manage an EKS cluster, you visibility of what's running in there, but we weren't able to manage the lifecycle With this announcement. We can give you a full management of lifecycle of S workloads. Our customers have 400 plus EKS clusters, multiple teams sharing those in a multi-tenanted way with common policy. And they wanna manage a full life cycle, including all the upstream open source component that make up Kubernetes people. That ES is the one thing, it's a collection of a lot of open, open source packages. We're making it simple to manage it consistently from a single place on the security front. We're now making tons of service mesh available in the marketplace. >>And if you look at what service MeSHs, it's an overlay. It's an abstraction. I can create an idea of a global name space that cuts across multiple VPCs. I'm, I'm hearing at Amazon's gonna make some announcements around VPC and how they stitch VPCs together. It's all moving towards this idea of abstractions. I can set policy at logical level. I don't have to worry about data security and the communication between services. These are the things we're now enabling, which are really an, and to make EKS even more productive, making enterprise grade enterprise ready. And so a lot of excitement from the EKS development teams as well to partner closely with us to make this an end to end solution for our >>Customers. Yeah. So I mean it's under chasy, it was really driving those primitives and helping developers under continuing that path, but also recognizing the need for solutions. And that's where the ecosystem comes in, >>Right? And the question is, what is that box? As you said last time, right? For the super cloud, there is a cloud infrastructure, which is becoming the new palette, but how do you make sense of the 300 plus primitives? How do you bring them together? What are the best practices, patterns? How do I manage that when something goes wrong? These are real problems that we're looking to solve. >>And if you're gonna have deeper business integration with the cloud and technology in general, you have to have that >>Abstraction. You know, one of the simple question I ask is, how do you know you're getting value from your cloud investment? That's a very hard question. What's your trade off between performance and cost? Do you know where your security, when a lock 4G happens, do you know all the open source packages you need to patch? These are very simple questions, but imagine today having to do that when everybody's doing in a bespoke manner using the set of primitives. You need a platform. The industry is shown at scale. You have to start standardizing and building a consistent way of delivering and abstracting stuff. And that's where the next stage of the cloud journey >>And, and with the economic environment, I think people are also saying, okay, how do we get more? Exactly. We're in the cloud now. How do we get more? How do we >>Value out of the cloud? >>Exactly. Totally. >>How do we transform the business? Last question, AJ for you, is, if you had a bumper sticker and you're gonna put it on your fancy car, what would it say about VMware tan zone aws? >>I would say tan accelerates apps. >>Love >>It. Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Appreciate it. Always great to be here. >>Pleasure. Likewise. For our guest, I'm Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

>>Good morning and welcome back to the Cube where we are excited to be broadcasting live all week from Detroit to Michigan at Cuban slash cloud Native con. Depending on who you're asking, Lisa, it's day two things are buzzing. How are you feeling? >>Good, excited. Ready for day two, ready to have more great conversations to see how this community is expanding, how it's evolving, and how it's really supporting it itself. >>Yeah, Yeah. This is a very supportive community. Something we talked a lot about. And speaking of community, we've got some very bold and brave folks over here. We've got this CTO and the head of product from Storm Forge, and they are on a mission to automate Kubernetes. Now automatic and Kubernetes are not words that go in the same sentence very often, so please welcome Patrick and Yasmin. Thank you both for being here. Hello. How you doing? >>Thanks for having us. >>Thanks for having us. >>Talk about what you guys are doing. Cause as you said, Kubernetes auto spelling is anything but auto. >>Yeah. >>The, what are some of the challenges? How do you help >>Eliminate this? Yeah, so the mission at Storm Forge is primarily automatic resource configuration and optimization essentially. So we started as a machine learning company first. And it's kind of an interesting story cuz we're one of those startups that has pivoted a few times. And so we were running our machine learning workloads. Most >>Have, I think, >>Right? Yeah. Yeah. We were, we started out running our machine learning workloads and moving them into Kubernetes. And then we weren't quite sure how to correctly adjust and size our containers. And so our ML team, we've got three PhDs and applied mathematics. They said, Well, hang on, we could write an algorithm for that. And so they did. And then, Oh, I love this. Yeah. And then we said, Well holy cow, that's actually really useful. I wonder if other people would like that. And that's kind of where we got our start. >>You solved your own problem and then you built a business >>Around it. Yeah, exactly. >>That is fantastic. Is, is that driving product development at Storm Forge still? That kind of attitude? >>I mean that kind of attitude definitely drives product development, but we're, you know, balancing that with what the users are, the challenges that they have, especially at large scale. We deal with a lot of large enterprises and for us as a startup, we can relate to the problems that come with Kubernetes when you're trying to scale it. But when you're talking about the scale of some of these larger enterprises, it's just a different mentality. So we're trying to balance that of how we take that input into how we build our product. Talk >>About that, like the, the end user input and how you're taking that in, because of course it's only going to be a, you know, more of a symbiotic relationship when that customer feedback is taken and >>Acted on. Yeah, totally. And for us, because we use machine learning, it's a lot of building confidence with our users. So making sure that they understand how we look at the data, how we come up with the recommendations, and actually deploy those changes in their environment. There's a lot of trust that needs to be built there. So being able to go back to our users and say, Okay, we're presenting you this type of data, give us your feedback and building it alongside them has helped a lot in these >>Relationships. Absolutely. You said the word trust, and that's something that we talk about at every >>Show. I was gonna jump on that too. It's >>Not, Yeah, it's not a buzzword. It's not, It shouldn't be. Yeah. It really should be, I wanna say lived and breathed, but that's probably grammatically incorrect. >>We're not a gram show. It's okay darling. Yeah, thank >>You. It should be truly embodied. >>Yeah. And I, I think it's, it's not even unique to just what we do, but across tech in general, right? Like when I talk about SRE and building SRE teams, one of the things I mentioned is you have to build that trust first. And with machine learning, I think it can be really difficult too for a couple different reasons. Like one, it tends to be a black box if it's actually true machine learning. Totally. Which ours is. But the other piece that we run into. Yeah. And the other piece we run into though is, is what I was an executive at United Health Group before I joined Storm Forge. And I would get companies that would come to me and try to sell me machine learning and I would kind of look at it and say, Well no, that's just a basic decision tree. Or like, that's a super basic whole winter forecast, right? Like that's not actually machine learning. And that's one of the things that we actually find ourselves kind of battling a little bit when we talk about what we do in building that trust. >>Talk a little bit about the latest release as you guys had a very active September. Here we are. And towards the, I think end of October. Yeah. What are some of the, the new things that have come out? New integrations, new partnerships. Give us a scoop on that. >>Yeah, well I guess I'll start and then I'll probably hand it over to you. But like the, the big thing for us is we talked about automating Kubernetes in the very beginning, right? Like Kubernetes has got a vpa it's >>A wild sentence anyway. Yeah, yeah. >>It it >>Has. We're not gonna get over at the whole show. Yeah. >>It as a VPA built in, it has an HPA built in and, and when you look at the data and even when you read the documentation from Google, it explicitly says never the two should meet. Right. Because you'll end up thrashing and they'll fight each other. Well the big release we just announced is with our machine learning, we can now do both. And so we vertically scale your pods to the correct up. Yeah. >>Follow status. I love that. >>Yeah, we can, we can scale your pods to the correct size and still allow you to enable the HPA and we'll make recommendations for your scaling points and your thresholds on the HPA as well so that they can work together to really truly maximize your efficiency that without sacrificing your performance and your reliability of the applications that you're running. That >>Sounds like a massive differentiator for >>Storm launch, which I would say it is. Yeah. I think as far as I know, we're the first in the industry that can do this. Yeah. >>And >>From very singularity vibes too. You know, the machines are learning, teaching themselves and doing it all automatically. Yep. Gets me very >>Excited. >>Yeah, absolutely. And from a customer demand perspective, what's the feedback been? Yeah, it's been a few >>Weeks. Yeah, it's been really great actually. And a lot of why we went down this path was user driven because they're doing horizontal scale and they want to be able to vertically size as they're scaling. So if you put yourself in the shoes of someone that's configuring Kubernetes, you're usually guessing on what you're setting your CPU requests and limits do. But horizontal scale makes sense. You're either adding more things or removing more things. And so once they actually are scaled out as a large environment and they have to rethink, how am I gonna resize this now? It's just not possible. It's so many thousands of settings across all the different environments and you're only thinking about CPU memory, You're not thinking about a lot of things. It's just, but once you scale that out, it's a big challenge. So they came to us and said, Okay, you're doing, cuz we were doing vertical scaling before and now we enable vertical and horizontal. And so they came to us and said, I love what you're doing about right sizing, but we wanna be able to do this while also horizontally scaling. And so the way that our software works is we give you the recommendations for what the setting should be and then allow Kubernetes to continue to add and remove replicas as needed. So it's not like we're going in and making changes to Kubernetes, but we make changes to the configuration settings so that it's the most optimal from a resource perspective. >>Efficiency has been a real big theme of the show. Yeah. And it's clear that that's a focus for you. Everyone here wants to do more faster Of course. And innovation, that's the thing to do that sometimes we need partners. You just announced an integration with Datadog. Tell us about that. Yeah, >>Absolutely. Yeah. So the way our platform works is we need data of course, right? So they're, they're a great partner for us and we use them both as an input and an output. So we pull in metrics from Datadog to provide recommendations and we'll actually display all those within the Datadog portal. Cause we have a lot of users that are like, Look, Datadog's my single pane of glass and I hate using that word, but they get all their insights there. They can see their recommendations and then actually go deploy those. Whether they wanna automatically have the recommendations deployed or go in and actually push a button. >>So give me an example of a customer that is using the, the new release and some of the business outcomes they're achieving. I imagine one of the things that you're enabling is just closing that ES skills gap. But from a business level perspective, how are they gaining like competitive advantages to be able to get products to market faster, for example? >>Yeah, so one of the customers that was actually part of our press release and launch and spoke about us at a webinar, they are a SaaS product and deal with really bursty workloads. And so their cloud costs have been growing 40% year over year. And their platform engineering team is basically enabled to provide the automation for developers and in their environment, but also to reduce those costs. So they want to, it's that trade off of resiliency and cost performance. And so they came to us and said, Look, we know we're over provisioned, but we don't know how to tackle that problem without throwing tons of humans at the problem. And so we worked with them and just on a single app found 60% savings and we're working now to kind of deploy that across their entire production workload. But that allows them to then go back and get more out of the, the budget that they already have and they can kind of reallocate that in other areas, >>Right? So there can be chop line and bottom >>Line impact. Yeah. And I, I think there's some really direct impact to the carbon emissions of an organization as well. That's a good point. When you can reduce your compute consumption by 60%. >>I love this. We haven't talked about this at all during the show. Yeah. And I'm really glad that you brought this up. All of the things that power this use energy. Yeah. >>What is it like seven to 8% of all electricity in the world is consumed by data centers. Like it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And so like that's wild. Yeah. Yeah. So being able to make a reduction in impact there too, especially with organizations that are trying to sign green pledges and everything else. >>It's hard. Yeah. ESG initiatives are huge. >>Absolut, >>It's >>A whole lot. A lot of companies have ESG initiatives where they can't even go out and do an RFP with a business, Right. If they don't have an actual active starting, impactful ESG program. Yes. Yeah. >>And the RFPs that we have to fill out, we have to tell them how they'll help. >>Yeah. Yes. It's so, yeah, I mean I was really struck when I looked on your website and I saw 54% average cost reduction for Yeah. For your cloud operations. I hadn't even thought about it from a power perspective. Yeah. I mean, imagine if we cut that to 3% of the world's power grid. That is just, that is very compelling. Speaking of compelling and exciting future things, talk to us about what's next? What's got you pumped for 2023 and and what lies >>Ahead? Oh man. Well that seems like a product conversation for sure. >>Well, we're super excited about extending what we do to other platforms, other metrics. So we optimize a lot right now around CPU and memory, but we can also give people insights into, you know, limiting kills, limiting CPU throttling, so extending the metrics. And when you look at hba and horizontal scale today, most of it is done with cpu, but there are some organizations out there that are scaling on custom metrics. So being able to take in more data to provide more recommendations and kind of extend what we can do from an optimization standpoint. >>That's, yeah, that's cool. And what house you most excited on the show floor? Anything? Anything that you've seen? Any keynotes? >>There's, Well, I haven't had a lot of time to go to the keynotes unfortunately, but it's, >>Well, I'm shock you've been busy or something, right? Much your time here. >>I can't imagine why. But no, there's, it's really interesting to see all the vendors that are popping up around Kubernetes focus specifically with security is always something that's really interesting to me. And automating CICD and how they continue to dive into that automation devs, SEC ops continues to be a big thing for a lot of organizations. Yeah. Yeah. >>I I do, I think it's interesting when we marry, Were you guys here last year? >>I was not here. >>No. So at, at the smaller version of this in Los Angeles. Yeah. I, I was really struck because there was still a conversation of whether or not we were all in on Kubernetes as, as kind of a community and a society this year. And I'm curious if you feel this way too. Everyone feels committed. Yeah. Yeah. I I I feel like there's no question that Kubernetes is the tool that we are gonna be using. >>Yeah. I I think so. And I think a lot of that is actually being unlocked by some of these vendors that are being partners and helping people get the most outta Kubernetes, you know, especially at the larger enterprise organizations. Like they want to do it, but the skills gap is a very real problem. Right. And so figuring out, like Jasmine talked about figuring out how do we, you know, optimize or set up the correct settings without throwing thousands of humans at it. Never mind the fact you'll never find a thousand people that wanna do that all day every day. >>I was gonna, It's a fold endeavor for those >>People study, right? Yeah. And, and being able to close some of those gaps, whether it's optimization, security, DevOps, C I C D. As we get more of those partners like I just talked about on the floor, then you see more and more enterprises being more open to leaning into Kubernetes a little bit. >>Yeah. Yeah. We've seen, we've had some great conversations the last day and, and today as well with organizations that are history companies like Ford Motor Companies for >>Example. Yeah. Right. >>Just right behind us. One of their EVs and, and it's, they're becoming technology companies that happen to do cars or home >>Here. I had a nice job with 'em this morning. Yes. With that storyline, honestly. >>Yes. That when we now have such a different lens into these organizations, how they're using technologies, advanced technologies, Kubernetes, et cetera, to really become data companies. Yeah. Because they have to be, well the consumers on the other end expect a Home Depot or a Ford or whomever or your bank Yeah. To know who you are. I want the information right here whenever I need it so I can do the transaction I need and I want you to also deliver me information that is relevant to me. Yeah. Because there, there's no patience anymore. Yeah. >>And we partner with a lot of big FinTech companies and it's, it's very much that. It's like how do we continue to optimize? But then as they look at transitioning off of older organizations and capabilities, whether that's, they have a physical data center that's racked to the gills and they can't do anything about that, so they wanna move to cloud or they're just dipping their toe into even private cloud with Kubernetes in their own instances. A lot of it is how do we do this right? Like how do we lean in and, Yeah. >>Yeah. Well I think you said it really well that the debate seems to be over in terms of do we go in on Kubernetes? That that was a theme that I think we felt that yesterday, even on on day one of the keynotes. The community seems to be just craving more. I think that was another thing that we felt yesterday was all of the contributors and the collaborators, people want to be able to help drive this community forward because it's, it's a flywheel of symbiosis for all of the vendors here. The maintainers and, and really businesses in any industry can benefit. >>Yeah. It's super validating. I mean if you just look at the floor, there's like 20 different booths that talk about cost reporting for Kubernetes. So not only have people moved, but now they're dealing with those challenges at scale. And I think for us it's very validating because there's so many vendors that are looking into the reporting of this and showing you the problem that you have. And then where we can help is, okay, now you know, you have a problem, here's how we can fix it for you. >>Yeah. Yeah. That, that sort of dealing with challenges at scale that you set, I think that's also what we're hearing. Yeah. And seeing and feeling on the show floor. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>What can folks see and, and touch and feel in your booth? >>We have some demos there you can play around with the product. We're giving away a Lego set so we've let >>Gotta gets >>Are right now we're gonna have to get some Lego, We do a swag segment at the end of the day every day. Now we've >>Some cool socks. >>Yep. Socks are hot. Let's, let's actually talk about scale internally as our closing question. What's going on at Storm Forge? If someone's watching right now, they're excited. Are you hiring? We are hiring. Yeah. How can they stalk you? What's the >>School? Absolutely. So you can check us out on Storm forge.io. We're certainly hiring across the engineering organization. We're hiring across the UX a product organization. We're dealing, like I said, we've got some really big customers that we're, we're working through with some really fun challenges. And we're looking to continue to build on what we do and do new innovative things like especially cuz like I said, we are a machine learning organization first. And so for me it's like how do I collect all the data that I can and then let's find out what's interesting in there that we can help people with. Whether that's cpu, memory, custom metrics, like as said, preventing kills, driving availability, reliability, What can we do to, to kind of make a little bit more transparent the stuff that's going on underneath the covers in Kubernetes for the decision makers in these organizations. >>Yes. Transparency is a goal of >>Many. >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you mentioned fun. If this conversation is any representation, it would be very fun to be working on both of your teams. We, we have a lot of fun Ya. Patrick, thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having us, Lisa, As usual, thanks for being here with me. My pleasure. And thank you to all of you for turning into the Cubes live show from Detroit. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll be back in a few.

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore '22, formerly VMworld. This is our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellente. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware's here. Great to see you. Great keynote, day one. >> Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. >> And you had no problem with the keynotes. We're back in person. Smooth as silk up there. >> We were talking about it. We had to like dust off a cobweb to make some of these inputs. >> It's not like riding a bike. >> No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So, I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. >> You do a great check, great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there. Raghu set the table. I know this is for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, address the Broadcom thing right out of the gate, wave from Hock Tan in the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there, you got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was the important highlights for you to share, the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? >> Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. (John chuckles) I was a little bit worried, but he really did it. >> I said, I betcha that was real. (everyone chuckles) >> Anyways, the jokes aside, he did fabulous. Lays out the strategy. My thinking, as you said, was to first of all speak with their customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out and CVS Health story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud first, which is needed, I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team which oftentimes be a parallel work stream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this stove piped information coming at 'em. And the converge model is how he opted to organize his team. So we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. >> Yeah, first of all, great point. I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting coming into VMworld with super cloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds and into the hood. The chaos is real. So, good call. I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity, or an enemy proprietary. However you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent. And also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners, it was vibrant. They're all on this wave. There is a wave and an inflection point. So, okay. I buy that. So, if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at. People are feeling it. Some say, I don't have a problem but they're cut chaos such is the problem. So, where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? >> Yeah, you're a 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reigned in. So we are focused on two major things right now which we have made progress in. And maybe third, we are still work in-progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. Our Aria, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud. And then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So, number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do but we have the DNA as a company, we have done that with data centers in the past, even though being part of Dell we did that in the data center in the past, we have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnerships with cloud provider which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware cloud universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem, or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring going forward. >> Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not going to be too competitive, but more open. So the question I got to ask you is what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? 'Cause you got customers, partners and team of VMware, what's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? >> Over the hump. I mean, listen, our value is this community. All this community has one of two paths to go. Either, they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, "You know what? I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to reign the chaos," as you mentioned because tooling and technologies are available. And I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. >> You are the connective tissue. I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health where you talked about the private that's where you started, the public cloud ops team, bringing that together. The platform is the glue. That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in. That's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology which it's hard to build that. >> From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before in that level of comprehensiveness, from a more of a infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers, but what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we're truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. >> Yeah, it's funny, John, I'd say very challenging technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe, remember the marketing people killed that term. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything anywhere, any Kubernete, any container. >> That's the reality. That's the chaos. >> And the cloud and that's a new, real problem. Real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. >> Well, I mean it's aspirational, right? Let's get the reality, right? So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multicloud's a reality. The question is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You got to enable so the market- >> True, true. I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided, for their cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of their cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. >> That's the key. I think the simplest. So, I want to ask you, this comes up a lot and I love that you brought that up, simple and self-service has proven developers who are driving the change, cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easier to deploy. I want a test, if I don't like it, I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the question for you is as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there, because I think that's what I'm hearing here at this year, VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. >> They're connected. Yeah, so our vision is, if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly they're the ones who are driving innovation, just the amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged, yet remains the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers often time have taken control over decision on infrastructure and ops. Why? Because infrastructure and ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. (John chuckles) Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day to day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one by one functions of ops, move to ops because they don't like it. So with our approach and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team which is a reformatted version of the traditional ops, it has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need. So that developers think and do what they really love. And the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. >> Infrastructure is code. >> Infrastructure has code, and even next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. >> So it's self-service infrastructure. And then you've got to have that capability to simplified, I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolf is coming on Thursday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects. 'Cause you're not done yet. The project narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. >> There's really critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, is it's early days. >> Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on. And we were commenting on the keynote review, Hock Tan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. >> He'd be like, "Hmm, this extra value." (everyone chuckles) >> He's got to be pretty stoked, don't you think? >> He is, he is. >> There's a lot of headroom on the margin. >> I mean, independent to that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers which is what, in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all great. >> Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energize. It's always been energized, but energized cuz it's sort of had to be, cuz it's such a strong- >> And there was the Dell history there too. >> But, yeah it was always EMC, and then Dell, and now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's- >> Really it's released almost. I like this new team, we've been calling this new ops kind of vibe going refactored ops, as you said, that's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. >> They want to go faster. >> They want to go fast cuz the velocity's paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. >> That's it. >> And let me drive this car. >> That's it because I mean think about it, if you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how to operate the code in production because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to spend my time building the applications and that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. >> And then I got to mention the props of seeing project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. >> I mean at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in a holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing, 20% increase in calls. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next five-six years. >> You would and if I don't have to make any changes and I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the Silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's law which was whatever, 35-40% a year, we're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvements. >> I think when you have an inflection point as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talent, new functionality, new use cases. So, we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware VMworld, now VMware Explore, we've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Raghu thing in the keynote. During the end, before the collective responsibility sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment, "As proud as we are," which is a word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Raghu kind of weaved that in there, I noticed that, I want to call that out there because Raghu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, "I'm a product guy." He's delivering keynote. >> Almost 20 years. >> As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware, Sumit, talk about that dynamic because you mentioned customers, your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, I mean 99%, whatever percentage it is, it's huge penetration. >> We are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Raghu or myself, or other executives changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies, we're just proud. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us. It's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud, that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to just the events team alone. Of course our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job, but we brought this team and we said, "We are going to get you to run an event after three years from not they doing one, we're going to change the name on you, we're going to change the attendees you're going to invite, we're going to change the fact that it's going to be new speakers who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. >> You're also going to serve a virtual audience. >> And we're going to have a virtual audience. And you know what? They embraced it and they surprised us and it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. >> The VMware team always steps up. You never slight it, you've got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, the segment, and I'll get your thoughts and reactions, Sumit, is again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have theCUBE tape to go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Multicloud, Raghu, I talked to Raghu in 2016 when he did the Pat Gelsinger, I mean Raghu, Pat and Andy Jassy. >> Yeah. >> When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multicloud, even then 2016, so this is not new. >> Yeah. >> You had the vision, there's a lot of stuff in the oven. You guys make announcements directionally, and then start chipping away at it. Now you got Broadcom buys VMware, what's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits are starting to bear on the tree. There's a lot of good stuff and just put that, contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? >> First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it. Okay, so that's number one. Now having said that what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We are not done on networking side. Okay, we announced something as project Northstar with networking portfolio, that's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of O-RAN as well as our edge solutions, along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross cloud services. They're all really, some of them where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there such as Aria continuation, some of them where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. >> All right. Sumit, what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team, we got that. Great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys, the team? >> I think for us, two things, first of all, this is our momentum season as we call it. So for the first time, after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored to five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, we are expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touchpoint, cuz we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. >> Sumit, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing what's going on. Appreciate it. >> Always great to have chatting. >> Here with the president, the CEO's coming up next in theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after the short breaks, stay with us. (upbeat music)

(energetic music) >> Okay, we're back with Justin Borgman, CEO of Starburst, Richard Jarvis is the CTO of EMIS Health, and Teresa Tung is the cloud first technologist from Accenture. We're on to lie number three. And that is the claim that today's "Modern Data Stack" is actually modern. So (chuckles), I guess that's the lie. Or, is that it's not modern. Justin, what do you say? >> Yeah, I think new isn't modern. Right? I think it's the new data stack. It's the cloud data stack, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's modern. I think a lot of the components actually, are exactly the same as what we've had for 40 years. Rather than Teradata, you have Snowflake. Rather than Informatica, you have Fivetran. So, it's the same general stack, just, y'know, a cloud version of it. And I think a lot of the challenges that have plagued us for 40 years still maintain. >> So, let me come back to you Justin. Okay, but there are differences, right? You can scale. You can throw resources at the problem. You can separate compute from storage. You really, there's a lot of money being thrown at that by venture capitalists, and Snowflake you mentioned, its competitors. So that's different. Is it not? Is that not at least an aspect of modern dial it up, dial it down? So what do you say to that? >> Well, it is. It's certainly taking, y'know what the cloud offers and taking advantage of that. But it's important to note that the cloud data warehouses out there are really just separating their compute from their storage. So it's allowing them to scale up and down, but your data's still stored in a proprietary format. You're still locked in. You still have to ingest the data to get it even prepared for analysis. So a lot of the same structural constraints that exist with the old enterprise data warehouse model on-preem still exist. Just yes, a little bit more elastic now because the cloud offers that. >> So Teresa, let me go to you, 'cause you have cloud-first in your title. So, what's say you to this conversation? >> Well, even the cloud providers are looking towards more of a cloud continuum, right? So the centralized cloud as we know it, maybe data lake, data warehouse in the central place, that's not even how the cloud providers are looking at it. They have use query services. Every provider has one that really expands those queries to be beyond a single location. And if we look at a lot of where our- the future goes, right? That's going to very much fall the same thing. There was going to be more edge. There's going to be more on-premise, because of data sovereignty, data gravity, because you're working with different parts of the business that have already made major cloud investments in different cloud providers, right? So, there's a lot of reasons why the modern, I guess, the next modern generation of the data stack needs to be much more federated. >> Okay, so Richard, how do you deal with this? You've obviously got, you know, the technical debt, the existing infrastructure, it's on the books. You don't want to just throw it out. A lot of conversation about modernizing applications, which a lot of times is, you know, of microservices layer on top of legacy apps. How do you think about the Modern Data Stack? >> Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the stack really has to include the processes and people around the data as well is all well and good changing the technology. But if you don't modernize how people use that technology, then you're not going to be able to, to scale because just 'cause you can scale CPU and storage doesn't mean you can get more people to use your data to generate you more value for the business. And so what we've been looking at is really changing in very much aligned to data products and, and data mesh. How do you enable more people to consume the service and have the stack respond in a way that keeps costs low? Because that's important for our customers consuming this data but also allows people to occasionally run enormous queries and then tick along with smaller ones when required. And it's a good job we did because during COVID all of a sudden we had enormous pressures on our data platform to answer really important life threatening queries. And if we couldn't scale both our data stack and our teams we wouldn't have been able to answer those as quickly as we had. So I think the stack needs to support a scalable business not just the technology itself. >> Well thank you for that. So Justin let's, let's try to break down what the critical aspects are of the modern data stack. So you think about the past, you know, five seven years cloud obviously has given a different pricing model. Derisked experimentation, you know that we talked about the ability to scale up scale down, but it's, I'm taking away that that's not enough. Based on what Richard just said, the modern data stack has to serve the business and enable the business to build data products. I buy that. I'm you a big fan of the data mesh concepts, even though we're early days. So what are the critical aspects if you had to think about you know, the, maybe putting some guardrails and definitions around the modern data stack, what does that look like? What are some of the attributes and, and principles there >> Of how it should look like or, or how >> Yeah. What it should be? >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, in, in Theresa mentioned this in in a previous segment about the data warehouse is not necessarily going to disappear. It just becomes one node, one element of the overall data mesh. And I certainly agree with that. So by no means, are we suggesting that, you know Snowflake or what Redshift or whatever cloud data warehouse you may be using is going to disappear, but it's it's not going to become the end all be all. It's not the, the central single source of truth. And I think that's the paradigm shift that needs to occur. And I think it's also worth noting that those who were the early adopters of the modern data stack were primarily digital, native born in the cloud young companies who had the benefit of of idealism. They had the benefit of starting with a clean slate that does not reflect the vast majority of enterprises. And even those companies, as they grow up, mature out of that ideal state, they go by a business. Now they've got something on another cloud provider that has a different data stack and they have to deal with that heterogeneity that is just change and change is a part of life. And so I think there is an element here that is almost philosophical. It's like, do you believe in an absolute ideal where I can just fit everything into one place or do I believe in reality? And I think the far more pragmatic approach is really what data mesh represents. So to answer your question directly, I think it's adding you know, the ability to access data that lives outside of the data warehouse, maybe living in open data formats in a data lake or accessing operational systems as well. Maybe you want to directly access data that lives in an Oracle database or a Mongo database or, or what have you. So creating that flexibility to really future proof yourself from the inevitable change that you will you won't encounter over time. >> So thank you. So Theresa, based on what Justin just said, I I might take away there is it's inclusive whether it's a data mart, data hub, data lake, data warehouse, just a node on the mesh. Okay. I get that. Does that include Theresa on, on Preem data? Obviously it has to. What are you seeing in terms of the ability to, to take that data mesh concept on Preem I mean most implementations I've seen and data mesh, frankly really aren't, you know adhering to the philosophy there. Maybe, maybe it's data lake and maybe it's using glue. You look at what JPMC is doing, HelloFresh, a lot of stuff happening on the AWS cloud in that, you know, closed stack, if you will. What's the answer to that Theresa? >> I mean, I think it's a killer case for data mesh. The fact that you have valuable data sources on Preem, and then yet you still want to modernize and take the best of cloud. Cloud is still, like we mentioned, there's a lot of great reasons for it around the economics and the way ability to tap into the innovation that the cloud providers are giving around data and AI architecture. It's an easy button. So the mesh allows you to have the best of both world. You can start using the data products on Preem, or in the existing systems that are working already. It's meaningful for the business. At the same time, you can modernize the ones that make business sense because it needs better performance. It needs, you know, something that is, is cheaper or or maybe just tapping into better analytics to get better insights, right? So you're going to be able to stretch and really have the best of both worlds. That, again, going back to Richard's point, that is meaningful by the business. Not everything has to have that one size fits all set a tool. >> Okay. Thank you. So Richard, you know, talking about data as product wonder if we could give us your perspectives here what are the advantages of treating data as a product? What, what role do data products have in the modern data stack? We talk about monetizing data. What are your thoughts on data products? >> So for us, one of the most important data products that we've been creating is taking data that is healthcare data across a wide variety of different settings. So information about patients, demographics about their their treatment, about their medications and so on, and taking that into a standards format that can be utilized by a wide variety of different researchers because misinterpreting that data or having the data not presented in the way that the user is expecting means that you generate the wrong insight and in any business that's clearly not a desirable outcome but when that insight is so critical as it might be in healthcare or some security settings you really have to have gone to the trouble of understanding the data, presenting it in a format that everyone can clearly agree on. And then letting people consume in a very structured managed way, even if that data comes from a variety of different sources in the first place. And so our data product journey has really begun by standardizing data across a number of different silos through the data mesh. So we can present out both internally and through the right governance externally to, to researchers. >> So that data product through whatever APIs is is accessible, it's discoverable, but it's obviously got to be governed as well. You mentioned appropriately provided to internally. >> Yeah. >> But also, you know, external folks as well. So the, so you've, you've architected that capability today? >> We have and because the data is standard it can generate value much more quickly and we can be sure of the security and value that that's providing, because the data product isn't just about formatting the data into the correct tables, it's understanding what it means to redact the data or to remove certain rows from it or to interpret what a date actually means. Is it the start of the contract or the start of the treatment or the date of birth of a patient? These things can be lost in the data storage without having the proper product management around the data to say in a very clear business context what does this data mean, and what does it mean to process this data for a particular use case. >> Yeah, it makes sense. It's got the context. If the, if the domains on the data, you know you got to cut through a lot of the, the centralized teams, the technical teams that that data agnostic, they don't really have that context. All right, let's end. Justin. How does Starburst fit into this modern data stack? Bring us home. >> Yeah. So I think for us it's really providing our customers with, you know the flexibility to operate and analyze data that lives in a wide variety of different systems. Ultimately giving them that optionality, you know and optionality provides the ability to reduce costs store more in a data lake rather than data warehouse. It provides the ability for the fastest time to insight to access the data directly where it lives. And ultimately with this concept of data products that we've now, you know incorporated into our offering as well you can really create and, and curate, you know data as a product to be shared and consumed. So we're trying to help enable the data mesh, you know model and make that an appropriate compliment to you know, the modern data stack that people have today. >> Excellent. Hey, I want to thank Justin, Teresa, and Richard for joining us today. You guys are great. Big believers in the in the data mesh concept, and I think, you know we're seeing the future of data architecture. So thank you. Now, remember, all these conversations are going to be available on the cube.net for on demand viewing. You can also go to starburst.io. They have some great content on the website and they host some really thought provoking interviews and they have awesome resources. Lots of data mesh conversations over there and really good stuff in, in the resource section. So check that out. Thanks for watching the "Data Doesn't Lie... or Does It?" made possible by Starburst data. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> In 2011, early Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher famously said, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads, and that sucks!" Let's face it. More than a decade later, organizations continue to be frustrated with how difficult it is to get value from data and build a truly agile and data-driven enterprise. What does that even mean, you ask? Well, it means that everyone in the organization has the data they need when they need it in a context that's relevant to advance the mission of an organization. Now, that could mean cutting costs, could mean increasing profits, driving productivity, saving lives, accelerating drug discovery, making better diagnoses, solving supply chain problems, predicting weather disasters, simplifying processes, and thousands of other examples where data can completely transform people's lives beyond manipulating internet users to behave a certain way. We've heard the prognostications about the possibilities of data before and in fairness we've made progress, but the hard truth is the original promises of master data management, enterprise data warehouses, data marts, data hubs, and yes even data lakes were broken and left us wanting for more. Welcome to The Data Doesn't Lie... Or Does It? A series of conversations produced by theCUBE and made possible by Starburst Data. I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and joining me today are three industry experts. Justin Borgman is the co-founder and CEO of Starburst, Richard Jarvis is the CTO at EMIS Health, and Teresa Tung is cloud first technologist at Accenture. Today, we're going to have a candid discussion that will expose the unfulfilled, and yes, broken promises of a data past. We'll expose data lies: big lies, little lies, white lies, and hidden truths. And we'll challenge, age old data conventions and bust some data myths. We're debating questions like is the demise of a single source of truth inevitable? Will the data warehouse ever have feature parity with the data lake or vice versa? Is the so-called modern data stack simply centralization in the cloud, AKA the old guards model in new cloud close? How can organizations rethink their data architectures and regimes to realize the true promises of data? Can and will an open ecosystem deliver on these promises in our lifetimes? We're spanning much of the Western world today. Richard is in the UK, Teresa is on the West Coast, and Justin is in Massachusetts with me. I'm in theCUBE studios, about 30 miles outside of Boston. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, let's get right into it. You're very welcome. Now, here's the first lie. The most effective data architecture is one that is centralized with a team of data specialists serving various lines of business. What do you think Justin? >> Yeah, definitely a lie. My first startup was a company called Hadapt, which was an early SQL engine for IDU that was acquired by Teradata. And when I got to Teradata, of course, Teradata is the pioneer of that central enterprise data warehouse model. One of the things that I found fascinating was that not one of their customers had actually lived up to that vision of centralizing all of their data into one place. They all had data silos. They all had data in different systems. They had data on prem, data in the cloud. Those companies were acquiring other companies and inheriting their data architecture. So despite being the industry leader for 40 years, not one of their customers truly had everything in one place. So I think definitely history has proven that to be a lie. >> So Richard, from a practitioner's point of view, what are your thoughts? I mean, there's a lot of pressure to cut cost, keep things centralized, serve the business as best as possible from that standpoint. What does your experience show? >> Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo Justin's experience really that we as a business have grown up through acquisition, through storing data in different places sometimes to do information governance in different ways to store data in a platform that's close to data experts people who really understand healthcare data from pharmacies or from doctors. And so, although if you were starting from a greenfield site and you were building something brand new, you might be able to centralize all the data and all of the tooling and teams in one place. The reality is that businesses just don't grow up like that. And it's just really impossible to get that academic perfection of storing everything in one place. >> Teresa, I feel like Sarbanes-Oxley have kind of saved the data warehouse, right? (laughs) You actually did have to have a single version of the truth for certain financial data, but really for some of those other use cases I mentioned, I do feel like the industry has kind of let us down. What's your take on this? Where does it make sense to have that sort of centralized approach versus where does it make sense to maybe decentralize? >> I think you got to have centralized governance, right? So from the central team, for things like Sarbanes-Oxley, for things like security, for certain very core data sets having a centralized set of roles, responsibilities to really QA, right? To serve as a design authority for your entire data estate, just like you might with security, but how it's implemented has to be distributed. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to scale, right? So being able to have different parts of the business really make the right data investments for their needs. And then ultimately, you're going to collaborate with your partners. So partners that are not within the company, right? External partners. We're going to see a lot more data sharing and model creation. And so you're definitely going to be decentralized. >> So Justin, you guys last, jeez, I think it was about a year ago, had a session on data mesh. It was a great program. You invited Zhamak Dehghani. Of course, she's the creator of the data mesh. One of our fundamental premises is that you've got this hyper specialized team that you've got to go through if you want anything. But at the same time, these individuals actually become a bottleneck, even though they're some of the most talented people in the organization. So I guess, a question for you Richard. How do you deal with that? Do you organize so that there are a few sort of rock stars that build cubes and the like or have you had any success in sort of decentralizing with your constituencies that data model? >> Yeah. So we absolutely have got rockstar data scientists and data guardians, if you like. People who understand what it means to use this data, particularly the data that we use at EMIS is very private, it's healthcare information. And some of the rules and regulations around using the data are very complex and strict. So we have to have people who understand the usage of the data, then people who understand how to build models, how to process the data effectively. And you can think of them like consultants to the wider business because a pharmacist might not understand how to structure a SQL query, but they do understand how they want to process medication information to improve patient lives. And so that becomes a consulting type experience from a set of rock stars to help a more decentralized business who needs to understand the data and to generate some valuable output. >> Justin, what do you say to a customer or prospect that says, "Look, Justin. I got a centralized team and that's the most cost effective way to serve the business. Otherwise, I got duplication." What do you say to that? >> Well, I would argue it's probably not the most cost effective, and the reason being really twofold. I think, first of all, when you are deploying a enterprise data warehouse model, the data warehouse itself is very expensive, generally speaking. And so you're putting all of your most valuable data in the hands of one vendor who now has tremendous leverage over you for many, many years to come. I think that's the story at Oracle or Teradata or other proprietary database systems. But the other aspect I think is that the reality is those central data warehouse teams, as much as they are experts in the technology, they don't necessarily understand the data itself. And this is one of the core tenets of data mesh that Zhamak writes about is this idea of the domain owners actually know the data the best. And so by not only acknowledging that data is generally decentralized, and to your earlier point about Sarbanes-Oxley, maybe saving the data warehouse, I would argue maybe GDPR and data sovereignty will destroy it because data has to be decentralized for those laws to be compliant. But I think the reality is the data mesh model basically says data's decentralized and we're going to turn that into an asset rather than a liability. And we're going to turn that into an asset by empowering the people that know the data the best to participate in the process of curating and creating data products for consumption. So I think when you think about it that way, you're going to get higher quality data and faster time to insight, which is ultimately going to drive more revenue for your business and reduce costs. So I think that that's the way I see the two models comparing and contrasting. >> So do you think the demise of the data warehouse is inevitable? Teresa, you work with a lot of clients. They're not just going to rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Maybe they're going to build on top of it, but what does that mean? Does that mean the EDW just becomes less and less valuable over time or it's maybe just isolated to specific use cases? What's your take on that? >> Listen, I still would love all my data within a data warehouse. I would love it mastered, would love it owned by a central team, right? I think that's still what I would love to have. That's just not the reality, right? The investment to actually migrate and keep that up to date, I would say it's a losing battle. Like we've been trying to do it for a long time. Nobody has the budgets and then data changes, right? There's going to be a new technology that's going to emerge that we're going to want to tap into. There's going to be not enough investment to bring all the legacy, but still very useful systems into that centralized view. So you keep the data warehouse. I think it's a very, very valuable, very high performance tool for what it's there for, but you could have this new mesh layer that still takes advantage of the things I mentioned: the data products in the systems that are meaningful today, and the data products that actually might span a number of systems. Maybe either those that either source systems with the domains that know it best, or the consumer-based systems or products that need to be packaged in a way that'd be really meaningful for that end user, right? Each of those are useful for a different part of the business and making sure that the mesh actually allows you to use all of them. >> So, Richard, let me ask you. Take Zhamak's principles back to those. You got the domain ownership and data as product. Okay, great. Sounds good. But it creates what I would argue are two challenges: self-serve infrastructure, let's park that for a second, and then in your industry, one of the most regulated, most sensitive, computational governance. How do you automate and ensure federated governance in that mesh model that Teresa was just talking about? >> Well, it absolutely depends on some of the tooling and processes that you put in place around those tools to centralize the security and the governance of the data. And I think although a data warehouse makes that very simple 'cause it's a single tool, it's not impossible with some of the data mesh technologies that are available. And so what we've done at EMIS is we have a single security layer that sits on top of our data mesh, which means that no matter which user is accessing which data source, we go through a well audited, well understood security layer. That means that we know exactly who's got access to which data field, which data tables. And then everything that they do is audited in a very kind of standard way regardless of the underlying data storage technology. So for me, although storing the data in one place might not be possible, understanding where your source of truth is and securing that in a common way is still a valuable approach, and you can do it without having to bring all that data into a single bucket so that it's all in one place. And so having done that and investing quite heavily in making that possible has paid dividends in terms of giving wider access to the platform, and ensuring that only data that's available under GDPR and other regulations is being used by the data users. >> Yeah. So Justin, we always talk about data democratization, and up until recently, they really haven't been line of sight as to how to get there, but do you have anything to add to this because you're essentially doing analytic queries with data that's all dispersed all over. How are you seeing your customers handle this challenge? >> Yeah, I mean, I think data products is a really interesting aspect of the answer to that. It allows you to, again, leverage the data domain owners, the people who know the data the best, to create data as a product ultimately to be consumed. And we try to represent that in our product as effectively, almost eCommerce like experience where you go and discover and look for the data products that have been created in your organization, and then you can start to consume them as you'd like. And so really trying to build on that notion of data democratization and self-service, and making it very easy to discover and start to use with whatever BI tool you may like or even just running SQL queries yourself. >> Okay guys, grab a sip of water. After the short break, we'll be back to debate whether proprietary or open platforms are the best path to the future of data excellence. Keep it right there. (bright upbeat music)

>>In 2011, early Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Ocker famously said the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads. And that sucks. Let's face it more than a decade later organizations continue to be frustrated with how difficult it is to get value from data and build a truly agile data-driven enterprise. What does that even mean? You ask? Well, it means that everyone in the organization has the data they need when they need it. In a context that's relevant to advance the mission of an organization. Now that could mean cutting cost could mean increasing profits, driving productivity, saving lives, accelerating drug discovery, making better diagnoses, solving, supply chain problems, predicting weather disasters, simplifying processes, and thousands of other examples where data can completely transform people's lives beyond manipulating internet users to behave a certain way. We've heard the prognostications about the possibilities of data before and in fairness we've made progress, but the hard truth is the original promises of master data management, enterprise data, warehouses, data marts, data hubs, and yes, even data lakes were broken and left us wanting from more welcome to the data doesn't lie, or doesn't a series of conversations produced by the cube and made possible by Starburst data. >>I'm your host, Dave Lanta and joining me today are three industry experts. Justin Borgman is this co-founder and CEO of Starburst. Richard Jarvis is the CTO at EMI health and Theresa tongue is cloud first technologist at Accenture. Today we're gonna have a candid discussion that will expose the unfulfilled and yes, broken promises of a data past we'll expose data lies, big lies, little lies, white lies, and hidden truths. And we'll challenge, age old data conventions and bust some data myths. We're debating questions like is the demise of a single source of truth. Inevitable will the data warehouse ever have featured parody with the data lake or vice versa is the so-called modern data stack, simply centralization in the cloud, AKA the old guards model in new cloud close. How can organizations rethink their data architectures and regimes to realize the true promises of data can and will and open ecosystem deliver on these promises in our lifetimes, we're spanning much of the Western world today. Richard is in the UK. Teresa is on the west coast and Justin is in Massachusetts with me. I'm in the cube studios about 30 miles outside of Boston folks. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Let's get right into it. You're very welcome. Now here's the first lie. The most effective data architecture is one that is centralized with a team of data specialists serving various lines of business. What do you think Justin? >>Yeah, definitely a lie. My first startup was a company called hit adapt, which was an early SQL engine for hit that was acquired by Teradata. And when I got to Teradata, of course, Teradata is the pioneer of that central enterprise data warehouse model. One of the things that I found fascinating was that not one of their customers had actually lived up to that vision of centralizing all of their data into one place. They all had data silos. They all had data in different systems. They had data on prem data in the cloud. You know, those companies were acquiring other companies and inheriting their data architecture. So, you know, despite being the industry leader for 40 years, not one of their customers truly had everything in one place. So I think definitely history has proven that to be a lie. >>So Richard, from a practitioner's point of view, you know, what, what are your thoughts? I mean, there, there's a lot of pressure to cut cost, keep things centralized, you know, serve the business as best as possible from that standpoint. What, what is your experience show? >>Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo Justin's experience really that we, as a business have grown up through acquisition, through storing data in different places sometimes to do information governance in different ways to store data in, in a platform that's close to data experts, people who really understand healthcare data from pharmacies or from, from doctors. And so, although if you were starting from a Greenfield site and you were building something brand new, you might be able to centralize all the data and all of the tooling and teams in one place. The reality is that that businesses just don't grow up like that. And, and it's just really impossible to get that academic perfection of, of storing everything in one place. >>Y you know, Theresa, I feel like Sarbanes Oxley kinda saved the data warehouse, you know, right. You actually did have to have a single version of the truth for certain financial data, but really for those, some of those other use cases, I, I mentioned, I, I do feel like the industry has kinda let us down. What's your take on this? Where does it make sense to have that sort of centralized approach versus where does it make sense to maybe decentralized? >>I, I think you gotta have centralized governance, right? So from the central team, for things like star Oxley, for things like security for certainly very core data sets, having a centralized set of roles, responsibilities to really QA, right. To serve as a design authority for your entire data estate, just like you might with security, but how it's implemented has to be distributed. Otherwise you're not gonna be able to scale. Right? So being able to have different parts of the business really make the right data investments for their needs. And then ultimately you're gonna collaborate with your partners. So partners that are not within the company, right. External partners, we're gonna see a lot more data sharing and model creation. And so you're definitely going to be decentralized. >>So, you know, Justin, you guys last, geez, I think it was about a year ago, had a session on, on data mesh. It was a great program. You invited Jamma, Dani, of course, she's the creator of the data mesh. And her one of our fundamental premises is that you've got this hyper specialized team that you've gotta go through. And if you want anything, but at the same time, these, these individuals actually become a bottleneck, even though they're some of the most talented people in the organization. So I guess question for you, Richard, how do you deal with that? Do you, do you organize so that there are a few sort of rock stars that, that, you know, build cubes and, and the like, and, and, and, or have you had any success in sort of decentralizing with, you know, your, your constituencies, that data model? >>Yeah. So, so we absolutely have got rockstar, data scientists and data guardians. If you like people who understand what it means to use this data, particularly as the data that we use at emos is very private it's healthcare information. And some of the, the rules and regulations around using the data are very complex and, and strict. So we have to have people who understand the usage of the data, then people who understand how to build models, how to process the data effectively. And you can think of them like consultants to the wider business, because a pharmacist might not understand how to structure a SQL query, but they do understand how they want to process medication information to improve patient lives. And so that becomes a, a consulting type experience from a, a set of rock stars to help a, a more decentralized business who needs to, to understand the data and to generate some valuable output. >>Justin, what do you say to a, to a customer or prospect that says, look, Justin, I'm gonna, I got a centralized team and that's the most cost effective way to serve the business. Otherwise I got, I got duplication. What do you say to that? >>Well, I, I would argue it's probably not the most cost effective and, and the reason being really twofold. I think, first of all, when you are deploying a enterprise data warehouse model, the, the data warehouse itself is very expensive, generally speaking. And so you're putting all of your most valuable data in the hands of one vendor who now has tremendous leverage over you, you know, for many, many years to come. I think that's the story at Oracle or Terra data or other proprietary database systems. But the other aspect I think is that the reality is those central data warehouse teams is as much as they are experts in the technology. They don't necessarily understand the data itself. And this is one of the core tenants of data mash that that jam writes about is this idea of the domain owners actually know the data the best. >>And so by, you know, not only acknowledging that data is generally decentralized and to your earlier point about SAR, brain Oxley, maybe saving the data warehouse, I would argue maybe GDPR and data sovereignty will destroy it because data has to be decentralized for, for those laws to be compliant. But I think the reality is, you know, the data mesh model basically says, data's decentralized, and we're gonna turn that into an asset rather than a liability. And we're gonna turn that into an asset by empowering the people that know the data, the best to participate in the process of, you know, curating and creating data products for, for consumption. So I think when you think about it, that way, you're going to get higher quality data and faster time to insight, which is ultimately going to drive more revenue for your business and reduce costs. So I think that that's the way I see the two, the two models comparing and contrasting. >>So do you think the demise of the data warehouse is inevitable? I mean, I mean, you know, there Theresa you work with a lot of clients, they're not just gonna rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Maybe they're gonna build on top of it, but what does that mean? Does that mean the E D w just becomes, you know, less and less valuable over time, or it's maybe just isolated to specific use cases. What's your take on that? >>Listen, I still would love all my data within a data warehouse would love it. Mastered would love it owned by essential team. Right? I think that's still what I would love to have. That's just not the reality, right? The investment to actually migrate and keep that up to date. I would say it's a losing battle. Like we've been trying to do it for a long time. Nobody has the budgets and then data changes, right? There's gonna be a new technology. That's gonna emerge that we're gonna wanna tap into. There's going to be not enough investment to bring all the legacy, but still very useful systems into that centralized view. So you keep the data warehouse. I think it's a very, very valuable, very high performance tool for what it's there for, but you could have this, you know, new mesh layer that still takes advantage of the things. I mentioned, the data products in the systems that are meaningful today and the data products that actually might span a number of systems, maybe either those that either source systems for the domains that know it best, or the consumer based systems and products that need to be packaged in a way that be really meaningful for that end user, right? Each of those are useful for a different part of the business and making sure that the mesh actually allows you to use all of them. >>So, Richard, let me ask you, you take, take Gemma's principles back to those. You got to, you know, domain ownership and, and, and data as product. Okay, great. Sounds good. But it creates what I would argue are two, you know, challenges, self-serve infrastructure let's park that for a second. And then in your industry, the one of the high, most regulated, most sensitive computational governance, how do you automate and ensure federated governance in that mesh model that Theresa was just talking about? >>Well, it absolutely depends on some of the tooling and processes that you put in place around those tools to be, to centralize the security and the governance of the data. And I think, although a data warehouse makes that very simple, cause it's a single tool, it's not impossible with some of the data mesh technologies that are available. And so what we've done at emus is we have a single security layer that sits on top of our data match, which means that no matter which user is accessing, which data source, we go through a well audited well understood security layer. That means that we know exactly who's got access to which data field, which data tables. And then everything that they do is, is audited in a very kind of standard way, regardless of the underlying data storage technology. So for me, although storing the data in one place might not be possible understanding where your source of truth is and securing that in a common way is still a valuable approach and you can do it without having to bring all that data into a single bucket so that it's all in one place. And, and so having done that and investing quite heavily in making that possible has paid dividends in terms of giving wider access to the platform and ensuring that only data that's available under GDPR and other regulations is being used by, by the data users. >>Yeah. So Justin, I mean, Democrat, we always talk about data democratization and you know, up until recently, they really haven't been line of sight as to how to get there. But do you have anything to add to this because you're essentially taking, you know, do an analytic queries and with data that's all dispersed all over the, how are you seeing your customers handle this, this challenge? >>Yeah. I mean, I think data products is a really interesting aspect of the answer to that. It allows you to, again, leverage the data domain owners, people know the data, the best to, to create, you know, data as a product ultimately to be consumed. And we try to represent that in our product as effectively a almost eCommerce like experience where you go and discover and look for the data products that have been created in your organization. And then you can start to consume them as, as you'd like. And so really trying to build on that notion of, you know, data democratization and self-service, and making it very easy to discover and, and start to use with whatever BI tool you, you may like, or even just running, you know, SQL queries yourself, >>Okay. G guys grab a sip of water. After this short break, we'll be back to debate whether proprietary or open platforms are the best path to the future of data excellence, keep it right there. >>Your company has more data than ever, and more people trying to understand it, but there's a problem. Your data is stored across multiple systems. It's hard to access and that delays analytics and ultimately decisions. The old method of moving all of your data into a single source of truth is slow and definitely not built for the volume of data we have today or where we are headed while your data engineers spent over half their time, moving data, your analysts and data scientists are left, waiting, feeling frustrated, unproductive, and unable to move the needle for your business. But what if you could spend less time moving or copying data? What if your data consumers could analyze all your data quickly? >>Starburst helps your teams run fast queries on any data source. We help you create a single point of access to your data, no matter where it's stored. And we support high concurrency, we solve for speed and scale, whether it's fast, SQL queries on your data lake or faster queries across multiple data sets, Starburst helps your teams run analytics anywhere you can't afford to wait for data to be available. Your team has questions that need answers. Now with Starburst, the wait is over. You'll have faster access to data with enterprise level security, easy connectivity, and 24 7 support from experts, organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact our Trino experts to get started. >>We're back with Jess Borgman of Starburst and Richard Jarvis of EVAs health. Okay, we're gonna get to lie. Number two, and that is this an open source based platform cannot give you the performance and control that you can get with a proprietary system. Is that a lie? Justin, the enterprise data warehouse has been pretty dominant and has evolved and matured. Its stack has mature over the years. Why is it not the default platform for data? >>Yeah, well, I think that's become a lie over time. So I, I think, you know, if we go back 10 or 12 years ago with the advent of the first data lake really around Hudu, that probably was true that you couldn't get the performance that you needed to run fast, interactive, SQL queries in a data lake. Now a lot's changed in 10 or 12 years. I remember in the very early days, people would say, you you'll never get performance because you need to be column there. You need to store data in a column format. And then, you know, column formats we're introduced to, to data apes, you have Parque ORC file in aro that were created to ultimately deliver performance out of that. So, okay. We got, you know, largely over the performance hurdle, you know, more recently people will say, well, you don't have the ability to do updates and deletes like a traditional data warehouse. >>And now we've got the creation of new data formats, again like iceberg and Delta and Hodi that do allow for updates and delete. So I think the data lake has continued to mature. And I remember a, a quote from, you know, Kurt Monash many years ago where he said, you know, know it takes six or seven years to build a functional database. I think that's that's right. And now we've had almost a decade go by. So, you know, these technologies have matured to really deliver very, very close to the same level performance and functionality of, of cloud data warehouses. So I think the, the reality is that's become a line and now we have large giant hyperscale internet companies that, you know, don't have the traditional data warehouse at all. They do all of their analytics in a data lake. So I think we've, we've proven that it's very much possible today. >>Thank you for that. And so Richard, talk about your perspective as a practitioner in terms of what open brings you versus, I mean, look closed is it's open as a moving target. I remember Unix used to be open systems and so it's, it is an evolving, you know, spectrum, but, but from your perspective, what does open give you that you can't get from a proprietary system where you are fearful of in a proprietary system? >>I, I suppose for me open buys us the ability to be unsure about the future, because one thing that's always true about technology is it evolves in a, a direction, slightly different to what people expect. And what you don't want to end up is done is backed itself into a corner that then prevents it from innovating. So if you have chosen a technology and you've stored trillions of records in that technology and suddenly a new way of processing or machine learning comes out, you wanna be able to take advantage and your competitive edge might depend upon it. And so I suppose for us, we acknowledge that we don't have perfect vision of what the future might be. And so by backing open storage technologies, we can apply a number of different technologies to the processing of that data. And that gives us the ability to remain relevant, innovate on our data storage. And we have bought our way out of the, any performance concerns because we can use cloud scale infrastructure to scale up and scale down as we need. And so we don't have the concerns that we don't have enough hardware today to process what we want to do, want to achieve. We can just scale up when we need it and scale back down. So open source has really allowed us to maintain the being at the cutting edge. >>So Jess, let me play devil's advocate here a little bit, and I've talked to Shaak about this and you know, obviously her vision is there's an open source that, that the data meshes open source, an open source tooling, and it's not a proprietary, you know, you're not gonna buy a data mesh. You're gonna build it with, with open source toolings and, and vendors like you are gonna support it, but to come back to sort of today, you can get to market with a proprietary solution faster. I'm gonna make that statement. You tell me if it's a lie and then you can say, okay, we support Apache iceberg. We're gonna support open source tooling, take a company like VMware, not really in the data business, but how, the way they embraced Kubernetes and, and you know, every new open source thing that comes along, they say, we do that too. Why can't proprietary systems do that and be as effective? >>Yeah, well, I think at least with the, within the data landscape saying that you can access open data formats like iceberg or, or others is, is a bit dis disingenuous because really what you're selling to your customer is a certain degree of performance, a certain SLA, and you know, those cloud data warehouses that can reach beyond their own proprietary storage drop all the performance that they were able to provide. So it is, it reminds me kind of, of, again, going back 10 or 12 years ago when everybody had a connector to Haddo and that they thought that was the solution, right? But the reality was, you know, a connector was not the same as running workloads in Haddo back then. And I think similarly, you know, being able to connect to an external table that lives in an open data format, you know, you're, you're not going to give it the performance that your customers are accustomed to. And at the end of the day, they're always going to be predisposed. They're always going to be incentivized to get that data ingested into the data warehouse, cuz that's where they have control. And you know, the bottom line is the database industry has really been built around vendor lockin. I mean, from the start, how, how many people love Oracle today, but our customers, nonetheless, I think, you know, lockin is, is, is part of this industry. And I think that's really what we're trying to change with open data formats. >>Well, that's interesting reminded when I, you know, I see the, the gas price, the tees or gas price I, I drive up and then I say, oh, that's the cash price credit card. I gotta pay 20 cents more, but okay. But so the, the argument then, so let me, let me come back to you, Justin. So what's wrong with saying, Hey, we support open data formats, but yeah, you're gonna get better performance if you, if you keep it into our closed system, are you saying that long term that's gonna come back and bite you cuz you're gonna end up, you mentioned Oracle, you mentioned Teradata. Yeah. That's by, by implication, you're saying that's where snowflake customers are headed. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a movie that, you know, we've all seen before. At least those of us who've been in the industry long enough to, to see this movie play over a couple times. So I do think that's the future. And I think, you know, I loved what Richard said. I actually wrote it down. Cause I thought it was an amazing quote. He said, it buys us the ability to be unsure of the future. Th that that pretty much says it all the, the future is unknowable and the reality is using open data formats. You remain interoperable with any technology you want to utilize. If you want to use spark to train a machine learning model and you want to use Starbust to query via sequel, that's totally cool. They can both work off the same exact, you know, data, data sets by contrast, if you're, you know, focused on a proprietary model, then you're kind of locked in again to that model. I think the same applies to data, sharing to data products, to a wide variety of, of aspects of the data landscape that a proprietary approach kind of closes you in and locks you in. >>So I, I would say this Richard, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Cause I talked to a lot of Oracle customers, not as many te data customers, but, but a lot of Oracle customers and they, you know, they'll admit, yeah, you know, they're jamming us on price and the license cost they give, but we do get value out of it. And so my question to you, Richard, is, is do the, let's call it data warehouse systems or the proprietary systems. Are they gonna deliver a greater ROI sooner? And is that in allure of, of that customers, you know, are attracted to, or can open platforms deliver as fast in ROI? >>I think the answer to that is it can depend a bit. It depends on your businesses skillset. So we are lucky that we have a number of proprietary teams that work in databases that provide our operational data capability. And we have teams of analytics and big data experts who can work with open data sets and open data formats. And so for those different teams, they can get to an ROI more quickly with different technologies for the business though, we can't do better for our operational data stores than proprietary databases. Today we can back off very tight SLAs to them. We can demonstrate reliability from millions of hours of those databases being run at enterprise scale, but for an analytics workload where increasing our business is growing in that direction, we can't do better than open data formats with cloud-based data mesh type technologies. And so it's not a simple answer. That one will always be the right answer for our business. We definitely have times when proprietary databases provide a capability that we couldn't easily represent or replicate with open technologies. >>Yeah. Richard, stay with you. You mentioned, you know, you know, some things before that, that strike me, you know, the data brick snowflake, you know, thing is, oh, is a lot of fun for analysts like me. You've got data bricks coming at it. Richard, you mentioned you have a lot of rockstar, data engineers, data bricks coming at it from a data engineering heritage. You get snowflake coming at it from an analytics heritage. Those two worlds are, are colliding people like PJI Mohan said, you know what? I think it's actually harder to play in the data engineering. So I E it's easier to for data engineering world to go into the analytics world versus the reverse, but thinking about up and coming engineers and developers preparing for this future of data engineering and data analytics, how, how should they be thinking about the future? What, what's your advice to those young people? >>So I think I'd probably fall back on general programming skill sets. So the advice that I saw years ago was if you have open source technologies, the pythons and Javas on your CV, you commander 20% pay, hike over people who can only do proprietary programming languages. And I think that's true of data technologies as well. And from a business point of view, that makes sense. I'd rather spend the money that I save on proprietary licenses on better engineers, because they can provide more value to the business that can innovate us beyond our competitors. So I think I would my advice to people who are starting here or trying to build teams to capitalize on data assets is begin with open license, free capabilities, because they're very cheap to experiment with. And they generate a lot of interest from people who want to join you as a business. And you can make them very successful early, early doors with, with your analytics journey. >>It's interesting. Again, analysts like myself, we do a lot of TCO work and have over the last 20 plus years. And in world of Oracle, you know, normally it's the staff, that's the biggest nut in total cost of ownership, not an Oracle. It's the it's the license cost is by far the biggest component in the, in the blame pie. All right, Justin, help us close out this segment. We've been talking about this sort of data mesh open, closed snowflake data bricks. Where does Starburst sort of as this engine for the data lake data lake house, the data warehouse fit in this, in this world? >>Yeah. So our view on how the future ultimately unfolds is we think that data lakes will be a natural center of gravity for a lot of the reasons that we described open data formats, lowest total cost of ownership, because you get to choose the cheapest storage available to you. Maybe that's S3 or Azure data lake storage, or Google cloud storage, or maybe it's on-prem object storage that you bought at a, at a really good price. So ultimately storing a lot of data in a deal lake makes a lot of sense, but I think what makes our perspective unique is we still don't think you're gonna get everything there either. We think that basically centralization of all your data assets is just an impossible endeavor. And so you wanna be able to access data that lives outside of the lake as well. So we kind of think of the lake as maybe the biggest place by volume in terms of how much data you have, but to, to have comprehensive analytics and to truly understand your business and understand it holistically, you need to be able to go access other data sources as well. And so that's the role that we wanna play is to be a single point of access for our customers, provide the right level of fine grained access controls so that the right people have access to the right data and ultimately make it easy to discover and consume via, you know, the creation of data products as well. >>Great. Okay. Thanks guys. Right after this quick break, we're gonna be back to debate whether the cloud data model that we see emerging and the so-called modern data stack is really modern, or is it the same wine new bottle? When it comes to data architectures, you're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Your data is capable of producing incredible results, but data consumers are often left in the dark without fast access to the data they need. Starers makes your data visible from wherever it lives. Your company is acquiring more data in more places, more rapidly than ever to rely solely on a data centralization strategy. Whether it's in a lake or a warehouse is unrealistic. A single source of truth approach is no longer viable, but disconnected data silos are often left untapped. We need a new approach. One that embraces distributed data. One that enables fast and secure access to any of your data from anywhere with Starburst, you'll have the fastest query engine for the data lake that allows you to connect and analyze your disparate data sources no matter where they live Starburst provides the foundational technology required for you to build towards the vision of a decentralized data mesh Starburst enterprise and Starburst galaxy offer enterprise ready, connectivity, interoperability, and security features for multiple regions, multiple clouds and everchanging global regulatory requirements. The data is yours. And with Starburst, you can perform analytics anywhere in light of your world. >>Okay. We're back with Justin Boardman. CEO of Starbust Richard Jarvis is the CTO of EMI health and Theresa tongue is the cloud first technologist from Accenture. We're on July number three. And that is the claim that today's modern data stack is actually modern. So I guess that's the lie it's it is it's is that it's not modern. Justin, what do you say? >>Yeah. I mean, I think new isn't modern, right? I think it's the, it's the new data stack. It's the cloud data stack, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's modern. I think a lot of the components actually are exactly the same as what we've had for 40 years, rather than Terra data. You have snowflake rather than Informatica you have five trend. So it's the same general stack, just, you know, a cloud version of it. And I think a lot of the challenges that it plagued us for 40 years still maintain. >>So lemme come back to you just, but okay. But, but there are differences, right? I mean, you can scale, you can throw resources at the problem. You can separate compute from storage. You really, you know, there's a lot of money being thrown at that by venture capitalists and snowflake, you mentioned it's competitors. So that's different. Is it not, is that not at least an aspect of, of modern dial it up, dial it down. So what, what do you say to that? >>Well, it, it is, it's certainly taking, you know, what the cloud offers and taking advantage of that, but it's important to note that the cloud data warehouses out there are really just separating their compute from their storage. So it's allowing them to scale up and down, but your data still stored in a proprietary format. You're still locked in. You still have to ingest the data to get it even prepared for analysis. So a lot of the same sort of structural constraints that exist with the old enterprise data warehouse model OnPrem still exist just yes, a little bit more elastic now because the cloud offers that. >>So Theresa, let me go to you cuz you have cloud first in your, in your, your title. So what's what say you to this conversation? >>Well, even the cloud providers are looking towards more of a cloud continuum, right? So the centralized cloud, as we know it, maybe data lake data warehouse in the central place, that's not even how the cloud providers are looking at it. They have news query services. Every provider has one that really expands those queries to be beyond a single location. And if we look at a lot of where our, the future goes, right, that that's gonna very much fall the same thing. There was gonna be more edge. There's gonna be more on premise because of data sovereignty, data gravity, because you're working with different parts of the business that have already made major cloud investments in different cloud providers. Right? So there's a lot of reasons why the modern, I guess, the next modern generation of the data staff needs to be much more federated. >>Okay. So Richard, how do you deal with this? You you've obviously got, you know, the technical debt, the existing infrastructure it's on the books. You don't wanna just throw it out. A lot of, lot of conversation about modernizing applications, which a lot of times is a, you know, a microservices layer on top of leg legacy apps. How do you think about the modern data stack? >>Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the stack really has to include the processes and people around the data as well is all well and good changing the technology. But if you don't modernize how people use that technology, then you're not going to be able to, to scale because just cuz you can scale CPU and storage doesn't mean you can get more people to use your data, to generate you more, more value for the business. And so what we've been looking at is really changing in very much aligned to data products and, and data mesh. How do you enable more people to consume the service and have the stack respond in a way that keeps costs low? Because that's important for our customers consuming this data, but also allows people to occasionally run enormous queries and then tick along with smaller ones when required. And it's a good job we did because during COVID all of a sudden we had enormous pressures on our data platform to answer really important life threatening queries. And if we couldn't scale both our data stack and our teams, we wouldn't have been able to answer those as quickly as we had. So I think the stack needs to support a scalable business, not just the technology itself. >>Well thank you for that. So Justin let's, let's try to break down what the critical aspects are of the modern data stack. So you think about the past, you know, five, seven years cloud obviously has given a different pricing model. De-risked experimentation, you know that we talked about the ability to scale up scale down, but it's, I'm, I'm taking away that that's not enough based on what Richard just said. The modern data stack has to serve the business and enable the business to build data products. I, I buy that. I'm a big fan of the data mesh concepts, even though we're early days. So what are the critical aspects if you had to think about, you know, paying, maybe putting some guardrails and definitions around the modern data stack, what does that look like? What are some of the attributes and, and principles there >>Of, of how it should look like or, or how >>It's yeah. What it should be. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, in, in Theresa mentioned this in, in a previous segment about the data warehouse is not necessarily going to disappear. It just becomes one node, one element of the overall data mesh. And I, I certainly agree with that. So by no means, are we suggesting that, you know, snowflake or Redshift or whatever cloud data warehouse you may be using is going to disappear, but it's, it's not going to become the end all be all. It's not the, the central single source of truth. And I think that's the paradigm shift that needs to occur. And I think it's also worth noting that those who were the early adopters of the modern data stack were primarily digital, native born in the cloud young companies who had the benefit of, of idealism. They had the benefit of it was starting with a clean slate that does not reflect the vast majority of enterprises. >>And even those companies, as they grow up mature out of that ideal state, they go buy a business. Now they've got something on another cloud provider that has a different data stack and they have to deal with that heterogeneity that is just change and change is a part of life. And so I think there is an element here that is almost philosophical. It's like, do you believe in an absolute ideal where I can just fit everything into one place or do I believe in reality? And I think the far more pragmatic approach is really what data mesh represents. So to answer your question directly, I think it's adding, you know, the ability to access data that lives outside of the data warehouse, maybe living in open data formats in a data lake or accessing operational systems as well. Maybe you want to directly access data that lives in an Oracle database or a Mongo database or, or what have you. So creating that flexibility to really Futureproof yourself from the inevitable change that you will, you won't encounter over time. >>So thank you. So there, based on what Justin just said, I, my takeaway there is it's inclusive, whether it's a data Mar data hub, data lake data warehouse, it's a, just a node on the mesh. Okay. I get that. Does that include there on Preem data? O obviously it has to, what are you seeing in terms of the ability to, to take that data mesh concept on Preem? I mean, most implementations I've seen in data mesh, frankly really aren't, you know, adhering to the philosophy. They're maybe, maybe it's data lake and maybe it's using glue. You look at what JPMC is doing. Hello, fresh, a lot of stuff happening on the AWS cloud in that, you know, closed stack, if you will. What's the answer to that Theresa? >>I mean, I, I think it's a killer case for data. Me, the fact that you have valuable data sources, OnPrem, and then yet you still wanna modernize and take the best of cloud cloud is still, like we mentioned, there's a lot of great reasons for it around the economics and the way ability to tap into the innovation that the cloud providers are giving around data and AI architecture. It's an easy button. So the mesh allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can start using the data products on-prem or in the existing systems that are working already. It's meaningful for the business. At the same time, you can modernize the ones that make business sense because it needs better performance. It needs, you know, something that is, is cheaper or, or maybe just tap into better analytics to get better insights, right? So you're gonna be able to stretch and really have the best of both worlds. That, again, going back to Richard's point, that is meaningful by the business. Not everything has to have that one size fits all set a tool. >>Okay. Thank you. So Richard, you know, talking about data as product, wonder if we could give us your perspectives here, what are the advantages of treating data as a product? What, what role do data products have in the modern data stack? We talk about monetizing data. What are your thoughts on data products? >>So for us, one of the most important data products that we've been creating is taking data that is healthcare data across a wide variety of different settings. So information about patients' demographics about their, their treatment, about their medications and so on, and taking that into a standards format that can be utilized by a wide variety of different researchers because misinterpreting that data or having the data not presented in the way that the user is expecting means that you generate the wrong insight. And in any business, that's clearly not a desirable outcome, but when that insight is so critical, as it might be in healthcare or some security settings, you really have to have gone to the trouble of understanding the data, presenting it in a format that everyone can clearly agree on. And then letting people consume in a very structured, managed way, even if that data comes from a variety of different sources in, in, in the first place. And so our data product journey has really begun by standardizing data across a number of different silos through the data mesh. So we can present out both internally and through the right governance externally to, to researchers. >>So that data product through whatever APIs is, is accessible, it's discoverable, but it's obviously gotta be governed as well. You mentioned you, you appropriately provided to internally. Yeah. But also, you know, external folks as well. So the, so you've, you've architected that capability today >>We have, and because the data is standard, it can generate value much more quickly and we can be sure of the security and, and, and value that that's providing because the data product isn't just about formatting the data into the correct tables, it's understanding what it means to redact the data or to remove certain rows from it or to interpret what a date actually means. Is it the start of the contract or the start of the treatment or the date of birth of a patient? These things can be lost in the data storage without having the proper product management around the data to say in a very clear business context, what does this data mean? And what does it mean to process this data for a particular use case? >>Yeah, it makes sense. It's got the context. If the, if the domains own the data, you, you gotta cut through a lot of the, the, the centralized teams, the technical teams that, that data agnostic, they don't really have that context. All right. Let's send Justin, how does Starburst fit into this modern data stack? Bring us home. >>Yeah. So I think for us, it's really providing our customers with, you know, the flexibility to operate and analyze data that lives in a wide variety of different systems. Ultimately giving them that optionality, you know, and optionality provides the ability to reduce costs, store more in a data lake rather than data warehouse. It provides the ability for the fastest time to insight to access the data directly where it lives. And ultimately with this concept of data products that we've now, you know, incorporated into our offering as well, you can really create and, and curate, you know, data as a product to be shared and consumed. So we're trying to help enable the data mesh, you know, model and make that an appropriate compliment to, you know, the, the, the modern data stack that people have today. >>Excellent. Hey, I wanna thank Justin Theresa and Richard for joining us today. You guys are great. I big believers in the, in the data mesh concept, and I think, you know, we're seeing the future of data architecture. So thank you. Now, remember, all these conversations are gonna be available on the cube.net for on-demand viewing. You can also go to starburst.io. They have some great content on the website and they host some really thought provoking interviews and, and, and they have awesome resources, lots of data mesh conversations over there, and really good stuff in, in the resource section. So check that out. Thanks for watching the data doesn't lie or does it made possible by Starburst data? This is Dave Valante for the cube, and we'll see you next time. >>The explosion of data sources has forced organizations to modernize their systems and architecture and come to terms with one size does not fit all for data management today. Your teams are constantly moving and copying data, which requires time management. And in some cases, double paying for compute resources. Instead, what if you could access all your data anywhere using the BI tools and SQL skills your users already have. And what if this also included enterprise security and fast performance with Starburst enterprise, you can provide your data consumers with a single point of secure access to all of your data, no matter where it lives with features like strict, fine grained, access control, end to end data encryption and data masking Starburst meets the security standards of the largest companies. Starburst enterprise can easily be deployed anywhere and managed with insights where data teams holistically view their clusters operation and query execution. So they can reach meaningful business decisions faster, all this with the support of the largest team of Trino experts in the world, delivering fully tested stable releases and available to support you 24 7 to unlock the value in all of your data. You need a solution that easily fits with what you have today and can adapt to your architecture. Tomorrow. Starbust enterprise gives you the fastest path from big data to better decisions, cuz your team can't afford to wait. Trino was created to empower analytics anywhere and Starburst enterprise was created to give you the enterprise grade performance, connectivity, security management, and support your company needs organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact us to get started.

>>In 2011, early Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Ocker famously said the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads. And that sucks. Let's face it more than a decade later organizations continue to be frustrated with how difficult it is to get value from data and build a truly agile data-driven enterprise. What does that even mean? You ask? Well, it means that everyone in the organization has the data they need when they need it. In a context that's relevant to advance the mission of an organization. Now that could mean cutting cost could mean increasing profits, driving productivity, saving lives, accelerating drug discovery, making better diagnoses, solving, supply chain problems, predicting weather disasters, simplifying processes, and thousands of other examples where data can completely transform people's lives beyond manipulating internet users to behave a certain way. We've heard the prognostications about the possibilities of data before and in fairness we've made progress, but the hard truth is the original promises of master data management, enterprise data, warehouses, data marts, data hubs, and yes, even data lakes were broken and left us wanting from more welcome to the data doesn't lie, or doesn't a series of conversations produced by the cube and made possible by Starburst data. >>I'm your host, Dave Lanta and joining me today are three industry experts. Justin Borgman is this co-founder and CEO of Starburst. Richard Jarvis is the CTO at EMI health and Theresa tongue is cloud first technologist at Accenture. Today we're gonna have a candid discussion that will expose the unfulfilled and yes, broken promises of a data past we'll expose data lies, big lies, little lies, white lies, and hidden truths. And we'll challenge, age old data conventions and bust some data myths. We're debating questions like is the demise of a single source of truth. Inevitable will the data warehouse ever have featured parody with the data lake or vice versa is the so-called modern data stack, simply centralization in the cloud, AKA the old guards model in new cloud close. How can organizations rethink their data architectures and regimes to realize the true promises of data can and will and open ecosystem deliver on these promises in our lifetimes, we're spanning much of the Western world today. Richard is in the UK. Teresa is on the west coast and Justin is in Massachusetts with me. I'm in the cube studios about 30 miles outside of Boston folks. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Let's get right into it. You're very welcome. Now here's the first lie. The most effective data architecture is one that is centralized with a team of data specialists serving various lines of business. What do you think Justin? >>Yeah, definitely a lie. My first startup was a company called hit adapt, which was an early SQL engine for hit that was acquired by Teradata. And when I got to Teradata, of course, Teradata is the pioneer of that central enterprise data warehouse model. One of the things that I found fascinating was that not one of their customers had actually lived up to that vision of centralizing all of their data into one place. They all had data silos. They all had data in different systems. They had data on prem data in the cloud. You know, those companies were acquiring other companies and inheriting their data architecture. So, you know, despite being the industry leader for 40 years, not one of their customers truly had everything in one place. So I think definitely history has proven that to be a lie. >>So Richard, from a practitioner's point of view, you know, what, what are your thoughts? I mean, there, there's a lot of pressure to cut cost, keep things centralized, you know, serve the business as best as possible from that standpoint. What, what is your experience show? >>Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo Justin's experience really that we, as a business have grown up through acquisition, through storing data in different places sometimes to do information governance in different ways to store data in, in a platform that's close to data experts, people who really understand healthcare data from pharmacies or from, from doctors. And so, although if you were starting from a Greenfield site and you were building something brand new, you might be able to centralize all the data and all of the tooling and teams in one place. The reality is that that businesses just don't grow up like that. And, and it's just really impossible to get that academic perfection of, of storing everything in one place. >>Y you know, Theresa, I feel like Sarbanes Oxley kinda saved the data warehouse, you know, right. You actually did have to have a single version of the truth for certain financial data, but really for those, some of those other use cases, I, I mentioned, I, I do feel like the industry has kinda let us down. What's your take on this? Where does it make sense to have that sort of centralized approach versus where does it make sense to maybe decentralized? >>I, I think you gotta have centralized governance, right? So from the central team, for things like star Oxley, for things like security for certainly very core data sets, having a centralized set of roles, responsibilities to really QA, right. To serve as a design authority for your entire data estate, just like you might with security, but how it's implemented has to be distributed. Otherwise you're not gonna be able to scale. Right? So being able to have different parts of the business really make the right data investments for their needs. And then ultimately you're gonna collaborate with your partners. So partners that are not within the company, right. External partners, we're gonna see a lot more data sharing and model creation. And so you're definitely going to be decentralized. >>So, you know, Justin, you guys last, geez, I think it was about a year ago, had a session on, on data mesh. It was a great program. You invited Jamma, Dani, of course, she's the creator of the data mesh. And her one of our fundamental premises is that you've got this hyper specialized team that you've gotta go through. And if you want anything, but at the same time, these, these individuals actually become a bottleneck, even though they're some of the most talented people in the organization. So I guess question for you, Richard, how do you deal with that? Do you, do you organize so that there are a few sort of rock stars that, that, you know, build cubes and, and the like, and, and, and, or have you had any success in sort of decentralizing with, you know, your, your constituencies, that data model? >>Yeah. So, so we absolutely have got rockstar, data scientists and data guardians. If you like people who understand what it means to use this data, particularly as the data that we use at emos is very private it's healthcare information. And some of the, the rules and regulations around using the data are very complex and, and strict. So we have to have people who understand the usage of the data, then people who understand how to build models, how to process the data effectively. And you can think of them like consultants to the wider business, because a pharmacist might not understand how to structure a SQL query, but they do understand how they want to process medication information to improve patient lives. And so that becomes a, a consulting type experience from a, a set of rock stars to help a, a more decentralized business who needs to, to understand the data and to generate some valuable output. >>Justin, what do you say to a, to a customer or prospect that says, look, Justin, I'm gonna, I got a centralized team and that's the most cost effective way to serve the business. Otherwise I got, I got duplication. What do you say to that? >>Well, I, I would argue it's probably not the most cost effective and, and the reason being really twofold. I think, first of all, when you are deploying a enterprise data warehouse model, the, the data warehouse itself is very expensive, generally speaking. And so you're putting all of your most valuable data in the hands of one vendor who now has tremendous leverage over you, you know, for many, many years to come. I think that's the story at Oracle or Terra data or other proprietary database systems. But the other aspect I think is that the reality is those central data warehouse teams is as much as they are experts in the technology. They don't necessarily understand the data itself. And this is one of the core tenants of data mash that that jam writes about is this idea of the domain owners actually know the data the best. >>And so by, you know, not only acknowledging that data is generally decentralized and to your earlier point about SAR, brain Oxley, maybe saving the data warehouse, I would argue maybe GDPR and data sovereignty will destroy it because data has to be decentralized for, for those laws to be compliant. But I think the reality is, you know, the data mesh model basically says, data's decentralized, and we're gonna turn that into an asset rather than a liability. And we're gonna turn that into an asset by empowering the people that know the data, the best to participate in the process of, you know, curating and creating data products for, for consumption. So I think when you think about it, that way, you're going to get higher quality data and faster time to insight, which is ultimately going to drive more revenue for your business and reduce costs. So I think that that's the way I see the two, the two models comparing and contrasting. >>So do you think the demise of the data warehouse is inevitable? I mean, I mean, you know, there Theresa you work with a lot of clients, they're not just gonna rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Maybe they're gonna build on top of it, but what does that mean? Does that mean the E D w just becomes, you know, less and less valuable over time, or it's maybe just isolated to specific use cases. What's your take on that? >>Listen, I still would love all my data within a data warehouse would love it. Mastered would love it owned by essential team. Right? I think that's still what I would love to have. That's just not the reality, right? The investment to actually migrate and keep that up to date. I would say it's a losing battle. Like we've been trying to do it for a long time. Nobody has the budgets and then data changes, right? There's gonna be a new technology. That's gonna emerge that we're gonna wanna tap into. There's going to be not enough investment to bring all the legacy, but still very useful systems into that centralized view. So you keep the data warehouse. I think it's a very, very valuable, very high performance tool for what it's there for, but you could have this, you know, new mesh layer that still takes advantage of the things. I mentioned, the data products in the systems that are meaningful today and the data products that actually might span a number of systems, maybe either those that either source systems for the domains that know it best, or the consumer based systems and products that need to be packaged in a way that be really meaningful for that end user, right? Each of those are useful for a different part of the business and making sure that the mesh actually allows you to use all of them. >>So, Richard, let me ask you, you take, take Gemma's principles back to those. You got to, you know, domain ownership and, and, and data as product. Okay, great. Sounds good. But it creates what I would argue are two, you know, challenges, self-serve infrastructure let's park that for a second. And then in your industry, the one of the high, most regulated, most sensitive computational governance, how do you automate and ensure federated governance in that mesh model that Theresa was just talking about? >>Well, it absolutely depends on some of the tooling and processes that you put in place around those tools to be, to centralize the security and the governance of the data. And I think, although a data warehouse makes that very simple, cause it's a single tool, it's not impossible with some of the data mesh technologies that are available. And so what we've done at emus is we have a single security layer that sits on top of our data match, which means that no matter which user is accessing, which data source, we go through a well audited well understood security layer. That means that we know exactly who's got access to which data field, which data tables. And then everything that they do is, is audited in a very kind of standard way, regardless of the underlying data storage technology. So for me, although storing the data in one place might not be possible understanding where your source of truth is and securing that in a common way is still a valuable approach and you can do it without having to bring all that data into a single bucket so that it's all in one place. And, and so having done that and investing quite heavily in making that possible has paid dividends in terms of giving wider access to the platform and ensuring that only data that's available under GDPR and other regulations is being used by, by the data users. >>Yeah. So Justin, I mean, Democrat, we always talk about data democratization and you know, up until recently, they really haven't been line of sight as to how to get there. But do you have anything to add to this because you're essentially taking, you know, do an analytic queries and with data that's all dispersed all over the, how are you seeing your customers handle this, this challenge? >>Yeah. I mean, I think data products is a really interesting aspect of the answer to that. It allows you to, again, leverage the data domain owners, people know the data, the best to, to create, you know, data as a product ultimately to be consumed. And we try to represent that in our product as effectively a almost eCommerce like experience where you go and discover and look for the data products that have been created in your organization. And then you can start to consume them as, as you'd like. And so really trying to build on that notion of, you know, data democratization and self-service, and making it very easy to discover and, and start to use with whatever BI tool you, you may like, or even just running, you know, SQL queries yourself, >>Okay. G guys grab a sip of water. After this short break, we'll be back to debate whether proprietary or open platforms are the best path to the future of data excellence, keep it right there. >>Your company has more data than ever, and more people trying to understand it, but there's a problem. Your data is stored across multiple systems. It's hard to access and that delays analytics and ultimately decisions. The old method of moving all of your data into a single source of truth is slow and definitely not built for the volume of data we have today or where we are headed while your data engineers spent over half their time, moving data, your analysts and data scientists are left, waiting, feeling frustrated, unproductive, and unable to move the needle for your business. But what if you could spend less time moving or copying data? What if your data consumers could analyze all your data quickly? >>Starburst helps your teams run fast queries on any data source. We help you create a single point of access to your data, no matter where it's stored. And we support high concurrency, we solve for speed and scale, whether it's fast, SQL queries on your data lake or faster queries across multiple data sets, Starburst helps your teams run analytics anywhere you can't afford to wait for data to be available. Your team has questions that need answers. Now with Starburst, the wait is over. You'll have faster access to data with enterprise level security, easy connectivity, and 24 7 support from experts, organizations like Zolando Comcast and FINRA rely on Starburst to move their businesses forward. Contact our Trino experts to get started. >>We're back with Jess Borgman of Starburst and Richard Jarvis of EVAs health. Okay, we're gonna get to lie. Number two, and that is this an open source based platform cannot give you the performance and control that you can get with a proprietary system. Is that a lie? Justin, the enterprise data warehouse has been pretty dominant and has evolved and matured. Its stack has mature over the years. Why is it not the default platform for data? >>Yeah, well, I think that's become a lie over time. So I, I think, you know, if we go back 10 or 12 years ago with the advent of the first data lake really around Hudu, that probably was true that you couldn't get the performance that you needed to run fast, interactive, SQL queries in a data lake. Now a lot's changed in 10 or 12 years. I remember in the very early days, people would say, you you'll never get performance because you need to be column there. You need to store data in a column format. And then, you know, column formats we're introduced to, to data apes, you have Parque ORC file in aro that were created to ultimately deliver performance out of that. So, okay. We got, you know, largely over the performance hurdle, you know, more recently people will say, well, you don't have the ability to do updates and deletes like a traditional data warehouse. >>And now we've got the creation of new data formats, again like iceberg and Delta and Hodi that do allow for updates and delete. So I think the data lake has continued to mature. And I remember a, a quote from, you know, Kurt Monash many years ago where he said, you know, know it takes six or seven years to build a functional database. I think that's that's right. And now we've had almost a decade go by. So, you know, these technologies have matured to really deliver very, very close to the same level performance and functionality of, of cloud data warehouses. So I think the, the reality is that's become a line and now we have large giant hyperscale internet companies that, you know, don't have the traditional data warehouse at all. They do all of their analytics in a data lake. So I think we've, we've proven that it's very much possible today. >>Thank you for that. And so Richard, talk about your perspective as a practitioner in terms of what open brings you versus, I mean, look closed is it's open as a moving target. I remember Unix used to be open systems and so it's, it is an evolving, you know, spectrum, but, but from your perspective, what does open give you that you can't get from a proprietary system where you are fearful of in a proprietary system? >>I, I suppose for me open buys us the ability to be unsure about the future, because one thing that's always true about technology is it evolves in a, a direction, slightly different to what people expect. And what you don't want to end up is done is backed itself into a corner that then prevents it from innovating. So if you have chosen a technology and you've stored trillions of records in that technology and suddenly a new way of processing or machine learning comes out, you wanna be able to take advantage and your competitive edge might depend upon it. And so I suppose for us, we acknowledge that we don't have perfect vision of what the future might be. And so by backing open storage technologies, we can apply a number of different technologies to the processing of that data. And that gives us the ability to remain relevant, innovate on our data storage. And we have bought our way out of the, any performance concerns because we can use cloud scale infrastructure to scale up and scale down as we need. And so we don't have the concerns that we don't have enough hardware today to process what we want to do, want to achieve. We can just scale up when we need it and scale back down. So open source has really allowed us to maintain the being at the cutting edge. >>So Jess, let me play devil's advocate here a little bit, and I've talked to Shaak about this and you know, obviously her vision is there's an open source that, that the data meshes open source, an open source tooling, and it's not a proprietary, you know, you're not gonna buy a data mesh. You're gonna build it with, with open source toolings and, and vendors like you are gonna support it, but to come back to sort of today, you can get to market with a proprietary solution faster. I'm gonna make that statement. You tell me if it's a lie and then you can say, okay, we support Apache iceberg. We're gonna support open source tooling, take a company like VMware, not really in the data business, but how, the way they embraced Kubernetes and, and you know, every new open source thing that comes along, they say, we do that too. Why can't proprietary systems do that and be as effective? >>Yeah, well, I think at least with the, within the data landscape saying that you can access open data formats like iceberg or, or others is, is a bit dis disingenuous because really what you're selling to your customer is a certain degree of performance, a certain SLA, and you know, those cloud data warehouses that can reach beyond their own proprietary storage drop all the performance that they were able to provide. So it is, it reminds me kind of, of, again, going back 10 or 12 years ago when everybody had a connector to Haddo and that they thought that was the solution, right? But the reality was, you know, a connector was not the same as running workloads in Haddo back then. And I think similarly, you know, being able to connect to an external table that lives in an open data format, you know, you're, you're not going to give it the performance that your customers are accustomed to. And at the end of the day, they're always going to be predisposed. They're always going to be incentivized to get that data ingested into the data warehouse, cuz that's where they have control. And you know, the bottom line is the database industry has really been built around vendor lockin. I mean, from the start, how, how many people love Oracle today, but our customers, nonetheless, I think, you know, lockin is, is, is part of this industry. And I think that's really what we're trying to change with open data formats. >>Well, that's interesting reminded when I, you know, I see the, the gas price, the tees or gas price I, I drive up and then I say, oh, that's the cash price credit card. I gotta pay 20 cents more, but okay. But so the, the argument then, so let me, let me come back to you, Justin. So what's wrong with saying, Hey, we support open data formats, but yeah, you're gonna get better performance if you, if you keep it into our closed system, are you saying that long term that's gonna come back and bite you cuz you're gonna end up, you mentioned Oracle, you mentioned Teradata. Yeah. That's by, by implication, you're saying that's where snowflake customers are headed. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a movie that, you know, we've all seen before. At least those of us who've been in the industry long enough to, to see this movie play over a couple times. So I do think that's the future. And I think, you know, I loved what Richard said. I actually wrote it down. Cause I thought it was an amazing quote. He said, it buys us the ability to be unsure of the future. Th that that pretty much says it all the, the future is unknowable and the reality is using open data formats. You remain interoperable with any technology you want to utilize. If you want to use spark to train a machine learning model and you want to use Starbust to query via sequel, that's totally cool. They can both work off the same exact, you know, data, data sets by contrast, if you're, you know, focused on a proprietary model, then you're kind of locked in again to that model. I think the same applies to data, sharing to data products, to a wide variety of, of aspects of the data landscape that a proprietary approach kind of closes you in and locks you in. >>So I, I would say this Richard, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Cause I talked to a lot of Oracle customers, not as many te data customers, but, but a lot of Oracle customers and they, you know, they'll admit, yeah, you know, they're jamming us on price and the license cost they give, but we do get value out of it. And so my question to you, Richard, is, is do the, let's call it data warehouse systems or the proprietary systems. Are they gonna deliver a greater ROI sooner? And is that in allure of, of that customers, you know, are attracted to, or can open platforms deliver as fast in ROI? >>I think the answer to that is it can depend a bit. It depends on your businesses skillset. So we are lucky that we have a number of proprietary teams that work in databases that provide our operational data capability. And we have teams of analytics and big data experts who can work with open data sets and open data formats. And so for those different teams, they can get to an ROI more quickly with different technologies for the business though, we can't do better for our operational data stores than proprietary databases. Today we can back off very tight SLAs to them. We can demonstrate reliability from millions of hours of those databases being run at enterprise scale, but for an analytics workload where increasing our business is growing in that direction, we can't do better than open data formats with cloud-based data mesh type technologies. And so it's not a simple answer. That one will always be the right answer for our business. We definitely have times when proprietary databases provide a capability that we couldn't easily represent or replicate with open technologies. >>Yeah. Richard, stay with you. You mentioned, you know, you know, some things before that, that strike me, you know, the data brick snowflake, you know, thing is, oh, is a lot of fun for analysts like me. You've got data bricks coming at it. Richard, you mentioned you have a lot of rockstar, data engineers, data bricks coming at it from a data engineering heritage. You get snowflake coming at it from an analytics heritage. Those two worlds are, are colliding people like PJI Mohan said, you know what? I think it's actually harder to play in the data engineering. So I E it's easier to for data engineering world to go into the analytics world versus the reverse, but thinking about up and coming engineers and developers preparing for this future of data engineering and data analytics, how, how should they be thinking about the future? What, what's your advice to those young people? >>So I think I'd probably fall back on general programming skill sets. So the advice that I saw years ago was if you have open source technologies, the pythons and Javas on your CV, you commander 20% pay, hike over people who can only do proprietary programming languages. And I think that's true of data technologies as well. And from a business point of view, that makes sense. I'd rather spend the money that I save on proprietary licenses on better engineers, because they can provide more value to the business that can innovate us beyond our competitors. So I think I would my advice to people who are starting here or trying to build teams to capitalize on data assets is begin with open license, free capabilities, because they're very cheap to experiment with. And they generate a lot of interest from people who want to join you as a business. And you can make them very successful early, early doors with, with your analytics journey. >>It's interesting. Again, analysts like myself, we do a lot of TCO work and have over the last 20 plus years. And in world of Oracle, you know, normally it's the staff, that's the biggest nut in total cost of ownership, not an Oracle. It's the it's the license cost is by far the biggest component in the, in the blame pie. All right, Justin, help us close out this segment. We've been talking about this sort of data mesh open, closed snowflake data bricks. Where does Starburst sort of as this engine for the data lake data lake house, the data warehouse fit in this, in this world? >>Yeah. So our view on how the future ultimately unfolds is we think that data lakes will be a natural center of gravity for a lot of the reasons that we described open data formats, lowest total cost of ownership, because you get to choose the cheapest storage available to you. Maybe that's S3 or Azure data lake storage, or Google cloud storage, or maybe it's on-prem object storage that you bought at a, at a really good price. So ultimately storing a lot of data in a deal lake makes a lot of sense, but I think what makes our perspective unique is we still don't think you're gonna get everything there either. We think that basically centralization of all your data assets is just an impossible endeavor. And so you wanna be able to access data that lives outside of the lake as well. So we kind of think of the lake as maybe the biggest place by volume in terms of how much data you have, but to, to have comprehensive analytics and to truly understand your business and understand it holistically, you need to be able to go access other data sources as well. And so that's the role that we wanna play is to be a single point of access for our customers, provide the right level of fine grained access controls so that the right people have access to the right data and ultimately make it easy to discover and consume via, you know, the creation of data products as well. >>Great. Okay. Thanks guys. Right after this quick break, we're gonna be back to debate whether the cloud data model that we see emerging and the so-called modern data stack is really modern, or is it the same wine new bottle? When it comes to data architectures, you're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Your data is capable of producing incredible results, but data consumers are often left in the dark without fast access to the data they need. Starers makes your data visible from wherever it lives. Your company is acquiring more data in more places, more rapidly than ever to rely solely on a data centralization strategy. Whether it's in a lake or a warehouse is unrealistic. A single source of truth approach is no longer viable, but disconnected data silos are often left untapped. We need a new approach. One that embraces distributed data. One that enables fast and secure access to any of your data from anywhere with Starburst, you'll have the fastest query engine for the data lake that allows you to connect and analyze your disparate data sources no matter where they live Starburst provides the foundational technology required for you to build towards the vision of a decentralized data mesh Starburst enterprise and Starburst galaxy offer enterprise ready, connectivity, interoperability, and security features for multiple regions, multiple clouds and everchanging global regulatory requirements. The data is yours. And with Starburst, you can perform analytics anywhere in light of your world. >>Okay. We're back with Justin Boardman. CEO of Starbust Richard Jarvis is the CTO of EMI health and Theresa tongue is the cloud first technologist from Accenture. We're on July number three. And that is the claim that today's modern data stack is actually modern. So I guess that's the lie it's it is it's is that it's not modern. Justin, what do you say? >>Yeah. I mean, I think new isn't modern, right? I think it's the, it's the new data stack. It's the cloud data stack, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's modern. I think a lot of the components actually are exactly the same as what we've had for 40 years, rather than Terra data. You have snowflake rather than Informatica you have five trend. So it's the same general stack, just, you know, a cloud version of it. And I think a lot of the challenges that it plagued us for 40 years still maintain. >>So lemme come back to you just, but okay. But, but there are differences, right? I mean, you can scale, you can throw resources at the problem. You can separate compute from storage. You really, you know, there's a lot of money being thrown at that by venture capitalists and snowflake, you mentioned it's competitors. So that's different. Is it not, is that not at least an aspect of, of modern dial it up, dial it down. So what, what do you say to that? >>Well, it, it is, it's certainly taking, you know, what the cloud offers and taking advantage of that, but it's important to note that the cloud data warehouses out there are really just separating their compute from their storage. So it's allowing them to scale up and down, but your data still stored in a proprietary format. You're still locked in. You still have to ingest the data to get it even prepared for analysis. So a lot of the same sort of structural constraints that exist with the old enterprise data warehouse model OnPrem still exist just yes, a little bit more elastic now because the cloud offers that. >>So Theresa, let me go to you cuz you have cloud first in your, in your, your title. So what's what say you to this conversation? >>Well, even the cloud providers are looking towards more of a cloud continuum, right? So the centralized cloud, as we know it, maybe data lake data warehouse in the central place, that's not even how the cloud providers are looking at it. They have news query services. Every provider has one that really expands those queries to be beyond a single location. And if we look at a lot of where our, the future goes, right, that that's gonna very much fall the same thing. There was gonna be more edge. There's gonna be more on premise because of data sovereignty, data gravity, because you're working with different parts of the business that have already made major cloud investments in different cloud providers. Right? So there's a lot of reasons why the modern, I guess, the next modern generation of the data staff needs to be much more federated. >>Okay. So Richard, how do you deal with this? You you've obviously got, you know, the technical debt, the existing infrastructure it's on the books. You don't wanna just throw it out. A lot of, lot of conversation about modernizing applications, which a lot of times is a, you know, a microservices layer on top of leg legacy apps. How do you think about the modern data stack? >>Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the stack really has to include the processes and people around the data as well is all well and good changing the technology. But if you don't modernize how people use that technology, then you're not going to be able to, to scale because just cuz you can scale CPU and storage doesn't mean you can get more people to use your data, to generate you more, more value for the business. And so what we've been looking at is really changing in very much aligned to data products and, and data mesh. How do you enable more people to consume the service and have the stack respond in a way that keeps costs low? Because that's important for our customers consuming this data, but also allows people to occasionally run enormous queries and then tick along with smaller ones when required. And it's a good job we did because during COVID all of a sudden we had enormous pressures on our data platform to answer really important life threatening queries. And if we couldn't scale both our data stack and our teams, we wouldn't have been able to answer those as quickly as we had. So I think the stack needs to support a scalable business, not just the technology itself. >>Well thank you for that. So Justin let's, let's try to break down what the critical aspects are of the modern data stack. So you think about the past, you know, five, seven years cloud obviously has given a different pricing model. De-risked experimentation, you know that we talked about the ability to scale up scale down, but it's, I'm, I'm taking away that that's not enough based on what Richard just said. The modern data stack has to serve the business and enable the business to build data products. I, I buy that. I'm a big fan of the data mesh concepts, even though we're early days. So what are the critical aspects if you had to think about, you know, paying, maybe putting some guardrails and definitions around the modern data stack, what does that look like? What are some of the attributes and, and principles there >>Of, of how it should look like or, or how >>It's yeah. What it should be. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, in, in Theresa mentioned this in, in a previous segment about the data warehouse is not necessarily going to disappear. It just becomes one node, one element of the overall data mesh. And I, I certainly agree with that. So by no means, are we suggesting that, you know, snowflake or Redshift or whatever cloud data warehouse you may be using is going to disappear, but it's, it's not going to become the end all be all. It's not the, the central single source of truth. And I think that's the paradigm shift that needs to occur. And I think it's also worth noting that those who were the early adopters of the modern data stack were primarily digital, native born in the cloud young companies who had the benefit of, of idealism. They had the benefit of it was starting with a clean slate that does not reflect the vast majority of enterprises. >>And even those companies, as they grow up mature out of that ideal state, they go buy a business. Now they've got something on another cloud provider that has a different data stack and they have to deal with that heterogeneity that is just change and change is a part of life. And so I think there is an element here that is almost philosophical. It's like, do you believe in an absolute ideal where I can just fit everything into one place or do I believe in reality? And I think the far more pragmatic approach is really what data mesh represents. So to answer your question directly, I think it's adding, you know, the ability to access data that lives outside of the data warehouse, maybe living in open data formats in a data lake or accessing operational systems as well. Maybe you want to directly access data that lives in an Oracle database or a Mongo database or, or what have you. So creating that flexibility to really Futureproof yourself from the inevitable change that you will, you won't encounter over time. >>So thank you. So there, based on what Justin just said, I, my takeaway there is it's inclusive, whether it's a data Mar data hub, data lake data warehouse, it's a, just a node on the mesh. Okay. I get that. Does that include there on Preem data? O obviously it has to, what are you seeing in terms of the ability to, to take that data mesh concept on Preem? I mean, most implementations I've seen in data mesh, frankly really aren't, you know, adhering to the philosophy. They're maybe, maybe it's data lake and maybe it's using glue. You look at what JPMC is doing. Hello, fresh, a lot of stuff happening on the AWS cloud in that, you know, closed stack, if you will. What's the answer to that Theresa? >>I mean, I, I think it's a killer case for data. Me, the fact that you have valuable data sources, OnPrem, and then yet you still wanna modernize and take the best of cloud cloud is still, like we mentioned, there's a lot of great reasons for it around the economics and the way ability to tap into the innovation that the cloud providers are giving around data and AI architecture. It's an easy button. So the mesh allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can start using the data products on-prem or in the existing systems that are working already. It's meaningful for the business. At the same time, you can modernize the ones that make business sense because it needs better performance. It needs, you know, something that is, is cheaper or, or maybe just tap into better analytics to get better insights, right? So you're gonna be able to stretch and really have the best of both worlds. That, again, going back to Richard's point, that is meaningful by the business. Not everything has to have that one size fits all set a tool. >>Okay. Thank you. So Richard, you know, talking about data as product, wonder if we could give us your perspectives here, what are the advantages of treating data as a product? What, what role do data products have in the modern data stack? We talk about monetizing data. What are your thoughts on data products? >>So for us, one of the most important data products that we've been creating is taking data that is healthcare data across a wide variety of different settings. So information about patients' demographics about their, their treatment, about their medications and so on, and taking that into a standards format that can be utilized by a wide variety of different researchers because misinterpreting that data or having the data not presented in the way that the user is expecting means that you generate the wrong insight. And in any business, that's clearly not a desirable outcome, but when that insight is so critical, as it might be in healthcare or some security settings, you really have to have gone to the trouble of understanding the data, presenting it in a format that everyone can clearly agree on. And then letting people consume in a very structured, managed way, even if that data comes from a variety of different sources in, in, in the first place. And so our data product journey has really begun by standardizing data across a number of different silos through the data mesh. So we can present out both internally and through the right governance externally to, to researchers. >>So that data product through whatever APIs is, is accessible, it's discoverable, but it's obviously gotta be governed as well. You mentioned you, you appropriately provided to internally. Yeah. But also, you know, external folks as well. So the, so you've, you've architected that capability today >>We have, and because the data is standard, it can generate value much more quickly and we can be sure of the security and, and, and value that that's providing because the data product isn't just about formatting the data into the correct tables, it's understanding what it means to redact the data or to remove certain rows from it or to interpret what a date actually means. Is it the start of the contract or the start of the treatment or the date of birth of a patient? These things can be lost in the data storage without having the proper product management around the data to say in a very clear business context, what does this data mean? And what does it mean to process this data for a particular use case? >>Yeah, it makes sense. It's got the context. If the, if the domains own the data, you, you gotta cut through a lot of the, the, the centralized teams, the technical teams that, that data agnostic, they don't really have that context. All right. Let's send Justin, how does Starburst fit into this modern data stack? Bring us home. >>Yeah. So I think for us, it's really providing our customers with, you know, the flexibility to operate and analyze data that lives in a wide variety of different systems. Ultimately giving them that optionality, you know, and optionality provides the ability to reduce costs, store more in a data lake rather than data warehouse. It provides the ability for the fastest time to insight to access the data directly where it lives. And ultimately with this concept of data products that we've now, you know, incorporated into our offering as well, you can really create and, and curate, you know, data as a product to be shared and consumed. So we're trying to help enable the data mesh, you know, model and make that an appropriate compliment to, you know, the, the, the modern data stack that people have today. >>Excellent. Hey, I wanna thank Justin Theresa and Richard for joining us today. You guys are great. I big believers in the, in the data mesh concept, and I think, you know, we're seeing the future of data architecture. So thank you. Now, remember, all these conversations are gonna be available on the cube.net for on-demand viewing. You can also go to starburst.io. They have some great content on the website and they host some really thought provoking interviews and, and, and they have awesome resources, lots of data mesh conversations over there, and really good stuff in, in the resource section. So check that out. Thanks for watching the data doesn't lie or does it made possible by Starburst data? This is Dave Valante for the cube, and we'll see you next time. >>The explosion of data sources has forced organizations to modernize their systems and architecture and come to terms with one size does not fit all for data management today. Your teams are constantly moving and copying data, which requires time management. And in some cases, double paying for compute resources. Instead, what if you could access all your data anywhere using the BI tools and SQL skills your users already have. 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>>Okay. We're back with Justin Boorman CEO of Starburst. Richard Jarvis is the CTO of EMI health and Teresa tongue is the cloud first technologist from Accenture. We're on July number three. And that is the claim that today's modern data stack is actually modern. So I guess that's the lie or it's it is it's is that it's not modern, Justin, what do you say? >>Yeah, I mean, I think new isn't modern, right? I think it's, the's the new data stack. It's the cloud data stack, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's modern. I think a lot of the components actually are exactly the same as what we've had for 40 years, rather than Terra data. You have snowflake rather than Informatica you have five trend. So it's the same general stack, just, you know, a cloud version of it. And I think a lot of the challenges that it plagued us for 40 years still maintain. >>So lemme come back to you just this, but okay. But, but there are differences, right? I mean, you can scale, you can throw resources at the problem. You can separate compute from storage. You really, you know, there's a lot of money being thrown at that by venture capitalists and snowflake, you mentioned it's competitors. So that's different. Is it not, is that not at least an aspect of, of modern dial it up, dial it down. So what, what do you say to that? >>Well, it, it is, it's certainly taking, you know, what the cloud offers and taking advantage of that, but it's important to note that the cloud data warehouses out there are really just separating their compute from their storage. So it's allowing them to scale up and down, but your data's still stored in a proprietary format. You're still locked in. You still have to ingest the data to get it even prepared for analysis. So a lot of the same sort of structural constraints that exist with the old enterprise data warehouse model OnPrem still exists just, yes, a little bit more elastic now because the cloud offers that. >>So Theresa, let me go to you cuz you have cloud first in your, in your, your title. So what's what say you to this conversation? >>Well, even the cloud providers are looking towards more of a cloud continuum, right? So the centralized cloud, as we know it, maybe data lake data warehouse in the central place, that's not even how the cloud providers are looking at it. They have news query services. Every provider has one that really expands those queries to be beyond a single location. And if we look at a lot of where our, the future goes, right, that that's gonna very much fall the same thing. There was gonna be more edge. There's gonna be more on premise because of data sovereignty, data gravity, because you're working with different parts of the business that have already made major cloud investments in different cloud providers. Right? So there's a lot of reasons why the modern, I guess the next modern generation of the data staff needs to be much more federated. >>Okay. So Richard, how do you deal with this? You you've obviously got, you know, the technical debt, the existing infrastructure it's on the books. You don't wanna just throw it out. A lot of, lot of conversation about modernizing applications, which a lot of times is a, you know, of microservices layer on top of leg legacy apps. Ho how do you think about the modern data stack? >>Well, I think probably the first thing to say is that the stack really has to include the processes and people around the data as well is all well and good changing the technology. But if you don't modernize how people use that technology, then you're not going to be able to, to scale because just cuz you can scale CPU and storage doesn't mean you can get more people to use your data, to generate you more value for the business. And so what we've been looking at is really changing in very much aligned to data products and, and data mesh. How do you enable more people to consume the service and have the stack respond in a way that keeps costs low? Because that's important for our customers consuming this data, but also allows people to occasionally run enormous queries and then tick along with smaller ones when required. And it's a good job we did because during COVID all of a sudden we had enormous pressures on our data platform to answer really important life threatening queries. And if we couldn't scale both our data stack and our teams, we wouldn't have been able to answer those as quickly as we had. So I think the stack needs to support a scalable business, not just the technology itself. >>Oh thank you for that. So Justin let's, let's try to break down what the critical aspects are of the modern data stack. So you think about the past, you know, five, seven years cloud obviously has given a different pricing model. Drisk experimentation, you know that we talked about the ability to scale up scale down, but it's, I'm, I'm taking away that that's not enough based on what Richard just said. The modern data stack has to serve the business and enable the business to build data products. I, I buy that I'm, you know, a big fan of the data mesh concepts, even though we're early days. So what are the critical aspects if you had to think about, you know, the paying, maybe putting some guardrails and definitions around the modern data stack, what does that look like? What are some of the attributes and principles there >>Of, of how it should look like or, or how >>Yeah. What it should be? >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, in Theresa mentioned this in, in a previous segment about the data warehouse is not necessarily going to disappear. It just becomes one node, one element of the overall data mesh. And I, I certainly agree with that. So by no means, are we suggesting that, you know, snowflake or Redshift or whatever cloud data warehouse you may be using is going to disappear, but it's, it's not going to become the end all be all. It's not the, the central single source of truth. And I think that's the paradigm shift that needs to occur. And I think it's also worth noting that those who were the early adopters of the modern data stack were primarily digital, native born in the cloud young companies who had the benefit of, of idealism. They had the benefit of starting with a clean slate that does not reflect the vast majority of enterprises. >>And even those companies, as they grow up mature out of that ideal state, they go by a business. Now they've got something on another cloud provider that has a different data stack and they have to deal with that heterogeneity that is just change and change is a part of life. And so I think there is an element here that is almost philosophical. It's like, do you believe in an absolute ideal where I can just fit everything into one place or do I believe in reality? And I think the far more pragmatic approach is really what data mesh represents. So to answer your question directly, I think it's adding, you know, the ability to access data that lives outside of the data warehouse, maybe living in open data formats in a data lake or accessing operational systems as well. Maybe you want to directly access data that lives in an Oracle database or a Mongo database or, or what have you. So creating that flexibility to really Futureproof yourself from the inevitable change that you will, you won't encounter over time. >>So thank you. So there, based on what Justin just said, I, I might take away there is it's inclusive, whether it's a data Mart, data hub, data lake data warehouse, it's a, just a node on the mesh. Okay. I get that. Does that include Theresa on, on Preem data? Obviously it has to, what are you seeing in terms of the ability to, to take that data mesh concept on pre I mean most implementations I've seen and data mesh, frankly really aren't, you know, adhering to the philosophy there. Maybe, maybe it's data lake and maybe it's using glue. You look at what JPMC is doing. Hello, fresh, a lot of stuff happening on the AWS cloud in that, you know, closed stack, if you will. What's the answer to that Theresa? >>I mean, I, I think it's a killer case for data mesh. The fact that you have valuable data sources, OnPrem, and then yet you still wanna modernize and take the best of cloud cloud is still, like we mentioned, there's a lot of great reasons for it around the economics and the way ability to tap into the innovation that the cloud providers are giving around data and AI architecture. It's an easy button. So the mesh allows you to have the best of both world. You can start using the data products on-prem or in the existing systems that are working already. It's meaningful for the business. At the same time, you can modernize the ones that make business sense because it needs better performance. It needs, you know, something that is, is cheaper or, or maybe just tap into better analytics to get better insights, right? So you're gonna be able to stretch and really have the best of both worlds that, again, going back to Richard's point, that is needful by the business. Not everything has to have that one size fits all set a tool. >>Okay. Thank you. So Richard, you know, you're talking about data as product. Wonder if we could give us your perspectives here, what are the advantages of treating data as a product? What, what role do data products have in the modern data stack? We talk about monetizing data. What are your thoughts on data products? >>So for us, one of the most important data products that we've been creating is taking data that is healthcare data across a wide variety of different settings. So information about patients' demographics about their, their treatment, about their medications and so on, and taking that into a standards format that can be utilized by a wide variety of different researchers because misinterpreting that data or having the data not presented in the way that the user is expecting means that you generate the wrong insight and in any business, that's clearly not a desirable outcome, but when that insight is so critical, as it might be in healthcare or some security settings, you really have to have gone to the trouble of understanding the data, presenting it in a format that everyone can clearly agree on. And then letting people consume in a very structured and managed way, even if that data comes from a variety of different sources in, in, in the first place. And so our data product journey has really begun by standardizing data across a number of different silos through the data mesh. So we can present out both internally and through the right governance externally to, to research is >>So that data product through whatever APIs is, is accessible, it's discoverable, but it's obviously gotta be governed as well. You mentioned appropriately provided to internally. Yeah. But also, you know, external folks as well. So the, so you've, you've architected that capability today >>We have and because the data is standard, it can generate value much more quickly and we can be sure of the security and, and, and value that that's providing because the data product isn't just about formatting the data into the right, correct tables, it's understanding what it means to redact the data or to remove certain rows from it or to interpret what a date actually means. Is it the start of the contract or the start of the treatment or the date of birth of a patient? These things can be lost in the data storage without having the proper product management around the data to say in a very clear business context, what does this data mean? And what does it mean to process this data for a particular use >>Case? Yeah, it makes sense. It's got the context. If the, if the domains on the data, you, you gotta cut through a lot of the, the, the centralized teams, the technical teams that, that data agnostic, they don't really have that context. All right. Let's end, Justin, how does Starburst fit into this modern data stack? Bring us home. >>Yeah. So I think for us, it's really providing our customers with, you know, the flexibility to operate and analyze data that lives in a wide variety of different systems. Ultimately giving them that optionality, you know, and optionality provides the ability to reduce costs, store more in a data lake rather than data warehouse. It provides the ability for the fastest time to insight to access the data directly where it lives. And ultimately with this concept of data products that we've now, you know, incorporated into our offering as well, you can really create and, and curate, you know, data as a product to be shared and consumed. So we're trying to help enable the data mesh, you know, model and make that an appropriate compliment to, you know, the, the, the modern data stack that people have today. >>Excellent. Hey, I wanna thank Justin Teresa and Richard for joining us today. You guys are great. I big believers in the, in the data mesh concept, and I think, you know, we're seeing the future of data architecture. So thank you. Now, remember, all these conversations are gonna be available on the cube.net for on-demand viewing. You can also go to starburst.io. They have some great content on the website and they host some really thought provoking interviews and, and, and they have awesome resources, lots of data mesh conversations over there, and really good stuff in, in the resource section. So check that out. Thanks for watching the data doesn't lie or does it made possible by Starburst data? This is Dave ante for the, and we'll see you next time.