>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our second full day of coverage of theCUBE. Lots going on, lots of announcements. We always love talking to customers, hearing the voice of the customer, and we have a couple of guests, one from Dell Customer at Lowe's, John Dabek is here, the senior director of infrastructure. Ali Biers also joins us, marketing director of edge solutions at Dell Technologies. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for inviting us. Appreciate it. >> So John, let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what the heck is going on in retail. Tremendous change, tremendous transformation, lot of pressures. The last two years have been quite influential. Talk to us about some of the trends that you're seeing in retail, some of the challenges that are going on. >> Absolutely, so COVID has put everything on steroids in terms of the omnichannel experience, so we no longer think of digital as something that's separate. It's all integrated with the store experience. So, interestingly enough, two thirds of our customers shop online before they come into the store, so that shows you the power of having the digital working in harmony with the store. >> So how does that affect your technology strategy? What changes do you see? >> That's a very good question, so we've had to accelerate a number of our new technologies to really create that frictionless experience for the customer. So for example, I'll give you a great example of a technology that we deploy today called pickup lockers. So you order online and then there's a set of pickup lockers right in the vestibule of the store. You go up and you scan it, the locker opens, and then you can take your merchandise and go on, so it's a great experience as to how the technology has changed, and everything from utilizing the mobile applications where customers can now text us when they're in the parking lot, we can deliver their merchandise. Michael Dell put it very well in terms of the strategy in his keynote yesterday. What he talked about was today it's the public cloud, it's the private cloud within the data centers, and it's the edge, and the edge has become very, very important for us because that's where we want to put all of our technologies in the store, closer to the store. >> Ali talk to us about from an overall a Dell vision lens perspective the challenges overall that you're seeing in retail and where the edge is really advantageous for organizations to be competitive. >> Yeah, I mean, really what you're seeing is you've got these incredibly savvy customers who really want to have an experience when they go into the store, and on the other hand, you have the retailer that wants to develop that loyalty but yet they're dealing with tremendous complexity in their footprint, as well as just the pace of change, so trying to modernize and do that at a really fast pace just like what John was talking about and still stick to all the imperatives like being secure and manageable at scale. It's really a big challenge. >> Yeah, and when you talk, Ali, about modernizing at a fast pace, the first 600 stores that we did with VxRail, and we'll go into a little more detail I'm sure about that, we did in three months with the help of Dell technology. >> Lisa: 600 stores in three months? >> In three months, right, and the key was zero disruptions in the store. Now we're talking about 100,000+ square foot stores, so we're talking big stores, and we have a very short window. We can go from midnight to 5:00 AM because 5:00 AM the contractors are there to pick up their materials and we have to be open and ready, so we didn't miss a beat. >> So that's interesting. I heard your CEO the other day talking about how you guys really focused on the contractors, especially during COVID. So that was also another shift. I mean, the volume from contractors probably increased 'cause we give them such great focus. So there's this concept of the intelligent factory. Is there a similar one with the intelligent store? >> John: Oh, without a doubt. So I'll give you an example. We have 140,000 mobile devices deployed in our stores for our employees that can do everything from find merchandise, talk, receive calls. You're going to the store to pick up mulch, and they can take the device and do a checkout from the device instead of you having to come into the store and then go out to pick up your mulch. It doesn't get better than that. >> I love that example cause that one's so relatable, and I think like once you start thinking about how all this to technology in the store can really help, so all of a sudden you know where your customers are spending their time in the store. You can position your customer service people to help in the aisles where people are getting stuck, so it really just puts so many more insights in the hands of retailers to be able to action and make decisions. >> You know, it's funny, sometimes people, when they talk to people in IT, technology like ourselves say, "You know, you guys always talk about, oh, permanent changes. Nah, it's going to be the same. You watch in a few years." Here's an example, there's no way we're ever going back. You know, it's permanent. >> It's permanent, and you know what? All the bad things about about COVID and the pandemic, the great thing is it really accelerated that omnichannel journey. It forced many retailers to do that, including Lowe's. >> Silver lining, but it also, from a forcing factor perspective, it was critical from a competitive standpoint. I mean, we have these expectations as consumers that we can have this consumer experience everywhere which means I want to be able to do my transaction in real time. I want to go onto the website and make sure that they have what I want inventory wise in real time. Real time we learned in the pandemic, not a nice to have anymore. >> No, absolutely. >> Lisa: That is a competitive advantage for every industry, especially retail. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we have a mini data center inside the store with the VxRail, so it was very important for us because we were not able to leverage the new application development on the old platform, so we absolutely need the power of the new platform to enable the stores. It's very, very, critical. >> Paint a picture of what it's like inside of a store. I mean, what's the infrastructure look like, the apps that are running, the data flow? >> John: So if you picture a dedicated room for the technology, unfortunately in a store you don't build a data center, so it's a concrete floor, as you can imagine. But through the help of Dell, they've really helped us harden the environment as well, to put in technologies that help with intelligent power distribution units and other types of technology because we're making such a big investment that we don't want to have power be a disrupter. You get six nines on our network, six nines on our, on our compute infrastructure. We don't want power to be an impact. But in terms of the apps, everything that you need to run a store from a POS perspective runs in the environment, and it's being enhanced every day, because now the communication from the mobile device of the consumer to what happens in the store is integrating, so it really requires a lot of compute power. >> What I really like about the way you guys have done it too is that you guys have really thought about it in terms of planning for the future. So you thought about how to create that foundation that's really going to scale over time. >> And Ali you've brought up a good point because one of the things that we didn't anticipate when we started was the fact that we would need GPUs in the future. and the power of the GPU was required for things like video analytics, AI, and it came to light as we had one of our innovator, person in the lab saying, "Hey in the test system, we want 300 gigs of memory to do a test," and we're going like, oh my God, this would never run in production. So that's when we got into the whole concept of GPU so all of our stores are GPU enabled, so as we need them, we can add that to the store, but thanks for bringing that. >> That's really interesting. So for what, security? Other use cases? AI, you're saying. How are you applying that? Dig into that. >> It could be security, so think of having cameras in the store that watch what people do from a checkout perspective, and it's tied in with the system so it knows the weight of an item, it knows the cost of an item, and it's able to spot potential frauds and alert people. But to do that, you need video analytics, and that requires a lot of processing power. >> How much of that data do you persist? >> We could talk about that for another hour. >> Oh, okay. >> With respect to that. But generally we utilize the data to handle what we're looking to accomplish. We do capture other data for AI and other analytic purposes as well. >> Ali I think I interrupted you. >> Ali: Oh, no worries. I think one of the things about the edges, people have a tendency to go build a technology stack to address the business problem that they're trying to address in that moment, and it's usually driven by the people that are working in the store. They see an opportunity for advancement, but all of a sudden, if you have a lot of those, how now are you going to deploy it, secure it, manage it, and do them all separately? So I think what you're talking about is you've really figured out a way to do that across all those different use cases, and maybe even for the ones that you don't know exist yet so. >> And that's the good point is that we don't know what exists, because we have to, as we build it, we have to build the business case for what makes sense to put into the stores. So you you'll see a lot of continued innovation with inventory aids to help stock shelves, applications that help the customer journey. I saw some deployment of some new apps in the stores where we can tell where people are located real time in the store, so wouldn't it be great if you know that you can dispatch customer service personnel to that area and great opportunity to plus sell in that environment. >> I can't wait for my next trip to Lowe's. This is going to be so fantastic. But John, I got to ask you, you're sitting here with the marketing director, I'm a marketing girl myself, future proof. It's a term that is always interests me because it can mean so many different things. You're working with Dell, I've been working with Dell for a while, how is what you've architected for the connected store? Intelligence store, excuse me. How do you feel like when you don't know what's coming, but do you really feel like we've got a future-proof architecture capabilities and a partner that's going to allow us to scale and grow as things, obviously we couldn't have predicted what happened in the last two years. >> So not too recent in the past where you would primarily have appliances in stores and single purpose servers, separate storage. So now with the VxRail technology, you have hyper converged infrastructure. So things are virtualized, your storage is virtualized, your server host infrastructure is virtualized, and the power of the VxRail is that as we grow and have different needs, we can change out the processor, we can add memory, we can add storage all while we're still running in a store. >> Dave: Bring a GPU in if you need to, right? >> Bring a GPU in, so it was architected to handle the growth and the simplicity of running the store. So we only have a handful of people that manage the stores from a technology standpoint, and thanks to the the technologies that are provided. >> So you could scale it, and you got the blueprint, what's the network look like? >> And that's some good advice for folks who are looking at this. You have to address the network first, so we deployed a software defined network that gave us the capacity and the future growth capacity and the backup we're using. We're transferring to from 4G to 5G for backup purposes, and we're trying to figure out what's the role of 5G in the future? 'Cause it gives you tremendous flexibility. But remember the VxRail and the edge can run independently, so if the network goes down, we operate a store. >> Lisa: And you had that frictionless experience which as consumers, we all had this expectation that it's going to be frictionless, it's going to be seamless, I'm going to be able to get what I want. >> Absolutely. >> Not quite 24/7. Well, yeah, with online, yeah. >> With online, 24/7. >> So last question as we grab, and I wish we had more time to dig into this. What's next? What are some of the future directions as hopefully things return back to "normal". What are some of the things that Lowe's and Dell are going to do next together? >> We have to finish the stores. We'll be done by October. And by the way, we're experiencing supply chain issue, but not with Dell. We're having trouble getting network switches, but last week we had a breakthrough, and right now we're on track to finish all of the stores by October of 2022. But what's next? Continuing to now leverage the platform that we've put in place, to bring the applications and to start working with our innovators to experiment with the GPUs and put it into effect, and I'm sure Ali's got some great things planned as well on the edge with the technology which we're look to take advantage of. >> Yeah I mean, our goal is really to help customers to simplify their edge because it's incredibly complex. They're dealing with an ecosystem of partners, software, hardware, networking, so really being that partner that they can rely on, having that broad end to end portfolio, and being the person and the company that can architect and bring all of that together in a way that you can life cycle manage it over time. >> John: And the great thing is by being software defined, it's all seems very complicated, but it's simple to manage, and that's the key and that's the power that Dell brings to us. >> Simple to manage, famous last words. John, thank you, Ali you as well for joining us, sharing what Dell and Lowe's are doing together to really enable this intelligent store. I really can't wait for my next trip. (everyone laughing) >> Thank you so much. >> Yes, I got to hit the mulch pile. Want 'em to bring into my car's, it's too heavy to carry. Guys thank you so much for sharing your insights. We appreciate the story. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas at the Venetian. Day two of our coverage of Dell Tech World continues right after this short break. (soft music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year in 2020 it was good to be in tech and even better to be in the cloud, as organizations had to rely on remote cloud services to keep things running. We believe that tech spending will increase seven to 8% in 2021. But we don't expect investments in cloud computing to sharply attenuate, when workers head back to the office. It's not a zero sum game, and we believe that pent up demand in on-prem data centers will complement those areas of high growth that we saw last year, namely cloud, AI, security, data and automation. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll provide our take on the latest ETR COVID survey, and share why we think the tech boom will continue, well into the future. So let's take a look at the state of tech spending. Fitch Ratings has upped its outlook for global GDP to 6.1% for January's 5.3% projection. We've always expected tech spending to outperform GDP by at least 100 to 200 basis points, so we think 2021 could see 8% growth for the tech sector. That's a massive swing from last year's,5% contraction, and it's being powered by spending in North America, a return of small businesses, and, the massive fiscal stimulus injection from the U.S led central bank actions. As we'll show you, the ETR survey data suggests that cloud spending is here to stay, and a dollar spent back in the data center doesn't necessarily mean less spending on digital initiatives, generally and cloud specifically. Moreover, we see pent up demand for core on-prem data center infrastructure, especially networking. Now one caveat, is we continue to have concerns for the macro on-prem data storage sector. There are pockets of positivity, for example, pure storage seems to have accelerating momentum. But generally the data suggests the cloud and flash headroom, continue, to pressure spending on storage. Now we don't expect the stock market's current rotation out of tech. We don't expect that that changes the fundamental spending dynamic. We see cloud, AI and ML, RPA, cybersecurity and collaboration investments still hovering above, that 40% net score. Actually cybersecurity is not quite there, but it is a priority area for CIOs. We'll talk about that more later. And we expect that those high growth sectors will stay steady in ETRs April survey along with continued spending on application modernization in the form of containers. Now let me take a moment to comment on the recent action in tech stocks. If you've been following the market, you know that the rate on the 10-year Treasury note has been rising. This is important, because the 10 years of benchmark, and it affects other interest rates. As interest rates rise, high growth tech stocks, they become less attractive. And that's why there's been a rotation, out of the big tech high flyer names of 2020. So why do high growth stocks become less attractive to investors when interest rates rise? Well, it's because investors are betting on the future value of cash flows for these companies, and when interest rates go up, the future values of those cash flows shrink, making the valuations less attractive. Let's take an example. Snowflake is a company with a higher revenue multiple than pretty much any other stock, out there in the tech industry. Revenues at the company are growing more than 100%, last quarter, and they're projected to have a revenue of a billion dollars next year. Now on March 8th, Snowflake was valued at around $80 billion and was trading at roughly 75x forward revenue. Today, toward the middle the end of March. Snowflake is valued at about 50 billion or roughly 45x forward revenue. So lower growth companies that throw off more cash today, become more attractive in a rising rate climate because, the cash they throw off today is more valuable than it was in a low rate environment. The cash is there today versus, a high flying tech company where the cash is coming down the road and doesn't have to be discounted on a net present value basis. So the point is, this is really about math, not about fundamental changes in spending. Now the ETR spending data has shown, consistent upward momentum, and that cycle is continuing, leading to our sanguine outlook for the sector. This chart here shows the progression of CIO expectations on spending over time, relative to previous years. And you can see the steady growth in expectations each quarter, hitting 6% growth in 2021 versus 2020 for the full year. ETR estimates show and they do this with a 95% confidence level, that spending is going to be up between 5.1 to 6.8% this year. We are even more up optimistic accounting for recent upward revisions in GDP. And spending outside the purview of traditional IT, which we think will be a tailwind, due to digital initiatives and shadow tech spending. ETR covers some of that, but it is really a CIO heavy survey. So there's some parts that we think can grow even faster, than ETR survey suggests. Now the positive spending outlook, it's broad based across virtually all industries that ETR tracks. Government spending leads the pack by a wide margin, which probably gives you a little bit of heartburn. I know it does for me, yikes. Healthcare is interesting. Perhaps due to pent up demand, healthcare has been so busy saving lives, that it has some holes to fill. But look at the sectors at 5% or above. Only education really lags notably. Even energy which got crushed last year, showing a nice rebound. Now let's take a look at some of the strategies that organizations have employed during COVID, and see how they've changed. Look, the picture is actually quite positive in our view. This data shows the responses over five survey snapshots, starting in March of 2020. Most people are still working from home that really hasn't changed much. But we're finally seeing some loosening of the travel restrictions imposed last year, is a notable drop in canceled business trips. It's still high, but it's very promising trend. Quick aside, looks like Mobile World Congress is happening in late June in Barcelona. The host of the conference just held a show in Shanghai and 20,000 attendees showed up. theCube is planning to be there in Barcelona along with TelcoDr, Who took over Ericsson's 65,000 square foot space, when Ericsson tapped out of the conference. We are good together we're going to lay out the future of the digital telco, in a hybrid: physical slash virtual event. With the ecosystem of telcos, cloud, 5G and software communities. We're very excited to be at the heart of reinventing the event experience for the coming decade. Okay, back to the data. Hiring freezes, way down. Look at new IT deployments near flat from last quarter, with big uptick from a year ago. Layoffs, trending downward, that's really a positive. Hiring momentum is there. So really positive signs for tech in this data. Now let's take a look at the work from home, survey data. We've been sharing this for several quarters now, remember, the data showed that pre pandemic around 15 to 16% of employees worked remotely. And we had been sharing the CIO is expected that figure to slowly decline from the 70% pandemic levels and come into the spring in the summer, hovering in the 50% range. But then eventually landing in the mid 30s. Now the current survey shows 31%. So, essentially, it's exactly double from the pre COVID levels. It's going to be really interesting to see because across the board organizations are reporting, big increases in productivity as a result of how they've responded to COVID in the remote work practices and the infrastructure that's been put in place. And look, a lot of workers are expecting to stay remote. So we'll see where this actually lands. My personal feelings, the number is going to be higher than the low 30s. Perhaps well into the mid to upper 30s. Now let's take a look at the cloud and on-prem MCS. So were a little bit out on a limb here with a can't have a cake and eat it too scenario. Meaning pent up demand for data center infrastructure on-prem is going to combine with the productivity benefits of cloud in the digital imperative. So that means that technology budgets are going to get a bigger piece of the overall spending pie, relative to other initiatives. At least for the near term. ETR asked respondents about how the return to physical, is going to impact on-prem architectures and applications. You can see 63% of the respondents, had a cloud friendly answer, as shown in the first two bars. Whereas 30% had an on-prem friendly answer, as shown in the next three bars. Now, what stands out, is that only 5% of respondents plan to increase their on-prem spend to above pre COVID levels. Sarbjeet Johal pinged me last night and asked me to jump into a clubhouse session with Martin Casado and the other guys from Andreessen Horowitz. They were having this conversation about the coming cloud backlash. And how cloud native companies are spending so much, too much, in their opinion, on AWS and other clouds. And at some point, as they scale, they're going to have to claw back technology infrastructure on-prem, due to their AWS vague. I don't know. This data, it certainly does not suggest that that is happening today. So the cloud vendors, they keep getting more volume, you would think they're going to have better prices and better economies of scales than we'll see on-prem. And as we pointed out, the repatriation narrative that you hear from many on-prem vendors is kind of dubious. Look, if AWS Azure, and Google can't provide IT infrastructure and better security than I can on-prem, then something is amiss. Now however, they are creating an oligopoly. And if they get too greedy and get hooked on the margin crack, of cloud, they'd better be careful, or they're going to become the next regulated utility? So, it's going to be interesting to see if the Andreessen scenario has (laughs) legs, maybe they have another agenda, maybe a lot of their portfolio companies, have ideas are around doing things to help on-prem? Why are we so optimistic that we'll see a stronger 2021 on-prem spend if the cloud continues to command so much attention? Well, first, because nearly 20% of customers say there will be an uptick in on-prem spending. Second, we saw in 2020, that the big on-prem players, Dell, VMware, Oracle, and SAP in particular, and even IBM made it through, okay. And they've managed to figure out how to work through the crisis. And finally, we think that the lines between on-prem and cloud, and hybrid and cross cloud and edge will blur over the next five years. We've talked about this a lot, that abstraction layer that we see coming, and there's some real value opportunities there. It'll take some time. But we do see there, that the traditional vendors, are going to attack those new opportunities and create value across clouds and hybrid systems and out to the edge. Now, as those demarcation lines become more gray, a hybrid world is emerging that is going to require hardware and software investments that reduce latency and are proximate to users buildings and distributed infrastructure. So we see spending in certain key areas, continuing to be strong across the board, will require connecting on-prem to cloud in edge workloads. Here's where it CIOs see the action, asked to cite the technologies that will get the most attention in the next 12 months. These seven stood out among the rest. No surprise that cyber comes out as top priority, with cloud pretty high as well. But interesting to see the uptick in collaboration in networking. Execs are seeing the importance of collaboration technologies for remote workers. No doubt, there's lots of Microsoft Teams in that bar. But there's some pent up demand it seems for networking, we find that very interesting. Now, just to put this in context, in a spending context. We'll share a graphic from a previous breaking analysis episode. This chart shows the net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis. And the market share or pervasiveness in the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. The big four areas of spend momentum are cloud, ML and AI, containers in RPA. This is from the January survey, we don't expect a big change in the upcoming April data, we'll see. But these four stand out above the 40% line that we've highlighted, which to us is an indicator of elevated momentum. Now, note on the horizontal axis only cloud, cloud is the only sector that enjoys both greater than 60% market share on the x axis, and is above the 40% net score line and the y axis. So even though security is a top priority as we were talking about earlier. It competes with other budget items, still right there certainly on the horizontal axis, but it competes with other initiatives for that spend momentum. Okay, so key takeaways. Seven to 8% tech spending growth expected for 2021. Cloud is leading the charge, it's big and it has spending momentum, so we don't expect a big rotation out of cloud back to on-prem. Now, having said that, we think on-prem will benefit from a return to a post isolation economy. Because of that pent up demand. But we caution we think there are some headwinds, particularly in the storage sector. Rotation away from tech in the stock market is not based on a fundamental change in spending in our view, or demand, rather it's stock market valuation math. So there should be some good buying opportunities for you in the coming months. As money moves out of tech into those value stocks. But the market is very hard to predict. Oh 2020 was easy to make money. All you had to do is buy high growth and momentum tech stocks on dips. 2021 It's not that simple. So you got to do your homework. And as we always like to stress, formulate a thesis and give it time to work for you. Iterate and improve when you feel like it's not working for you. But stay current, and be true to your strategy. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly in siliconangle.com and wikibond.com and always appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus where all the survey data science actually resides. Some really interesting things that they're about to launch. So do follow that. This is Dave vellante. Thanks for watching theCube Insights powered by ETR. Good health to you, be safe and we'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the cubes Coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 The digital edition. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm welcoming back one of our Cube alumni. Paul Saville joins me the S VP of product management and services from Lumen Technologies. Paul, welcome back to the Cube. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Last time I got to go to an event was aws reinvent 2019. You were there, but when you were there, you were with centurylink Centurylink. Lumen, What's the correlation? >>Yeah, well, thanks for asking that question. Yes. So we did Rand rebrand our company to loom in technologies. And there's a reason for that because, really, a few years ago, centurylink was largely a consumer telecom business. It's roughly half of its business was in the consumer space, delivering home broadband services, voice services. The other half of the business was around enterprise services and telecom services. But now our company has grown, and we've become much more than that. Now the consumer side of our business is much smaller it's. It's less than 25% of our business overall, and we brought in many more capabilities and technologies. And so we really felt like we were at a point where we and talking to our customers and doing brand analysis around the world because we're now a global, uh, company that has operations in over 100 countries around the world. Um, we felt like we needed to change that branding to represent who we are as terms of that, that large enterprise services company that does a lot more than just telecom services. And so that's why we came up with the name of Lumen Technologies. And as I said, the consumer side, the business still has a centurylink brand. But now the Enterprise Services piece of our company is called Lumen. >>So as that's transpired during this very dynamic time, just give me a little bit of perspective from your customers. How are they embracing this reading? Because we know rebrand is far more than simply rebranding product names and things like that. >>Yes, yeah, I think our customers we're really embracing it. Well, I mean, we've got great feedback from them on the new naming approach and our customers love the name. And but they also more than just the name they love, the idea of, of what we're doing and how we're positioning, how we're transforming our company to really represent what we do as being a company that delivers a platform for managing and distributing digital applications and digital assets across the world. And as you as this audience really knows, uh, enterprises values arm or and MAWR being being determined by their digital assets, whether that is content or whether it's applications. Or it could be, um, processes and things that the intellectual property that that companies own. And when we thought about our company and what it was that we really do for our customers, it really boils down to that is that customers trust us to move their their most valuable digital assets around the world to place them where they need to be when they need to be secured them in place and remove them when they don't need them there anymore. >>And that trust is absolutely critical. I want to get your perspective on something I noticed on Lumens website saying powering progress and the promise of the fourth Industrial Revolution. First of all, what is the promise of the fourth Industrial Revolution? And how is Lumen positioned to deliver progress on it? >>Yeah, So the fourth Industrial Revolution. Some of the audience may not understand what we mean by that when there's really been been. Up to now, there have been three industrial or industrial revolutions. The last one was the advent of the Internet and electron ICS And, you know, looming in its history plays a big role in the third Industrial Revolution because of the build out of the global Internet. You know, we operate one of the largest public Internet networks in the world, and but now we see that technology is pacing. Is taking a ramp up in the next phase of leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning i O. T technologies technologies that that require applications and data that need to be distributed in a much more wide basis because computers happening everywhere in the fourth Industrial Revolution. And when we say that we're enabling that and we're enabling the promise of that, we're looking at what we do as having a platform that enables enterprise customers to create capabilities that leverage Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies and distribute those around the world on a dynamic basis in a real time basis, in in in the fashion of How Cloud has evolved over the last few years. >>So how are you guys working together with AWS to enable customers to be able to leverage that technology that power the ability to get data that they need all across the globe as quickly as possible? >>Yes, so we worked with AWS and a number of ways in that front. You know, of course, AWS makes some great products that are based in the cloud. And they do all these technologies that are speaking about in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning and video analytics or things and tools that AWS is built to be run out of their out of their cloud services. But Lemon works with AWS in that distribution aspect of it, and taking those assets and those applications and making them operate on a much widely distributed basis and dropping them on customer premise locations at the deep edge in into different markets wherever it makes the most sense for customers, from a performance and economic standpoint to be running those, uh, those next generation types of applications. And so we work with in combination with a W s to build those solutions into end for customers. Lumen has a professional services I t services organization also, that helps customers put together complex solutions involving Internet of things. So we, for instance, we just deployed a factory environment that has a million square foot factory with high level of automation that's run using these types of analytics tools where we're we're putting together the integration on the factory floor back to, uh, the cloud a cloud like aws. >>So in the last, you know, nine months of the world being in such a different place with businesses overnight suddenly having to dio almost 100% remote operations, how does the technology that you just talked about? How does that facilitate a business to keep up and running to not just be able to survive and continue to pivot as they need to during this time, but also to be able to really become the drivers of tomorrow? >>Yes, you know, and from our position is having, you know, over 100,000 enterprise customers and operating in regions over the world are perspective. We've really been able to see how our customers have survived and thrived and those who have not thrived so well through this whole cove it pandemic. And, you know, one of the keys for the companies that have really kind of excelled during this time has been there how far along they were in the adoption curve of cloud technologies and things like the Fourth Industrial Revolution types of technologies. Because those companies were able to dynamically scale up re shift, their resource is they were able to act remotely and control things remotely without having to have humans on premise on site engaging. Um, you know, some of the factory things that we've seen some of the work from home situations that we've seen those companies that were not operating with the kind of flexibility and scale that the cloud environment and the the four ir environment enables have really have really struggled, while the others have really been able to step up on bond, even outperform in many ways from where they were before. >>Yeah, we've been talking for months on the Cube about this acceleration of digital transformation that this pandemic has really forced and seen those companies to your point. Those that were already poised to be agile to adopted are in a much better position. One of the companies I was talking to you recently has Webcams all over the globe, and they're providing, um, you could get it throughout your Apple TV or I think, in Amazon Fire Stick where you can have these virtual experiences going into what's going on in Paris right now, of course, helping us live vicariously since we can't travel. But that's the whole proliferation of the edge and the amount of data that's being generated and process at the edge to the cloud to the core and getting that quickly to the consumer, whether it's a business or an actual consumer, what are you guys doing to help your business is your customers leverage the edge in a in an efficient way so that this accelerated pace that we're living in is actually able to help them. Dr Value. >>Yeah, we we have seen a really uptick in terms of edge opportunities since the Kobe pandemic hit and s so I can give you a great example of one that we that we recently just publicly announced its with a interesting situation with a company called Cyber Reef. Cyber Reef Builds has security technology that they help protect school systems and kids that are now being educated at home instead of in the public schools. Physically, they're they're they're at home, and those kids need protection from the Internet because they're on the Internet all day now. And Cyber Reef provides security tools for the public school systems to help protect those Children and what they're doing and making sure that there focused on school and not, you know, getting. They're having bad actors reached them through the public Internet. They're doing that That is an edge application because they needed to place their security software control tools very close to the edge deep into these markets, with good connection into public Internet and close proximity to the eyeballs of these, uh, these schoolchildren that around in the area, and so they have deployed across the country across our footprint, their their their platform, basically on on our platform to support those deployments toe help our Children as they get educated, >>so important. And if you think about a year ago when we were all in Vegas for reinvent 2019, we wouldn't even have thought we would need something of that scale. I'm here we are with this massive need and companies like Lumet and A W s being able to enable that. Talk to me a little bit about though what you guys are doing with a W s outpost is that part of what you just talked about? >>It wasn't for that example that I just gave, but we are working a lot with AWS outpost. And so we have we see aws outpost, a za key part of our total edged portfolio of solutions that we that we deliver. We have been, uh, investing a lot in our data centers across the world, because looming has hundreds of data centers that are deeply distributed into all of these markets around the world and working with aided without the ws on certifying those locations as outpost deployment, uh, locations. We have also used that I T services organization that that can provide consultation and I t management services for our enterprise customers. Thio. We've been certifying them on outpost configurations. So we've been training our I T professionals on, uh, the AWS solution and on the outpost solution in getting those certification credentials so that we can bring joint products to market with AWS that involved outposts as part of the solution and build in the end capabilities that combine our our services and capabilities with AWS and outpost for for combined solution. >>And can that combined solution to help your customers your joint customers get faster access to their data? Because we know data volume is only going up and up and up, and businesses need to be able to gain insights in real time. Is this the technology that could help get faster insights or access data faster? >>Absolutely. You know, that's and that's one of the key value propositions of ah, a solution like an outpost. Is that because you can drop them pretty much anywhere in the world that you that you need to put compute close to the point of digital interaction? Then, uh, it makes an ideal solution for customers that, uh, that want to work in that AWS environment and also leverage all of the other tools that eight of us can bring to bear from the cloud, uh, platform that that they that they offer but yeah, the place and compute close to that. That point of digital interaction is what it's all about, and it isn't just driven by performance, and performance is a really key part of it because they wanna have that fast interaction at the edge. But there are other things there, too. I mean, sometimes there are economics that play out for many companies that just make it make more sense to act on on compute or storage that it sits, sits more centrally, too many notes that could be aggregated in a market to that one essential location. We're running across use cases where customers, uh, they want to keep that data local because of governance issues or because of privacy issues or because of some kind of a regulatory requirement that they've got that they don't. They need to know exactly where that that data resides at all times, and it needs to be localized in a certain market or country. And eso they're the types of reasons why they would want to use an outpost to really there's there numerous. >>So last question. When you're talking with customers, I imagine the conversations quite different the last nine months or so. Maybe even the level of which you're having these conversations has gone up to the C suite or maybe even to the board. What do you what's your advice to businesses in any industry that really need to move forward quickly, transform to be able to start harnessing the power that four er can deliver but are just not sure where to start. >>Yeah, so, you know, we're just my advice is that they're gonna have to embrace the future embrace that, you know, embrace change. We're Look, we we have never been in a period of time where the pace of change has been assed fast as it is now, and it's not going to slow down. And so you do have to embrace that. But when you But if you're sitting there struggling, I appreciate the dilemma that they're in because, like, Well, where do I start? What do I what do I try? The thing is that that you can you you should pick a project that you can manage and deploy it. But when you deploy it and test it, make sure that you've got really measurable results. that you have really clear KP eyes of what you're trying to achieve and what you know. Are you out for financial goals or you out for performance improvement? Are you out for I t. Greater I t agility. Build the measures around that, Then test the technology that you want to try because we find that some companies approach it and they're kind of like doing it as a science experiment. And then they go, Wow, this was This was cool. It was a good science experiment, but it didn't, but it didn't wind up. They didn't capture the the actual benefit of it. And so then they don't They can't go in and prove it in anymore. And it's kind of like it sets them back because they didn't take that extra preparation >>and businesses in any industry. Nobody has. Has the time Thio face a setback because there's gonna be somebody right behind you in the rear view mirror who's gonna be smaller, agile, more nimble to take advantage. Paul. Great advice for businesses in every industry, and thank you for talking to us about what Lumen Technologies is what you guys are doing with a W s to help customers really embrace the capabilities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We appreciate your time. >>All right. Thank you. And thank you to the Cuba. It's good to see you all again. >>Good to see you too. Glad you're safe. And hopefully next time we'll get to see you in person soon For Paul Saville. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of aws reinvent 2020? Yeah.

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. I think I just saw Don Johnson running by. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2019. This is day one of our wall-to-wall coverage. Ian McClarty is here. He's the president of PhoenixNAP, Ian thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So PhoenixNAP, service provider based in the southwest. Tell us more about the company. >> Yeah so we started on the Southwest, hence the name Phoenix, and NAP stands for network access point. So we focus on the connectivity side, on the telecom. But we really have moved more to infrastructure services, and that's been more of a world wide deployment. Last year we did about six global locations that were new to us, so today we're at about on 15 locations. >> So I always ask guys like you, you know, the Cloud was suppose to put you out of business, and then the Cloud has been this huge tail wind. >> Yeah. >> Why, what was it that everybody missed about the cloud and how have you able to exploit it? >> Yeah, so we come from a hosting background. So the Cloud has been around for us forever, right? Before it was termed Cloud, we believed in OpEx model for infrastructure services. That's what the Cloud is. Scalable, easy to absorb. So for us, what the Cloud did was make us mainstream. Because hosting was very boutique back in the day, back in the 90's. Now today we're a very mainstream brand, very mainstream products. So Cloud has really made our lives easier, actually. >> So it opened up everybody's eyes. >> Yeah. >> Sort of ... The guys like Amazon and Azure did a lot of market development for you. >> They did, a lot. And a lot of market development that we ourselves cannot do because we are smaller companies. >> Right. So talk a little bit about what your unique value proposition is, how you guys, you know, compete in the market place. Why PhoenixNAP? >> Why PhoenixNAP? So its really about the suite of infrastructure products. So our spectrum really starts with co-location on one end and it ends to bare metal dedicated Cloud systems. And then in between we have all the virtual station cloud platforms, more standard BMR deployments. So really its about our spectrum of services that we cover and we really are really good at that spectrum of services. So we have developed a lot of depth also around these different offerings. >> And your facilities, as you say you started in the Southwest, but where are you guys located? Are you? ... >> Yeah, so we're, So we own and operate out of Phoenix, Arizona, 120,000 square foot of facility. With the I-T usable space, um, and we have expanded now to other, with other partnerships with taking on large location spaces to basically seed our different locations and put us in point we are building those locations. Ashburn is one we are getting very close with actually. >> Uh-huh. So you're data centered guys right? I mean, you know - >> We're data, We're hosting guys that went into the data center business, and became infrastructure people. >> Okay, so it sort of evolved, this is act 3 for you >> Yes, this is act 3. >> We've been talking about act 2 all day. So how have you evolved your, you skillset, your customer base, talk about the evolution of the, of the company and where you see it going. >> Yeah so I mean, today we're focusing very much on mid-market enterprise, that's where our, and again, how do you define that? We define that by $50 to $500 million in revenue that's out definition of mid-market enterprise. So we're not going after the Fortune 500, and we're not going after S&B. And we have really tapped into the space. It's a very hard space for, for the, for the public clouds to, um, to act in today. >> So what's different? So obviously, the difference between mid and large enterprises is the mid-size guys, they're more generalists, they don't have, you know, all kinds of specialists, they don't have the resources, >> They do not. >> That the large guys do. But they're more advanced than the S. >> Yes. >> S and M are different, >> Yes, they are. >> Than the large. So what are the unique attributes of M that really uh, you try to focus on delivering? >> So M has budget, but M doesn't want to outsource. That's key. They know enough, but they don't have expertise. So what they're looking at, they're looking for supplemental I-T, and really what we focus on. >> So they don't want to outsource their strategic jewel, the family jewels, but they need help. >> They need supplemental help. And they don't want to go to consultants either. >> But M also wants to be L and I think that's the big issue, M wants to be L, typically M wants to be L, So they're looking for, they have budget, they have plans, >> Yeah. >> They want to scale, but they have to be very careful about how they invest to get there. >> And then like to (mumbles) still, they like (mumbles), infrastructure, they want to know you, they want to build a relationship. That's what I'm saying, it's very hard for the public clouds to tap into that space because of that. It had a lot of nuances. >> M wants to scale they want to act like a real business, >> Yes. >> They want, they want to know their suppliers, because they want to know if they're going to be able to go with them. >> (Ian) They want to have control over their suppliers as well. >> Exactly. But come back to that, because that becomes, that becomes more increasingly a services play. >> Yes. >> As M gets more experiences, these medium-size companies get more experience, they are starting to acknowledge and recognize the new classes of services that they need because they have that sophistication. So how is your business changing? And specifically thinking about what Veeam's doing here, to become more of a service-provider, of, at a higher level than just the underlying infrastructure. >> So I'll tell you what we're doing right now. On the surface-side, we're really focusing more on manage-infrastructure, right? That's the moniker we use. But what infrastructure means is really changing. So today we're (mumbles), right? What are we going to do have a managed (mumbles) stack, that is deliverable in an A-P-I model? That's our vision for the company. >> So, um, you're a platinum partner of Veeam, uh, can you talk a little bit about where they fit in your stack? I mean, you've got a whole security layer. >> (IAN) Yep. >> I think you were saying to us earlier that, you know, the data protection piece, the backup is sort of the last-- >> It's a lifeline. >> Resort, yeah. So describe that infrastructure and what you guys have built up. >> Yeah so when we started the company, we started at the edge, right? Plus folks on the (mumbles), those folks on network protection, let's start there, and let's work our way down. And so now then we've built a V-M-R stack that basically is, um, it's third-party audited, it follows compliance rules. When you go to the, um, (mumbles) it works on PCI, when you go to the PCI website you can see PheonixNAP listed as E-S-S provider there, and it abstractly outlines what we protect on the cloud side. So very clear in where we transferred on that side, so it's been layered for us, a layered approach of protecting services. But there will always be a breach, and you have to count on that. It's unfortunate, but it's a reality, right? And once you embrace that, you can build products around that, and so really V-M-R has become a very key part of that equation with both backup and recovery services, and then if there is a breach, then you need to be able to recover those services somewhere, so the (mumbles) recovery services for us is big. So it really fills that missing piece that we had in the equation. >> Yeah I mean you've made that point Peter, many times, is that the breach is inevitable, it's how you repsond to that breach that's really critical. >> Yes. >> And that's, I mean not brand-new thinking, but it's certainly over the last ten years has evolved, you know Peter-- >> (IAN) You've got to embrace it. >> People used to not talk about breaches, oh no, don't talk about it, now it's like at the board level, yeah we acknowledge that it's going to happen, and we're putting more and more resources into our response, is that sort of what you're seeing? >> Yes, that is exactly what I'm seeing. And this year alone fifteen-thousand breaches that were reported right? And again, who reports those breaches? It's not the S, not the M, it's the large enterprise that reports those breaches. So those numbers are even worse in the S and M market right? >> (DAVE) Right, right. >> Although the M guys have, are now getting large enough When-- >> They have to report. >> They have to start reporting. You're coming back to this notion, that, and it used to be that when there was a breach, it was always discussed in terms of hardware, it was discussed in terms of network. >> Yeah. >> But now it's data! >> It is. >> Because that's where the asset is, and that's where people after, >> Exactly. >> So again, coming back to that notion of higher-level services, backup used to be something that you kind of, checked off as you were leaving the customer's location, taken the order, has it become something that's increasingly one of the reasons why customers are bringing you in? >> I will tell you, the easiest way for us to (mumbles) another part where Veeam falls into our equation, is customer acquisition. Like Veeam to me is not the highest revenue, product, period, right? But from a customer acquisition perspective, it's the best product that we have. It's an easy conversation, because it is. Historically it's been a checkbox, but once the customer figures out, "hey, okay so I've got backups, now how do I recover these backups? How do I restore them? Where do I go?" that's where we can have a much more complex conversation with them. >> A lot of these M customers, to become L, are now realizing "I'm not going to get there, if I don't use data in ways that the L guys have hard time using it. So I need to focus on data assets, I need to focus on my digital transformation", which means it's essential that they start thinking about how data protection is going to operate within their business, because increasingly, they're becoming digital businesses. And data protection becomes digital business protection. Are you having those conversations? >> All the time. On day-to-day basis. That's the bulk of our conversations now, for new customer acquisition. >> (DAVE) Why Veeam? >> Yeah. >> You know a lot of companies out there, a lot of new startups entering the marketplace, you've got big wheels like, you know, Dell EMC, and some established companies like Veritas, IBM, you got the big blue blanket, why Veeam? >> Why Veeam for us? Well for us, part of it is culture, right? That was very critical for us. First, the technology piece, obviously solid, works right? The "it does work" moniker that was used, it's true right? And the simplicity of it, too. As a service provider, we know what to expect with Veeam, so we built a lot of competency around Veeam as a product line. Obviously we've played, we've used other products, but we always go back to Veeam. Because, again, it's evolving in a place that we like. We see where they're going for the recovery piece, right? The restoration piece. We like that as a vision piece also, that it's not talked about a lot. It's coming right? It's always the upcoming. But for us it's good to (mumbles) another vendor. The second that comes out, it's a (mumbles) vendor for us. So we like the vision of the company, we like where they're heading, we also like from a corporate culture perspective, what they're doing for channel-centric. For us it helps us mature as an organization tremendously. You know Ratmir hit the nail on the head when he said, "Not the best product wins in the market", right? You have to have, the company that has the best sales and marketing along with that as well. So for us you know, we have pretty decent sales. Marketing we're weaker on, and Veeam has really coached us along the way to make our marketing efforts even stronger. >> Yeah Veeam knows how to market! >> Yeah they do, they are marketing geniuses. And I love them for that, right? And I have a lot of respect towards them for that, so. >> Ian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to have you. >> You as well. >> All right keep it right there everybody, this is Peter Burris and Dave Vellante, we're live at Veeamon 2019 from Miami. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (poppy electro music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Ferrier. You're watching the Cube live at Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. This is our second full day of Double Cube set coverage. We've got a couple of we're gonna really cool conversation coming up for you. We've got Robbie Pender County, one of our alumni on the cue back as VP product management server solutions. Robbie, Welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Much appreciated. >> And you brought some Hollywood? Yes. Glenn Glenn ER, president of Sony Innovation Studios. Glenn and welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> So you are love this intersection of Hollywood and technology. But you're a filmmaker. >> Yeah. I have been filming movies for many years. Uh, I started off making motion pictures for many years. Executive produced him and over so production for them at one of our movie labels called Screen Gems, which is part of Sony Pictures. >> Wait a tremendous amount of evolution of the creative process being really fueled by technology and vice versa. Sony Innovation Studios is not quite one year old. This is a really exciting venture. Tell us about that and and what the the impetus was to start this company. >> You know that the genesis for it was based out of necessity because I looked at a nice Well, you know, I love making movies were doing it for a long time. And the challenge of making good pictures is resource is and you never get enough money believing not you never get enough money and never get enough time. That's everybody's issue, particularly time management. And I thought, Well, you know, we got a pretty good technology company behind us. What if we looked inward towards technology to help us find solutions? And so innovation studios is born out of that idea on what was exciting about it was to know that we had, uh, invited partners to the game right here with Del so that we could make movies and television shows and commercials and even enterprise solutions leaning into state of the art and cutting edge technology. >> And what some of the work prize and you guys envision coming out this mission you mentioned commercials. TV is it going to be like an artist's studio actor? Ackerson Ball is Take us through what this is going to look like. How does it get billed out? >> I lean into my career as a producer. To answer that one and say is going to enable that's one of the greatest things about being a producer is enabling stories, uh, inspiring ideas to be Greenland. That may not have been able to be done so before. And there's a key reason why we can't do that, because one of our key technologies is what we call the volumetric image acquisition. That's a lot of words. You probably say. What the heck is that? But a volumetric image acquisition is our ability to capture a real world, this analog world and digitize it, bring it into our servers using the power of Del and then live in that new environment, which is now a virtual sets. And that virtual set is made out of billions and trillions in quadrillions of points, much like the matter around us. And it's a difference because many people use pixels, which is interpretation of like worry, using points which is representative of the world around us, so it's a whole revolutionary way of looking at it. But what it allows us to do is actually film in it in a thirty K moving volume. >> It's like a monster green screen for the world. Been away >> in a way, your your your your action around it because you have peril X so these cameras could be photographing us. And for all you know, we may not be here. Could be at stage seven at Innovation Studios and not physically here, but you couldn't tell it. If >> this is like cloud computing, we talking check world, you don't the provisional these resource is you just get what you want. This is Hollywood looking at the artistry, enabling faster, more agile storytelling. You don't need to go set up a town and go get the permit. All the all the heavy lifting you're shooting in this new digital realm. >> That's right. Exactly. Now I love going on location on. There's a lot to celebrate about going on location, but we can always get to that location. Think of all the locations that we want to be in that air >> base off limits. Both space, the one I >> haven't been, uh, but but on said I've been I've walked on virtual moons and I've walked on set moons. But what if we did a volumetric image acquisition of someone set off the moon? Now we have that, and then we can walk around it. Or what if there's a great club, a nightclub? This says guys want you shoot here, but we have performances Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night there. You know they have a job. What if we grab that image, acquired it, and then you could be there anytime you want. >> Robbie, we could go for an hour here. This is just a great comic. I >> completely agree with you. >> The Cube. You could. You could sponsor a cube in this new world. We could run the Q twenty four seven. That's absolutely >> right. And we don't even have >> to talk about the relationship with Dale because on Del Technologies, because you're enabling new capabilities. New kind of artistry was just totally cool. Want to get back to the second? But you guys were involved. What's your role? How do you get involved? Tell the story about your >> John. I mean, first and foremost one of things that didn't Glendon mention is he's actually got about fifty movies to his credit. So the guy actually knows this stuff, so which is absolutely fantastic. So we said, How do you go take average to the next level? So what else is better than trying to work something out, wherein we together between what Glenn and Esteem does at the Sony Innovation Labs for Studio Sorry. And as in Dead Technologies could do is to try and actually stretch the boundaries of our technology to a next tent that when he talks about kazillion bytes of data right one followed the harmony of our zeros way have to be able to process the data quickly. We have to be able to go out and do their rendering. We probably have to go out and do whatever is needed to make a high quality movie, and that, I think, in a way, is actually giving us an opportunity to go back and test the boundaries of their technology. They're building, which we believe this is the first of its kind in the media industry. If we can go learn together from this experience, we can actually go ahead and do other things in other industries. To maybe, and we were just talking about how we could also take this. He's got his labs here in Los Angeles, were thinking maybe one of the next things we do based on the learnings we get, we probably could take it to other parts of the world. And if we are successful, we might even take it to other industries. What if we could go do something to help in this field of medicine? >> It's just thinking that, right? Yes. >> Think about it. Lisa, John. I mean, it's phenomenal. I mean, this is something Michael always talks about is how do we as del technologies help in progress in the human kind? And if this is something that we can learn from, I think it's going to be phenomenal. >> I think I think that's so interesting. Not only is that a good angle for Del Technologies, the thing that strikes me is the access toe artist trees, voices, new voices that may be missed in the prop the vetting process the old way. But, you know, you got to know where we're going. No, in the Venture Capital way seen this with democratization of seed labs and incubators, where, if you can create access to the story, tells on the artists we're gonna have one more exposure to people might have missed. But also as things change, like whether it's Ray Ray beaming and streaming, we saw in the gaming side to pull a metric or volumetric things. You're gonna have a better canvas, more paint brushes on the creative side and more. Artist. Is that the mission to get AC, get those artists in there? Is it? Is that part of the core mission submission? Because you're going to be essentially incubating new opportunities really fast. >> It's, uh, it's very important to me. Personally. I know it speaks of the values of both Sony and L. I like to call it the democratization of storytelling. You know, I've been very blessed again, a Hollywood producer, and we maybe curate a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of experience. But there's so many voices around the world that need to be hurt, and there are so many stories that otherwise can't be enabled. Imagine a story that perhaps is a unique >> special voice but requires distance. It requires five disparate locations Perhaps it's in London, Piccadilly Circus and in Times Square. And perhaps it's overto Abu Dhabi on DH Libya somewhere because that's part of the story. We can now collapse geography and bring those locations to a central place and allow a story to be told that may not otherwise have been able to be created. And that's vital to the fabric of storytelling worldwide's >> going change the creative process to you don't have to have that waterfall kind of mentality like we don't talk about intact. You're totally distributed content, decentralized, potentially the creative process going change with all the tools and also the visual tools. >> That's right. It's >> almost becoming unlimited. >> You wanted to be unlimited. You want the human spirit to be unlimited. You want to be able to elevate people on. That's the great thing about what we're trying to achieve and will achieve. >> It is your right. I mean, it is interesting, you know, we were just talking about this, too. Uh, we're in, you know, as an example. Shock tank. Yes, right. I mean, they obviously did it. The filming and stuff, and then they don't have the access. Let's say to the right studio. But the fact is, they had all this done. Andi, you know, they had all the rendering they had captured. Already done. You could now go out and do your chute without having all the space you needed. >> That's right. In the case of Shark Tank, which shoots a Sony Pictures studios, they knew they had a real estate issue. The fact of the matter is, there's a limited amount of sound stages around the world. They needed to sound stages and only had access to one. So we went in and we did a volumetric image acquisition of their exit interview stage. They're set. And then when it came time to shoot the second half a season ten, one hundred contestants went into a virtual set and were filmed in that set. And the funny thing is, one of the guys in the truck you know how you have the camera trucks and, you know, off offstage, he leaned into the mike. Is that you guys, could you move that plant a couple inches to the left and somebody said, Uh, I don't think we can do it right now, he said, We're on a movie lot. You could move a plant. They said No, it's physically not there. We're on innovation studios goes Oh, that's right. It's virtual mind. >> So he was fooled. >> He was pulled. In a way, we're >> being hashing it out within a team. When we heard about some of the things you know Glenn and Team are doing is think about this. If you have to teach people when we are running short of doctors, right? Yeah, if you could. With this technology and the learnings that come from here, if you could go have an expert surgeon do surgery once you're captured, it would be nice. Just imagine, to take that learning, go to the new surgeons of the future and trained them and so they can get into the act without actually doing it. So my point and all this is this is where I think we can take technology, that next level where we can not only learn from one specific industry, but we could potentially put it to human good in terms of what we could to and not only preparing the next of doctors, but also take it to the next level. >> This was a great theme to Michael Dell put out there about these new kinds of use case is that the time is now to do before. Maybe you could get there technology, but maybe aspirational. Hey, let's do it. I could see that, Glenn, I want to ask you specifically. The time is now. This is all kind of coming together. Timing's pretty good. It's only gonna get better. It's gonna be good Tech, Tech mojo Coming for the creative side. Where were we before? Because I can almost imagine this is not a new vision for you. Probably seen it now that this house here now what was it like before for, um and compare contrast where you were a few years ago, maybe decades. Now what's different? Why? Why is this so important >> for me? There's a fundamental change in how we can create content and how we can tell stories. It used to be the two most expensive words in the movie TV industry were what if today that the most important words to me or what if Because what if we could collapse geography? What if we could empower a new story? Technology is at a place where, if we can dream it. Chances are we can make it a reality. We're changing the dynamics of how we may content. He used to be lights, action camera. I think it's now lights, action, compute power action, you know, is that kind of difference. >> That is an amazing vision. I think society now has opportunities to kind of take that from distance learning to distance connections, the distance sharing experiences, whether it's immersion, virtual analog face, the face could really be powerful. Yeah, >> and this is not even a year old. >> That's right. >> So if you look at your your launch, you said, I think let june fourth twenty eighteen. What? Where do you go from here? I mean, like we said, this is like, unlimited possibilities. But besides putting Robbie in the movie, naturally, Yes, of course I have >> a star here >> who? E. >> So I got to say he's got star power. >> What's what's next year? Exactly? >> Very exciting. I will say we have shark tank Thie Advanced Imaging Society gives an award for being the first volume met you set ever put out on the airwaves. Uh, for that television show is a great honor. We have already captured uh, men in black. We captured a fifty thousand square foot stage that had the men in black headquarters has been used for commercials to market the film that comes out this June. We have captured sets where television shows >> and in hopes, that they got a second season and one television show called up and said, Guys, we got the second season so they don't have to go back to what was a very expensive set and a beautiful set >> way captured that set. It reminds me of a story of productions and a friend of mine said, which is every year. The greatest gift I have is building a beautiful set and and to me, the biggest challenges. When I say, remember that sent you built four years ago? I need that again. Now you can go >> toe. It's hard to replicate the exact set. You capture it digitally. It lives. >> That's exactly it. >> And this is amazing. I mean, I'd love to do a cube set into do ah, like a simulcast. Virtually. >> So. This is the next thing John and Lisa. You guys could be sitting anywhere going forward >> way. You don't have to be really sitting here >> you could be doing. What do you have to do? And, you know, you got everything rendered >> captured. We don't have to come to Vegas twenty times a year. >> We billed upset once. You >> know you want to see you here believing that So I'LL take that >> visual is a really beautiful thing. So if we can with hologram just seeing people doing conscious with Hollywood. Frank Zappa just did a concert hologram concert, but bringing real people and from communities around the world where the localization diversity right into a content mixture is just so powerful. >> Actually, you said something very interesting, John, which is one of the other teams to which is, if you have a globally connected society and he wanted try and personalize it to that particular nation ethnicity group. You can do that easily now because you can probably pop in actors from the local area with the same. Yeah, think about it. >> It's surely right. >> There's a cascade of transformations that that this is going Teo to generate. I mean just thinking of how different even acting schools and drama schools will be well, teaching people how to behave in these virtual environments, right? >> How to immerse themselves in these environments. And we have tricks up our sleeves that Khun put the actor in that moment through projection mapping and the other techniques that allow filmmakers and actors to actually understand the world. They're about to stepped in rather than a green screen and saying, OK, there's going to be a creature over here is gonna be blue Water falls over there will actually be able to see that environment because that environment will exist before they step on the stage. >> Well, great job the Del Partnership. On my final question, Glenn, free since you're awesome and got a great vision so smart, experienced, I've been really thinking a lot about how visualization and artistry are coming together and how disciplines silo disciplines like music. They do great music, but they're not translating to the graphics. It was just some about Ray tracing and the impact with GP use for an immersive experiences, which we're seeing on the client side of the house. It del So you got the back and stuff you metrics. And so, as artist trees, the next generation come up. This is now a link between the visual that audio the storytelling. It's not a siloed. >> It is not >> your I want to get your vision on. How do you see this playing out and your advice for young artists? That might be, you know, looked as country. What do you know? That's not how we do it. >> Well, the beautiful thing is that there are new ways to tell stories. You know, Hollywood has evolved over the last century. If you look at the studios and still exist, they have all evolved, and that's why they do exist. Great storytellers evolved. We tell stories differently, so long as we can emotionally relate to the story that's being told. I say, Do it in your own voice. The cinematic power is among us. We're blessed that when we look back, we have that shared experience, whether it's animate from Japan or traditional animation from Walt Disney everybody, she shares a similar history. Now it's opportunity to author our new stories, and we can do that and physical assets and volumetric assets and weaken blend the real and the unreal. With the compute power. The world is our oyster. >> Wow, >> What a nice >> trap right there. >> Exactly. That isn't my job. The transformation of of Hollywood. What it's really like the tip of the iceberg. Unlimited story potential. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you. This has been a fascinating cannot wait to hear, See and feel and touch What's next for Sony Animation studios With your technology power, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Thank you both. Which of >> our pleasure for John Carrier? I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube lie from Del Technologies World twenty nineteen We've just wrapped up Day two we'LL see you tomorrow.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Ferrier. You're watching the Cube live at Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. This is our second full day of Double Cube set coverage. We've got a couple of we got a really cool conversation coming up for you. We've got Robbie Pender County, one of our alumni on the cue back as VP product management server solutions. Robbie, Welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Much appreciated. >> And you brought some Hollywood? Yes, Glenn Glenn er, president of Sony Innovation Studios. Glenn and welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> So you are love this intersection of Hollywood and technology. But you're a filmmaker. >> Yeah, I have been filming movies for many years. I started off making motion pictures for many years. Executive produced him and oversaw production for them at one of our movie labels called Screen Gems, which is part of Sony Pictures. >> Wait a tremendous amount of evolution of the creative process being really fueled by technology and vice versa. Sony Innovation Studios is not quite one year old. This is a really exciting venture. Tell us about that and and what the The impetus was to start this company. >> You know that the genesis for it was based out of necessity because I looked at a nice Well, you know, I love making movies were doing it for a long time. And the challenge of making good pictures is resource is and you never get enough money. Believe or not, you never get enough money and never get enough time. That's everybody's issue, particularly time management. And I thought, Well, you know, we got a pretty good technology company behind us. What if we looked inward towards technology to help us find solutions? And so innovation studios is born out of that idea on what was exciting about it was to know that we had, uh, invited partners to the game right here with Del so that we could make movies and television shows and commercials and even enterprise solutions leaning into state of the art and cutting edge technology. >> And what some of the work private you guys envision coming out this mission you mentioned commercials TV. Is it going to be like an artist's studio actor actress in ball is take us through what this is going to look like. How does it get billed out? >> I lean into my career as a producer. To answer that one and say is going to enable that's one of the greatest things about being a producer is enabling stories, uh, inspiring ideas to be green lit that may not have been able to be done so before. And there's a key reason why we can't do that, because one of our key technologies is what we call the volumetric image acquisition. That's a lot of words. You probably say. What the heck is that? But a volumetric image acquisition is our ability to capture a real world, this analog world and digitize it, bring it into our servers using the power of Del and then live in that new environment, which is now a virtual sets. And that virtual set is made out of billions and trillions in quadrillions of points, much like the matter around us. And that's a difference because many people use pixels, which is interpretation of like we're using points which is representative of the world around us, so it's a whole revolutionary way of looking at it. But what it allows us to do is actually film in it in a thirty K moving volume. >> It's like a monster green screen for the world. Been away >> in a way, you're you're you're interaction around it because you have peril X, so these cameras could be photographing us. And for all you know, we may not be here. Could be at stage seven at Innovation Studios and not physically here, but you couldn't tell the >> difference. This is like cloud computing. We talking check world, you don't the provisional these resource is you just get what you want. This is Hollywood looking at the artistry, enabling faster, more agile storytelling. You don't need to go set up a town and go get the permit. All the all the heavy lifting you're shooting in this new digital realm. >> That's right. Exactly. Now I love going on location on There's a lot to celebrate about going on location, but we can always get to that location. Think of all the locations that we want to be in that air >> base off limits. Both space, the one I >> haven't been, uh, but but on said I've been I've walked on virtual moons and I've walked on set moons. But what if we did a volumetric image acquisition of someone set off the moon? Now we have that, and then we can walk around it. Or what if there's a great club, a nightclub? This says guys and wanted to shoot here. But we have performances Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night there. You know they have a job. What? We grabbed that image acquired it. And then you could be there anytime you want. >> Robbie, we could go for an hour here. This is just a great comic. I >> completely agree with >> you. The Cube. You could You could sponsor a cube in this new world. We could run the Q twenty four seven is absolutely >> right. And we don't even have >> to talk about the relationship with Dale because on Del Technologies, because you're enabling new capabilities. New kind of artistry, just totally cool. Want to get back to the second? But you guys were involved. What's your role? How do you get involved? Tell the story about your >> John. I mean, first and foremost one of the things didn't Glendon mention is he's actually got about fifty movies to his credit. So the guy actually knows this stuff. So which is absolutely fantastic. So we said, How do you go take coverage to the next level? So what else is better than trying to work something out, wherein we together between what Glenn and Esteem does at the Sony Innovation Labs for Studio Sorry. And as in Dead Technologies could do is to try and actually stretch the boundaries of our technology to a next tent that when he talks about kazillion bytes of data right one followed by harmony, our zeros. We have to be able to process the data quickly. We have to be able to go out and do their rendering. We probably have to go out and do whatever is needed to make a high quality movie, and that, I think, in a way, is actually giving us an opportunity to go back and test the boundaries of their technology. They're building, which we believe this is the first of its kind in the media industry. If we can go learn together from this experience, we can actually go ahead and do other things in other industries do. Maybe. And we were just talking about how we could also take this. He's got his labs here in Los Angeles, were thinking maybe one of the next things we do based on the learning to get. We probably could take it to other parts of the world. And if we are successful, we might even take it to other industries. What if we could go do something to help in this field of medicine? >> It's just thinking that, right? Yes. Think >> about it. Lisa, John. I mean, it's phenomenal. I mean, this is something Michael always talks about is how do we as del technologies help in progress in the human kind? And if this is something that we can learn from, I think it's going to be phenomenal. >> I think I think that's so interesting. Not only is that a good angle for Del Technologies, the thing that strikes me is the access to artist trees, voices, new voices that may be missed in the prop the vetting process the old way. But, you know, you got to know where we're going. No, in the venture, cobble way seen this with democratization of seed labs and incubators where, if you can create access to the story, tells on the artists we're gonna have one more exposure to people might have missed. But also as things change, like whether it's Ray Ray beaming and streaming we saw in the gaming side to volumetric or volumetric things, you're gonna have a better canvas, more paint brushes on the creative side and more action. Is that the mission to get AC Get those artists in there? Is it? Is that part of the core mission submission? Because you're going to be essentially incubating new opportunities really fast. >> It's, uh, it's very important to me. Personally. I know it speaks of the values of both Sony and L. I like to call it the democratization of storytelling. You know, I've been very blessed again, a Hollywood producer, and we maybe curate a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of experience. But there's so many voices around the world that need to be hurt, and there are so many stories that otherwise can't be enabled. Imagine a story that perhaps is >> a unique special voice but requires distance. It requires five disparate locations. Perhaps it's in London Piccadilly Circus and in Times Square. And perhaps it's overto Abu Dhabi on DH Libya somewhere because that's part of the story. We can now collapse geography and bring those locations to a central place and allow a story to be told that may not otherwise have been able to be created. And that's vital to the fabric of storytelling. Worldwide >> is going to change the creative process to You don't have to have that waterfall kind of mentality like we don't talk about intact. You're totally distributed content, decentralized, potentially the creative process going change with all the tools and also the visual tools. >> That's right. It's >> almost becoming unlimited. >> You want it to be unlimited. You want the human spirit to be unlimited. You want to be able to elevate people on. That's the great thing about what we're trying to achieve and will achieve. >> It is your right. I mean, it is interesting, you know, we were just talking about this too. We're in, you know, as an example, shock tank. Yes, right. I mean, they obviously did it the filming and stuff, and then they don't have the access, let's say to the right studio, but The fact is, there had all this done on DH. No, they had all the rendering. They had the captured already done. You could now go out and do your chute without having all the space you needed. >> That's right. In the case of Shark Tank, which shoots a Sony Pictures studios, they knew they had a real estate issue. The fact of the matter is, there's a limited amount of sound stages around the world. They needed to sound stages and only had access to one. So we went in and we did a volumetric image acquisition of their exit interview stage. They're set. And then when it came time to shoot the second half a season ten, one hundred contestants went into a virtual set and were filmed in that set. And the funny thing is, one of the guys in the truck you know how you have the camera trucks and, you know, off offstage, he leaned into the mike. Is that you guys, could you move that plant a couple inches to the left and somebody said, Uh, I don't think we can do it right now, he said. We're on a movie lot. You could move a plant. They said, No, it's physically not there. We're on innovation studios goes Oh, that's right. It's virtual mind. >> So he was fooled. >> He was pulled. In a way, we're >> being hashing it out within a team. When we heard about some of the things you know Glenn and Team are doing is think about this. If you have to teach people when we are running short of doctors, right? Yeah, if you could. With this technology and the learnings that come from here, if you could go have an expert surgeon do surgery once you're captured, it would be nice. Just imagine, to take that learning, go to the new surgeons of the future and trained them and so they can get into the act without actually doing it. So my point in all this is this is where I think we can take technology, that next level where we can not only learn from one specific industry, but we could potentially put it to human good in terms of what we could to and not only preparing the next of doctors, but also take it to the next level. >> This was a great theme to Michael Dell put out there about these new kinds of use case is that the time is now to do before. Maybe you couldn't get there with technology, but maybe aspirational, eh? Let's do it. I could see that. Glenn, I want to ask you specifically. The time is now. This is all kind of coming together. Timing's pretty good. It's only gonna get better. It's gonna be good. Tech, Tech mojo Coming for the creative side. Where were we before? Because I could almost imagine this is not a new vision for you. Probably seen it now that this house here now what was it like before for, um and compare contrast where you were a few years ago, maybe decades. Now what's different? Why? Why is this so important? >> You know, for me, there's a fundamental change in how we can create content and how we can tell stories. It used to be the two most expensive words in the movie TV industry were what if today that the most important words to me or what if Because what if we could collapse geography? What if we could empower a new story? Technology is at a place where if we can dream it. Chances are we can make it a reality. We're changing the dynamics of how we may content. He used to be lights, action, camera. I think it's now lights, action, compute power action, you know, is that kind of difference. >> That is an amazing vision. I think society now has opportunities to kind of take that from distance learning to distance connections, the distance sharing experiences, whether it's immersion, virtual analog face the face. I could really be powerful. Yeah, >> and this is not even a year old. >> That's right. >> So if you look at your your launch, you said, I think let june fourth twenty eighteen. What? Where do you go from here? I mean, like we said, this is like, unlimited possibilities. But besides putting Robbie in the movie, naturally, Yes, of course I have >> a star here >> who video. >> So I got to say he's got star power. >> What's what. The next year? Exactly. >> Very exciting. I will say we have shark tank Thie Advanced Imaging Society gives an award for being the first volume metric set ever put out on the airwaves. Uh, for that television show was a great honor. Uh, we have already captured, uh, men in black. We captured a fifty thousand square foot stage that had the men in black headquarters has been used for commercials to market the film that comes out this June. We have captured sets where television >> shows and in the in hopes that they got a second season and one television show called up and said, Guys, we got the second season so they don't have to go back to what was a very expensive set and a beautiful set >> Way captured that set. It reminds me of a story of productions and a friend of mine said, which is every year. The greatest gift I have is building a beautiful set and and to me, the biggest challenges. When I say, remember that sent you built four years ago. I need that again. Now you can go >> toe hard, replicate the exact set, you capture it digitally. It lives. >> That's exactly it. >> And this is amazing. I mean, I'd love to do a cube set into do ah, like a simulcasts. Virtually. >> So. This is the next thing John and Lisa. You guys could be sitting anywhere going forward. We don't have to be really sitting here you could be doing. What do you have to do? And, you know, you got everything rendered >> captured. We don't have to come to Vegas twenty times a year. >> We billed upset once >> You want to see you here believing that So I'LL take that >> visual is a really beautiful thing. So if we can with hologram just seeing people doing conscious. But Hollywood Frank Zappa just did a concert hologram concert, but bringing real people and from communities around the world where the localization diversity right into a content mixture is just so powerful. >> Actually, you said something very interesting, John, which is one of the other teams to which is, if you have a globally connected society and he wanted try and personalize it to that particular nation ethnicity group. You can do that easily now because you can probably pop in actors from the local area with the same city. Yeah, think about it. >> It's surely right. >> There's a cascade of transformations that that this is going Teo to generate. I mean just thinking of how different even acting schools and drama schools will be well, teaching people how to behave in these virtual environments, right? >> How to immerse themselves in these environments. And we have tricks up our sleeves that Khun put the actor in that moment through projection mapping and the other techniques that allow filmmakers and actors to actually understand the world. They're about to stepped in rather than a green screen and saying, OK, there's going to be a creature over here is gonna be blue Water Falls over there will actually be able to see that environment because that environment will exist before they step on the stage. >> Well, great job the Dale Partnership On my final question, Glenn free since you're awesome and got a great vision so smart, experienced, I've been really thinking a lot about how visualization and artistry are coming together and how disciplines silo disciplines like music. They do great music, but they're not translating to the graphics. It was just some about Ray tracing and the impact with GP use for immersive experiences, which was seeing on the client side of the house. It del So you got the back and stuff, but you metrics. And so, as artist trees, the next generation come up. This is now a link between the visual that audio, the storytelling. It's not a siloed. >> It is not >> your I want to get your vision on. How do you see this playing out and your advice for young artists? That might be, you know, looked as country. What do you know? That's not how we do it. >> Well, the beautiful thing is that there are new ways to tell stories. You know, Hollywood has evolved over the last century. If you look at the studios and still exist, they have all evolved, and that's why they do exist. Great storytellers evolved. We tell stories differently, so long as we can emotionally relate to the story that's being told. I say Do it in your own voice. The cinematic power is among us. We're blessed that when we look back, we have that shared experience, whether it's animate from Japan or traditional animation from Walt Disney, everybody shares a similar history. Now it's opportunity to author our new stories and we can do that and physical assets and volumetric assets and weakened blend the real and the unreal. With the compute power. The world is our oyster. >> Wow, >> What a nice >> trap right there. >> Exactly that is, um I dropped the transformation of Hollywood. What? And it's really think the tip of the iceberg. Unlimited story potential. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you. This has been a fascinating cannot wait to hear, See and feel and touch What's next for Sony Animation studios With your technology power We appreciate your time. >> Yeah, Thank you. Thank you both of >> our pleasure for John Farrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube lie from Del Technologies World twenty nineteen We've just wrapped up Day two we'LL see you tomorrow.

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

>> (Announcer) From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube! Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston, everybody. This is day one of the LiveWorx show, PTC's big IoT user conference, but it's much, much more than that. My name's Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube, the leader in LiveTech coverage. It's really our pleasure to have Devin Cleary here, he's the Director of Events at PTC. Dev, thanks so much for coming on The Cube, and thanks for putting together such a great show. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is great. >> You're welcome. So, I say it's a user conference, but it's so much more. I mean, talk about what your intent was and what you've created, you and your team at LiveWorx. >> Absolutely. So for us, we take a step back in corporate events. And we're really trying to bring sort of a unique flair to the corporate events world. In a nutshell, we at PTC have a 25 year legacy of doing really powerful user events, and it was really an inspiration two years ago to kind of shake the mold. And again, no pun intended, be disruptive in the marketplace. So for us, we sort of coined a new term or strategy that we call Industry Inclusiveness. And this is something where we wanted to sort of break down the four walls of the company, and invite industry influencers, individuals who are leading the charge, inclusive of actual competitors, 'cause for us, it's better together. And the whole story and talk track around LiveWorx is collaboration accelerates innovation. So for us, we want to make sure we embrace a lot of different people, walks of life, and diversity, and the intent is to create a one time a week a year, successful program that focuses and profiles nine of the most disruptive technologies on the planet. So this is everything from robotics to AI, to IoT, to AR, blockchain, and so much more. And for us, this is really the essence of what LiveWorx has become, which again for us, we want everyone to know that this event is sort of the world's most respected digital transformation conference. >> So, couple things I want to point out. Well, so over 6,000 people here, the kickoff was in the theater-in-the-round I've only seen that-- We do over a hundred events every year, I've only seen it done twice, and it's worked both times. I think it's a home run when you do the theater-in-the-round. The intro was like, I tweeted out this morning, it was like an Olympic opening ceremony. I mean really, where do you get your inspiration from that? >> So, you know what, for us, I have a really amazing team that works with me and collaboratively. And for us, we really want to sort of challenge the status quo. So, we always look for things actually outside of the tech bubble, if you will. We look at music. We look at fashion. We look at art. We look at a lot of pop culture sort of references and that sort of stems our ideas of how we sort of nurture and create what we call the apex, or LiveWorx or what you saw this morning. And for us, I'm all about what I call delight moments. So these are moments that frankly are sort of above and beyond the core content of what the conference offers and just making people have a great time. Showmanship and entertainment is just as much important as the core again content that we offer at LiveWorx. >> Dev, you've got a big tent here with a lot of different topics. There's a show I go to, we talk about the random collision of unusual suspects, which this reminded me of. Can you talk a little bit about how in these diverse communities, yet we should see some overlap and some bumping together. >> Yeah. Absolutely. So, again with LiveWorx, and sort of again profiling these nine to ten most disruptive technologies out there, we're always trying to recruit people that are very diverse from various backgrounds. You know, one specific goal that we have, just from a geographic persepective is making sure that over half our audience is from international markets outside of the United States. So again, when you're bumping shoulders or walking the halls everywhere around us, you're guaranteed to hear someone that comes from a different walk of life, a different experience, a different educational background and that adds a lot of value to the overall conference. Now, again, we target everyone from administrators to engineers, developers and more because really this show runs the gamut on everything from product design and sort of the ideas of what you want to do, all the way through service, manufacturing, it is the full scope of industry 4.0. So, to your point, there's a lot of intersection and a lot of overlapping because every company, every person, every individual, wants to experience and learn how to embrace what we call disruptive tech. >> You know, again, we do a lot of shows and the vast majority, when someone like you guys brings us to a show, they want to showcase their products and basically pimp up their own stuff. You chose a different approach. First of all, thank you for that. So, this today has been all about thought leadership. Stu and I were saying it reminds us of some of the stuff we do with MIT. Where you have professors, you have thought leaders, talking about not, kind of frankly, some boring products. >> And it's not a sales pitch. >> Right, it's not a sales pitch. But, why that decision and what's your vision for where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so again, I would say that a lot of conferences, and this is no offense to my brothers and my sisters in the events world out there, but people are so sick and tired of going to the standard trade show. The days of pipe-and-drape and aisles of just being pitched to and receiving free stress balls, and hiring staff that might not even be employed by the company, but they just frankly look good, those days are completely over. In our audience, the technologists who really matter in this world, who are doing a lot of great work, they want that substance and that core content. So, for us, it's really a vision about that's embraced and sort of evolved into give back and let the content lead your success. And that is going to help amplify the voice and further the mission. We look at LiveWorx as a catalyst well beyond the company that employs me and the people that work for just these companies. We have a vision to make Boston an epicenter, a headquarters, a world-renown attraction for technologists world-wide knowing this city for IoT and for AR. And for us, we embrace the innovation district as that pallet, that backdrop, that environment to allow us to really accomplish that. So, LiveWorx is growing exponentially. We experienced double digit growth this year, which was amazing. Starting where I was only with this company two years ago and less than 25 hundred attendees and we're at 6,100 right now live on the show floor at LiveWorx. So the future is really bright for us, and we're embracing this notion of the convention center is only going to be constricting for so long. It's time that we also implode those four walls and we embrace the outside. And what our plans are going for, which I'm really excited to sort of announce, is we're going to be now becoming more of an industrial innovation week in Boston, and taking our plans mainstream. So, that means taking the content that we focus on, and the partners that we work with, and the industry thought leaders and now you start to actually replicate these events throughout the entire seaport. So, think of it, and again most of you know South by Southwest, I'm a big fan and an avid follower, think of it South by Southwest meets Industrial, and that is the future of this show. >> Love it, and you know, we're thrilled to be part of it. And it's palpable. You actually see now, in the seaport... You know, we were talking off camera, you can't compete with Silicon Valley or on terms with Silicon Valley does. You shouldn't even try. We're bicoastal, we have an office in Palo Alto we know it well. It's a unique vortex. But certainly, IoT, Blockchain, VR, there really is some clear innovation going on here so, if you can focus on that, you can actually really blossom an ecosystem and that's really what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. And, again, PTC has been headquartered here for over 25 years, they're a leader in industrial innovation. They're a company that believes in giving back. We have curated and nurtured through partnerships with Harvard Business School, with MIT Innovation Lab, etc. We have cultivated some of the greatest startups of our time right now, who are creating groundbreaking technology in IoT, in AR, that is changing the world. We're even actually doing work right now in our backyard with Boston Children's Hospital, for example. Doing incredible work with our Vuforia product in AR that's helping actually find a cure for Alzheimer's. So, again, the possibilities are endless, and the innovation is limitless. >> Well, you're the hot company right now, obviously growing very rapidly, you're kind of like the Comeback Kid. You're clearly punching above your weight. The Scott Kirsner article in the Globe was unbelieveable. >> (Devin) Thank you I know we're very... Shout out to Scott. >> And so, you got to be thrilled with that. But, what's interesting to me, Dev, is you're not... You could ride that wave, and just pump up PTC but you're doing things that will allow you to sustain this as a community member, paying it forward, you know, it's kind of a cliche, but that's what I see. Thoughts? >> A hundred percent. And, again, the way that we sort of frame LiveWorx is I want you to think of PTC as the presenting sponsor. They are an investor in the vision that this team has to carry forward the community and the movement all around industrial innovation. And again, we feel that Boston being sort of our headquarters in our backyard, it's important that we're giving back and again, furthering that opportunity to further solidify our right as a rightful heir of IoT and AR, as a city, as a community and as the state of Massachusetts. >> Dev, wondering if you could give our audience that didn't come to this event a quick flavor of what's going on, flavoring and I loved you had the Boston food trucks all right outside. They're a little warm. My friends from the west coast are like, "This isn't warm." But for Boston, it hit summer. But, give us a quick tour around what people missed. >> Yeah, so we're all about an immersive experience at LiveWorx. Again, you're going to have sort of a checklist of what you absolutely need to have at an event to sustain someone's expectations. So, the content, the networking, the value. But again, we like to take it a step further and things that I call delight moments. So, for example, this year in Extropolis, and Extropolis, for those of you at home, that is our sort of expectation shattering, ground-breaking, playground for adults in technology. So, every corner, every ounce, every inch of this show floor has something to engage, ignite the 5 senses and tell our story. And one example specifically that I love to highlight this year is I've actually created the vision with a whole slew of individuals from PTC and partners and whatnot. Something we call the X-factory. Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in business in the world. Mostly every company at an enterprise level has some sort of manufacturing component to it. And what we wanted to do this year is create the factory of the future. Meaning, working with the leaders like McKinsey, and again HeroTech and global brands in Germany who are defining manufacturing and who founded manufacturing in our history, we have partnered with them to say, "What does that factory of the future look like? What are companies going to be doing five, ten, fifteen years from now and what can we expect?" You're getting that first at LiveWorx, which is awesome, and the whole process is "Let's not have a standard kiosk. Let's not do a laptop with a video. Let's actually build out a 20,000 square foot industrial factory with multiple stations from digital engineering to service to again, AR induced digital twins and everything else in between. And let's actually have every single attendee create, design and manufacture a smart connected product. We're working with our partner, Bell and Howell, from a shipping, service and supply chain perspective, and again, we are blowing the roof off this show on that one activation, and there's over a hundred in total throughout this entire show this week. So, that's a little bit of a flavor of LiveWorx. And beyond that, we do things, everything from a puppy daycare hour to sort of do a high tech low touch feel. We do incredible food presentations and we're going to be ending with a big bang tomorrow with our closing party called the Mix-It Six, which is one of my favorite programs the entire week. And that is actually a superhero themed event where we're actually having a guest host and a personal friend, Paul Rudd, who was the Ant Man for Marvel, he'll be hosting our event. And the whole notion around superheroes is that we tell everyone this week "Unleash your inner superhero". Take advantage of the technology that is on display, and realize how it can enable and empower you to now have superhuman powers. So, everything from AR giving you the power to see the invisible, to IoT helping you get the power to predict the future. Everything is possible and everything is creative at LiveWorx. >> Well, it's obviously working. And so, I'm sure the execs are seeing this going, "Great. Good Job. Way to go. We've got some momentum. Let's double down." But, you back up two years ago, how did you sell this to the folks? Cause we see a lot of guys like, "Alright, how many leads we going to get out. How much revenue we going to drive" How'd you get through that knothole? >> So, let's put it in this perspective. There's a lot of intrinsic and intangible ways to measure the success of a show, and the value and the impact brought to a company. One thing I would actually say, I've worked in the tech industry for over six years now, I've been in the events business for over a decade, I've worked for some of the most incredible and impressive, and media-driven startups in the world right now. PTC, though, is a very interesting ecosystem. Their executives actually embrace the notion of what I presented first and foremost, about again, industry inclusiveness as we call that term. And for us, we have a vision at PTC to be disruptive, to be ground-breaking. If we do not embrace that ourselves, as our culture and our business model, how do we hope someone else to believe in the product, and the vision and the mission that we set forth in the marketplace. >> And from that, you got a response of, "Yeah, let's do it." >> So, again, am I going to be a hundred percent honest and transparent? Was everyone embracing that a hundred percent? No. But again, I think the proof is in the pudding and I think again it's a leap of faith in saying, "Listen, take a chance. Be disruptive, and see what the product of our fruits of our labor could be." And again, here you have it three years later, triple the size of the audience, tripling the size of the success, seeing multiple customers, multiple partners multiple industry leaders now attaching themselves to this brand. So for us, LiveWorx is nothing greater than a record breaking success this year, and I'm so excited for the rest of you at home to experience on the live stream, or again check out 2019 June 10-13. >> June 10, right here. Right? >> (Devin) Right here again. >> Dev, first of all thanks so much for having The Cube here and making us a part of this awesome event and look forward to working with you in the future. Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. By the way, check out thecube.net that's where all the videos here will be. Check out siliconangle.com all the editorial coverage. Wikibond.com is where the research is. We're a wrap here from LiveWorx day one. Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching, we'll see you next time.

(orchestral string music) >> Welcome to this special Cube Conversation here in our Palo Alto studios, the Cube office here. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconAngle Media, and also the co-host of the Cube. Our next guest is Jeremy Almond who is the CEO of PayStand, a hot startup doing some really new things in and around Blockchain, decentralized, and really targeting the B to B space on a really compelling and an interesting topic that a lot of people are interested in. Jeremy, welcome to this Cube Conversation. >> Awesome, thank you John. >> John: Hey, so tell me a little bit about the company and set the table for us...Paystand, what you guys are doing, why you were founded, and what's the disruptive enabler you guys are taking? What's the angle of your business? >> Jeremy: Yeah, sure...so Paystand, like you mentioned, is a B to B software platform specifically focused on payment. So you can imagine what PayPal or Venmo does from the consumer level. We do for complicated commercial transactions between accounts receivable and accounts payable departments that normally would be paying with paper checks in a manual process. >> John: So basically, accounting, ledger, I'm kind of guessing...nice fit for Blockchain... >> Correct, yeah, yeah. So what we do is we apply Blockchain technology to help a company speed up their time-to-cash, automate their business process, and dramatically lower their transaction costs. >> I'll get your thoughts on this...I interviewed Don Tapscott at an event and we were riffing on this notion of the nature of the firm, right? People would come to an office, you'd have accounting, all these things that you'd have to put in place of systems. Now with this decentralized world we're living in, internet, and with Blockchain in particular, and a crypto-currency market that's pretty frothy but, you know, you look at Blockchain and separate those two for a minute, you really can look at ways to change how work is organized. How do you guys view that? I mean, it's obviously a new, big wave coming. Then you got businesses who are just trying to operate and make money, right? Keep the lights on, but they almost have to start rethinking about the future. So, what is this block wave...Blockchain wave coming? How do you talk about that? Is it that disruptive? I mean, certainly centralized databases aren't going away anytime soon, but it's coming. What's your thoughts in reaction to that? >> It's coming, you know...I think it's... It will affect the enterprise which is where we spend our time and space, in a lot of ways like Cloud did, right? So I've spent probably 15 years doing un-sexy B to B tech, in some way, shape, or form. And what we've seen is digital transformation in the enterprise has happened in a few key areas. CRM is now in the Cloud, right? You have companies like SalesForce that have become significant. ERP is now in the Cloud, your financial software is now automated, right? Kind of ironically, the last mile piece, that part that lubricates the business, the core of the business, the money-movement piece, is actually still really, really manual. So, you have humans that sit around and they take an invoice and then a paper check and then they move it, and that process is very, very ineffecient. And so, having a more automatic, smart financial system can improve the business's life in really significant ways. >> Also, you know, one of the things we've been commenting on and opining here on the Cube is... I made a statement a couple weeks ago, "Oh, MarTech"...you know, marketing technology wave, all those logos on those landscape slides, "didn't really pan out 'cause the Cloud kind of changes that." I mean, it's panning out, but not the way people thought. FinTech...financial tech...is also certainly important. Banks, subsidy trading, you see that. What is the inhibitor for these new trends? Because you mentioned they're moving paper around. I mean, it's money, they probably don't want to mess with an operational system that's core to their business. Is it fear? Is it tech? Both? What's your view on why it's taking so long? Or is it moving along at a speed you think it's going to... Be adopted? >> Jeremy: Yeah, it's actually kind of a unique point in time right now. I think on one hand, financial services in general, part of their job is to manage risk, right? And so they're going to be a lagging, in some ways, industry. And so, digital transformation, right? The internet has opened up and democratized media. It's opened up so many other areas. Blockchain now is the entry point for digital transformation of financial services, and so the time is probably right, right now. We've been in the space...we started the company in 2014. And, you know, I've seen over the last three years, hearing banks, other large institutions, large enterprises, go from skepticism to curiosity. >> John: What's the technology stack look like? Obviously four years is, like, decades in the Blockchain world, and obviously, people are running as fast as they can. It's kind of a moving train at many levels. Business model side as well as a tech stack. And this is really the opportunity. A lot of these systems... I mean, some of the e-commerce systems are 20-year-old tech stacks, some are even older. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Just going back four years, since you were founded... What's the big moving glacier, if you will, of change and how are you guys managing that? How should people think about managing the risk of the tech stack? >> Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I think...you know... On the Blockchain-specific side... in the early days, a lot of it was about currency, and actual payment, right? I think what we're seeing now is the opportunity for Blockchain, particularly in the enterprise, to actually dramatically improve their operations side, right? Ethereum, private Blockchains... actually have the ability to not just decentralize how money movement or networks operate, but how an internal system operates. I'll give you an example...we used the Blockchain to... A private Blockchain to actually control approval workflow. So when a payment goes out, oftentimes you need your accounts payable person to send a payment out, but the controller or the treasury or someone else has to sign off on it, right? So that signature, you need it to be valid, trusted, the identity around it, right? And you want an audit record. And so Blockchain's a really, really good use case for something like that. That's not peer-play payments, it's not peer-play settlement. It doesn't require, you know, a million people to get on. It just can operate in the business in a really critical function, in a better way than the current technology does. >> John: It's interesting, I love these new technology opportunities 'cause... There's always going to be a tipping point and the famous Steve Jobs quote is, "Hey if I was asked to build a better "phone in 2005, I would have built an excellent... "better Blackberry." But he...then he built the iPhone, so he thought differently. No one was really asking for the iPhone. The question I get a lot from skeptics in Blockchain is, "No one's really asking for Blockchain." So, again, this is kind of like...you could always say, "I'm building a better centralized database system "in a distributed computing environment." Okay, we've done that. >> Yeah. >> Are people asking for Blockchain, or are they just asking for it in a different way? What's your thoughts to that? >> Yeah, I would say that there's... There's a big picture question of, "Are people asking for it." And I'd say society's actually asking for it. Part of my personal story is, you know, my family, blue collar family, they... My mother's side immigrated here, her generation. My brick-layer father, they spent their entire lives getting their first home. And you know, 800 square foot home, that's nothing special, but it was their American dream. In 2008, in the financial crisis, they lost the house. And so I think, you know, society said, "Financial services and core parts of our economy "actually could...we could do better, right?" And I think the magic thing about technology is we get to imagine the world not as it is but as it ought to be. So one, I think society is actually asking for... Can the core parts of our economy actually do better? Can we dream up something better? And I think that's the purest part of what the folks in the Blockchain movement are trying to do. That's, you know, at a very high level. And then I think, practically, right, for businesses like we operate day in and day out...you know... If there's technology that allows them to be able to operate their business more efficiently, drop their costs and grow faster, you know... How would that work, right? It's in some ways like Cloud. How does Cloud work? You know, I think... now we're really getting into the deep mess of it, but you know, Cloud was transformative to the business, right? VOIP was transformative to some businesses. Inbound marketing was transformative to some businesses. Blockchain is the same kind of concept. >> I mean, and Cloud, too...there was a lot of naysayers. I remember I used the first EC2 instances of Amazon when it came out, being an entrepreneur, I'm like, "I don't have to provision servers? "This is amazing, I can put my credit card down "and pay a few bucks..." And then even still, up until, I would say, even three or four years ago they were dismissed as relevant. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And again, the rest is history, look what they've done. So there's always going to be those naysayers. But to the point about Cloud and Blockchains, and even crypto, this is a wave, and we've, you know... We're very bullish on this movement because we see the wave coming way out there and it's huge. This is probably bigger than the other waves combined, in our opinion. So you mentioned societal change. This is a big deal. I mean, you're seeing regulations right now in GDPR in Europe, kind of trying to govern an old database market that's...it's a mess, database wise. But it makes sense from a society standpoint. People want to pull their data out. This is a trend. You got societal forces, and then technical legacy. I mean, this could be an opportunity for Blockchain to say, "Hey, optimize for the new wave." Don't try to retrofit, say, an old wave. What's your thoughts? >> Jeremy: Correct, yeah, I mean I think there's a... ...a number of areas... Even in the data cyber society. Take an Enron scandal, right? That happened a decade plus ago. Out of that came regulation called Sarbanes-Oxley, right? And Sarbanes-Oxley's concept, right, is to ensure that companies publicly account for their records in a proper way, right? If there's an audit trail, that they don't sort of take their financial systems and misrepresent them, right? Blockchain, because it's a source of truth that's immutable, meaning it can't be changed, is a great way, right, to have more efficiency in that process. Today there's a whole industry that's popped up just for Sarbanes-Oxley, just to regulate the financial system, just to ensure that the books actually say what they're supposed to say, right? That's kind of the definition of what a smart contract can and should do. >> John: This is really an opportunity for entrepreneurs, if you think about it. I mean, a lot of alpha entrepreneurs are really licking their chops on Blockchain because they can see how it could disrupt industries. And I showed you some of the things we're working on, and what we're thinking about for SiliconAngle about media and data. But it brings up things that we obviously see every day in the press: the election, weaponizing content for bad things. Facebook's having a challenge right now on how they optimize their data for their own self-service reasons. This is a problem, this is a revolution. People are kind of tired, so...what's your view of the role of data to the human? I mean, obviously, you know, the cliche: "Oh, the users are in charge, "they should own their own data." Okay I got that. But how...how do you see that vision playing out? I mean not just from a Facebook which is a social network example, but how does data impact a user going forward in your vision? Because they could really change from the outside in. >> Yeah, I mean I think...part of what's critical with data is two things: one, identity really matters, right? How do you manage identity? And so I think there's a number of really fascinating Blockchain companies that are specifically focused on the identity question, right? And that's...that's true around the social media side, it's true around...how do I actually manage where I move... Identity around? So I think that's one side that's really, really critical to solve. I don't know that we've got a crystal ball yet on what it will ultimately look like. But the Blockchain model for identity allows us to... rethink the fabrics of what privacy is, what permission looks like, and what trust looks like with people I want to engage with and with people I don't want to engage with. It's interesting, you talk about the Blockchain culture being more societal and mission-driven. My word, but you're kind of implying that. I remember when the Cloud came out, it was... The network guys were in charge, and the app guys were like, have to feed off the network requirements. And then that sea-change flipped around. The app guys are in charge, data driving requirements for the network. Question for you is: Do you see a day, soon, where societal requirements will dictate technology? I mean, you're seeing... you're seeing that pattern kind of emerging now, it's kind of not yet been fully thought through in public commentary but, you know...we see these pressure points potentially impacting tech design. >> Jeremy: Yeah, yeah...I think there's actually a good tug-of-war or balance, right? So entrepreneurs naturally are going to run as fast as they can to see innovation hopefully with means of improving society, right? And then, you know, you have regulators and you have government agencies who are looking and saying, "Okay, you might be thinking about one myopic view "and we need to make sure "we're looking at the good of society." And so I think that tug-of-war you saw with the internet, right, where how much do we regulate the internet, right? And I think the balance was mostly healthy. And we're sort of seeing that through today with Blockchain as well, where...you know, things like ICOs have good and bad implications. The regulators have been watching it relatively closely. But they also haven't completely came down and clamped down on it, you know, even this week there's... There was a relative balance in the discussions that came out. >> John: The SEC's done a good job, they've... >> Correct. >> John: They whipped a few people in shape to send the signal, but they weren't foreclosing any innovation. >> Jeremy: That's correct, yeah. >> And ICOs...certainly there're some scams. What's the good sides of ICO? Obviously the scams are out there. What's the good side? The fundraising? Democratization? What's your take on the ICO? Initial coin offering opportunity. >> Yeah, you know, I think...in some ways, democratization has become such a buzzword it's lost its meaning, right? But if you think about what it really is, it's so powerful, because it's this concept, right, that we distribute power and control to the hands of many. And so, you know, I think there are a lot of public good technologies that actually can use that concept, right? The internet is a public good. You could argue Wikipedia is a public good, right? And so, utility-type tokens actually are valuable because they can have a dual nature to them. I think the other thing that I'm particularly interested in watching how ICOs evolve is...I think there's some danger in ICOs...coming in and... in the early stage market. Because early stage companies tend to be... They're so nascent that they need guidance, right? And I actually...I might be contradictory here to most people in the Blockchain space, but I actually think early stage investors have a lot of value in that space. And so, I am actually fascinated about what happens in later stage rounds and what do ICOs become there. So I think utility, and later stage rounds are actually two fascinating areas of ICOs. >> John: Sure, that's a great point. I would also say that the trend that we're seeing is... There's an early stage component that needs mentoring and needs some nurturing, I would agree with that. That's a classic VC, maybe some token economics in there, but again, different playbook. The tokenization of business is really interesting 'cause now you have token economics being applied to a preexisting, proven business, with a disruptive nature on the other side, is super interesting. So I have to ask you: Are we going to have a chief economic officer as a new role soon? Or, is that going to be...'cause remember, if you think about token economics, it's about opening up and changing the distribution of data and wealth, you can argue both are the same, but...how do you view that? Because that's a trend we're seeing. The tokenization of a business to disrupt an industry incumbent...set of incumbents. >> Correct, yeah, and I think it's a... it's really, really early days and what... You have really early stage companies that are thinking about tokenizing their business before they exist, right? And then you have other companies which are maybe past the innovation curve and they're trying to apply tokens to their business. >> A pivot of an existing business. >> Yeah, so we've seen these, right? Public companies that have added Blockchain to the name. I think the fascinating thing will become where... Fast-growing, real businesses, where there's a there there, they've crossed the chasm, go, "Okay how do we apply "tokenization to our company? "And how do we think about it, from both a... "commercial economic part of the business, "and then how do we think about it "from tokenizing the business?" And we haven't seen many cases yet, but I actually think that's one of the next waves we'll see. >> John: Great insight. I got to ask you on a personal level. You're doing some talking, obviously the founder of the company, CEO. What's going on? What do you talk about these days? What are you passionate about? I know you were talking to some folks at UC Santa Barbara. You mentioned going to teach down there. What are you talking about? What are you sharing publicly? what's on your mind these days? >> Yeah, I mean, I think...I'm personally deeply motivated every day by waking up and going, you know, "The financial service industry can go through a massive transformation, right? And I think there's a lot of really good companies that are doing that at the consumer level, and so, you know, I think our space...we have a unique place in time to be working at the commercial level. So the commercial level affects big parts of our economic infrastructure in ways that we don't think about. The Equifax breach was a pretty big deal to people, right? The financial crisis was a big deal to people. So, how do we imagine those kinds of industries, right? Supply chain, title, logistics, right? And how do we think about those industries, democratizing them with Blockchain? Those, to me, are the unsung heroes of what Blockchain will ultimately help transform society. >> John: It's interesting, you said you were kind of humble when you came on earlier. "I'm in boring areas of B to B..." But I got to say to your point about Cloud earlier, there's a calm before the storm, these boring areas that are, say, calm are really the grounds where you see disruption, and I think that's an area... Not just high-frequency trading, that's going to be, you know, always an issue, but in terms of real financial plumbing. >> Yeah. >> Perfect for a ledger, perfect for those things. Okay, take a plug for your company. How are people using you guys? What's the value proposition? What are some of the things that you guys are involved in? How does someone engage with you guys? Give the plug for PayStand. >> Yeah, so at PayStand, we tend to work with companies where there are high volumes of paper checks in the process. So if you have a $100,000 invoice that goes out, for example, with a company that you've been working at for a decade, and you have a contract that says it's a Net 60 contract, right? The challenge is, it's a paper check, you want to move it digitally, what do you move it digitally to? And the reality is the consumer payment companies that are focused on credit cards are not really an ideal solution for that because their business model is a percentage business model. There's nothing wrong with a percentage business model that charges a company two or three percent if I'm swiping for a five dollar cup of coffee, right? If it's a $100,000 payment that I owe someone that I know, and I have contract terms, I'm not going to pay the bank $3,000 to move ones and zeroes from this bank database to this bank database. So what we do with our network is we make that money movement fast, instant, automatic, verified, validated, right, with control, in a way where we can automate the process. >> It's so funny what jumped in my mind is punch cards to computers, tape to storage. This is interesting. So paper checks, probably big, I don't know what the numbers are, you might have them handy. People are doing paper checks, so you're building a system around paper checks, did I get that right? >> Yeah, so we digitize what would have been a paper check. Today over 50 percent of all commercial payments are still done in paper checks. So they're gone in our digital world, right? Like, you and I, we Venmo each other. But when a business goes to write a check, when they get an invoice, they send out a check. And so we digitize the whole process. The moment that the invoice is ready to go, to the moment it gets in the bank, it all becomes digital space. >> John: And the alternative is what, I got to go check when it was mailed, was it received, was it cashed, did it get put into the accounting system? And that's kind of... >> Jeremy: That's correct. >> That's the manual... >> Jeremy: That's the manual. So they spend...they'll spend a week tracking down the payment from the moment the controller says, "Okay to pay," to the time it sits in their bank account, that's humans, time, money. >> And an old, antiquated system that doesn't change because of...what? >> Jeremy: Well, it's legacy infrastructure in one way. But in another, you know, even the banking infrastructure, the...most of the banking infrastructure that are for commercial payments was designed in the 60s and 70s. And last time I checked, the 60s and 70s was before the internet of today. So they weren't really designed for digital realtime payments. And they weren't designed for commercial use cases like today. >> Is fraud a factor, or is that not a factor? Is that part of it, or...yes? >> Jeremy: Yeah and I think a key thing with what we do, enterprise payments, security is really, really important. We take it very, very seriously. And this is, again, one of the downsides to the legacy commercial infrastructure. When you have a check, right? You have this checking and routing number on it. Anybody takes that, in theory, that's all that identifies you and your company and your account. And so money can actually be moved and ran against in that case. With a network like ours, we can validate that you are who you say you are, you have the money in your account, it moved when it should, and you've actually authorized it. These are all things that we should know, but we just don't. >> John: And you take the data around it, you take that check, put it into the system. Okay so when does a company want...should be calling you. Is it like, "I'm overloaded with paper, "I want a new system, I'm doing a refresh." I mean, when do people call PayStand? What's the signals that would give your buyer some indicator of time to call PayStand? >> Yeah, so generally it's after...it's when they have high-volumes of checks and they're growing, and/or that they've basically taken their ERP, and they've done an ERP Cloud migration, right? And so now they've got their general ledger, and that financial system's not in a shoebox anymore, right? It's in a critical core ERP system. And so what they're finding is they've bought digital transformation for financial services and their accountant only sort of has half the solution. And so they come in and they use us to close the last mile. >> John: Okay, so I'm going to put my naysayer hat on and ask you the question: I love it, but what's this Blockchain thing? I'm an accounting guy, took one computer class, whatever, I get blockchained. How do you stay up to date, how do you ensure that I'm going to have a system that's going to be working? I know that Blockchain standards are changing. How do you guys mitigate that? How do you handle that question? >> Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I think the critical thing for our customers, right, is... For us, our customers, money moves in dollars, right? It leaves their bank account, and goes into their supplier's bank account, the supplier's bank account goes into their customer's bank account, right? Their financial system does not change. We're actually very, very sensitive to that. We think about this very different than a consumer solution, which is...consumer solutions almost have a... A critical mass question. They need everybody to get into the system for it to work. For commercial, you don't actually want to change the business process of your partners, right? It's really important, they've been doing this...so... So we are very thoughtful about our software doesn't change business process, it doesn't require you to enter into some kind of new economy or a new currency. You simply do what you're always doing, with the systems you're already using, right? And we just digitize the process to make them faster, cheaper, and automated. >> Awesome. Talk about your goals for the year at PayStand. Where are you guys at, company-wise? Funding, goals, hiring, what's going on? Give a quick final word on the company. >> Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I think we...you know... We're blessed right now, I would say we're one of, if not the fastest B to B payment company... fastest-growing B to B payment company today. So, you know, I think we have a long way to go... I would call this inning two for us, right? We ultimately...I think much more about what does 10 years look like than 12 months look like. Because this is the beginning of the commercial financial service wave. And so, you know, I think we ultimately believe the digital transformation is going to reinvent our industry. And if we can go lead the way, we'll be very happy. QAnd for us that just means continue growing, continue serving our customers, continue hiring, you know. I think if we do all that, you know, right place right time. >> John: Awesome...final question for you. To the folks out there watching, you're an expert in the industry...again, fintech as well as computer engineering. If my sister who is not savvy says, "Jeremy, what is Blockchain?" How would you describe Blockchain to someone who's interested and needs to know the definition and importance of Blockchain? >> Jeremy: Okay, so Blockchain, to me, is basically a way to be able to take information like you might have on your checkbook, or you might have in a spreadsheet, and use it where anybody can access it in a way that's actually easily, controllable, visible, secure, and automated. That doesn't sound very sexy, but the important thing is how we keep records affects all of society, right? We have records of who owns their houses, we have records of how much money we have in our account, we have records of who did we vote on, right? Those records are the foundation for our society. Currently companies own those records. Companies are fallible, right? And so what Blockchain does is it allows us to make a more infallible system to keep access to those records you and I care about. >> John: And this is an infrastructure opportunity, not so much crypto currency... kind of a distinction between the two, right? >> That's right, that's right. I would say crypto currency and money is like the first pillar app on top of Blockchain. >> John: Jeremy Almond, CEO, founder of PayStand, hot company, doing something really good in a growing, changing market called checks, paper checks, and if you have them and groan, digitize them. Great entry strategy for Blockchain. Thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. And thanks for joining us here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier in the Cube Studios for Cube Conversations. Thanks for watching. (exciting orchestral music)

(orchestral music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation here at Palo Alto studios, at the Cube office yeah I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and also co-host the Cube. Our next guest is Jeremy Almond is the CEO of Paystand, hot startup doin' some really new things in and around blockchain, decentralize, and really targeting the B2B space on a really compelling and interesting topic that a lot of people are interested in. Jeremy welcome to this Cube conversation. >> Awesome, thank you John. >> Hey so talk a little about the company, set the table for us, PayStand, what you guys are doing, why you were founded, and what's the disruptive enabler that you guys are taking, and what's the angle of your business? >> Yeah sure so, PayStand like you mentioned, is a B2B software platform, specifically focused on payment. So, you can imagine what Paypal or Venmo does from the consumer level, we do for complicated commercial transactions between accounts receivable and accounts payable departments that normally would be paying with paper checks in manual process. >> So basically accounting, ledger, I'm kind of guessing. Nice bit for blockchain. >> Correct, yeah, yeah. So, what we do is we apply blockchain technology to help a company speed up their time to cash, automate their business process and dramatically lower their transaction cost. >> I'll get your thoughts on this. I interviewed Don Tapscott at an event and we were riffing on this notion of the nature of the firm, right? People would come to an office, you'd have accounting, all these things that you'd have to put in place as systems. Now with this decentralized world we're living in, internet and with blockchain in particular, and a cryptocurrency market that's pretty frothy. But, you look at blockchain and you separate those two for a minute. You really can look at ways to change how work is organized. How do you guys view that, I mean, It's obviously a new, big wave coming. Then you've got businesses who are just trying to operate and make money, right? So, keep the lights on, but they also have to start rethinking about the future. So, what is this block wave, blockchain wave coming? How do you talk about that? Is it that disruptive? I mean, certainly centralized databases aren't going a away any time soon, but it's coming. What's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> It's coming. You know, I think it's... It will effect the enterprise, which is where we spend our time and space. In a lot of ways like cloud did. So, I've spent probably 15 years doing unsexy B2B tech in some way shape or form. And what we've seen is digital transformation in the enterprise has happened in a few key areas. CRM is now in the cloud. You have companies like Salesforce that have become significant. ERP is now in the cloud, you're financial software is now automated. Kind of ironically the last mile piece, the part that lubricates the business, the core of the business, the money movement piece, is actually still really, really manual. So, you have humans that sit around and they take an invoice and then a paper check and then they move it. And that process is very, very inefficient. And so, having a more automatic, smart financial system can improve the business's life in really significant ways. >> Also, you know, one of the things we've been commenting on opining here on the Cube is, I made a statement a couple weeks ago, OMAR tech, marketing technology, Wave, all those logos on those landscape slides, didn't really pan out cause the cloud kind of changed that. It's panning out, but not the way people thought. FinTech, financial tech, is also certainly important. Banks of safe trading, you see that. What is the inhibitor for these new trends? Because you mentioned moving paper around. I mean it's money, they probably don't want to mess with an operational system that's a quarter of their business. Is it fear? Is it tech? Both? What's your view on why it's taking so long? Or is it moving along at a speed you think is going to... Being adopted? >> Yeah, it's actually kind of a unique point in time right now. I think in one hand, financial services in general, part of their job is to manage risk. And so, they're going to be a lagging, in some ways, industry. And so, digital transformation, the internet has opened up and democratized media. It's opened up so many other areas. Blockchain, now, is the entry point for digital transformation of financial services. And so, the time is probably right now. We've been in the space. We started the company in 2014. I'd seen over the last three years, hearing banks, other large institutions, large enterprises go from skepticism to curiosity. >> What's the technology stack look like? Obviously, four years is like decades in the blockchain world. Obviously, people are running as fast as they can. It's kind of a moving train, at many levels, business model side, as well as the tech stack. And this is really the opportunity a lot of these systems-- I mean some of the e-commerce systems are 20 year old tech stacks, some are even older. Just going back four years since you were founded, what's the big moving glacier, if you will, of change and how are you guys managing that? And how should people think about managing the risk of the tech stack? >> Yeah, I mean, I think on the blockchain specific side, in the early days a lot of it was about currency and actual payment. I think what we're seeing now is the opportunity for blockchain, particularly in the enterprise, to actually dramatically improve their operations side. So, Ethereum, private blockchains, actually have the ability to, not just decentralize how money movement or networks operate, but how an internal system operates. I'll give you an example, we used the blockchain to-- A private blockchain to actually control approval work flow. So when a payment goes out, often times you need your accounts payable person to send a payment out, but the controller or the treasury or someone else has to sign off on it. So that signature, you need it to be valid, trusted, the identity around it, right? And you want an audit record. And so blockchains a really, really good use case for something like that. That's not pure play payments, it's not pure play settlement, it doesn't require a million people to get on. It just can operate in the business in a really critical function in a better way than the current technology does. >> It's interesting. I love these new technology opportunities, cause there's always going to be a tipping point and the famous Steve Jobs quote is, "Hey, if I was asked to build a better phone "in 2005 I would've built an excellent, better Blackberry" But then he built the Iphone, so he thought differently. No one was really asking for the Iphone. So, the question I get a lot from skeptics in blockchain is, no one's really asking for blockchain. So, again, this is kind of like, you could always say, I'm building a better centralized database system in a distributive computing environment. Okay, we've done that. >> Yeah >> Are people asking for blockchain? Or are they just asking for it in a different way? What's your thoughts to that? >> Yeah, I would say that there's a big picture question of are people ask for it? And I'd say, society is actually asking for it. Part of my personal story is, my family, blue collar family, my mother's side immigrated here, her generation. My brick layer father, they spent their entire lives getting their first home. 800 square foot home, it was nothing special, but it was their American dream. In 2008, in the financial crisis, they lost that house. And so I think society said financial services and core parts of our economy actually could-- we could do better. And I think the magic thing about technology is we get to imagine the world not as it is, but as it ought to be. So, one, I think society is actually asking for can the core parts of our economy actually do better? Can we dream up something better? I think that's the purest part of what the folks in the blockchain movement are trying to do. That's at a very high level. And then I think practically, right, for businesses like we operate day in and day out, if there's technology that allows them to be able to operate their business more efficiently, drop their costs and grow faster, how would that work? It's in some ways like cloud. How does cloud work? I think now we're really getting into the deep mess of it. But cloud was transformative to the business. VOIP was transformative to some businesses. Inbound marketing was transformative to some businesses. Blockchain is the same kind of concept. >> And cloud too, there's a lot of naysayers. I remember I use the first EC2 instances of Amazon, when it came out being an entrepreneur I don't have to have provision servers. This is amazing. And I can put credit card down and pay a few bucks? And then even still, up until three or four years ago, they were dismissed as relevant. And, again, the rest is history. Look what they've done. So, there's always going to be those naysayers. But, to the point about cloud and blockchain, and say even crypto, this is a wave and we are very bullish on this movement because we see the waves coming way out there and it's huge. And this is probably bigger than the other waves combined, in our opinion. So, you mentioned societal change. This is a big deal. You're seeing regulations right now in GDPR, in Europe. Trying to govern an old database market, that's even in an own problem. It's a mess database wise. But it makes sense from a society standpoint. People want to pull their data out. This is a trend. You've got societal forces and then technical legacy. This could be an opportunity for a blockchain to saying, hey optimize for the new wave, don't try to retrofit, say, an old wave. What's your thoughts? >> Correct. Yeah, I think there's a number of areas, even in the data side with society. Take an Enron scandal that happened a decade plus ago. Out of that came regulation called Sarbanes-Oxley. And Sarbanes-Oxley's concept is to ensure that companies publicly account for their records in the proper way. That there's an audit trail. That they don't, sort of, pick their financial systems and misrepresent them. The blockchain, because it's a source of truth that's immutable, meaning it can't be changed, is a great way to have more efficiency in that process. Today, there's a whole industry that's popped up just for Sarbanes-Oxley, just to regulate the financial system, just to ensure that the books actually say what their supposed to say. That's kind of the definition of what a smart contract can and should do. >> This is though, really an opportunity for entrepreneurs when you think about it. A lot of alpha entrepreneurs are really lickin' their chops on blockchain, because they can see how it could disrupt industries. And this is really, again, I showed you some things we're working on and what we're thinking about with SiliconANGLE about media and data. But it brings up things that we, obviously, see every day in the press. The election, weaponizing content for bed, things-- Facebooks having a challenge right now in how they optimize their data for their own self service reasons. This is a problem. This is a revolution. People are kind of tired. So, what's your view of the role of data to the human? Obviously the cliche, oh the users are in charge, they should own their own data. Okay, I get that, but how do you see that vision playing out? Not just from Facebook, that's just a social network example. But how does data impact a user going forward in your vision? Because they could really change from the outside in. >> Yeah, I think part of what's critical with data is two things. One, identity really matters. How do you manage identity? So, I think there's a number of really fascinating blockchain companies that are specifically focused on the identity question. And that's true around the social media side. It's true around, how do I actually manage where I move identity around? So, I think that's one side that's really, really critical to solve. I don't know that we've got a crystal ball yet on what it will ultimately look like. But the blockchain model for identity allows us to rethink the fabrics of what privacy is, what permission looks like and what trust looks like with people I want to engage with and with people I don't want to engage with. >> That's interesting. You talk about the blockchain culture being more societal and mission driven, my word, but you're kind of implying that. I remember when the cloud came out. It was, the network guys were in charge and the app guys had to feed off the network requirements. And then that seat changed, flipped around. The app guys are in charge, data is driving requirements for the network. Question for you is do you see a day soon where societal requirements will dictate technology? You're seeing that pattern kind of emerging now, kind of not yet been fully thought through in public commentary. We see the pressure points potentially impacting tech design. >> Yeah, I think there's actually a good tug of war balance. So, entrepreneurs naturally are going to run as fast as they can to see innovation. Hopefully with means of improving society. And then you have regulators and you have government agencies who are looking and saying okay, you might be thinking about one myopic view and we need to make sure we're looking at the good of society. And so, I think that tug of war you saw with the internet, where how much do we regulate the internet? And I think the balance was mostly healthy. And we're sort of seeing that through today with blockchain as well. Where things like ICOs have good and bad implications. The regulators have been watching it relatively closely. But they also haven't completely came down and clamped down on it. Even this week there's... There was a relative balance in the discussions that came out. >> The SECs done a great job. >> Correct. >> They've whipped a few people into shape, sent the signal, but they weren't foreclosing any innovation. >> That's correct. >> And ICOs certainly had some scams. What's the good sides of ICOs? Obviously the scams are out there. What's the good sides? The fundraising, democratization? What's your take on the ICO, initially coin offering opportunity? >> Yeah, I think in some ways democratization has become such a buzz word it's lost it's meaning. But if you think about what it really is it's so powerful, because it's this concept that we distribute power and control to the hands of many. And so, I think there are a lot of public, good technologies that actually can use that concept. The internet is a public good. You could agree Wikipedia is a public good. And so, utility type tokens actually are valuable, because they can have a dual nature to them. I think the other thing, that I'm particularly interested in watching how ICOs evolve, is-- I think there's some danger in ICOs coming in, in the early stage market. Because early stage companies tend to be... They're so nascent that they need guidance. And I actually, I might be contradictory here to most people in the blockchain space, but I actually think early stage investors have a lot of value in that space. And so, I am actually fascinated about what happens in later stage rounds and what do ICOs become there. So, I think utility and later stage rounds are actually two fascinating areas of ICOs. >> Jeremy, that's a great point. I would also say that the trend that we're seeing is: there's an early stage component that needs mentoring and needs some nurturing, I would agree with that. That's a classic VC-- Maybe some token economics in there, but again different playbook. The tokenization of business is really interesting, cause now you have token economics being applied to a pre-existing proven business with a disruptive nature on the other side. >> Correct. >> Is super interesting. So, I have to ask you. Are we going to have a chief economic officer as a new role soon? Or is that going to be-- Cause it made me think about token economics it's about opening up and changing the distribution, or data and wealth, you could argue both are the same. But how do you view that? Because that's a trend were seeing. The tokenization of a business to disrupt an industry incumbent, set of incumbents. >> Correct, yeah. And I think it's really, really early days in what... You have really early stage companies that are thinking about tokenizing their business before they exist. And then you have other companies which are maybe past the innovation curve and their trying to apply tokens to their business. >> A pivot of an old, existing business. >> Yeah, so we've seen these, right? Public companies that have added blockchain to their name. I think the fascinating thing will become where fast growing, real businesses where there's a there, there. They've crossed the chasm. Go, okay, how do we apply tokenization to our company? And how do we think about it, from both a commercial economic part of the business and then how do we think about it from tokenizing the business? We haven't seen many cases yet, but I actually think that's one of the next waves we'll see. >> Great. Great insight. I got to ask you, on a personal level, you're doing some talking, obviously your the founder of the company, CEO, what's goin' on? What are you talking about these days? What are you passionate about? I know your talking to some folks at University of Santa Barbara. You mentioned going to teach down there. What are you talking about? What are you sharing publicly? What's on your mind these days? >> Yeah, I think I'm personally deeply motivated every day by waking up and going. The financial service industry can go through a massive transformation. And I think there's a lot of really good companies doing that at the consumer level. And so, I think our space, we have a unique place and time to be working at the commercial level. So, the commercial level effects big parts of our economic infrastructures in ways that we don't think about. The Equifax breach was a pretty big deal to people, right? The financial crisis was a big deal to people. So, how do we imagine those kinds of industries? Supply chain, title, logistics. And how do we think about those industries democratizing them with blockchain? Those, to me, are the unsung heroes of what blockchain will ultimately help transform society. >> That's interesting. You said you were kind of humble when you came on earlier. I'm in boring areas of B2B, but I got to say, to see your point about cloud earlier. There's a calm before the storm, these boring areas that are, say, calm, are really the grounds where you see disruption. I think that's an area-- Not just high frequency trading, that's going to be always an issue, but in terms of real financial plumbing. Perfect for a ledger, perfect for those things. Okay, explain-- Take a plug for your company. How are people using you guys? What's the value proposition? What are some of the things you guys are involved in? How does someone engage with you guys? Give the plug for Paystand. >> Yeah, so at Paystand we tend to work with companies where there are high volumes of paper checks in the process. So if you have a hundred thousand dollar invoice that goes out, for example, with a company you've been working out with for a decade. And you have a contract that says it's a net 60 contract. The challenge is, it's paper check. You want to move it digitally. What do you move it digitally to? And the reality is, the consumer payment companies that are focused on credit cards are not really an ideal solution for that because their business model is a percentage business model. And there's nothing wrong with a percentage business model that charges a company two or three percent if I'm swiping for a five dollar cup of coffee. If it's a hundred thousand dollar payment that I owe someone that I know and I have a contract terms. I'm not going to pay the bank 3,000 dollars to move ones and zeros from this bank database to this bank database. So, what we do with our network is we make that money movement fast, instant, automatic, verified, validated with control, in a way that we can automate the process. >> It's so funny. What jumps into my mind is punchcards to computers, tape to duck storage. This is interesting. So, paper checks, probably big, I don't know what the numbers are, you might have them handy. People are doing paper checks. So, you're doing a system around paper checks, did I get that right? >> Yeah, so we digitized what would have been a paper check. Today, over 50 % of all commercial payments are still done in paper checks. So, they're gone in our digital world. You and I, we Venmo each other. But when the business goes to write a check, when they get an invoice they send out a check. And so we digitized the whole process. The moment that the invoice is ready to go to the moment it gets in the bank. It all becomes digital space. >> And the alternative is what? I got to go check when it was mailed, was it received, was it cashed, did it get put into the accounting system? And that's kind of, that's the manual-- >> That's the manual. So, they'll spend a week tracking down the payment. From the moment the controller says okay to pay, to the time it sits in their bank account. That's humans, time, money. >> And an old antiquated system that doesn't change because of what? >> Well it's legacy infrastructure in one way. But in another, even the banking infrastructure-- Most of the banking infrastructure that are for commercial payments was designed in the 60s and 70s. And last time I checked, the 60s and 70s was before the internet today. So, they weren't really designed for digital real time payments. And they weren't designed for commercially used cases like today. >> Is fraud a factor or is that not a factor? Or is that not a part of it? Or yes? >> Yeah, I think a key thing with what we do, enterprise payments, is security is really, really important. We take it very, very seriously. And this is, again, one of the down sides to the legacy commercial infrastructure is when you have a check, you have this checking and routing number on it. Anybody takes that, in theory, that's all that identifies you and your company and your account. Money can actually be moved and ran against in that case. With a network like ours, we can validate that you are who you say you are, you have the money in your account, it moved when it should and you've actually authorized it. These are all things that we should know, but we just don't. >> And you put the data around it. You take that payload, aka check, put it into the system. So, when does a company want-- Should be calling you? Is it like, I'm overloaded with paper. I want a new system. I'm doing a refresh. When do people call Paystand? What's the signals that would give your buyer some indicator of time to call Paystand? >> Yeah, so generally it's after-- It's when they have high volumes of checks and they're growing. And, or, that they've basically taken their ERP and they've done an ERP cloud migration. So, now they've got their general ledger and that financial system is not in a shoebox anymore, it's in a critical, core ERP system. And so, what they're finding is they bought digital transformation for financial services and their accountant only sort of has half the solution. And so they come in and they use us to close the last mile. >> Okay, so I'm going to put my naysayer hat on and ask you the question. I love it, but what's this blockchain thing? I'm an accounting guy. Look at one computer class or whatever, I get blockchain. How do you stay up to date? How do you ensure that I'm going to have a system that's going to be working? I know that blockchain standards are changing. How do you guys mitigate that? How do you handle that question? >> Yeah, I think the critical thing for our customers is for us, our customers, money moves in dollars. It leaves their bank account and goes into their supplier's bank account. The supplier's bank account goes into their customer's bank account. Their financial system does not change. We're actually very, very sensitive to that. We think about this very different than a consumers solution. Which is, consumer solutions almost have a critical mass question. They need everybody to get into the system for it to work. For commercial, you don't actually want to change the business process of your partners. It's really important, they've been doing this. So, we are very thoughtful about our software. It doesn't change business process. It doesn't require you to enter into come kind of new economy or new currency. You simply do what your always doing with the systems you're already using. And we just digitize the process to make them faster, cheaper and automated. >> Awesome. Talk about your goals for the year with Paystand. Where you guys at company wise? Funding? Goals? Hiring? What's going on? Give a quick final word on the company. >> Yeah, I think we're blessed right now. I would say we're one of, if not the fastest B2B payment companies, fastest growing B2B payment companies today. I think we have a long way to go. I would call this inning two for us. We ultimately-- I think much more about what does ten years look like than twelve months look like because this is the beginning of the commercial financial service way. And so, I think we ultimately believe that digital transformation is going to reinvent our industry. And if we can go lead the way we'll be very happy. And for us that just means continue growing, continue serving our customers, continue hiring. I think if we do all that... Right place, right time. >> Awesome. Final question for you. The folks out there watching, your an expert in the industry, again, FinTech as well as computer engineering. If my sister, who is not savvy, says Jeremy what is blockchain? How would you describe blockchain to someone who's interested and needs to know the importance definition and the importance of blockchain? >> Okay, so blockchain to me is basically a way to be able to take information like you might have on your techbook or you might have in a spreadsheet and use it where anybody can access it in a way that's actually easily controllable, visible, secure and automated. That doesn't sound very sexy, but the important thing is how we keep records effects all of society. We have records of who owns our houses. We have records of how much money we have in our account. We have records of who did we vote on. Those records are the foundation for our society. Currently, companies own those records. Companies are fallible And so, what blockchain does, is it allows us to make a more infallible system to keep access to those records you and I care about. >> And this is an infrastructure opportunity, not so much cryptocurrency, kind of a distinction between those two, right? >> That's right. I would say, cryptocurrency and money is like the first pillar app on top of blockchain. >> Jeremy Almond, CEO, founder of Paystand, hot company doing something really good in a growing, changing market called checks, paper checks. And if you have um', grow um', digitize them. Great entry strategy for blockchain. Thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. Thanks for joining us here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier in the Cube studios For Cube conversation, thanks for watching. (orchastral music)

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now 2017 brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage in our Palo Alto Studios. We have folks on the ground in Orlando. It's the third day of Sapphire Now and we're bringing our friends and experts inside our new 4500 square foot studio where we're starting to get our action going and covering events anywhere they are from here. If we can't get there we'll do it from here in Palo Alto. Our next guest is Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation. A hot start-up funded by Custom Adventures, Catalyst Data Collective, and I think Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor? >> Satyen: That's right. >> Satyen, welcome to the cube conversation here. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are doing this special coverage, and I wanted to bring you in and discuss Sapphire Now as it relates to the context of the biggest wave hitting the industry, with waves are ones cloud. We've known that for a while. People surfing that one, then the data wave is coming fast, and I think this is a completely different animal in the sense of it's going to look different, but be just as big. Your business is in the data business. You help companies figure this out. Give us the update on, first take a minute talk about Alation, for the folks who aren't following you, what do you guys do, and then let's talk about data. >> Yeah. So for those of you that don't know about what Alation is, it's basically a data catalog. You know, if you think about all of the databases that exist in the enterprise, stuff on Prem, stuff in the cloud, all the BI tools like Tableau and MicroStrategy, and Business Objects. When you've got a lot of data that sits inside the enterprise today and a wide variety of legacy and modern tools, and what Alation does is, it creates a catalog, crawling all of those systems like Google crawls the web and effectively looks at all the logs inside of those systems, to understand how the data is interrelated and we create this data social graph, and it kind of looks >> John: It's a metadata catalog? >> We call you know, we don't use the word metadata because metadata is the word that people use when you know that's that's Johnny back in the corner office, Right? And people don't want to talk about metadata if you're a business person you think about metadata you're like, I don't, not my thing. >> So you guys are democratizing what data means to an organization? That's right. >> We just like to talk about context. We basically say, look in the same way that information, or in the same way when you're eating your food, you need, you know organic labeling to understand whether or not that's good or bad, we have on some level a provenance problem, a trust problem inside of data in the enterprise, and you need a layer of you know trust, and understanding in context. >> So you guys are a SAS, or you guys are a SAS solution, or are you a software subscription? >> We are both. Most of this is actually on Prem because most of the people that have the problem that Alation solves are very big complicated institutions, or institutions with a lot of data, or a lot of people trying to analyze it, but we do also have a SAS offering, and actually that's how we intersect with SAP Altiscale, and so we have a cloud base that's offering that we work with. >> Tell me about your relation SAP because you kind of backdoored in through an acquisition, quickly note that we'll get into the conversation. >> Yeah that's right, So Altiscale to big intersections, big data, and then they do big data in the cloud SAP acquired them last year and what we do is we provide a front-end capability for people to access that data in the cloud, so that as analysts want to analyze that data, as data governance folks want to manage that data, we provide them with a single catalog to do that. >> So talk about the dynamics in the industry because SAP clearly the big news there is the Leonardo, they're trying to create this framework, we just announced an alpha because everyone's got these names of dead creative geniuses, (Satyen laughs) We just ingest our Nostradamus products, Since they have Leonardo and, >> That's right. >> SAP's got Einstein, and IBM's got Watson, and Informatica has got Claire, so who thought maybe we just get our own version, but anyway, everyone's got some sort of like bot, or like AI program. >> Yep. >> I mean I get that, but the reality is, the trend is, they're trying to create a tool chest of platform re-platforming around tooling >> Satyen: Yeah. >> To make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> You have a lot of work in this area, through relation, trying to make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> And also they get the cloud, On-premise, HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAV cloud platform, meaning developers. So the convergence between developers, cloud, and data are happening. What's your take on that strategy? You think SAP's got a good move by going multi cloud, or should they, should be taking a different approach? >> Well I think they have to, I mean I think the economics in cloud, and the unmanageability, you know really human economics, and being able to have more and more being managed by third-party providers that are, you know, effectively like AWS, and how they skill, in the capability to manage at scale, and you just really can't compete if you're SAP, and you can't compete if your customers are buying, and assembling the toolkits On-premise, so they've got to go there, and I think every IT provider has to >> John: Got to go to the cloud you mean? >> They've got to go to the cloud, I think there's no question about it, you know I think that's at this point, a foregone conclusion in the world of enterprise IT. >> John: Yeah it's pretty obvious, I mean hybrid cloud is happening, that's really a gateway to multi-cloud, the submission is when I build Norton, a guest in latency multi-cloud issues there, but the reality is not every workloads gone there yet, a lot of analytics going on in the cloud. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> DevTest, okay check the box on DevTest >> Satyen: That's right. >> Analytics is all a ballgame right now, in terms of state of the art, your thoughts on the trends in how companies are using the cloud for analytics, and things that are challenges and opportunities. >> Yeah, I think there's, I think the analytics story in the cloud is a little bit earlier. I think that the transaction processing and the new applications, and the new architectures, and new integrations, certainly if you're going to build a new project, you're going to do that in the cloud, but I think the analytics in a stack, first of all there's like data gravity, right, you know there's a lot of gravity to that data, and moving it all into the cloud, and so if you're transaction processing, your behavioral apps are in the cloud, then it makes sense to keep the data in an AWS, or in the cloud. Conversely you know if it's not, then you're not going to take a whole bunch of data that sits on Prem and move it whole hog all the way to the cloud just because, right, that's super expensive, >> Yeah. >> You've got legacy. >> A lot of risks too and a lot of governance and a lot of compliance stuff as well. >> That's exactly right I mean if you're trying to comply with Basel II or GDPR, and you know you want to manage all that privacy information. How are you going to do that if you're going to move your data at the same time >> John: Yeah. >> And so it's a tough >> John: Great point. >> It's a tough move, I think from our perspective, and I think this is really important, you know we sort of say look, in a world where data is going to be on Prem, on the cloud, you know in BI tools, in databases and no SQL databases, on Hadoop, you're going to have data everywhere, and in that world where data is going to be in multiple locations and multiple technologies you got to figure out a way to manage. >> Yeah. I mean data sprawls all over the place, it's a big problem, oh and this oh and by the way that's a good thing, store it to your storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, data legs are popping out, but you have data links, for all you have data everywhere. >> Satyen: That's right. >> How are you looking at that problem as a start-up, and how a customer's dealing with that, and what is this a real issue, or is this still too early to talk about data sprawl? >> It's a real issue, I mean it, we liken it to the advent of the Internet in the time of traditional media, right, so you had you had traditional media, there were single sort of authoritative sources we all watched it may be CNN may be CBS we had the nightly news we had Newsweek, we got our information, also the Internet comes along, and anybody can blog about anything, right and so the cost of creating information is now this much lower anybody can create any reality anybody can store data anywhere, right, and so now you've got a world where, with tableau, with Hadoop, with redshift, you can build any stack you want to at any cost, and so now what do you do? Because everybody's creating their own thing, every Dev is doing their own thing, everybody's got new databases, new applications, you know software is eating the world right? >> And data it is eating software. >> And data is eating software, and so now you've got this problem where you're like look I got all this stuff, and I don't know I don't know what's fake news, what's real, what's alternative fact, what doesn't make any sense, and so you've got a signal and noise problem, and I think in that world you got to figure out how to get to truth, right, >> John: Yeah. And what's the answer to that in your mind, not that you have the answer, if you did, we'd be solving it better. >> Yeah. >> But I mean directionally where's the vector going in your mind? I try to talk to Paul Martino about this at bullpen capital he's a total analytics geek he doesn't think this big data can solve that yet but they started to see some science around trying to solve these problems with data. What's your vision on this? >> Satyen: Yeah you know so I believe that every I think that every developer is going to start building applications based on data I think that every business person is going to have an analytical role in their job because if they're not dealing with the world on the certainty, and they're not using all the evidence, at their disposable, they're not making the best decisions and obviously they're going to be more and more analysts and so you know at some level everybody is an analyst >> I wrote a post in 2008, my old blog was hosted on WordPress, before I started SilicionANGLE, data is the new developer kid. >> That's right. >> And I saw that early, and it was still not as clear to this now as obvious as least to us because we're in the middle, in this industry, but it's now part of the software fabric, it's like a library, like as developer you'd call a library of code software to come in and be part of your program >> Yeah >> Building blocks approach, Lego blocks, but now data as Lego blocks completely changes the game on things if you think of it that way. Where are we on that notion of you really using data as a development component, I mean it seems to be early, I don't, haven't seen any proof points, that says, well that company's actually using the data programmatically with software. >> Satyen: Yeah. well I mean look I think there's features in almost every software application whether it's you know 27% of the people clicked on this button into this particular thing, I mean that's a data based application right and so I think there is this notion that we talked a lot about, which is data literacy, right, and so that's kind of a weird thing, so what does that exactly mean? Well data is just information like a news article is information, and you got to decide whether it's good or it's bad, and whether you can come to a conclusion, or whether you can't, just as if you're using an API from a third-party developer you need documentation, you need context about that data, and people have to be intelligent about how they use it. >> And literacies also makes it, makes it addressable. >> That's right. >> If you have knowledge about data, at some point it's named and addressed at some point in a network. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> Especially Jada in motion, I mean data legs I get, data at rest, we start getting into data in motion, real-time data, every piece of data counts. Right? >> That's exactly right. And so now you've got to teach people about how to use this stuff you've got to give them the right data you got to make that discoverable you got to make that information usable you've got to get people to know who the experts are about the data, so they can ask questions, you know these are tougher problems, especially as you get more and more systems. >> All right, as a start up, you're a growing start-up, you guys are, are lean and mean, doing well. You have to go compete in this war. It's a lot of, you know a lot of big whales in there, I mean you got Oracle, SAP, IBM, they're all trying to transform, everybody is transforming all the incumbent winners, potential buyers of your company, or potentially you displacing this, as a young CEO, they you know eat their lunch, you have to go compete in a big game. How are you guys looking at that compass, I see your focus so I know a little bit about your plan, but take us through the mindset of a start-up CEO, that has to go into this world, you guys have to be good, I mean this is a big wave, see it's a big wave. >> Yeah. Nobody buys from a start-up unless you get, and a start-up could be even a company, less than a 100-200 people, I mean nobody's buying from a company unless there's a 10x return to value relative to the next best option, and so in that world how do you build 10x value? Well one you've got to have great technology, and then that's the start point, but the other thing is you've got to have deep focus on your customers, right, and so I think from our perspective, we build focus by just saying, look nobody understands data in your company, and by and large you've got to make money by understanding this data, as you do the digital transformation stuff, a big part of that is differentiating and making better products and optimizing based upon understanding your data because that helps you and your business make better decisions, >> John: Yeah. >> And so what we're going to do is help you understand that data better and faster than any other company can do. >> You really got to pick your shots, but what you're saying, if I hear you saying is as a start-up you got to hit the beachhead segment you want to own. >> Satyen: That's right. >> And own it. >> Satyen: That's exactly. >> No other decision, just get it, and then maybe get to a bigger scope later, and sequence around, and grow it that way. >> Satyen: You can't solve 10 problems >> Can't be groping for a beachhead if you don't know what you want, you're never going to get it. >> That's right. You can't solve 10 problems unless you solve one, right, and so you know I think we're at a phase where we've proven that we can scalably solved one, we've got customers like, you know Pfizer and Intuit and Citrix and Tesco and Tesla and eBay and Munich Reinsurance and so these are all you know amazing brands that are traditionally difficult to sell into, but you know I think from our perspective it's really about focus and just helping customers that are making that digital analytical transformation. Do it faster, and do it by enabling their people. >> But a lot going on this week for events, we had Informatica world this week, we got V-mon. We had Google I/O. We had Sapphire. It's a variety of other events going on, but I want to ask you kind of a more of a entrepreneurial industry question, which is, if we're going through the so-called digital transformation, that means a new modern era an old one movie transformed, yet I go to every event, and everyone's number one at something, that's like I was just at Informatica, they're number one in six squadrons. Michael Dell we're number in four every character, Mark Hurr at the press meeting said they're number one in all categories, Ross Perot think quote about you could be number one depends on how you slice the market, seems to be in play, my point is I kind of get a little bit, you know weirded out by that, but that is okay, you know I guess theCUBE's number one in overall live videos produced at an enterprise event, you know I, so we're number one at something, but my point is. >> Satyen: You really are. >> My point is, in a new transformation, what is the new scoreboard going to look like because a lot of things that you're talking about is horizontally integrated, there's new use cases developing, a new environment is coming online, so if someone wanted to actually try to keep score of who number one is and who's winning, besides customer wins, because that's clearly the one that you can point to and say hey they're winning customers, customer growth is good, outside of customer growth, what do you think will be the key requirements to get some sort of metric on who's really doing well these are the others, I mean we're not yet there with >> Yeah it's a tough problem, I mean you know used to be the world was that nobody gets fired for choosing choosing IBM. >> John: Yeah. >> Right, and I think that that brand credibility worked in a world where you could be conservative right, in this world I think, that looking for those measures, it is going to be really tough, and I think on some level that quest for looking for what is number one, or who is the best is actually the sort of fool's errand, and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for, you know what's the best answer for me based upon social signal, you know it's kind of like you know I'm going to go do the what the popular kids do in high school, I mean that could lead to you know a path, but it doesn't lead to the one that's going to actually get you satisfaction, and so on some level I think that customers, like you are the best signal, you know, always, >> John: Yeah, I mean it's hard, it's a rhetorical question, we ask it because, you know, we're trying to see not mystical with the path of fact called the fashion, what's fashionable. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> That's different. I mean talk about like really a cure metro, in the old days market share is one, actually IDC used a track who had market shares, and they would say based upon the number of shipments products, this is the market share winner, right? yeah that's pretty clean, I mean that's fairly clean, so just what it would be now? Number of instances, I mean it's so hard to figure out anyway, I digress. >> No, I think that's right, I mean I think I think it's really tough, that I think customers stories that, sort of map to your case. >> Yeah. It all comes back down to customer wins, how many customers you have was the >> Yeah and how much value they are getting out of your stuff. >> Yeah. That 10x value, and I think that's the multiplier minimum, if not more and with clouds and the scale is happening, you agree? >> Satyen: Yeah. >> It's going to get better. Okay thanks for coming on theCUBE. We have Satyen Sangani. CEO, co-founder of Alation, great start-up. Follow them on Twitter, these guys got some really good focus, learning about your data, because once you understand the data hygiene, you start think about ethics, and all the cool stuff happening with data. Thanks so much for coming on CUBE. More coverage, but Sapphire after the short break. (techno music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: It's the Cube, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hey, welcome back to our exclusive SAP coverage here in our studio in Palo Alto, our 4,500 square foot studio. I'm John Furrier. Our three days, we're on third day, of Sapphire Now 2017 coverage. I'm on the phone with RJ Bibby, who's the SAP Global Alliance Manager for SAP. Handles the relationship. RJ, great to have you on the phone and thanks for calling in from Orlando, really appreciate it. >> RJ: You bet, John. Love the Cube. Love SiliconANGLE. We're great partners. It's been a great week and looking forward to talking to you about it. >> Tell us what's going on on the ground. First, give us the updates on day three. So, pretty much everyone's coming-- And always a great activities at night as well. So, SAP, a lot of business done during the day. They work hard. They play hard. But, day three, what's it like? What's settling in as the storylines for Sapphire 2017? >> RJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, you're starting to feel-- You've gone through about-- We're in our third tour. For the partner's community, we're in day four, cause we had the partner day. Last night was the big partner night. We actually NetApped with our partners with Cisco and KPIT did a private event at Universal Studios at the Jimmy Fallon Theme Park that was highly successful. What was great about today, was in the morning, we kicked off will Bill McDermott on stage with Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter. And it was all about leadership and mentorship and experience in being in the business, whatever industry that you're in for so long and how you just stay creative, hungry, and passionate. And it was packed. One of the comments was they couldn't believe, on the day after the big party night of all the partners that you still have a lot of energy on the floor. Ultimately, it's still about data, which is great for our business that we can get into at NetApp. There's a lot of buzzword bingo going on here, John, all week, whether it's machine to machine, blocked chain, Cloud-- And at the end of it, it's still our customers who we've talked to a lot this week, and wow. What are we going to do with out data? How do we analyze it? And how do we improve that user experience based on all this data that we have? And I think that's one of the things that I see on the floor that's almost overwhelming with the amount of people, 30,000, all the partners. Just a lot of information. And lastly, I'll say, the good news with that is everybody is hungry for content. Whether it's a mini-theater, whether it's at one of the booths, interactions one-on-one, it's people are hungry for what is happening in the industry. And I think that's exciting for all of us. >> Well, we do our part and try and get as much coverage as possible, even if we are going to do it from Palo Alto. Question for you on NetApp. I mean, you guys have been-- The scuttlebutt in Silicon Valley is that NetApp is doing very well with the Hyperscale (mumbles). I know for a fact. I've interviewed the former CEO and others within NetApp. They were really on early with AWS. And obviously, AWS a big part of the announcement at Sapphire. So, you guys are kind of like getting these relationships with these key players. It's changed a little bit of the business model, or culture within NetApp. What's different about NetApp right now? With resect to some of the big players that you've had relationships with. It's not this new relationship with SAP. You guys have a deep relationship. What's changing as the CloudWave hits, as the DataWave hits? Those are the biggest waves hitting the world right now. How are you guys playing in that world? And share some insight there. >> RJ: Absolutely. Great question. 'Cause the world is going through digital transformation and so is NetApp. So, we are actually celebrating our 25th year as a company right now and we've been a traditional, global technology and data management company. And, the digital shift to Hybrid Cloud is where we're moving. So, specifically with partners like AWS, Microsoft and Azure, the Hyperscalers like CenturyLink, it's how we can help our customers really collect, transport, analyze, protect data, in whatever environment they want to hold their data. Whether it's On-Premises, if your in a Cloud, you can choose whatever Hyperscaler you want. You still have to deal with the data. And then, how do we manage it? How do we consume it? Where is dead data that needs to be taken out? So, data's the currency and with our data fabric methodology and tools from software, hardware, we're really able to help manage that complete life cycle, whether it's SAP, or any other type of environment we hold. So, the exciting thing for us, and the stock prices is showing that at an all time high, is what Bill McDermott said on Monday, in the keynote, or excuse me, Tuesday, "Data is the currency. "Our new mission statement is we're trying "to empower our customers to change the world with data." So, back to the buzzWord bingo comment I made earlier, we're still dealing with fact that we have all these great technologies: all these censors, machine-to-machine, On-Print to Cloud. At the heart of everything is the data and what you do with it. And I think that one of the things that NetApp does and the best in the world of, is we continually evolve digital transformations with the tools on how we deal with data. So, that's high level. >> How about the data dynamic? >> Data is the fundamental story, in my opinion. Cloud has been around, the Clouderati. We were part of that from the beginning. Now, Cloud is mainstream. Amazon stock prices looking like a hockey stick now, it's going straight up. But, that took years of development, right? I mean, you saw the Cloud formation coming, really, in the mid-2000s and then, really at 2008, -09, -10 was the foundational years and then the rest is history. Data's now going through the same thing. As people get over themselves and say, "Okay, big data's not a dupe. It's everything." IOT is certainly highlighting a lot of that. SAP has recognized that legacy systems have to move to a MultiCloud and certainly multi-vendor world in a whole new way. But, at the end of the day, you still got to store this stuff. So, that's your business. How are you keeping up with the moving train of data as is architecturally shifts in the marketplace? >> RJ: Great question. I think that we have some of the best minds in Silicon Valley. Again, been there 25 years. I think with the deep relationships we have with companies like SAP. On the front end, I think the one thing that we bring as a value to SAP is the consumption model, life exists. Through owning the data and the user experience, we're able to enable and accelerate the license consumption to the edge. Right from application in to the system. From an architectural standpoint, it still comes down to the thing that we are creating and blabs and launching around, like the data fabric, the tool system, really software. The software that can help from an analytical perspective affect the user experience. Everybody wants it live. And the other part is the data protection and the DR aspect of it. And I think that's another core competency that we're continuing to develop as a service for the customer. So, I hop I've answered your question. >> Yup. >> RJ: But if-- >> (mumbles) a bottom line then, why NetApps? Say I'm a customer. Okay, I get the SAP. Why should I go with you guys over new the Delium see powerhouse over there, or the White-Box Storage? >> RJ: At the end of the day, we are best at capitalizing the value of data in the Hybrid Cloud. Nobody can help collect, analyze, test, and do life-cycle management live like NetApp can. And that's the reason that we are going more upstream, selling like we say at EPC, always selling to the CXO. I think we're changing the landscape from a true storage company on the infrastructure side to a full end-to-end Hybrid Cloud data management portfolio company. And it's been proven by the acquisition of Salazar from bringing Slash in to the portfolio, our cloning, and snapshot capabilities. So, anywhere in the stack at any time during the day when you're looking live at your operations or your data that you can take live snapshots. Just so if there's a glitch from a data protection side, or there's some type of spike from a request on the ticketing side or demand side of your system. So, I think that's some of the things that we're differentiating. And that's the reason that the AWSs and the Azures and the SAPs are so excited about co-innovating together to again, improving the customer experience with their data. >> RJ, final question. What's the net-net? What's the bumper sticker for you this year at Sapphire 2017? What's the walk-away revelation? >> RJ: Well, I think from the SAP side, it's the revelation on the push of Leonardo. I think that SAP-- I'd like to see them continue to hone out the 'what' and the 'if' from partners with Leonardo from blotching in machine-to-machine and IOT. For us, it is the beautiful fact that now at the center of everything that SAP and the ecosystem is trying to do is around the data side of it and it's the actual currency. And the fact that we have kind of the leading-edge tools to enhance the customer experience with our platform for customers' and partners' data is really, really exciting for us. And we're excited. We're all psyched to be partnered with the Cube. And everything we do is in the Cloud. So, I'm here to help. >> Alright. >> RJ, thanks so much for takin' the time callin' in from Orlando. RJ Bibby, SAP Global Alliance Executive with NetApp. He runs the the relationship with NetApp. And again, it's been a long-term relationship. I remember takin' photos on my phone, way back in the day, years ago. So, not a new relationship and continued momentum. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the insight from Orlando. 'Preciate it. >> RJ: You bet. Thanks for the partnership. Have a great day. >> 'Kay, more coverage from the Cube in Palo Alto on SAP, Sapphire 2017 after this short break. Stay with us. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn in New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Stu Miniman. We're going to talk cloud service providers. Cloud is obviously a very hot topic this week at VeeamOn. Matt Chesterton is here. He's the CEO of OffsideDataSync and he's joined by William Bell who's the vice president of production development for cloud and enterprise services at PhoenixNAP. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> So, let's start. What's happening at VeeamOn? You heard what I said about, you know, cloud seems to be a major theme here. What are you guys seeing this week? >> We're seeing the same thing. So today is officially cloud day at VeeamOn and some great announcements that are going on so new product announcements with B10, so we're excited about that. >> William, anything you'd add? >> Yeah, I mean, the general session this morning covered so much around cloud and what's that's going to mean to the end user at Veeam. Right, and how the ecosystem is being built and working both with the hyper-scalers and guys like us. >> So, so much talk in the industry about the big, really the big three. Maybe you throw a China cloud in there, a Japan cloud in there, how is it that folks like you all can differentiate from the likes of AWS and Azure and Google. Maybe you can start, Bill, and share with us. >> Yeah, sure, and service. I think that's really the key is that customers need a help. >> Dave: You mean I could talk to you? >> You could talk to me. We can actually help you achieve an outcome that you're looking for with your business. That's not something that you're going to get from a hyper-scaler, period. >> You don't have a little device I can put in my house that I talk to instead? >> No, no new devices, no books, no operating systems to install, just help. >> So your value property is really high-touch. >> High-touch, high-touch for us, it's high-touch global, right? So we can help you do the same things that you're trying to accomplish anywhere in the world talking to the same people, alright? And that's our kind of commitment. >> And yet you've also got infrastructure behind that. >> William: We do. >> So why wouldn't you, for example, could a viable strategy be, say, I'll put that high-touch in front of AWS or Azure? Why not? >> Well, for us, it really comes down to margins, right? At the end of the day, it's that we derive margin from infrastructure just the same way we do from the service angle of that. So if it's only service and there's no margin on the infrastructure it's a tougher business to scale, right? We also can capture markets that are uncapturable. This isn't a cloud business for us, right? We're data center owner-operators. We're doing things that customers need that are not cloud-centric. >> How about you guys, Matt? Little different story here. You guys are more specialized. >> Yeah, little bit, little bit different. So service is always important. We've taken the approach with the public clouds of kind of going with the tide. So layering products and services that go with that. Example, today or yesterday, I think it was announced with the scale-up backup repositories being integrated with storage like Glacier. I'm sure there's a product plan there for a service provider like us so that we can offer that as a service, too. So kind of taking that momentum and working with it. So integrating with what's already going on. It's going to be a tough tide to fight if we don't kind of direct it in the way we want, so we're kind of taking that and going in the direction of how can we use it and how can we benefit from it. >> Matt, can you build on that Veeam as a partner. I think it was Peter McKay told us 30% of their business is to the, you know, thousands and thousands of service providers they have. You know, where do you find opportunity, products, growth when it comes to Veeam? >> Good question, Stu. What Veeam's doing, they make it very easy for us as partners, in the cloud of course, so that when something's delivered, they make a cloud available, as well. So as you can see, users of Veeam can direct their backups and archives to the cloud, private, public, but they've also made that available and are going to make that available for us so they're a great partner. They always think about cloud and cloud first so they don't just develop a product that can be used in and around service providers but that we can take and capitalize from it as well. >> William, what I want to add on there, you're also a VMware partner. Maybe tell us what it's like being a VMware and Veeam and do you go beyond the VMware piece too with Veeam or? >> Yeah, so I mean, in Veeam's ecosystem, VMware and Microsoft are very important to both of them, right? And because of where Veeam started, hyper-V's a large part of their business and growing still very rapidly part of their business, right? And so we're forced to address both sides of that. When we go to build our own infrastructure, when we're going to offer our own services, we've made a commitment to VMware today, right? And we're building services around that ecosystem including the stuff that's happening with Veeam. But let me talk about Veeam as a partner, right? Veeam has been singularly the best manufacturer partner that we've worked with up until this point. Maybe it doesn't mean that somebody else maybe not tomorrow, but at least up until this point, they've help both of our businesses really grow. >> Matt: I couldn't agree more. >> And grow in branding and grow in product diversity and grow all over the place. >> Explain that more. >> Is it simplicity? Is it pricing? Is it, you know, community? >> It's their dedication to us as a partner. So you hear of partner relationships in the community. Veeam has taken it to a new level. They're truly a partner with us. They care about how our business is doing and how they can develop us and how they can find out what we don't have experience with and then help us. So design a program or introduce us to the right folks or make the right alliance relationships. So they genuinely look at it >> So are they a channel for you or are you a channel for them? >> William: Both. >> Yeah, sometimes you don't know. The lines are not exactly clear. And that's good. >> Yeah, I think that those unclear lines means an increase in all kinds of things for both of our companies mutually, right? We're here. We started together in this Veeam ecosystem, you know, three and a half years ago I guess now, and you know, as the first five service providers that were teamed up with Veeam, and we're also both standing here with gigantic platinum sponsorships at their show because it's become that important to us and our business. >> And you guys, I mean, you sell to, your customers are doing everything. They got one of everything in their floor. They're, I'm sure, diverse. You've seen a bunch of folks on stage this week. We saw Microsoft today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We saw Cisco yesterday. What kind of relationships do you have with the big whales? >> So we align very well with Cisco. In fact, that's what we power our networks with, and we use their Cisco UCS series for everything we power in our data centers, too. So it's great to see them here and interact with the team. They're a great partner for us. >> And HP Nimble Storage is our other clear-cut top partner, right, in this ecosystem. And there's a great marriage there, both on the integration side, but from a powering these Veeam powered cloud services like offsite backup and Zas recovery requires a lot of storage, right, to take that data in and hold it and replicate it and do things with it. And so our partnership with HP Nimble's large. 6- In some of the expansion that we're seeing Veeam talk about, the kind of new ten years where they're going, some of that is as a service. How do they talk about that dynamic of potentially being a competitor now to the 18,000 great partners that they've had? >> You know, I think a lot of it's got up in a bit of semantics problems, right, semantic issues. Veeam is doing a lot of things that are going to enable services and as a service, I don't see them building solutions that would compete, right? They have a great example of what it looks like to do that with vCloud Air being such a VMware-centric partnership, that was a headwind that they were unable to overcome even the size of VMware, right, going out and building and being a service provider and building an infrastructure service, trying to take their software company and become a service provider, it doesn't work. The same for us, I'm not going to go start building backup software. (laughs) >> So, if you think about the mega phases of cloud. We've been doing this for a long time, and I think back to the early VMworlds that we did, we had so much discussion around cloud, and back in the early days, it was kind of, you know, after Amazon announced AWS and cloud sort of got coined, it was an experiment, it was for startups, and that was pretty clear. And then in sort of 2008 when the economy tanked, a lot of CFOs said, "All right, shift capex to opex." And that was sort of the next phase. And then coming out of the downturn, a lot of lines of business said, "Hey, we got cash. We need speed. Let's go," and started to invest. And then after that IT sort of embraced it. And now seems to be whatever term you want to use, cloud broker or just, they've sort of captured a religion in a nut to hang it onto lun provisioning anymore as a practice. Now I'm wondering if that is a reflection of your world or because you in your case are specialists and you guys are more service oriented, did you ride those waves, was it different ways. Maybe William we can start with you. >> So, our first product line was a 250,000 square foot facility in Phoenix, Arizona, right? Building a kolo, a network access point, that's the heritage of the PhoenixNAP, right, the name, and so we were relying on capex. People to go in and buy equipment and stick it in our facility. Everyone had already decided they didn't want to build data centers. Right, in 2010, everyone's like, "You know what, ten million dollars to get my data room up? No thanks." Right? But they were committed to buying hardware. And we took advantage of that and grew that business and we started to address the opex side in 2012 kind of moving forward. At least we believe we're prime positioned because at the end of the day, it's going to be both. All opex is not the answer, right? I truly believe that. And that's part of that hybrid story, as well. >> And Matt, what about you guys? Again, being specialists in all kinds of things, DR, recovery, etc, did you take a different journey? >> Yeah, Dave, we did. And I heard the term even this week, born in the cloud. If it makes sense, we're a cloud company that had that vision from the beginning. So we didn't build a facility, but that's certainly what we do, leverage space power bandwidth that we partner with Switch and Supernet facilities for our data centers. And we believe that customers are and will continue to move into the opex model into the cloud, so both production work loads and DRAs backup as well. It's interesting to see that mix, too, especially as things from Veeam are announced that really becomes one. So the workloads of DRAs are soon within, you know, 15 minutes or 15 seconds can become a production work load. So if customers aren't necessarily moving their infrastructure to the cloud, it's going to happen one way or the other, whether it's the model of they don't want to purchase hardware any longer or they've had some sort of failure, disaster, and they're going to move that way. >> I want to let you speak a little bit more about your customers. There was a great line, I thought, from Mark Russinovich which said that the C-suite doesn't come asking for infrastructure as a service, they want to figure out how to take their business to the next level. Where are you customers in that kind of cloud strategy and how are you helping them along that journey? >> We have a discussion with them. We try to understand what their business objectives are and what they're trying to achieve by either pushing to the cloud or understanding what the cloud is. And there's a spectrum there from as I mentioned before, backup, disaster recovery as a service, infrastructure as a service, and not all things line up to one single service or way you can put it in the cloud. So we try to understand what their business objectives are and say, "It's going to make the most sense to put some of the work load in the cloud, but some applications stay onsite and you have DRAs replication to get them offsite." So really engaging and understanding what their business needs are and getting under the hood of what they're trying to achieve. >> Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, we are focused on a hybrid future. We truly believe that customers will search for the cloud experience, the business optimization for a period of time where they're saying, "You know what? I don't care. I want this outcome. Go get me this outcome." At some point, it will come back. They will be like, "We have the outcome. How can we optimize this outcome? Are we spending the right amount of money to achieve this outcome?" And the moment they do that, they will find that opex purely and blatantly, if you just say, "I'm all in. I'm always on. I'm only opex." You will spend more money on that over time. If you pick and choose the things that you are incapable of doing or would cost you more to do through capex and staffing, then you can basically position both of those things to maximize value. >> Horses for course, gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, 'preciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from VeeamOn 2017. This is theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE special coverage of Sapphire Now we're here in Palo Alto. Sapphire now SAPs premier conference in Orlando. We are in Palo Alto, we have folks on the ground in Orlando. Special three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Taking you through all the action from our new studio in Palo Alto, 4,500 square feet. Our chance to cover events when we can't get there in person we certainly can cover it from here. And that's what we're going to be doing for the next three days; we're going to have stories on the ground, no story is too small. We're going to chase 'em all down. We have people calling in, we have folks on the ground that'll be Skyping in, calling in, whatever it takes to get the story out to you, we're going to do it and, certainly, expert coverage from inside the studio here. We got George Gilbert from Wikibon and a variety of folks who did not make it to Orlando will be coming into Palo Alto to sit down and talk with us. I'm John Furrier, my co-host is Jeff Frick. Jeff, we'll do whatever it takes. We'll cover from our studio, we'll go to Orlando virtually we got the Twitter hashtag, Sapphirenow, we're on that. We have folks on the ground, a lot of great news coming out of Sapphire. >> What do ya think? I mean, you were just as Dell EMC World last week and the story was all about, kind of, hybrid cloud and customer choice and it sounds like that's a recurring theme here at SAP, where they've got a lot of cloud options based on what their customer wants to do. >> I mean, if you, I mean this sounds really bad to say for someone who follows the tech industry but I just think this digital transformation thing is just over-played. But it's the, it's the Groundhog's Day moment. The movie just keeps replaying itself. Digital transformation, digital transformation, and, again, just like every other commerce, like Dell EMC World and every other one, digitally transforming your business is the theme. Little bit played, I would say business transformation is, I would say, the next chapter of what's happening and what you see from these shows. Specifically, at Dell EMC World, US ServiceNow, OpenStack, all the different events, Red Hat's been the one we been going to this past couple weeks is the business impact of the technology and SAP highlights that with their results and their keynotes in the news letter drops today, which is, look it, they have been doing SAP for all the top companies powering with SAP. As in Oracle. But now the customers want to go beyond the legacy SAP. And this has been a challenge for SAP over the past five years. They've had all the right messaging, digital dashboards, real time for business, all there. But the problem was they were missing a big piece of it. That is a cloud native and really aligning with the explosive growth of cloud computing, cloud native. Which is the new application developer. This new class of developer is emerging and that's different than the in-house SAP guys, by the way, which is still a massive market. >> Sure. >> That's the big trend. And of course, machine learning, AI, the kinds of design tooling that you'd expect to see, they're calling that Leonardo. >> I think it really shows the power of the consumer and the impact that the big public clouds have had on the marketplace, right? With Google, and with Amazon, especially Microsoft, as well, coming into play. And I think it's, what's interesting on the SAP tact is they have their own cloud. But now they've, you know, are very aggressively following up on an earlier announcement at Google Cloud Platform Show. With more announcements at this show and then they continue to strengthen their relationship with Amazon. So, it's a pretty interesting place, if you're an SAP customer, really having options around where, what cloud and what cloud deployment is really no longer an argument. You've got a lot of options at SAP, very different than Oracle, which is still pretty much exclusively Oracle on the Oracle cloud. Very different kind of a tact. >> Yeah and just reading the hard news from from hitting the ground today down in Orlando is the key points, I'll just summarize it real quick. Expanded SAP Leonardo, Digital Innovation System, SAP Google Expand the Strategic Partnership, SAP Cloud Platform accelerates adoption and proves choice advances consumption for customers. That, essentially, is it. And there's a lot of other subtext going on on Enterprise Cloud, a lot of other massive pockets. But in terms of top-level news, it's Leonardo, okay? Leonardo Da Vinci, dead, creative genius. Okay? But that is all about providing the tools for business to be successful in a digital world. But to me, the big story, Jeff, is the transformation of what used to be called HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. This is their platform as a service bet around winning the new developers, the cloud native. Last year at Sapphire, we actually had theCUBE on the ground they announced a deal with Apple computer around iOS and developers. That, now, has chip as a general availability so you're seeing SAP bringing two worlds together. The Cloud Native World, which they never played in much to the SAP Eco System, which is flush with cash. There's a ton of money to be made in that world. The install base is massive, now you have Cloud-Computing Hybrid Cloud with the HANA Cloud Platform, I mean the SAP Cloud Platform to bring that in. Again, I still can't even get it right. >> And so, let's just break it down as simply as you can, John. Why do they change the name? And what exactly do they have today? >> Well, here's the first of all problem. I'm so used to saying HANA because they have been branding HANA on >> They been bangin' HANA for the decade, or forever. >> It's just like, in my brain. I just can't get it out. SAP HANA, so anytime, and they actually called it HANA Cloud Platform before. >> Right, right. >> But HANA is such a massive set of capabilities that they really wanted to break out the platform as a service, which is the Cloud Native play, where all the action is for developers. From HANA, a viable product that they have that everyone's using. So, they have two clouds that we can say. SAP Cloud Platform, that's in Cloud Native, and then, HANA Enterprise Cloud. One's a delivery mechanism and one's a developer environment; it's the way I like to think about it. I'm a HANA customer, I'm going to need Enterprise Cloud to take my HANA solution and extend it up with self-service or provisioning, some partnership with AWS Google and the different clouds, getting my legacy HANA Enterprise software to be cloud enabled. That's HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP Cloud Platforms for folks who don't, who like DevOps, the Cloud Native world that we cover deeply. >> Okay, and then, how do you look at the kind of Google partnership, Google Cloud Platform versus AWS partnership. SAP's goin' dual-track, is it just simply to have choice based on what their customers, are they fundamentally different relationships? How do you read that? >> This is where I think SAP's got genius going on. But if they might screw it up because they can't get out of their own way. >> Jeff: Can't use genius anymore, we've had enough geniuses. >> So, so, this could be a brilliant strike of move for SAP. I think it's a brilliant move in the way they're playing it out. But, again, like I said, SAP, they might not be able to get out of their own way. That's going to be their issue. But from a functionality standpoint, this multi-cloud opportunity; they've been with Amazon for many many years. They announced a partnership with Google which is just kind of toe in the water. That's tryin' to advance pretty quickly. Not a lot of meat on the bone there. And Azure relationships. So, SAP wants to put their cloud platform, that platform as a service, in all the different major clouds so that their legacy can work on pram and in whichever cloud the customer chooses. >> Yeah, I think there is, >> I think, that is a multi-cloud strategy that is viable for SAP. Unlike, say, Oracle, which isn't multi-cloud, it's Oracle Cloud. >> Right, right, right. >> So, you know the SAP Oracle, you know, head-to-head thing has been kind of, like, taking completely different paths. Someone will be right. >> Right. But I think there's more meat on the bone with the Google thing than, maybe, maybe we know of, or are aware of, or whatever. I mean, Burnt did come and get in the keynote with Diane Greene at Google Cloud Platform. And, you know, I think it's relatively significant. What'll be interesting to see how it shapes out and, again, what are the customer choices that are going to drive them to Amazon or to SB Cloud or to the Google cloud. I guess at the end of the day it's about choice and I know that was a big theme at Dell EMC World. Is that everyone has to cater to the choice of the customer or else it's just too easy for them to flip a lot of these other clouds. >> I mean, when I say, "not ready for primetime," I mean, Google's got a lot of work to do. SAP as a company is not as far down the road with Google as they are with Amazon and Azure, just to make my point clear. >> Okay. >> But the do have our announcing additional certifications of the coinnovation between SAP and Google. Between SAP Cloud Platform and Google Cloud Platform. IOT, machine learning, they certified SAP NetWeaver in a variety of S4 HANA, business warehousing; essentially more market place to accelerate the digital transformation. And, again, this is all about SAP co-locating in Google. >> Right, right. >> If a customer wants to take advantage of TensorFlow and all the goodness of, say, Google. That's a good move for SAP and, again, I think this is a brilliant strategy for SAP if they don't screw it up. >> Right, right. And potentially, that's the bridge to, like you said, it's been a little bit of Groundhog Day with cloud, cloud, cloud. But what's really the theme of 2017 is AI machine learning and it's an interesting bridge with Google Cloud, to their TensorFlow as another way to bring AI machine learning into the application learning into the application. >> So, Jeff, we've been covering a lot of events. One comment, I will say, is that SAP always has great messaging. >> I got to say, because we've been covering out eighth year covering Sapphire Now. We've only missed, like, two years over that time span. It's a lot like Oracle on the sense that it's a very business oriented event, but they have good pulse. Bill McDermott, great communicator, great customer-focused person. Always has his hand on the pulse. They have great messaging. And they tend to pick the right waves. And they've had some false starts with cloud, they've bought, had some acquisitions, things been cobbled together, but they've never wavered from their mission. And the mission has always been powering the speed of business, great software solutions. The issue is, they're moving off of SAP to new cloud solutions, so SAP is taking a proactive strike to say, look here, we can play in the cloud, therefore this multi-cloud game is critical for the growth of SAP, in my opinion. >> How much of the SAP in cloud will be new greenfield opportunities, or people want the flexibility, and a lot of the attributes of cloud versus, they're not migrating old R3 instances into the cloud. I mean, this is, I would assume, mainly new greenfield opportunities. >> Well, I think it's both. I mean, I think you have greenfield developers basically that are being hired by their customers to build apps, top line driven apps, and also, you know, some consolidation apps. But mainly, you know, their customers are hiring developers. Hey, we need a mobile app for our business, so you need to have data, you need to have some domain expertise. But at the end of the day, the system of records probably stored in some SAP system somewhere. So what they're trying to do is decouple the dependency between that developer, but still use SAP, but and offer an extension of SAP. It really is an opportunity, in my mind, for that to happen, and also partners. Look at Accenture, Capgemini, all these different partners. They are poised to create some great value and make some cash along the way. Remember the minicomputer boom. People who lined their pockets with cash were the integrators. The large global system integrators. So I think that, and the channel partners are going to have a great opportunity to take advantage of preexisting legacy accounts and to grow them further. >> Well, they certainly have a giant ecosystem. There's no doubt about it. It's one of the startup challenges that, new company starters to build that ecosystem. I mean, they have a giant ecosystem. So, what are you looking for this week besides the obvious announcement? And kind of tells that you want to see to let you know that SAP continues to be on track and move with the shifting tides of the market trends? >> Well do me, I'm looking at the multi-cloud story. It's a good story. Not sure how baked it is, but from a story standpoint, I really like it. I think that whoever can really crack the code on multi-cloud in a viable way is going to be a winner. So to me, I'm going to be looking heavily at the multi-cloud stuff coming out of Orlando. I'm interested to see how the developer traction pans out. I'm really interested in following up on the Apple relationship and see how that pans out. And then ultimately, how the rest of SAP can transform as a business. Because SAP tends to have a lot of buzzwords, a lot of word salad, not a lot of, you know, breaking it down and orchestrating. So to me, SAP, where I'm critical of them is, they kind of can't get out of their own way, Jeff. So, sometimes they kind of get caught in that old world thinking when the world is moving very very fast. Look at Amazon Web Services, you look at what Google's doing, you look at where Vmware is changing. Vmware started Pat Gelsinger. He was in the dumps in 2016, now he's flying high. He went from almost being fired, stock had a 52 week low, to them soaring. They have a market cap that's greater than HPE. So these old incumbent like SAP, they have to transform their culture, get relevant, and get real. And if they can't show the proof points with customer wins and partners, and multi-cloud, then they're going to be on shaky ground. So that's what I'm looking for. >> Jeff: All right, so should be a good week. I'm looking forward to it. >> Okay, we are here in the Palo Alto studio, our new 4,500 square foot operation. We can do coverage here, and then have on the ground coverage of which we will be doing all week Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for our SAP Sapphire Now. We've got great guests coming in, great editorial coverage. I want to thank our sponsors, SAP, for, you know, allowing us to do this and continuing theCUBE tradition at Sapphire Now. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. More coming after this short break.

[Narrator] It's The Cube. Covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. Brought to you by: SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone live here in Palo Alto for our studio coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. I'm John Furrier of The Cube. Three days of SAPPHIRE NOW coverage from our 4500 square foot studio in Palo Alto covering all the action news on the ground in Orlando, Florida where SAP SAPPHIRE NOW is taking place. The big news and big story of SAPPHIRE is the cloud, multi-cloud strategy and what it means for customers. This is part of SAP's Cloud Platform. I had a chance to sit down with the leader of that team, Dan Lahl, who is the Vice President of Product Marketing. I asked Dan to break down the big news for SAP Cloud Platform. Here's the conversation with myself and Dan Lahl. >> What we're announcing at SAPPHIRE this week is we are going to be running SAP Cloud Platform not only in SAP data centers, but also in AWS data centers, in Azure data centers and in GCP data centers. So, we really now are above the fray of the infrastructure wars. >> It's actually, we also talked with your team at SAP Cloud Platform around Google Next. >> Dan: Yeah. >> And, you guys had a significant announcement. The folks flew in from Germany, the big entourage on-stage with Diane Greene's team at Google, and I was scratching my heading saying I didn't even see this coming, you kind of kept it from me. (chuckles) I knew you had something up your sleeve. Significant presence with Google. So I ping the Amazon folks and say hey what's going on, you lose Hensburg? They said no, no we're doing a lot of great stuff with SAP. Of course, Google is trotted out there as a big win. But this is the strategy for SAP, and Andy Jassy was in San Francisco a while back and he said look, we are winning with more services, more services. But, he made a point. The lock-in spec of the old, and he also talked about the, you can't fight gravity. The old way to buy infrastructure is just taking it down. >> It's dead, it's dead. And our view is we're going to be a software company, right? We're not going to play at the hardware layer, we're going to play above that and differentiate with business services above that. Let the customers decide what they think the best hyper-scale vendor is. We'll give them great software, business services above those layers. >> So, I think multi-cloud is the hottest trend that nobody's talking about. You guys are talking about it obviously, but in the press corps, in the media, no one's actually really digging into this because it's very nuanced. It's an industry kind of thing. But having multi-cloud is like interoperability back in the networking days. >> Dan: That's right. >> And just to be clear, you guys are still behind a hundred percent with AWS, Amazon Web Services, >> Dan: Absolutely, yep. >> and Microsoft Azure. >> Yep, and GCP as well. And then you want to run it at an SAP data center you can do that too, and we'll give customers one cockpit, one piece of glass to manage all those different environments. >> So your PaaS is on Google Cloud Platform >> Yep. >> At Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. >> To be perfectly clear, GA on AWS, beta on Azure and we're doing a pilot showcase on GCP. That's cool -- >> So that's platforms of service. >> That's right. >> Now that's a completely different strategy than say Oracle. >> Yeah, let's lock you in one more time. Let's lock you in to cloud. >> But they have hardware, and they're going frontal attack against Amazon and vice versa. There's a war going on between the two. That's not what SAP's trying to do, I don't see you making any noise out there. >> To me that's a race to the bottom. That's a race to the bottom. So we're going to provide business services above that hardware layer with the PaaS and then business services above that to help customers. >> So, managing Cloud Workloads is also another topic and this is being talked a lot in context to hybrid clouds. So hybrid cloud obviously is a big deal. A lot of people are moving to public cloud and Andy Jassy says they're happening much faster. I kind of disagree with Andy on this point. I think he's got momentum for sure, and I love what they're doing, but I don't think they're moving as fast. Still got a lot of on-premise. This is your world as well at SAP, so you have to kind of build the connectors if you will. Connectors or API. So, a lot of customers want to know what to do, and then so multi-cloud I think's going to be super important. >> Dan: Yes. >> But I still got the on-premise investment in systems of record, systems of software, that need to enable opportunities for new app development and what-not. How do you talk to customers about that? >> That's not going away. That is not going away for ten years. So, hybrid cloud's going to be with us. So our strategy is we will provide integration services, whether that be at the data layer, whether it be at the process layer, or whether that be through API or microservices. We're going all-in on all of those. So, if you want to connect a business process that you've built in Cloud Platform with an on-premise system, you can do that whether that's SAP or a not SAP. If you want to use APIs and use that infrastructure, we're exposing more and more APIs. In fact, this week we're announcing over a hundred APIs being exposed for S/4HANA, in the finance area for Ariba, for SuccessFactors, for Fieldglass. And then we're adding actually specific APIs for specific business functions. So, do a billing off an invoice, collect data, collect information off a purchase order. We're exposing those higher level services as well. So, integration is huge and again we've been in the data services as well, so you want to move data to the cloud we're providing services to do that too. >> So, two things that are jumping out at me looking at what you guys are doing this week at SAPPHIRE is this API connector. So you're connecting the SAP world into the cloud. And certainly the platform is a service that you have in the platform, the cloud platform is fundamental. But, there's a big buzz around marketplaces. So talk about some of the new things you're doing there because I think this where it gets kind of interesting and it lets us get your perspective on what you guys are announcing, and your thoughts on this notion of the apps center, marketplace, I mean Amazon Web Services is doing a lot of great things. They think that the consumption pattern in the future will all be driven by some sort of app center. You guys are in the software business. I'm assuming that's a big part of what you got doing, what's new? >> Yeah, very exciting for marketplace as well. So, we're extending the value of the app center for our customers. So today you want to look at a partner application, you can go look at it, you can discover it, but you really can't do more than that off the app center. So, today what we're announcing, or this week at SAPPHIRE, the ability discover, to learn, to try, to buy, and to use all directly off the app center. And in further on to that, we'll manage the application for the partner and for the customer. So, if the partner updates their application, automatically gets downloaded and updated through the marketplace, through the app center. >> I've been reading a lot of stuff on the cloud and AI and use the line 'talk to me like I'm a, pretend I'm a five-year old.' People have been using that quote a lot. So, pretend that I'm a customer, I'm not a five-year old, but a customer that's not under the hood, might not be following all the trends. Here's my challenge. I'm on-prem, I'm moving to the cloud, and I just haven't decided yet who I want to look at and John hasn't posted his competitive matrix yet, so I don't know he feels, and I got that coming out, a little plug for my upcoming research, (Dan laughs) but they have a relationship with Microsoft, I have a relationship with SAP, I love Google's got the Mojo with TensorFlow and Machine Learning and all the smart engineers they have. And Amazon is just awesome. I just don't know yet which ones. Can I just choose from the app center? >> Absolutely. >> John: Cloud, any cloud that I want? Or -- >> Well, it's really for any partner that's built on the cloud platform today. So, as we move forward with the multi-cloud you're going to see that happening. >> John: But that's a trend you guys see. >> We definitely see that. And you're right, we want to make it like a five-year old. You want to discover, you want to try, you want to use. That's what we do with the app center today. >> So the other thing I liked about Mobile World Congress when we did chat last, you guys announced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress this notion of Workflow. What is the new with that? Cause there's some news around some new things you're doing with Workflow. What do you have? >> Yeah, so we're extending Workflow with actually a rules system as well, so we've added a new service to go along with Workflow called Business Rules. So, now you can mash up workflows as we've talked before, mash up some business processes. But now you can actually use the rules system to open up each business process, add logic into that, and as a business analyst it's really if-then type of capability. So pretty easy. Put that, close it back up, now you have a whole new business process or an extended business processes in using Workflow and Rules together. >> So you make it more flexible for the Workflow to get -- >> Let the business analysts deliver more value in their job, and extend business processes more easily. >> What about the app developer? I'm an app developer, I want to take advantage of all the greatness of SAP. What mechanisms are you guys announcing or talking about at SAPPHIRE this year that make my life easier? Without being an expert on SAP, is there any mechanism for me to say hey I want some Rules and app goodness coming into my app? >> Yeah, we have all-new tooling that we're going to be talking about at SAPPHIRE, so we have some relationships we're building with other partners to do high-productivity application work. And then we're extending our Web IDE development tool to be a full stack development environment. Whether you want to do it via the web, whether you want to do it via mobile, if you want to integrate other combinations, other technologies like Slack or other technologies in there. You can do all that in the Web IDE development tool. >> So I can add business services into the API. >> Into the Web IDE, and you can extend the Web IDE like we've done with Slack. So, you just create another tab and import that tool into the Web IDE. So, very easy for developers now to create applications that will run seamlessly on Cloud Platform. >> Let's just take a step back while you're on this topic. This is interesting, DevOps has been the movement that has gone mainstream now with things that we're talking about here. Your philosophy with the developer is what, to just give them SAP all day long? What's the main value proposition for the platform as a service that you have for the developer? >> So, my joke is with Cloud Platform we're able to talk to developers under 40 because it's a Java-based environment. So, what we get with the Cloud Foundry work that we've done with the multi-PaaS and that's how we're doing -- >> John: Oh yeah, everyone over 40 still likes Java too, so we learned about Java >> Me too. (both laugh) So anyway, what we're delivering through multi-cloud we're doing it through Cloud Foundry, and that gives the ability to have multiple run-times. So for those folks that want to use no doT.js they can use that. They want to use different languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Go, those languages, they can use those as well. So, our view is whatever language, whatever run-time you want to bring to the party, SAP will have this environment where you can develop and deploy in that. And we bring all the mobile technology that we've had for years and years and years if you want to deploy on mobile you can do that too. So I think where we've been lacking in the past is some of the high-productivity tools. So we're adding high-productivity capabilities for our mobile development as well as for core development too. >> Bottom line me on how you would package this up, because there's so much going on at SAPPHIRE. What's the net, net, net? What's the bottom line, because how, gimme the elevator pitch real quick. What's the big news that -- >> Here's the real sound bite. >> -- to set SAP Cloud Platform. >> Yeah, the real sound bite is we're accelerating choice, accelerating adoption, and accelerating ease of use for our customers to be able to adopt cloud. So you get your choice through multi-cloud. You get your choice of different applications that you can do business directly on, and then you're getting choice and capabilities through all of the services. >> What are you most excited about, to point to one thing say look at this new feature. >> It's multi-cloud. We think multi-cloud, as you said, it's the hottest thing going today. We are all-in on multi-cloud. And you'll see us deliver more and more capabilities and services that run on whatever infrastructure provider you want to run on. So, again we're a software company. We're not going to participate at the hardware layer. We're going up, not going down. >> I recently interviewed the CTO of Analytics at Accenture here on one of my shows. He got a huge amount of views. There's a huge interest in analytics. Obviously not something new to you guys, but Accenture's a partner. And that brings up the question, this is all great, you got the cloud relationship so essentially you guys look at cloud the same way you looked at hardware vendors in the past. They're partners, SAP doesn't really change your game, you're still doing the software, still provide all that business intelligence to your customers through software. But I got to ask you the impact to partners, cause they're changing. >> Dan: They are changing. >> Accenture, Deloitte, all of them that, all the top guys out there are changing. >> They're having to become ISVs. It's pretty amazing. They're having to do more than just coming in with a big pitch saying a million dollars in two years. So what we see Accenture, Deloitte, others doing, is providing actual full applications now as an ISV and Deloitte and Accenture have actually done that both through cloud platform. And they're also becoming prototyping and PoC specialists as well. So, they'll come in, they'll do a design thinking with our customer, they'll prototype it, they'll PoC it on the Cloud Platform, do something in four weeks, prove out a concept so that they can then go to the next level, the next step on the agreement. >> Yeah, they're becoming much more strategic with the customers. Well, they always had been, I'm not saying they hadn't in the past. >> But not just implementation, right? It's actually proving that they can do something new in digital transformation, for example. >> I mean, back in the old days SAP ERP roll out in the 80s and early 90s. It was a gravy train for the integrators. >> Yeah. >> You know, the time tables were multi-year. And to your point, the world has changed with Agile that they have to then break down these milestones and have proof of value. Time to value is much shorter, so it's still lucrative, but just different execution cadence. Can you talk about that? >> And just think about that, with the value they're providing they're actually bringing a prototype or a PoC that's a proof point, a proven part of the application that they're going to show to the customer so that they can get to that next level of application development with the customer. So it's really much more of a partnership, and we get to be the platform on which they're running which is the cool part for us. >> Dan, thanks for coming. This Cube conversation's special on SAPPHIRE what's happening around all the new announcements. What should people be looking at this week? What cool things have you got going on on the ground in Orlando? >> Yeah, come to our campus. Come see all the cool things we're doing. Not just what I've talked about, but also IoT that runs on Cloud Platform, Machine Learning AI that runs on Cloud Platform, big data that runs on Cloud Platform. All of the new applications we're bringing that are part of Cloud Platform as well that run on top of the Platform. So, we are truly becoming a pretty cool cog in the SAP wheel. >> Well, great strategy, I'll say it's really brilliant. It's actually mapped the old SAP onto a modern world with cloud as infrastructure. You got the multi-cloud vision, I think that's very relevant. I still, it's still early, early innings stage, but certainly great with the PaaS applied from as a service. The API in the app center, all the new services, great for partners, great for SAP. And again, you're not Oracle. Oracle's fighting all the cloud guys directly. You guys are, you're Switzerland here. >> Exactly. >> Congratulations, thanks for spending the time and breaking it down, appreciate it. >> Dan: Thank you John, appreciate your time today. >> Hi, I'm John Furrier, this is a Cube conversation about SAPPHIRE 2017 with SAP Cloud Platform's Dan Lahl, who's the Vice President of Product Marketing. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (tech music)