>>From around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm john ferrier host of the cube. Got a great story here. Navigating Covid 19 with Watson advertising and weather channel conversations. Sherry back steen. Who's the gM of Watson advertising in the weather company. Sherry, thanks for coming on the cube. My favorite part of IBM think is to talk about the tech and also the weather company innovations. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, happy to be here, john >>So COVID-19 obviously some impact for people that working at home. Um normally you guys have been doing a lot of innovation around weather weather data um certainly huge part of it. Right. And so lots been changing with AI and the weather company and IBM so let's first start before we jump in, just a little background about what your team has created because a lot of fascinating things here. Go ahead. >>Yeah. So when the pandemic started, you know we looked at the data that we were seeing and of course in weather accuracy and accurate data is really important trusted data. And so we created a COVID-19 hub on our weather channel app and on weather.com. And essentially what it was is an aggregated area where consumers could get the most up to date information on covid cases, deaths in their area, trends see heat maps uh information from the C. D. C. And what was unique about it. It was to a local level. Right so state level information is helpful but we know that consumers uh me included. I need information around what's happening around me. And so we were able to bring this down to a county level which we thought was really helpful for consumers >>share as watching sports on tv. And recently, a few months ago, the Masters was on and you saw people getting back into real life, It's almost like a weather forecast. Now. You want to know what's going on in the pandemic. People are sharing that. They're getting the vaccine. Um, really interesting. And so I want to understand how this all came together with you guys. Is was it something that has a weather data, a bunch of geeks saying, hey, we should do this for companies, but take us to the thought process with their team. Was it like you saw this as value? How did you get to this? Because this is an interesting user benefit. I want to know the weather, I want to know if it's safe. These are kind of a psychology of a user expectation. How did you guys connect the dots here for this project? >>Well, we certainly do have a very passionate team of people, um some weather geeks included, um and you're absolutely right watching the Masters a few months ago was amazing to see, you know, some sense of normality happening here. But you know, we looked at, you know, IBM, the weather company, like, how do we help during this pandemic? And when we thought about it, we looked at there's an amazing gap of information. And as the weather channel, you know, what we do is bring together data, give people insights and help them make decisions with that. And so it was really part of our mission. It's always been that way to give information to keep people safe. And so all we did is took a different data set and provided the same thing. And so in this case, the covid data set, which we actually had to, you know, aggregate from different sources whether it was the C. D. C. The World Health Organization uh State governments or county governments to provide this to consumers. But it was really really natural for us because we know what consumers want. You know we all want information around where we live, right? And then we want to see like where our friends live, where our relatives live to make sure that they're okay. And then that enables people to make the decisions that are right for their family. And so it was really really natural for us to do that. And then of course we have the technology to be able to scale to hundreds of millions of people. Which is really important. >>It's not obvious until you actually think about that. It's so obvious. Congratulations. What a great innovation. What were the biggest challenges you guys had to face and how did you overcome it? Because I'm curious. I see you've got a lot of, lot of large scale data dealing with diversity of data with weather. What was the challenges with Covid? And how did you overcome it? >>So again, without a doubt it was the data because you're looking at one, we wanted that county level data. So you're looking at multiple sources. So how do we aggregate this data? So first finding that trusted source that that we could use. But then how do you pull it in in an automated way? And the challenge was it with the State Department, the county departments that data came in all kinds of formats. Some counties used maps, some use charts, some use pds to get that information. So we had to pull all this unstructured data, uh, and then that data was updated at different times. So some counties did it twice a day, some did it once day, different time zones. So that really made it challenging. And so then, you know, so what we did is this is where the power of A I really helps because a I can take all of that data, bring in and organize it and then we could put it back out to the consumer in a very digestible way. And so we were able to do that. We built an automated pipeline around that so we can make sure that it was updated. It was fresh and timely, which was really important. But without a doubt looking at that structured data and unstructured data and really helping it to make sense to the consumer was the biggest challenge. And what's interesting about it. Normally it would take us months to do something like that. I challenged the team to say we don't have months, we have days. They turned that around in eight days, which was just an amazing herculean feat. But that's really just the power of, as you said, passionate people coming together to do something so meaningful. >>I love the COVID-19 success stories when people rally around their passion and also their expertise. What was the technology to the team used? Because the theme here at IBM think is transformation innovation, scale. How did you move so fast to make that happen? >>So we move fast by our Ai capabilities and then using IBM cloud and so really there's four key components are like four teams that worked on it. So first there was the weather company team um and because we are a consumer division of IBM, we know what consumers want. So we understand the user experience and the design, but we also know how to build an A. P. I. That can scale because you're talking about being able to scale not only in a weather platform. So in the midst of covid weather still happened, so we still had severe weather record breaking hurricane season. And so those A. P. S. Have to scale to that volume. Then the second team was the AI team. So that used the Watson AI team mixed with the weather Ai team to again bring in that data to organize that data. Um And we used Watson NLP so natural natural language processing in order to create that automated pipeline. Then we had the corralled infrastructure so that platform team that built that architecture and that data repository on IBM cloud. And then the last team was our data privacy office. So making sure that that data was trusted that we have permission to use it uh and just know really that data governance. So it's all of that technology and all of those teams coming together to build this hub for consumers. Um And it worked I mean we would have about four million consumers looking at that hub every single day. Um and even like a year later we still have a couple million people that access that information. So it's really kind of become more like the weather checking the weather's come that daily habit. >>That's awesome. And I gotta I gotta imagine that these discoveries and innovations that was part of this transformation at scale have helped other ways outside the pandemic and you share how this is connected to um other benefits outside the pandemic. >>Yeah so absolutely um you know ai for businesses part of IBM strategy and so really helping organizations to help predict um you know to help take workloads and automate them. So they're high valued employees can work on you know other work. And also you know to bring that personalization to customers. You know, it's really a i when I look at it for my own part of a IBM with the weather company, three things where I'm using this technology. So the first one is around advertising. So the advertising industry is at a really um you know, pivotal part right now, a lot of turmoil and challenges because of privacy legislation because big tech companies are um you know, getting rid of tracking pixels that we normally use to drive the business. So we've created a suite of AI solutions for publishers for you know, different players within the ad tech space, um which is really important because it protects the open web, so like getting covid information or weather information, all of that is free information to the public. We just ask that you underwrite it by seeing advertising so we can keep it free. So those products protect the open red. So really, really important. Then on the consumer side of my business, within the weather channel, we actually used Watson Ai um to connect health with weather. So we know that there's that connection, some health um you know, issues that people have can be impacted by weather, like allergies and flew. So we've actually used Watson Ai to build a um Risk of flu that goes 15 days out. So we can tell people in your local area this one actually goes down to the zip code level, um the risk of flu in your area or the risk of allergies. So help to manage your symptoms, take your prescription. So, um that's a really interesting way. We're using AI and of course weather dot com and our apps are on IBM cloud, so we have this strong infrastructure to support that. And then lastly, you know, our weather forecasting has always been rooted in a i you take 100 different weather models, you apply ai to that to get the best and most accurate forecasts that you deliver. Um and so we are using these technologies every day to, you know, move our business forward and to provide, you know, weather services for people. >>I just love the automation and as users have smartphones and more instrumentation on their bodies, whether it's wearables, people will plan their day around the weather, and retail shops will have a benefit knowing what the stock and or not have on hand and how to adjust that. This, the classic edge computing paradigm, fascinating impact. You wouldn't think about that, but that's a pretty big deal. People are planning >>around >>the weather data and making that available is critical. >>Oh, absolutely. You know, every business needs a weather strategy because whether it impacts your supply chain, um agriculture, should I be watering today or not even around, you know, um, if you think about energy and power lines, you know, the vegetation growth over power lines can bring power lines down and it's a disruption, you know, to customers and power. So there's just when you start thinking about it, you're like, wow, whether really impacts every business, um, not to say just consumers in general and their daily lives. >>And uh, and there's a lot of cloud scale to that can help companies whether it's um be part of a better planet or smarter planet as it's been called, and help with with global warming. I mean, you think about this is all kind of been contextually relevant now more than ever. Super exciting. Um Great stuff. I want to get your take on outside of um the IBM response to the pandemic more broadly outside of the weather. What are you guys doing um to help? Are you guys doing anything else with industry? How could you talk a little bit more about IBM s response more broadly to the pandemic? >>Yeah so IBM has been you know working with government academia, industry is really from the beginning uh in several different ways. Um you know the first one of the first things we did is it opened up our intellectual property. So R. I. P. And our technology our supercomputing To help researchers really try to understand COVID-19 some of the treatments and possible cures so that's been really beneficial as it relates to that. Um Some other things though, that we're doing as well is we created a chat bots that companies and clients could use and this chat but could either be used to help train teachers because they have to work remotely or help other workers as well. Um and also the chatbots was helping as companies started to re enter back to the workforce and getting back to the office. So the chatbots been really helpful there. Um and then, you know, one of the things that we've been doing on the advertising side is we actually have helped the ad council with their vaccine campaign. Um It's up to you is the name of the campaign and we delivered a ad unit that can dynamically assemble a creative in real time to make sure that the right message was getting out the right time to the right person. So it's really helped to maximize that campaign to reach people um and encourage them if it's the right thing for them, you know where the vaccines are available. Um and that you know, they could take those. So a lot of great work that's going on within IBM. Um and actually the most recent thing just actually in the past month is we release the Digital Health Pass in cooperation with the state of new york. Um and this is a fantastic tool because it is a way for individuals to keep their private information around their vaccines or you know, some of the Covid test they've been having on a mobile device that's secure and we think that this is going to be really important as cities start to reopen um to have that information easily accessible. >>Uh sure, great insight, um great innovation navigating Covid 19 a lot of innovation transformation at IBM and obviously Watson and the weather company using AI and also, you know, when we come out of Covid post, post Covid as real life comes back, we're still going to be impacted. We're gonna have new innovations, new expectations, tracking, understanding what's going on, not just the weather. So thanks >>for absolutely great >>work. Um, awesome. Thank you. >>Great. Thanks john good to see you. >>Okay. This is the cubes coverage of IBM. Think I'm john for a host of the cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great story here. Navigating COVID-19 with Watson advertising and weather channel conversations, Sheri Bachstein, who's the GM of Watson Advertising in the weather company. Sheri, thanks for coming on theCUBE. My favorite part of IBM Think is to talk about the tech and also the weather company innovations. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, happy to be here John. >> So COVID-19 obviously some impact for people that working at home. Normally you guys have been doing a lot of innovation around weather, weather data, certainly huge part of it. And so lots been changing with AI and the weather company and IBM, so let's first start before we jump in just a little background about what your team has created because a lot of fascinating things here. Go ahead. >> Yeah, so when the pandemic started, we looked at the data that we were seeing and of course in weather accuracy and accurate data is really important trusted data. And so we created a COVID-19 hub on our weather channel app and on weather.com and essentially what it was is an aggregated area where consumers could get the most up-to-date information on COVID cases, deaths in their area, trends see heat maps, information from the CDC. And what was unique about it, it was to a local level, right? So state level information is helpful, but we know that consumers me included. I need information around what's happening around me. And so we were able to bring this down to a County level which we thought was really helpful for consumers >> Sheri's watching sports on TV. And recently a few months ago, the masters was on and you saw people getting back into real life. It's almost like a weather forecast. Now you want to know what's going on in the pandemic. People are sharing that they're getting the vaccine, really interesting. And so I want to understand how this all came together with you guys. Was it something that as a weather data and a bunch of geeks saying, Hey, we should do this for companies but take us to thought process 113. Was it like you saw this as value? How did you get to this? Because this is an interesting user benefit. I want to know the weather. I want to know if it's safe. These are kind of a psychology of a user expectation. How did you guys connect the dots here for this project? >> Well, we certainly do have a very passionate team of people some weather geeks included and you're absolutely right. Watching the masters a few months ago was amazing to see some sense of normality happening here. But we looked at IBM and the weather company like how do we help during this pandemic? And when we thought about it we looked at there's an amazing gap of information. And as the weather channel, what we do is bring together data give people insights and help them make decisions with that. And so it was really part of our mission. It's always been that way to give information to keep people safe. And so all we did is took a different data set and provided the same thing. And so in this case, the COVID data set which we actually had to aggregate from different sources whether it was the CDC, the world health organization, a state governments, our County governments to provide this to consumers. But it was really, really natural for us because we know what consumers want. We all want information around where we live, right? And then we want to see like where our friends live, where our relatives live to make sure that they're okay. And then if that enables people to make the decisions that are right for their family. And so it was really, really natural for us to do that. And then of course we have the technology to be able to scale to hundreds of millions of people, which is really important. >> Yeah, it's not obvious until you actually think about it, then it's so obvious. Congratulations, what a great innovation what were the biggest challenges you guys had to face and how did you overcome it? Because I'm curious, I see you got a lot of large scale data dealing with diversity of data with weather. What was the challenges with COVID and how did you overcome it? >> So again, without a doubt it was the data, because you're looking at one, we wanted that County level data. So you're looking at multiple sources. So how do we aggregate this data? So first finding that trusted source that we could use but then how do you pull it in, in an automated way? And the challenge was it with the state departments, the County departments, that data came in, all kinds of formats. Some counties used maps, some use charts some use PDFs to get that information. So we had to pull all this unstructured data and then that data was updated at different times. So some counties did it twice a day some did it once a day, different time zones. So that really made it challenging. And so then, so what we did is this is where the power of AI really helps, because AI can take all of that data bring it in, organize it, and then we could put it back out to the consumer in a very digestible way. And so we were able to do that. We built an automated pipeline around that so we can make sure that it was updated. It was fresh and timely, which was really important but without a doubt, looking at that structured data and unstructured data and really helping it to make sense to the consumer was the biggest challenge. And I'll, what's interesting about it. Normally it would take us months to do something like that. I challenged the team to say, we don't have months. We have days. They turned that around in eight days which was just an amazing Herculean feat but that's really just the power of as you said, passionate people coming together to do something so meaningful. >> I love the COVID-19 success stories when people rally around their passion and also their expertise, what was the technology did the team use? Because the theme here at IBM Think is, transformation, innovation, scale. How did you move so fast to make that happen? >> So we moved fast by our AI capabilities and then using IBM cloud. And so really there's four key components or like four teams that worked on it. So first there was the weather company team. And because we are a consumer division of IBM we know what consumers want. So we understand the user experience and the design but we also know how the build an API that can scale because you're talking about being able to scale not only in a weather platform. So in the midst of COVID weather still happen. So we still had severe weather record breaking hurricane season. And so those APIs have to scale to that volume. Then the second team was the AI team. So that used the Watson AI team mixed with the weather AI team to again bring in that data to organize that data. And we use Watson NLP. So natural language processing in order to create that automated pipeline. Then we had the collateral infrastructure. So that platform team that built that architecture and that data repository on IBM cloud. And then the last team was our data privacy office. So making sure that that data was trusted that we have permission to use it and just really that data governance. So it was all of that technology and all of those teams coming together to build this hub for consumers. And it worked, I mean we would have about 4 million consumers looking at that hub every single day. And even like a year later, we still have a couple million people that access that information. So it's really kind of become more like the weather checking the weather, that daily habit. >> That's awesome. And I got to imagine that these discoveries and these innovations that was part of this transformation that scale I've helped other ways outside of the pandemic. Can you share how this is connected to other benefits outside the pandemic? >> Yeah, so absolutely, AI for business is part of IBM strategy. And so really helping organizations to help predict, to help take workloads and automate them. So they're high valued employees can work on other work and also to bring that personalization to customers is really AI. When I look at it for my own part of a IBM with the weather company, three things where I'm using this technology. So the first one is around advertising. So the advertising industry is at a really pivotal part right now, a lot of turmoil and challenges because of privacy legislation because big tech companies are getting rid of tracking pixels that we normally use to drive the business. So we've created a suite of AI solutions for publishers, for different players within the ad tech space which is really important because it protects the open web. So like getting COVID information or weather information all of that is free information to the public. We just ask that you underwrite it by saying advertising so we can keep it free. So those products protect the open read. So really, really important. Then on the consumer side of my business within the weather channel we actually use Watson AI to connect health with weather. So we know that there's that connection. Some health issues that people have can be impacted by weather like allergies and flu. So we've actually used Watson AI to build a risk of flu that goes 15 days out. So we can tell people in your local area this one actually goes down to the zip code level the risk of flu in your area or the risk of allergies. So it help to manage your symptoms, take your prescription. So that's a really interesting way we're using AI and of course, weather.com and our apps are an IBM cloud. So we have this strong infrastructure to support that. And then lastly our weather forecasting has always been rooted in AI. You take a hundred different weather models you apply AI to that to get the best and most accurate forecast that you deliver. And so we are using these technologies every day to move our business forward and to provide weather services for people. >> I just love the automation as users have smartphones and more instrumentation on their bodies, whether it's wearables, people will plan their day around the weather and retail shops will have a benefit knowing what to stock or not have on hand and how to adjust that this the classic edge computing paradigm, fascinating impact. You wouldn't think about that, but that's a pretty big deal. People are planning around the weather data and making that available as critical. >> Oh, absolutely. Every business needs a weather strategy because whether it impacts your supply chain, agriculture should I be watering today or not, even around if you think about energy and power lines, the vegetation growth of our power lines can bring power lines down and it's a disruption, to customers and power. So there's just, when you start thinking about it you're like, wow, weather really impacts every business not to say just consumers in general and their daily life. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of cloud scale too, that can help companies whether it's be part of better planet or smarter planet as it's been called and help with, with global warming. I mean, you think about this is all kind of been contextually relevant now more than ever super exciting, great stuff. I want to get your take on outside of the IBM response to the pandemic, more broadly outside of the weather. What are you guys doing to help? Are you guys doing anything else with industry? How could you, talk a little bit more about IBM's response more broadly to the pandemic? >> Yeah, so IBM has been working with government academia industries really from the beginning in several different ways. The first, one of the first things we did is it opened up our intellectual property. So our IP and our technology, our super computing to help researchers, really try to understand COVID-19, some of the treatments and possible cures. So that's been really beneficial as it relates to that. Some other things though that we're doing as well is we created a Chatbot that companies and clients could use. And this Chatbot could either be used to help train teachers because they have to work remotely or help other workers as well. And also the Chatbot was helping as companies started to reenter back to the workforce and getting back to the office. So the Chatbot has been really helpful there. And then one of the things that we've been doing on the advertising side is we actually have helped the ad council with their vaccine campaign. It's up to you as the name of the campaign. And we delivered a ad unit that can dynamically assemble a creative in real time to make sure that the right message was getting out the right time to the right person. So it's really helped to maximize that campaign to reach people. And they encourage them if it's the right thing for them, where the vaccines are available and that they could take those. So a lot of great work that's going on within IBM and actually the most recent thing just actually in the past month is we released the digital health pass in cooperation with the state of New York. And this is a fantastic tool because it is a way for individuals to keep their private information around their vaccines, or some of the COVID tests they've been having on a mobile device that's secure. And we think that this is going to be really important as cities start to reopen to have that information easily accessible. >> Awesome Sheri, great insight, great innovation navigating COVID-19, lots of innovation transformation at IBM and obviously Watson and the weather company using AI. And also, when we come out of COVID post COVID, as real life comes back, we're still going to be impacted. We're going to have new innovations, new expectations, tracking, understanding what's going on not just the weather. So thanks for doing that great work. Awesome, thank you. >> Great, thanks John. Good to see you. >> This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Cube with digital coverage of >>AWS Public Sector Partner Awards >>brought to you by >>Amazon Web services. Everyone, welcome to this cube coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube with two great guests here. Travis Department director of analytics and Weather at Max. Our technologies and VJ teleplay Gotta Who's the chief? Modeling and data a simulation branch at Noah. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Max are what you guys do. >>Yeah, so Macs are is an organization. Does a lot of different activities unearth intelligence as well as space? We have about 4000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure, actually building satellites on all the infrastructure that's going to help us get us back to the moon and things like that. And then on the other side we have a north of intelligence group, which is where, I said, and we leverage remote sensing information for science information to help people better understand how, how and what they do might impact the Earth or have the earth, and it's activities might impact their business mission. Our operation. So what we wanted to set out to do was help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, business or operations. And a big element of that was doing it with speed. Ah, so we we knew? No. I had capabilities running America weather prediction models and very traditional on Prem. Big, beefy ah, high performance compute supercomputers. But we wanted to do it in The cloud we want to do is AWS is a key part. So we collaborated with B. J and Noah and his team is there to help pull that off. They gave this access public domain information, but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of the research scientists talking, and after pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time. We were able to pull something off that a lot of people didn't think was possible. I'm we got pretty excited. Once we saw some of the outcome >>Travis to be, Jay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together because this is not your classic Amazon partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together V. J and your team with AWS. Talk about the relationship and that and how Amazon plays because it's a unique partnership plane in more detail at specific relationship. >>Yeah, with Max or in AWS. You know, our partnership has gone back A number of years on Macs are being a fairly large organization. There's lots of different activities. I think Max Star was the first client of AWS Snowmobile, where they have the big tractor trailer back up to a data center, load all the data in and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that because we had over 100 petabytes of satellite imagery and archive that just moving across the Internet would probably still be going. Um, so the snowmobile is a good success story for us, but just with >>the >>amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or, you know, the scalable Ai ml were able to scale out that architecture scale out that compute the much easier, dynamic and really cost effective way with AWS, because when we don't need to use the machines, we turn them off. We don't have a big data center sitting somewhere. We have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on. Literally. AWS allows us to run our organization and a much more efficient way. Um and Noah, you know, they're They're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing as far as how they can use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud from cloud architecture, cloud computer, things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here, Max our with our HPC HPC solution in the cloud. It's something that's pretty interesting to know, and it's it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >>If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute. How did you guys set up the services, and what lessons did you learn from that process? >>We're still learning. It was probably the the short answer, but it all started with our people. Uh, you know, we have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, you know? So they understand the physics. So you know why the wind blows is the way it doesn't. Why Cloud's doing clouds to do, Um, but we also having a key strategic partnership with AWS. We really have to tap into some of their subject matter experts. And we really put those people together, you know, and come up with new solutions, new innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We're able to steer a little bit of AWS is product roadmap for is what we were trying to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it. But by interacting with us gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards. And then that's that's what allowed us to move pretty quick fashion. Um, you know, it's it's neat stuff technology, but it really comes down to the people. Um, and I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here. Attacks are as well as aws, um, as well as being able to collaborate with your great teams. That power, it's been a lot of fun. Well, >>Travis gonna create example? I think it's a template that could be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got large scale, multi scale situation there. Congratulations. Final question. What does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards as part of the show? You're the best in show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give us a quick side from the field? >>Yeah. I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that kind of sum it up. It's Ah, I shared the news with the team last night, and you know, there are a lot of a lot of good responses that came from a lot of people think it's cool. And at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team, you know, took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. Ah, and being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing. Um, I think we take a lot of that to heart. And, ah, we're very honored and proud of what we were able to do and proud that other people recognize the need stuff that we're doing well, >>Certainly taking advantage. The cloud, which is large scale. But you you're on a great wave. You've got a great area. I mean, whether you talk about whether it's exciting, it's dynamic. It's always changing. It's big data. It's large scale. So you get a lot of problems to solve in a lot of impact to get it right. So congratulations on ECs. >>Thank you very much. Great mission. Thank you. >>Love what you do love to follow up again. Maybe do another interview and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. But, Travis, thank you very much. >>Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Good to see you. >>Thank you. Good to be here. >>So Noah, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center year. That's your organization? You guys are competing to be best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level. Then we'll jump into some of the successes. >>So the national Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecast to save lives and property and improve the economy of the nation. And that's part of that. That the national weather services responsible for providing data and also the forecasts to the public and the industry and be responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are at the Environmental Modeling Center, uh, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modelling development, and you play it off all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. That's that's the kind of a range of products that we don't lock and provide are our key for managing the emergency services and patch it management and mitigation and also improving the nation's economy by preparing well in advance for the future events. And it's it's a science based organization, and we have ah well class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the moment of modeling center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modelling space weather, all weather related areas and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most. Uh huh. Most developed, uh, advanced modelling center that we use almost all possible computational resources available in the world. So this is a really computational in terms of user data, user computer seems off. Uh, all the power that we can get and we have a 3.5 petaflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts, and they provide the services every hour. For some sense is like the CDO rather our rates for every three hours for hurricanes and for every six hours for the regular, Rather like the participation, uh, the temperature forecast. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media, our department agencies, they are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. I think no one is the only center in the world that provides all this information for your past. So it is, ah, public service organization and we riding on a visa with society. >>We'll I love your title, Chief modeling and data, a simulation title branch of a lot of these organizations. This >>is >>whether it's ever critical. I want to get your thoughts cause we were talking before we came on about how the Hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forcing you to rethink things. Whether it is an evolving system, it's always changing. Either the catastrophe or something happens. Were you trying to proactive predicting, say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things going on that's not It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big job. It's a lot of data you need. Horsepower need computing. You need to stand up. Some HPC take us through like like the thinking around the organization. And what was The impact is that you see, because whether does have that impact. >>So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned, there are radius weather phenomenon that you describe like the five rather the Americans, every presentation, the flooding. So we developed solutions for individual weather phenomena, and, uh, we have grown in that direction by developing separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking has to be changed. And then there is Another big problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas, and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated, uh, development activity that we cannot take advantage. And they have no incentive for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking. And as you mentioned, Hurricane Katrina was an eye opener. We had the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information waas not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. How are >>you guys using AWS? Because HPC high performance computing I mean you can't ask for more resources in the massive cloud that is Amazon. How is that help to you? Can you take a minute to explain, but walk us through? >>What? >>Aws? There >>are a few example. Second site. But before then, I would like to really appreciate a Travis Hartman from Max. Are you know who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now we're expanding on. That s so we were able to share our community. Cores with Max are and without how they were able to establish this and drive modeling system as it is done in operations that Noah and they were able to reproduce operational forecast using the cloud resources. And then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems is that it can run even faster and quicker them are what insert no operations can do. So that gives us one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce, ah, globally, which will take about eight minutes per day. And, uh, Max I was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement and in the efficiency of the colors. And now the one piece of this is that the improvements that matter are other collaborators are using, or cords that they're putting into the system are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that, improving the efficiency in operations. So this is that this is like a win win situation for both, uh, who are participating in the R and D on who are using it in operations, and on top of it, you can create multiple configurations of this model in various instances on the cloud when you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be captured toe individual needs. And the one additional thing I want to mention about User Cloud is, is that you know, this is like when you have a need, you can search the compute you can. Instead she 8000 sub simulations to test a new innovation. For instance, you don't need to wait for the resources to be done in a sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production off these apartments in no kind and without Don't worry about. Of course, the cost is the fact that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there. The facilities are reacting to take advantage of the cloud solutions. If I'm a >>computer scientist person, I'm working on a project. Now I have all this goodness in the cloud, how's morale been and what's the reaction been like from from people doing the work. Because usually the bottleneck has been like I gotta provision resource. I gotta send a procurement request for some servers or I want to really push some load. And right now, I got a critical juncture. I mean, it's got a push morale up a bit, and you talk about the impact to the psychology of the people in your organization. >>Um, I haven't. I have two answers to this question. One from a scientist perspective like me. You know, I was not a computer scientist from the beginning, but I became a software engineer, kind of because I have to work with these software and hardware stuff more more on solving the computational problems than the critical problems. So people like us who have invested their careers in improving the science, they were not care whether it's ah, uh hbc on premise Cloud, what will be delighted to have, uh, resources available alleviate that they can drive. But on the other hand, the computer computational engineers are software engineers who are entering into this field. I think they are probably the most excited because of these emerging opportunities. And so there is a kind of a friction between the scientific and the computational aspects off personnel, I would say. But that difference is slowly raising on and we are working together as never before. So the collective moral is very high to take advantage of these resources and opportunities. I think way of making the we're going in the right direction. >>It's so much faster. I mean, in the old days, you write a paper, you got to get some traction. Gonna do a pilot now It's like you run an experiment, get it out there. VJ I'm very impressed with the organization. Love to do a follow up with you. I love the impact that you're doing certainly in the weather impact society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's providing for potentially a fire season or water shortage or anything going on there. But also it's a template. You're exceeding a new kind of waiting to innovate with community with large scale, multi scale data points. So congratulations and >>thank you. >>Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here part of AWS partner Awards program. Best HPC solution. Great. Great Example. Great use case. Great conversation. Thanks for watching two great interviews. Here is part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrier. The best in show for HPC Solutions. China's Hartman Max, our technologies and Vijay tell Apartado at Noah. Two great guests. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in the Palo Alto cube studios. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, with a great guest here, Shanthi Vigneshwaran, who is with the Office of Strategic programs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research within the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, is the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the Year award. Congratulations, Shanthi welcome to this cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> Congratulations on being the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the year award. Tell us more about the organization. I see FDA everyone's probably concerned these days making sure things going faster and faster, more complex, more things are happening. Tell us about your organization and what you work on. >> FDA is huge, our organization is Center for Drug Evaluation research. And its core mission is to promote public health by ensuring the availability of safety and effective drugs. For example any drugs you go and buy it in the pharmacy today, Our administration helps in trying to approve them and make sure it's so in term of quality and integrity of the marketed products in the industry. My office is specifically Office of strategic programs whose mission is to transform the drug regulatory operations with the customer focus through analytics and informatics. They work towards the advancement for the CDERs public health mission. >> What are some of the objectives that you guys have? What are some things you guys have as your core top objectives of the CDER, the drug research group? >> The core objectives is we wanted to make sure that we are promoting a safe use of the marketed drugs. We want to make sure there's the availability of the drugs that are going to the patients are effective. And also the quality of the drugs that are being marketed are able to protect public health. >> What are some of the challenges that you guys have to take in managing the pharmaceutical safety, because I can only imagine certainly now that supply chains, tracing, monitoring, drug efficacy, safety, all these things are happening. What are some of the challenges in doing all this? >> In our office there are challenges in three different areas. One is the drug regulation challenges because as drugs are being more advanced and as there are more increasingly complex products, and there are challenging in the development area of the drugs, we wanted to make sure here we have a regulation that supports any advancement in science and technology. The other thing is also Congress is actually given new authorities and roles for the FDA to act. For example the Drug Quality and Security Act, which means any drug that's they want to track and trace all the drugs that goes to the public is they know who are the distributors, who are the manufacturers. Then you have the 21st Century Cures Act, and also the CARES Act package which was recently assigned, which also has a lot of the OTC drug regulatory modernization. Then there's also the area of globalization because just as disease don't have any borders, Product safety and quality are no longer on one country. It's basically a lot of the drugs that are being manufactured are overseas and as a result we wanted to make sure there are 300 US ports. And we want to make sure the FDA regulated shipments are coming through correctly to proper venues and everything is done correctly. Those are some the challenges we have to deal with. >> So much going on a lot of moving purchase as people say, there's always drug shortages, always demand, knowing that and tracking it. I can only imagine the world you're living in because you got to be innovative, got to be fast, got to be cutting edge, got to get the quality right. Data is super critical. And can you share take a minute to explain some of the data challenges you have to address and how you did that. Because I mean I could almost just my mind's blown just thinking about how you live it every day. Can you just share some of those challenges that you had to address and how did you do? >> Some of the key challenges we actually see is we have roughly 170,000 regulatory submissions per year. There are roughly 88,000 firm registration and product listing that comes to us, and then there are more than 2 million adverse event reports. So with all these data submissions and organization as such as us we need it, we have multiple systems where this data is acquired and each has its own criteria for validating the data. Adding to it are internal and external stakeholders also want certain rules and the way the data is being identified. So we wanted to make sure there is a robust MDM framework to make sure to cleanse and enrich and standardize the data. So that it basically make sure the trust and the availability and the consistent of the data, is being supplied to published to the CDER regulatory data users. >> You guys are dealing with- >> Otherwise like it's almost to give them a 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. Through each of the different phases, both pre market which is before the drug hits the market, and then after it hits the market. We still want to make sure the data we receive still supports a regulatory review and decision making process. >> Yeah, and you got to deliver a consumer product to get people at the right time. All these things have to happen, and you can see it clearly the impacts everyday life. I got to ask you that the database question 'cause the database geek inside of me is just going okay. I can only imagine the silos and the different systems and the codes, because data silos is big document. We've been reporting on this on theCUBE for a long time around, making data available automation. All these things have to happen if there's data availability. Can you just take one more minute talk about some of the challenges there because you got to break down the silos at the same time you really can't replace them. >> That's true. What we did was we did leave it more of us I mean, step back like seven years ago, when we did the data management. We had like a lot of silo systems as well. And we wanted to look at we wanted to establish a, we knew we wanted to establish a master data management. So we took a little bit more of a strategic vision. And so what we ended up saying is identifying what are the key areas of the domain that will give us some kind of a relationship. What are the key areas that will give us the 360 degree lifecycle? So that's what we did. We identified the domains. And then we took a step back and said and then we looked at what is the first domain we wanted to tackle. Because we know what are these domains are going to be. And then we were like, okay, let's take a step back and say which is the domain we do it first that will give us the most return on investment, which will make people actually look at it and say, hey, this makes sense. This data is good. So that's what we ended up looking at. We looked at it as at both ends. One is from a end user perspective. Which is the one they get the benefit out of and also from a data silo perspective which is the one data domains that are common, where there's duplication that we can consolidate. >> So that's good. You did the work up front. That's critical knowing what you want to do and get out of it. What were some of the benefits you guys got out of it. From an IT standpoint, how does that translate to the business benefits? And what was achieved? >> I think the benefits we got from the IT standpoint was a lot of the deduplication was not theirs. Which basically means like a lot of the legacy systems and all of the manual data quality work we had to do we automated it. We had bots, we also had other automation process that we actually put into work with Informatica, that actually helped us to make sure it's the cost of it actually went for us considerably. For example it used to take us three days to process submissions. Now it takes us less than 24 hours to do it, for the users to see the data. So it was a little bit more, we saw the, we wanted to look at what are the low hanging fruits where it's labor intensive and how can we improve it. That's how we acted there. >> What are some of the things that you're experiencing? I mean, like, we look back at what it was before, where it is now? Is it more agility, you more responsive to the changes? Was it an aspirin? Was it a complete transformation? Was some pain reduced? Can you share just some color commentary on kind of before the way it was before and then what you're experiencing now? >> So for us, I think before, we didn't know where the for us, I mean, I wouldn't say we didn't know it, when we have the data, we looked at product and it was just product. We looked at manufactured they were all in separate silos. But when we did the MDM domain, we were able to look at the relationship. And it was very interesting to see the relationship because we now are able to say is. for example, if there is a drug shortage during due to hurricane, with the data we have, we can narrow down and say, Hey, this area is going to be affected which means these are the manufacturing facilities in that area , that are going to be not be able to function or impacted by it. We can get to the place where the hurricane tracks we use the National Weather Service data, but it helps us to narrow down some of the challenges and we can able to predict where the next risk is going to be. >> And then before the old model, there was either a blind spot or you were ad hoc, probably right? Probably didn't have that with you. >> Yeah, before you were either blind or you're doing in a more of a reactionary not proactively. Now we are able to do a little bit more proactively. And even with I mean drug shortages and drug supply chain are the biggest benefit we saw with this model. Because, for us the drug supply chain means linking the pre and post market phases that lets us know if there's a trigger and the adverse events, we actually can go back to the pre market side and see where the traceability is who's at that truck. What are all the different things that was going on. >> This is one of the common threats I see in innovation where people look at the business model and data and look at it as a competitive advantage, in this case proactivity on using data to make decisions before things happen, less reactivity. So that increases time. I mean, that would probably you're saying, and you get there faster, if you can see it, understand it, and impact the workflows involved. This is a major part of the data innovation that's going on and you starting to see new kinds of data whereas has come out. So again, starting to see a real new changeover to scaling up this kind of concept almost foundationally. What's your thoughts just as someone who's a practitioner in the industry as you start to get this kind of feelings and seeing the benefits? What's next, what do you see happening because you haven't success. How do you scale it? What how do you guys look at that? >> I think our next is we have the domains and we actually have the practices that we work. We look at it as it's basically data always just changes. So we look at is like what are some of the ways that we can improve the data? How can we take it to the next level. Because now they talk about power. They are also warehouse data lakes. So we want to see is how can we take these domains and get that relationship or get that linkages when there is a bigger set of data that's available for us. What can we use that and it actually we think there are other use cases we wanted to explore and see what is the benefit that we can get a little bit more on the predictability to do like post market surveillance or like to look at like safety signals and other things to see what are the quick things that we can use for the business operations. >> It's really a lot more fun. You're in there using the data. You're seeing the benefits and real. This is what clouds all about the data clouds here. It's scaling. Super fun to talk about and excited. When you see the impacts in real time, not waiting for later. So congratulations. You guys have been selected and you receive recognition from Informatica as the 2020, Intelligent Disrupter of the year. congratulations. What does that mean for your organization? >> I think we were super excited about it. But one thing I can say is when we embarked on this work, like seven years ago, or so, problem was like we were trying to identify and develop new scientific methods to improve the quality of our drugs to get that 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. The program today enables FDA CDER to capture all the granular details of data we need for the regulatory data. It helps us to support the informed decisions that we have to make in real time sometimes or and also to make sure when there's an emergency, we are able to respond with a quick look at the data to say like, hey this is what we need to do. It also helps the teams. It recognizes all the hard work. And the hours we put into establishing the program and it helped to build the awareness within FDA and also with the industry of our political master data management is. >> It's a great reward to see the fruits of the labor and good decision making I'm sure it was a lot of hard work. For folks out there watching, who are also kind of grinding away in some cases, some cases moving faster. You guys are epitome of a supply chain that's super critical. And speed is critical. Quality is critical. A lot of days critical. A lot of businesses are starting to feel this as part of an integrated data strategy. And I'm a big proponent. I think you guys have have a great example of this. What advice would you have for other practitioners because you got data scientists, but yet data engineers now who are trying to architect and create scale, and programmability, and automation, and you got the scientists in the the front lines coming together and they all feed into applications. So it's kind of a new things go on. Your advice to folks out there, on how to do this, how to do it right, the learnings, share. >> I think the key thing I, at least for my learning experience was, it's not within one year you're going to accomplish it, It's kind of we have to be very patient. And it's a long road. If you make mistakes, you will have to go back and reassess. Even with us, with all the work we did, we almost went back a couple of the domains because we thought like, hey, there are additional use cases how this can be helpful. There are additional, for example, we went with the supply chain, but then now we go back and look at it and say like, hy, there may be other things that we can use with the supply chain not just with this data, can we expand it? How can we look at the study data or other information so that's what we try to do. It's not like you're done with MDM and that is it. Your domain is complete. It's almost like you look at it and it creates a web and you need to look at each domain and you want to come back to it and see how it is you have to go. But the starting point is you need to establish what are your key domains. That will actually drive your vision for the next four or five years. You can't just do bottom up, it's more of like a top down approach. >> That's great. That's great the insight. And again, it's never done. I mean, it's data is coming. It's not going away. It's going to be integrated. It's going to be shared. You got to scale it up. A lot of hard work. >> Yeah. >> Shanthi thank you so much for the insight. Congratulations on your receiving the Disrupter of the Year Award winner for Informatica. congratulations. Intelligence >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Thank you. >> Thank you for sharing, Shanthi Vigneshswaran is here, Office of Strategic programs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research with the US FDA. Thanks for joining us, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM think brought to you by IBM hi everybody welcome back to the cubes coverage wall-to-wall coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital event experience my name is Dave Volante we'll be going really all week and and focusing on the impact of the pandemic how IBM is responding how customers are likely to respond I'm really excited Luke Niazi is here's the global managing director of consumer industries at IBM Luke good to see you nice do you see even that nice to be on the cool I mean if I think about consumer all the assumptions that we made about consumer behavior they're really up in the air right now I wonder if you could share with us what your current thinking is I mean the consumer has powered this global economy years what are you thinking about the consumer right now in the consumer behavior well was he some a massive shift in terms of the immediacy let me this back a little bit Dave and give you a bit of context we did some research at the beginning of the year that we launched the National Retail Federation and we surveyed over 19,000 people globally and that survey showed that they were do be on a shifts that are appearing first of all there was a shift in of the purpose given consumer of the 19,000 people that we surveyed 40% of them said that they were making decisions that were purpose different compared to 41% that make visions that were convenience and that's people who care about sustainability and where products are coming and the other big thing that we saw was popping in micro moments increase digital shopping and of anytime anywhere now of course with the and Emmy we are seeing an acceleration and fastening of those first of all beyond the immediate move panic buying that occurred we've seen a big big shift in online buying and we think like Ron and driver also a reinforcement of this move to more sustainable product and services yeah I mean so right now you have I guess buying for what's available you need something it might not be available as a consumer you're making a lot of trade-offs okay well I'll go for you know alcohol-based hand sanitizer you know as opposed to just conventional hand sanitizer as an example oh well I'll make some trade-offs in tissue paper etcetera etcetera and maybe there's some boredom buying I don't have you've seen that your people are shut-in but though all kinds of of daily changes weekly changes so how do you see this exiting how do you see compute consumer behavior you know changing as we exit this pandemic in waves and we're only sure how we're going to exit well let me kind of break it down in terms of what's been going on right now so of course we saw this massive waves of you know a shift to sanitary products a shift or groceries then we've seen a shift about how can I keep my kids entertained while they're at home and kind of more discretionary choices being much lower so when you kind of look at that in terms of actual impact on business we've seen grocery say in the u.s. up by about twenty seven and we've seen a move on digital in the u.s. about three percent of the of the US population shifts about buys online that's do 43 percent during this period and of course we think that these are things that are going to sustain what it's done is it's accelerate the type of purchases that people are doing in a digital context and we think that that is you know continued by some thoughts the data on the pandemic looks like it's been to continue for many months and and in ways those that we've seen the shifted digital and initially people are kind of looking for things anywhere but it's going to be combined with a kind of a new type of delivery model there's much more buy online pick up in center distribution center pick up our part whether that's you know your groceries or whether that's health related so it's going to change the delivery models it also means of course that stores are going to change a great great deal at the moment grocery stores all have social distancing with the protection of the store associates been you know a key element of that you're gonna see not the same amount of people in those stores going forward and you know a different configuration and application of technology also in store to keep monitoring both the safety of the employees and the safety of the customers but also make sure that occupancy levels are appropriate etc so big shifts the digital the big shifts to different types of delivery models you know big shifts of safety related technology of course what we're also seeing and this is the difficult piece which is if you have discretionary spend fashion apparel luxury the open those volumes are very very significant I mean look I've actually been quite impressed with some providers that have pivoted very quickly to things like curbside pickup and have really responded you know quite fast to that at the same time I've seen others where I mean it's clear that they really didn't have the infrastructure or the processes of their asking hey how how did we do do you mind taking a quick survey because they need to iterate how can I be M help those that really weren't that prepared and it sort of band-aided together some solutions get to the point post pandemic before this thing ends where they really need to be what are you guys doing with client yeah so well first and foremost as the pandemic we focused very much on resilience making sure that our clients but operators as robustly as possible in fact you know 95 percent to our services are being delivered it just began and remotely right what then happened was how do I deal with these massive volumes of airing in my two centers where by the way I have less staff because the people are I having to even themselves safe and social distance and so we deployed immediately beyond our resiliency solutions all centers that are helping our clients booth by aura ties and scream one of our major retail clients in the u.s. said you know I thought that the Watson Chapman knowledge ease were going to be helpful they weren't just helpful they saved us and so that kind of things occurring in the immediate that's the next piece of course you then start see is that finds have realized that both their digital panels and their fulfillment models have not been able to keep up nobody is being able to keep up with the demand that's not even Amazon's been able to keep up and what was you know a 24 or 48 hour delivery slot those those kind of slots have gone out the window so we are going to see a wave of reinvest in enhancing digital channels and we will leverage no both our our services business as well as our cloud knowledge ease to support that and then underpinning that you you're also seeing a need to rebalance the supply chain because of course where products come from have changed where is vsauce is now having to move much more from a global supply chain to a global local supply chain and we're having to balance supply with more local providers and so is a there's a demand supply balancing to be done that means that eyes are and i think about the practicalities of that but they were investing in next-generation technologies to support that for IBM that things like our IBM sterling portfolio but it's also the activation of our supply chain AI this massive demand set by and of imbalancing and we've been helping certain clients look at that and move stock most appropriate locations we've been doing that to help clients kind of rethink that there's this budgeting so we're gonna see a lot of that we have all of the intelligence of by chain and we're going to see no investment in the intelligence of buy chain just like we see this investment at baring in the change in the commerce engines last thing to say is wrap in trace is going to be hugely important reckon trace of all products and where they come from where they were handled and people and so technologies like lock pane and what we do with food trusts are also going to be a really important element yeah another really piece of digital I mean the cube we go to physical events and we've been saying that hang that this is not going to go back to 2019 the people are going to learn through this experience that there's really some additional value that they they can create through digital you think you think about consumer that's a much much more complex environment tens of thousands and fully hundreds of thousands or even millions of fights the product dimension chat thoughts you know the entire experience that we talked about a curbside pickup lead times people you know managing demand with lead times you can only or limiting the volume you mentioned supply chain track and trace block pain so a whole new set of digital assumptions are going to emerge or are emerging I don't want to make it sound like there's a there's some kind of binary beginning an end to this thing this is this is going to be a slow but yet fast iteration of constant iteration and continuous improvement yeah it is what am i - the newer faculty were talking earlier this week and they said look as difficult the environment is right now and of course we've been focused on our current operations and fulfilling our customers as best we can it's actually bringing us through a whole new window about who we think the priority is of our investment and how we look at that going forward and you know he's almost saying well I'm gonna have to zero based budgeting approach and against that we're gonna see a much better investment in almost regardless of what your model is whether you are digital first or physical first you're gonna see much better focus on kind of dealing with the pasady and the variability that we've experienced because organizations weren't geared up for that and you're going to see them the investment in the intelligence and the supply chain who support that backed up with trust and traceability and now back to the points that I start at the beginning of this session it means that the trends that we saw and we assess actually are going to be almost perpetuated because we think this move to sustainable and more local sourcing more balanced sourcing will continue to be a big factor and we think that this kind of idea of shopping in the micro moment but shopping in a much more digital way is here to stay the consequence of that is it's gonna have a what a big impact on the physical environments and unfortunately there aren't gonna do there are going to be as easy in this with certain sectors that are not going to be able to sustain the the big shift in the model so obviously physical down for the immediate and probably mid and maybe even long term digital up you one of your areas of expertise is agribusiness we thought you note you know tumour in general I wonder if you could share with us what you're what you're seeing there I'm inferring more more local sourcing which obviously has some impacts on what's available at different times a year potentially on on pricing thoughts on agribusiness and how they're responding yeah well it's it's fascinating you know if you take it into first of all of course you know agriculture has been impacted right now by not so much for the professional farming which has a large-scale mechanization before a lot of farming in large parts of Asia or Latin parts of Latin America or parts of Africa and even parts of Europe there's a lot of transitionary labor that occurs in order to be able to harvest crops and so that's a that's a really difficult immediate problem we've seen you people volunteering in certain countries like here in the UK where I live either people volunteering you can't work in their current job see how can I help that's kind of it an immediate thing that's needed right now but the broader topic in the work that my teams do is that actually the application of digital technologies and science who is behind what it is in other industries and there's such a great opportunity by leveraging digital only be more effective in actually hitting the most out of farming land without over farming the land and so we're working quite a lot on digital economics of buying base ability you truly from farmed or and no but have been together data sources that were not in the same base to be able to help build effectively an AgrAbility for the benefit the farmers and cross those things were going to see farmers empowered with more information in it more insight so simple things like The Weather Channel application that we have from our weather comm we're deploying that to millions of farmers in Africa and Asia and on top of that we're being able to and for the deployment of other related information though how to farm but also we could start to look at how to provide safety related information etcetera to those farmers so so we are going to see through effective use of technology increase appropriate digitization of no farming processes and there'll be in a very practical level what I'd put onto my phone so so definitely this is a big thing and and of course as you know the traceability that we do with our food resan isn't just about safety and talk about how food was produced how far it's traveled what conditions was it handled in what's a co2 footprint and so that traceability engine can actually accelerate also this is and as I referred to earlier Luca mean as we're discussing you know the moment-by-moment the assumptions are changing you know the narrative this weekend of course at least in the US was pay we've got it now get out there and and many are saying this not all but but just effect mass unity that it's really going to be the only way vaccines aren't coming anytime soon young people will go out retail environment of course you're gonna have social distancing people that are compromised or older aren't going to go out the clearly volumes are going to be down but it's a very fluid situation so business resiliency and flexibility is critical here and it sounds like you're helping organizations really build that into their operating model that is critical yeah absolutely and you know for some of the grantees that I haven't boomer you what you're seeing in things like a chorale fashion luxury is a a move to try to drive that engagement to you the customer in a much more digital sense so how do I interact with the brand how do I experience the band how can I all the way through to my purchase digitally when I don't have the ability to get stores so this digital transformation agenda will affect pretty much all major segments obviously the foods by chain the health by chain is the focus right now but we will see on the increasing digitization and a need to rebalance the in-store experience even for the segments so there will be a lot of transformation to be done a while of course having to deal with the cost balancing that need in these industries as they effectively shift more towards digital yeah you're right I mean the cost structure may dramatically change yet at the same time it may be critical for or maintaining or even gaining market share so a lot of potential disruption Luke I'll give you the final word your thoughts bring us home well you know first of all you know people's well-being in safety is our paramount purpose and that's what we've been looking at the outset but I think people would be positive that there is a lot of opportunity in which we can deliver the things that they need in a safe way in a secure way in a digital way that is able to cope with the environments that we see today and may prevail and it's about winning that intelligence and innovation into both the promise and the digital channels and into the supply chains all the way through to the track and trace which is what we focus on well look thanks so much for coming on the cube was great to have you with your your insights on the IBM very clearly has its hands and a lot of these different industries and it's great to have your industry expertise sharing with our audience I really appreciate your time take care thank you all right thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for our continuous coverage of IBM think digital event experience 2020 you're watching the cube right back right after this short break you [Music] you

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, we're back this is Dave Vellante from theCUBE and you're watching our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's Digital Think 2020 event and we are really pleased to have Guillermo Miranda here. He's the Vice President of Corporate and Social Responsibility. Guillermo thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Absolutely, good afternoon to you. Good evening, wherever you are. >> So, you know this notion of corporate responsibility, it really has gained steam lately and of course with COVID-19, companies like IBM really have to take the lead on this. The tech industry actually has been one of those industries that has been less hard hit and IBM as a leader along with some other companies are really being looked at to step up. So talk a little bit about social responsibility in the context of the current COVID climate. >> Absolutely. Now thank you for the question. Look, first our responsibility is with the safety of our employees and the continuity of business for our clients. In this frame what we have done is see what is the most adequate areas to respond to the emergency of the pandemic and using what we know in terms of expertise and the talent that we have is why we decided to work first with high performance computing. IBM design and produce the fastest computers in the world. So Summit and a consortium of providers of high performance computing is helping on the discovery of vaccinations and drugs for the pandemic. The second thing that we are doing is related with data and insights. We own The Weather Company which is at 80 million people connected to check the weather every morning, every afternoon. So through The Weather Company, we are providing insights and data about county level information on COVID-19. Another thing that we are doing is we are offering some of our products for free. Watson, it is a chatbot to inform about what is adequate, what is needed in the middle of a pandemic if you are a consumer. We are also helping with our volunteers. IBM volunteers are helping teachers and school districts to rapidly flip into remote learning and get used to the tools of working on a remote environment. And finally we have a micro volunteering opportunity for anybody that has a computer or an android phone. So with the world community grid, you can help with the discovery also of drugs and vaccinations for COVID-19. >> Wow that's great, those are four awesome initiatives. They can't get the vaccine fast enough. Getting good quality information in the hands of people in this era of fake news also very very important. Students missing out on some of the key parts of their learning so remote learning is key. I love this idea of kind of micro crowd sourcing solutions. Really kind of opening that up and hopefully we'll have some big wins there Guillermo. Thank you for that. I want to ask you people talk about blue collar jobs, they talk about white collar jobs, you guys talk about new collar jobs. You and others. What are new collar jobs and why are they important? >> Look, in this data, digital, artificial intelligence driven economy, it's important not to have a digital divide between the haves and the have nots on the foundational skills to be operational in a digital economy. So new collar jobs are precisely the intersection of the skills that you need to operate in this digital driven economy with the basic knowledge to be a user of technology. So think about a cyber security analyst. You don't need a masters degree in industrial engineering to be a cyber security analyst. You just need the basic things about operating an environment on a security control center for instance. Or talk about blockchain or talk about software engineering, full stack developer. There are many roles that you can do in this economy where you don't need to have a full four-year degree in a university to have a decent paying job for the digital economy. These are the new collar jobs and what we are attempting to do with the new collar job definition is to get rid of the paradigm that the university degree is the only passport to a successful career in the marketplace. You can start in different, having the opportunity to have a job in a high tech area. Not necessarily with a PhD in engineering as I said, it's something important for us, for our clients and for the community. >> Yeah, so that's a very interesting concept that a lot of us can relate to. To go back to our university days, many of the courses that we took, we shook our heads and said, "okay, why do I have to take this?" Okay, I get it, well rounded liberal arts experience, that's all good but it's almost like you're implying that the notion of specialization that we've known for years like for instance, in vocations, auto-mechanic, woodworking, etc. Planning that have really critical aspect of the economy. Applying that to the technology business. It's genius and very simple. >> Absolutely. Look, this is the reinvention of vocational education for the 21st century where you continue to need the plumber, you continue to need the hairdresser but also you need people that operate the digital platforms and are comfortable with this environment and they don't need to pass at the beginning through full university. And it's also the concept that we have divided the secondary education, high school from college, university etc., like a Chinese wall. Here is high school, here is college. No! There can be a clear integration because you can start to get ready without finishing high school yet. So there are several paradigms that we have evolved in the previous century that now we need to change and be ready for this 21st century digital driven economy. >> Yeah, very refreshing. Really about time that this thinking came into practice. Talk about P-Tech. How does P-Tech fit into acquiring these skills? And maybe you could give us a sense as to the sort of profile of the folks and there backgrounds and give us a sense as to and add some color to how that's all working. >> Absolutely, so look, the P-Tech model started 10 years ago in a high school in New York City, in Brooklyn. And the whole idea is to go to an under-served area and create a ramp onto success that will help you to first finish high school. Finishing high school is very important and has a lot connotations for your future. And then at the same time, they start getting an associate degree in an area of high growth. The third component is the industry partner. An industry partner that works with the school district and the community college in order to bring the knowledge of what is needed in that community in order to create real job opportunities and we will send you the people and then you will use it. No! We need to work together in order to train the talent for the future. And you just go to the middle age and the guilds were the ones that were preparing the workers. So the industry was preparing the workforce. Why in the 20th century we renounced to that? Having real, relevant skills starting in high school, helping the kids to graduate with a dual diploma. High school, college and practice in real life what it is to be in a workplace environment. So we have more than 220 schools. In this school year, we have more than 150,000 kids in 24 countries already working through the P-Tech model. >> Love it and really scaling that up. So let's say I'm an individual. I'm a young person, I'm from a diverse background, maybe my parents came to this country and I'm a first generation American. Of course, it's not just the United States, it's global but let's say I'm from a background that's less advantaged, how do I take advantage? How hard is it for me to tap in to something like P-Tech and get these skills? >> Well, first one of the characteristics of the model is this is free admission. So there is not a barrier fence. If your school district offers P-Tech, you can apply to P-Tech and get into the P-Tech model education without any barrier without any account. And the second thing that you need to have is curiosity. Because it's not going to be the typical high school where you have math, science, gym, whatever. This is more of an integration of how the look of a career will be in the future and how you have to start understanding that there are drivers into the economy that are fast tracks into well paid jobs. So curiosity on top of being ready to join a P-Tech school in the school district where you live in. >> That's great Guillermo, thank you for sharing that. Now of course corporate responsibility, that's a wide net. This is one of your passions. I'll give you the last word to kind of, where do you see this whole corporate responsibility movement going generally and specifically within IBM? >> I think that this whole pandemic will just accelerate some of the clear trends in the marketplace. Corporate responsibility cannot be an afterthought as before in the '80s or '90s. I will put a foundation. I have a little of profits that are left and then I will distribute grants and that's my whole corporate responsibility approach. Corporate responsibility needs to be within the fabric of how do you do business. It has to be embedded into the values of your company and your value proposition and you have to serve those projects with the same kind of skills and technology, in the case of IBM, that you do for your commercial engagements. And this is what we do in IBM. We help IBMers to be helpful to their communities with the same kind of quality and platforms that we offer to our clients. And we help to solve one of the most complicated problems in society through technology, innovation, time. >> Love it. Guillermo thanks so much, you're doing great work. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing with our audience. Congratulations. >> Absolutely. Thank you for very much for having me. >> You're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. You're watching our continuous coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital version. Keep it right there, we'll be right back after this short break. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here with The Cube coverage for two days. We're wrapping up, getting down on day one in the books for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of The Cube. We are in Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm personally excited for this next guest because I'm a huge Red Sox fan, even though I got moved out to California. Giants is in a different area. National League is different than American League, still my heart with the Red Sox. And we're here with an industry veteran, seasoned professional in IT and data, Brian Shield. Boston Red Sox Vice President of Technology and IT. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> John: So congratulations on the rings. Since I moved out of town, Red sox win their World Series, break the curse of the Bambino. >> Hey we appreciate that. Thank you. >> My family doesn't want me back. You got to show >> Yeah, maybe I'll put this one up for the, maybe someone can zoom in on this. Which camera is the good one? This one here? So, there ya go. So, World Series champs for at least for another week. (laughter) >> Bummer about this year. Pitching just couldn't get it done. But, good team. >> Happens. >> Again, things move on, but you know. New regime, new GM going to come on board. >> Yup. >> So, but in general, Red Sox, storied franchise. Love it there. Fenway Park, the cathedral of baseball parks. >> Brian: Defnitely. >> And you're seeing that just play out now, standard. So just a great place to go. We have tickets there. So, I got to ask you. Technology, sports, really is modernized faster than I think any category. And certainly cyber security forced to modernize because of the threats. But sports, you got a business to run, not just IT and making the planes run on time. >> Sure. >> Scouts, money, whatever. >> Fans. >> You got fan experience. >> Stadium opportunities. >> Club management, scouts are out there. So you got business, team, fans. And data's a big part of it. That's part of your career. Tell us what the cutting edge innovation is at the Red Sox these days. >> I think baseball in general, as you indicated, it's a very evolving kind of environment. I mean historically I think people really sort of relish the nostalgia of sports and Fenway Park being as historic as it is, was probably the pinnacle of that, in some respects. But Red Sox have always been leaders and baseball analytics, you know. And everyone's pretty familiar with "Moneyball" and Brad Pitt. >> John: Is that a true story, he turned down the GM job? >> I'm told it is. (laughter) I don't know if I fully vetted that question. But over the last six, seven years, you know we've really turned our attention to sort of leveraging sort of technology across the businesses, right? Not just baseball and analytics and how we do scouting, which continues to evolve at a very rapid pace. But also as you pointed out, running a better business, understanding our fans, understanding fan behavior, understanding stadiums. There's a lot of challenges around running an effective stadium. First and foremost to all of us is really ensuring it's a great fan experience. Whether it's artificial intelligence, or IoT technologies or 5G or the latest Wifi, all those things are coming up at Fenway Park. You and I talked earlier about we're about to break ground for a new theater, so a live theater on the outside, beyond the bleachers type of thing. So that'll be a 5,400-seat arena, 200 live performances a year, and with e-sports, you know, complementing it. It just gives you an example of just how fast baseball is sort of transitioning. >> And the theater, is that going to be blown out from where that parking garage is, structure and going towards >> So the corner of Landsdown and Ipswich, if you think of that sort of corner back there, for those that are familiar with the Fenway area. So it's going to be a very big change and you'll see the difference too from within the ballpark. I think we'll lose a couple of rows of the bleachers. That'll be replaced with another gathering area for fans and things like that, on the back end of that theater. So build a great experience and I think it really speaks to sort of our ability to think of Fenway as more of a destination, as a venue, as a complementary experience. We want people to come to the area to enjoy sports and to enjoy entertainment and things. >> You know Brian, the consumerization of IT has been kicked around. Last decade, that was a big buzzword. Now the blending of a physical event and digital has certainly consumed the world. >> Absolutely. >> And we're starting to see that dynamic. You speak to a theater. That's a physical space. But digital is also a big part of kind of that complementary. It's not mutually exclusive for each other. They're integrated business models. >> Absolutely. >> So therefore, the technology has to be seamless. The data has to be available. >> Yup. >> And it's got to be secure. >> Well the data's got to be ubiquitous, right? I mean you don't want to, if we're going to have fans attending theater and then you're going to go to Fenway Park or they leave a game and then go to some other event or they attend a tour of Fenway Park, and beyond maybe the traditional what people might think about, is certainly when you think about baseball and Fenway Park. You know we have ten to twelve concerts a year. We'll host Spartan games, you know. This Christmas, I'm sorry, Christmas 2020 we now have sort of the Fenway Bowl. So we'll be hosting the AAC ACC championship games there with ESPN. >> John: Hockey games? >> Hockey games. Obviously we have Liverpool soccer being held there so it's much more of a destination, a venue for us. How we leverage all the wonderful things about Fenway Park and how we modernize, how we get basically the best of what makes Fenway Park as great as it is, yet as modern as we can make it, where appropriate to create a great fan experience. >> It's a tough balance between balancing the brand and having things on brand as well. >> Sure. >> Does that come into your job a lot around IT? Saying being on brand, not kind of tearing down the old. >> Yeah absolutely. I think our CEOs and leadership team, I mean it's not success for us if you pan to the audience and everyone is looking at their phone, right? That's not what we aspire to. We aspire to leverage technology to simplify people's experience of how do you get to the ballpark, how do I park, how do I get if I want to buy concessions or merchandise, how do I do it easily and simply? How do we supplement that experience with maybe additional data that you may not have had before. Things like that, so we're doing a lot of different testing right now whether it's 4D technologies or how we can understand, watch a play from different dimensions or AI and be able to perhaps see sort of the skyline of Boston since 1912, when Fenway Park launched... And so we sort of see all these technologies as supplemental materials, really kind of making it a holistic experience for fans. >> In Las Vegas, they have a section of Las Vegas where they have all their test beds. 5G, they call it 5G, it's really, you know, evolution, fake 5G but it's a sandbox. One of the challenges that you guys have in Boston, I know from a constraint standpoint physically, you don't have a lot of space. How do you sandbox new technologies and what are some of the things that are cool that people might not know about that are being sandboxed? So, one, how do you do it? >> Yeah. >> Effectively. And then what are some of the cool things that you guys are looking at or things they might not know about that would be interesting. >> Sure. Yeah so Fenway Park, we struggle as you know, a little bit with our footprint. You know, honestly, I walk into some of these large stadiums and I get instant jealousy, relative to just the amount of space that people have to work with and things. But we have a great relationship with our partners so we really partner, I think, particularly well with key partners like Verizon and others. So we now have 5G partially implemented at Fenway Park. We expect to have it sort of fully live come opening day next year. So we're really excited about that. We hope to have a new version of Wifi, the latest version of Wifi available, for the second half of the year. After the All-Star Break, probably after the season's over. But before our bowl game hopefully. We're looking at some really interesting ways that we can tease that out. That bowl game, we're really trying to use that as an opportunity, the Fenway Bowl, as an opportunity to make it kind of a high-tech bowl. So we're looking at ways of maybe doing everything from hack-a-thons to a pre-egaming sort of event to some interesting fan experiential opportunities and things like that. >> Got a lot of nerds at MIT, Northeastern, BU, Bentley, Babson, all the schools in the area. >> Yeah, so we'll be reaching out to colleges and we'll be reaching out to our, the ACC and AACs as well, and see what we can do to kind of create sort of a really fun experience and capitalize on the evolving role of e-sports and the role that technology can play in the future. >> I want to get to the e-sports in a second but I want to just get the plug in for Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit. You flew down for it, giving some keynote speeches and talks around security. It's a security company, data protection, to cyber protection. It is a data problem, not a storage appliance problem. It's a data problem holistically. You get that. >> Sure. Sure. >> You've been in the business for a long time. What is the security kind of posture that you guys have? Obviously you want to protect the data, protect privacy. But you got to business. You have people that work with you, supply chain, complex but yet dynamic, always on environment. >> That's a great question. It's evolving as you indicated. Major League Baseball, first and foremost, does an outstanding job. So the last, probably last four plus years, Major League Baseball has had a cyber security program that all the clubs partake in. So all 30 clubs are active participants in the program. They basically help build out a suite of tools as well as the ability to kind of monitor, help participate in the monitoring, sort of a lot of our cyber security assets and logs And that's really elevated significantly our posture in terms of security. We supplement that quite a bit and a good example of that is like Acronis. Acronis, for us, represents the ability for us to be able to respond to certain potential threats like ransom-ware and other things. As well as frankly, what's wonderful about a tool like this is that it allows us to also solve other problems. Making our scouts more efficient. We've got these 125 scouts scattered around the globe. These guys are the lifeblood of our, you know, the success of our business. When they have a problem, if they're in Venezuela or the Dominican or someplace else, in southeast Asia, getting them up and running as quickly as we can, being able to consume their video assets and other things as they're scouting prospects. We use Acronis for those solutions. It's great to kind of have a partner who can both double down as a cyber partner as well as someone who helps drive a more efficient business. >> People bring their phone into the stadiums too so those are end points now connecting to your network. >> Definitely. And as you pointed out before, we've got great partnerships. We've got a great concession relationship with Aramark and they operate, in the future they'll be operating off our infrastructure. So we're in the point of rolling out all new point-of-sale terminals this off-season. We're excited about that 'cause we think for the first time it really allows us to build a very comprehensive, very secure environment for both ourselves and for all the touchpoints to fans. >> You have a very stellar career. I noticed you were at Scudder Investments back in the '80s, very cutting-edge firm. FTD that set the whole standard for connecting retailers. Again, huge scale play. Can see the data kind of coming out, they way you've been a CIO, CTO. The EVP CIO at The Weather Channel and the weather.com again, first mover, kind of pioneer. And then now the Red Sox, pioneering. So I got to ask you the modernization question. Red Sox certainly have been cutting-edge, certainly under the last few owners, and the previous Henry is a good one, doing more and more, Has the business model of baseball evolved, 'cause you guys a franchise. >> Sure. >> You operate under the franchisor, Major League Baseball, and you have jurisdictions. So has digital blurred the lines between what Advanced Media unit can do. You got communities developing outside. I watch the games in California. I'm not in there but I'm present digitally. >> Sure. Sure. >> So how has the business model flexed with the innovation of baseball? >> That's a great question. So I mean, first off, the relationship between clubs like ours and MLB continue to evolve. We have a new commissioner, relatively new commissioner, and I think the whole one-baseball model that he's been promoting I think has been great. The boundaries sometimes between digital assets and how we innovate and things like that continues to evolve. Major League Baseball and technology groups and product groups that support Major League Baseball have been a fantastic partner of ours. If you look at some of the innovations with Statcast and some of the other types of things that fans are now becoming more familiar with. And when they see how fast a runner goes or how far a home run goes and all those sort of things, these kinds of capabilities are on the surface, but even like mobile applications, to make it easy for fans to come into ballparks and things like that really. What we see is really are platforms for the future touchpoints to all of our customers. But you're right, it gets complicated. Streaming videos and people hadn't thought of before. >> Latin America, huge audience for the Red Sox. Got great players down there. That's outside the jurisdiction, I think, of the franchise agreement, isn't it? (laughs) >> Well, it's complicated. As this past summer, we played two games in England, right? So we enjoy two games in London, sadly we lost to the Yankees in both of those, but amazing experience and Major League Baseball really hats off to those guys, what they did to kind of pull that together. >> You mentioned Statcast. Every year when I meet with Andy Jassy at AWS, he's a sports fan. We love to talk sports. That's a huge, kind of shows the power of data and cloud computing. >> No doubt. >> How do you guys interface with Statcast? Is that an Amazon thing? Do they come to you? Are they leveraging dimensions, camera angles? How does that all work? Are you guys involved in that or? >> Brian: Oh yeah, yeah. >> Is that separate? >> So Statcast is just one of many data feeds as you can imagine. One of the things that Major League Baseball does is all that type of data is readily available to every club. So every club has access to the data. The real competitive differentiator, if you will, is how you use it internally. Like how your analysts can consume that data. We have a baseball system we call Beacon. We retired Carmine, if you're familiar with the old days of Carmine. So we retired Carmine a few years ago with Beacon. And Beacon for us represents sort of our opportunity to effectively collapse all this information into a decision-making environment that allows us to hopefully to kind of make the best decisions to win the most games. >> I love that you're answering all these questions. I really appreciate it. The one I really want to get into is obviously the fan experience. We talked about that. No talent on the field means no World Series so you got to always be constantly replenishing the talent pool, farm system, recruiting, scouting, all these things go on. They're instrumental. Data's a key driver. What new innovations that the casual fan or IT person might be interested in what's going on around scouting and understanding the asset of a human being? >> Right. Sure. I mean some of this gets highly confidential and things, but I think at a macro level, as you start to see both in the minor leagues and in some portions of the major leagues, wearable technologies. I think beyond just sort of player performance information that you would see traditionally with you might associate it with like Billy Beane, and things like that with "Moneyball" which is evolved obviously considerably since those days. I mean understanding sort of player wellness, understanding sort of how to get the most out of a player and understanding sort of, be able to kind of predict potential injuries and accelerate recoveries and being able to use all of this technology where appropriate to really kind of help sort of maximize the value of player performance. I mean, David Ortiz, you know, I don't know where we would have been in 2018 without, you know, David. >> John: Yeah. >> But like, you know >> Longevity of a player. >> Absolutely. >> To when they're in the zone. You wear a ring now to tell you if you're sleeping well. Will managers have a visual, in-the-zone, don't pull 'em out, he can go an extra inning? >> Well, I mean they have a lot of data. We currently don't provide all that data to the clubhouse. I mean, you know, and so If you're in the dugout, that information isn't always readily available type of thing. But players know all this information. We continue to evolve it. At the end of the day though, it's finding the balancing act between data and the aptitudes of our coaching staff and our managers to really make the wise decisions. >> Brian, final question for you. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? Besides the fan having a great experience, 'cause that's you kind of touched on that. What's the coolest thing that you're excited about that you're working on from a tech perspective that you think is going to be game-changing or interesting? >> I think our cloud strategy coming up in the future. It's still a little bit early stage, but our hope would be to kind of have clarity about that in the next couple months. I think is going to be a game-changer for us. I think having, you know, we enjoy a great relationship with Dell EMC and yet we also do work in the cloud and so being able to leverage the best of both of those to be able to kind of create sort of a compelling experience for both fans, for both player, baseball operations as well as sort of running an efficient business, I think is really what we're all about. >> I mean you guys are the poster child for hybrid cloud because you got core, data center, IoT, and >> No doubt. So it's exciting times. And we're very fortunate that with our relationship organizations like Dell and EMC, we have leading-edge technologies. So we're excited about where that can go and kind of what that can mean. It'll be a big step. >> Okay two personal questions from me as a fan. One is there really a money-counting room like in the movie "The Town"? Where they count a big stack of dollar bills. >> Well, I'm sure there is. I personally haven't visited it. (laughs) I know it's not in the room that they would tell you it is on the movie. (laughter) >> And finally, can The Cube get press passes to cover the games, next to NESN? Talk tech. >> Yeah, we'll see what we can do. >> They can talk baseball. We can talk about bandwidth. Right now, it's the level five conductivity. We're looking good on the pipes. >> Yeah we'll give you a tech tour. And you guys can sort of help us articulate all that to the fans. >> Thank you so much. Brian Shield, Vice President of Technology of the Boston Red Sox. Here talking about security and also the complications and challenges but the mega-opportunities around what digital and fan experiences are with the physical product like baseball, encapsulates kind of the digital revolution that's happening. So keep covering it. Here in Miami, I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen Rock Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem Partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for cubes coverage of Google next twenty nineteen. I'm suffering my coast, David. Want to many men also doing interviews out, getting, reporting and collecting all the data. And we're gonna bring it back on the Q R. Next to gas mark in l. A. Who's a senior technical account manager? AccuWeather at enough was the director product manager. Google Cloud Platform. Now welcome back to the Cube and >> thank you for >> coming on. Thank you. >> You got a customer. Big customer focus here this year. Step function of just logo's growth. New announcements. Technical. Really good stuff. Yeah. What's going on? Give us the update. AP economies here, full throttle. >> I mean, you know, the great thing is it's a pea eye's on all fronts. So what you saw this morning was about standardizing the AP eyes that cloud infrastructure is based on. You saw, You know, how do we build applications with AP eyes at a finer grained level? Micro services, you know, And we've had a lot of great customer examples of people using, and that's what you know with AC. You weather here talking about how do you use a P ice to service and build business models reached developer ecosystems. So you know. So I look at everything today. It's every aspect of it brings it back home tape. Yas. >> It's just things that's so exciting because we think about the service model of cloud and on premise. And now cloud, it's integration and AP Eyes or Ki ki and all and only getting more functional. Talk about your implementation. Aki weather. What do you guys do with Apogee? Google clouds just chair. What >> would implementation is so accurate? There's been running an AP I service for the past ten years, and we have lots of enterprise clients, but we started to realize we're missing a whole business opportunity. So we partnered with Apogee, and we created a new self survey P developer portal that allows developers to go in there, sign up on their own and get started. And it's been great for us as far as like basically unlocking new revenue opportunities with the FBI's because, as he said, everything is a p i cz. We also say everything is impacted by the weather. So why not have everyone used ac you other empty eyes to fulfill their weather needs? >> It wasn't like early on when you guys were making this call, was it more like experimenting? Did men even have a clue where they're like You's a p I I was gonna start grass Roots >> Way knew right >> away like we were working very heavily with the enterprise clients. But we wanted to really cater to the small business Is the individual developers to weather enthusiasts are students. Even so, we wanted to have this easy interface that instead of talking to a sales rep, you could just go through this portal and sign upon your own. It get started and we knew right away there is money to be left or money to be had money left on the table. So we knew right away with by working with apogee and creating this portal, it would run itself. Everyone uses a P eyes and everyone needs to weather, so to make it easier to find and use >> and what was it like? Now let's see how >> it we've been using it now for about two years, and it's been very successful. We've we've seen great, rather revenue growth. And more importantly, it's worked as a great sales channel for us because now, instead of just going directly to an enterprise agreement and talking about legal terms and contracts, you can go through this incremental steps of signed up on your own. Do a free trial. Then you could buy a package. You can potentially increase your package, and we can then monitor that. Let them do it on their own, and it allows us ability to reach out to them and see could just be a new partner that we want to work with, or is there a greater opportunity there? So it's been great for us as faras elite generator in the sales channel to really more revenue, more opportunities and just more aware these'LL process a whole new business model. It's amore awareness, actually replies. Instead, people were trying to find us. Now it's out there and people see great Now it Khun, use it, Get started >> Admission in the back end. The National Weather Service, obviously the government's putting up balloons taking data and presumably and input to your models. How are they connecting in to the AP eyes? Maybe described that whole process. Yeah. Tilak, You other works >> of multiple weather providers and government agencies from around the world. It's actually one of our strengths because we are a global company, and we have those agreements with all kinds of countries around the world. So we ingest all of that data into our back and database, and then we surface it through our story and users. >> Okay, so they're not directly sort of plugging into that ap economy yet? Not yet. So we have to be right there. Well, I >> mean, for now we have the direct data feeds that were ingesting that data, and we make it available through the AC you other service, and we kind of unjust that data with some of our own. Augur those to kind of create our own AccuWeather forecast to >> That's actually a barrier to entry for you guys. The fact that you've built those pipelines from the back end and then you expose it at the front end and that's your business model. So okay, >> tell about that. We're where it goes from here because this is a great example of how silly the old way papering legal contracts. Now you go. It was supposed to maybe eyes exposing the data. Where does it go from here? Because now you've got, as were close, get more complex. This is part of the whole announcement of the new rebranding. The new capabilities around Antos, which is around Hey, you know, you could move complex work clothes. Certainly the service piece. We saw great news around that because it gets more complex with sap. Ichi, go from here. How did these guys go? The next level. >> So, you know, I think that the interesting thing is you look at some of the themes here that we've talked about. It's been about unlocking innovation. It's about providing ways that developers in a self service way Khun, get at the data. The resource is that they need ask. They need them to build these types of new types of applications and vacuum weather experience and their journey on. That's a great example of it. Look, you know, moving from from a set of enterprise customers that they were serving very well to the fact that really ah, whole ecosystem of applications need act needs access to weather data, and they knew that if they could just unlock that, that would be an incredibly powerful things. So we see a lot of variants of that. And in fact, a lot of what you see it's on announcements this morning with Google Cloud is part of that. You know, Google Cloud is very much about taking these resource is that Google is built that were available to a select few and unlocking those in a self service fashion, but in a standard way that developers anywhere and now with andthe oh, switches hybrid a multi cloud wherever they are being able to unlock those capabilities. So why've you? This is a continuation of a P. I promise. You know, we're very excited about this because what we're seeing is more and more applications that are being built across using AP eyes and more more environments. The great thing for Apogee is that any time people are trying to consume AP eyes in a self service fashion agile way, we're able to add value. >> So Allison Wagner earlier was we asked her about the brand promise, and she said, We want our customers, customers they're not help them innovate all the way down our customers customers level. So I'm thinking about whether whether it gets a bad rap, right? I mean, >> look at it >> for years and we make make jokes about the weather. But the weather has been looked uncannily accurate. These they used to be art. Now it's becoming more silent. So in the spirit of innovation, talk about what's happening just in terms of predicting whether it's, you know, big events, hurricanes, tornadoes and some of the innovation that's occurring on that end. >> Well, I mean, look at from a broader standpoint to weather impacts everything. I mean, as we say, you look at all the different products out there in the marketplace that use whether to enhance that. So there's things you can do for actionable decisions, too. It's not just what is the weather, it is. How can whether impact what I'm doing next, what I'm doing, where I go, what I wear, how I feel even said every day you make a conscious and subconscious decision based on the weather. So when you can put that into products and tools and services that help make those actionable decisions for the users. That makes it a very, very powerful products. That's why a lot of people are always seeking out whether data to use it to enhance their product. >> Give us an example. >> What So a famous story I even told Justin my session earlier. Connected Inhaler Company named co hero they use are FBI's by calling our current conditions every time a user had a respiratory attack over time, it started to build a database as the user is using your inhaler. Then use machine learning to kind of find potential weather triggers and learn pattern recognition to find in the future. Based on our forecast, a p I When white might that user have another attack? So buy this. It's a connected health product that's helping them monitor their own health and keep them safe and keep them prepared as opposed to being reactive. >> The inhaler is instrumented. Yeah, and he stated that the cloud >> and that's just that's just one product. I mean, there's all kinds of things connected, thermostats and connect that >> talks about the creativity of the application developer. I think this highlights to me what Deva is all about and what cloud and FBI's all about because you're exposing your resource products. You don't have to have a deaf guy going. Hey, let's car get the pollen application, Martin. Well, what the hell does that mean? You put the creativity of the in the edge, data gets integrated to the application. This kind of kind of hits on the core cloud value problems, which is let the data drive the value from the APP developer. Without your data, that APP doesn't have the value right. And there's multiple instances of weird what it could mean the most viable in golf Africa and Lightning. Abbott could be whatever. Exactly. So this is kind of the the notion of cloud productivity. >> Well, it's a notion of club activity. It's also this idea of a digital value change. So, you know, Data's products and AP Icer products. And and so now we see the emergence of a P I product managers. You know, you know this idea that we're going to go and build a whole ecosystem of products and applications, that meat, the whole set of customer needs that you might not even initially or ever imagine. I'm sure you folks see all the time new applications, new use cases. The idea is, you know, can I I take this capability or can I take this set of data, package it up us an a p I that any developer can use in anyway that they want to innovate on DH, build new functionality around, and it's a very exciting time in makes developers way more productive than they could have been in >> this talks about the C I C pipeline and and programmable bramble AP eyes. But you said something interesting. I wanna unpack real quick talk about this rise of a pipe product managers because, yes, this is really I think, a statement that not only is the FBI's around for a long time to stay, but this is instrumental value. Yes. What is it? A byproduct. Men and okay, what they do. >> So it's a new concept that has Well, I should say a totally new concept. If you talk to companies that have provided a P eyes, you go back to the the early days of you know, folks like eBay or flicker. All of these idea was that you can completely reinvent your business in the way that you partner with other companies by using AP eyes to tie these businesses together. And what you've now seen has been really, I'd say, over the last five years become a mainstream thing. You've got thousands of people out there and enterprises and Internet companies and all sorts of industries that are a P I product managers who are going in looking at how doe I packet a package up, the capabilities the business processes, the data that my business has built and enable other companies, other developers, to go on, package these and embed them in the products and services that they're building. And, uh, that's the job of a P A. Product measures just like a product manager that you would have for any other product. But what they're thinking about is how do they make their A P? I success >> had to Mark's point there. He saw money being left on the table. Small little tweak now opens up a new product line at an economic model. The constructor that's it's pretty *** good. >> It's shifting to this idea platform business models, and it's a super exciting thing that we're seeing the companies that successfully do it, they see huge growth way. Think that every business is goingto have to transition into this AP I product model eventually. >> Mark, what's the what's the role of the data scientist? Obviously very important in your organization and the relationship between the data scientists and the developers. And it specifically What is Google doing, Tio? Help them coordinate, Collaborate better instead of wrangling data all day. Yeah, I mean, >> so far, a data scientists when we actually have multiple areas. Obviously, we're studying the weather data itself. But then we're studying the use case of data how they're actually ingesting it itself, but incorporating that into our products and services. I mean I mean, that's kind of >> mean date is every where the key is the applications have the data built in. This is to your point about >> unnecessarily incorporating it in, but to collaborate on creating products, right? I mean, you're doing a lot of data science. You got application developers. All right? You're talking about tooling, right? R, are they just sort of separate silos or they >> I mean, we obviously have to have an understanding of what day it is going to be successful. What's gonna be adjusted and the easiest way to adjust it a swell so way obviously are analyzing it from that sense is, >> I say step back for a second. Thiss Google Next mark. What's your impression of the show this year? What's the vibe? What's this day? One storyline in your mind. Yet a session you were in earlier. What's been some of the feedback? What's what's it like >> for me personally? It's that AP eyes, power, everything. So that's obviously what we've been very focused on, and that's what the messaging I've been hearing. But yeah, I mean, divide has been incredible here. Obviously be around so many different great minds and the creativity. It's it's definitely >> talk. What was the session that you did? What was the talk about? Outside? Maybe I was some >> of the feedback. Yeah, I mean, so the session I gave was how wacky weather unlock new business opportunities with the FBI's on way. Got great feedback was a full house, had lots of questions afterwards that followed me out to the hallway. It's was actually running here, being held up, but lots people are interested in learning about this. How can they unlock their own opportunity? How can they take what they have existing on and bring it to a new audience? For >> some of the questions that that was kind of the thematic kind of weaken stack rank, the categorical questions were mean point. The >> biggest thing was like trying to make decisions about how for us, for example, having an enterprise model already transitioning that toe a self serve model that actually worked before we're kind of engaging clients directly. So having something that users could look at and on their own, immediately engage with and connect with and find ways that they can utilize it for their own business models and purposes. >> And you gotta be psychic, FBI as a business model, You got FBI product managers, you got you got the cloud and those spanning now multiple domain spaces on Prem Hybrid Multi. >> Well, that last points are very exciting to us. So, you know, if you look at it, you know, it was about two and a half years ago that apogee became part of Google and G C P got into hybrid of multi cloud with aptitude that we were, you know, the definitive AP I infrastructure for AP eyes. Wherever they live. And what we saw this morning was DCP doubling down in a very big way on hybrid of multi clap. And so this is fantastic four. This message of AP eyes everywhere. Apogee is going to be able Teo sit on top of Antos and really, wherever people are looking at either producing are consuming AP eyes. We'LL be able to sit on top of that and make it a lot easier to do. Capture that data and build new business models. On top of it, >> we'LL make a prediction here in the Cube. That happens. He's going to be the center. The value proposition. As those abs get built, people go to the business model. Connecting them under the covers is going to be a very interesting opportunity with you guys. It's >> a very exciting, very exciting for us to >> get hurt here first in the queue, of course. The cubes looking for product manager a p I to handle our cube database. So if you're interested, we're always looking for a product manager. FBI economies here I'm Jeopardy Volante here The Cube Day one coverage Google Next stay with us for more of this short break

>> Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. (electronic beat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at IBM Think 2019 in soggy San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. Dave, I hope you brought a big umbrella today. >> Well luckily the Marriott lent me one, so-- >> I got one from my hotel, too. And what a perfect day to day have the hybrid, multi-cloud open upon us, shower San Francisco with rain, and talk about weather with an IBM expert. Mark Gildersleeve, welcome to the Cube. You are Vice President, Head of Business Solutions, and Watson Media, The Weather Company. >> Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure, so, we think IBM, this is the second annual IBM Think. There's about what, 30,000 people here, 2,000 plus business and technical sessions. There is a lot, a broad spectrum, no pun intended, of topics to cover, but excited to talk with you today about what IBM is doing in the agriculture industry. Let's talk about it from the growers perspective first, and we'll cover some other, other outlets. But, what are some of the challenges that growers are facing in 2019? >> So, first of all, if you think about it, this is a really sporty industry for growers to be in. They've got to worry about things that they can't have any control over: the weather, pest and disease, government regulation, trade, commodity pricing, there's a lot that they can't control. To make matters worse, they have very slim margins, okay, and they had to learn all these various aspects of technology to try to become better. And so, they're almost drowning in data, trying to figure out what do I do about it to get more yield, to get more profitability, to get better quality? There's a lot of challenges that they're wrestling with today. (people chattering) >> Well this is a huge problem, because the, the amount of farmable land isn't growing. It's essentially flat. >> It's flat. >> Maybe it's even shrinking. >> It's flat. >> They're talking with a multi-decade, 20, 30-year time frame. Population growth, we're talking about another two, two and a half billion people over the next three decades. So, something's got to give. What does the data say? >> So you're exactly correct, the estimates of population growth are 2.3 billion between now and 2050. That's 30% population growth. With zero incremental air-able lands, so, huge yeah. So we have to get yields, at least 30% higher. Okay, so if you think about that problem we're not going to get that yield increase status quo. We're not going to get that yield increase without having a much more data and an AI driven approach to agriculture, and that's exactly what we're doing. Our solution right now has 14 different AI and analytic capabilities inserted into it. Just to try to help growers, for one, make sense of their data and make better decisions to try and get their yield up, their profit up, their quality up. >> And is there enough in your estimation markers, is there enough head room actually to accommodate that population growth, given the constraints? >> Absolutely, taking a simple example of being a corn grower in the U.S. The average corn grower gets 175 bushels per acre, but the 70th percentile gets like 250, okay? So, if we got in, in the example of corn, every person that's at the 50th percentile, up to the 70th percentile, which is extremely doable. You can, you are, by definition, increasing the yield 30% in that case. So, it's doable, and we can see examples of growers doing it today. But what you have to understand is that 70% of the differences in performance between growers are just their farming practices. So, we have to get a handle on what farming practices drive better yield. We have to get those people at 50% to 70%. The people at 30% up to 50. We just have to get them about 20 points better in the benchmarking, and we will actually solve this problem from a U.S. perspective, then we have to do different things for other parts of the world. >> Now there's a multi-variable problem here as well though, because you got consumer patterns changing, people want, you know, more sustainable. You go into the grocery store now, you see all grass-fed, or free-range, and, so that takes up more land. Do consumer, how do consumer preferences, and the shifting consumer preferences factor in? >> It's the biggest change I think that's happened in this industry in the last 20 years. If you look at 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the tech chains were being driven kind of more from the ag-input side, and that's kind of the people that are selling to the growers. Now, we have the food companies hearing from consumers that they want sustainable, they want better quality, they want more nutrition, they want to understand how to have less chemicals going into their food. Okay, now we have the buyers of the growers, pushing on those growers to say you need to give me a better product. This change of consumers, and this ripple through the food eco-system is the big change. And the food companies are at the center of this revolution. And it's actually really interesting, and I think it actually will knit together this whole ag-eco-system, so that you now have to worry about the ag input people, the growers, the food companies, and the retailers, the bankers and the insurers, all kind of understanding, and coming together to figure out how to get better product to the consumers, and also, by the way, increase the yield so they can solve the food production problem. >> So, where do you start? Are you talking, what's the lowest hanging fruit? Is it going to the large-scale growers that have more resources, potentially resources that understand technology enough to start at that source? What about the smaller scale farmer growers? >> So, I think that, we have IBM clients that are interested in solving every aspect of the kind of size of foreign problem. So, I met with one organization from Africa today. In Africa, it's all a small farmer problem, right? And, and the vast bulk of growers in the world are small farmers, okay? But when we're looking at kind of solving the problem overall, we want to start with the food companies, and the people in finance. Because, right now, food companies, when they're trying to deal with their growers, they're trying to manage these growers with spreadsheets. Even though these are very sophisticated companies, very sophisticated. We need to help those food companies better understand what's going on the field. What chemicals that are going onto the land? When was the crop planted? When is it going to be harvested? When can I expect it in my storage facility? And they really want to understand, what are the farmers doing that are giving them the best quality crop? And how can they learn from the data, to get best practices for all the rest of their growers? If we start with the food companies, and have them work with their growers and the agronomists, that's going to be the best way to introduce change into this sector, I believe. >> And they're kind of the the pivot point between the consumer, they understand the consumer demand, they can feed that back to the farmers. Of course, they're ultimate goal is to make a profit. But look at it, if you give the people what they want, there's going to be a way to make money here. It's just, it's not going to be the same way that they've made money for the past 50 years. >> Exact, exactly right. But you know, take an example, in my house, we buy organic milk, okay? We're paying a premium for organic milk. We're willing to pay a premium. >> Happy to do so, yup. >> Happy to do it. We feel like it tastes better. We feel good about also the quality of it. So, I think in many cases, food companies are willing to pay a premium to growers to deliver a very specific crop to them. And so, this issue of food companies having more growers under contract, and working with those growers to deliver a better product, is of high interest to virtually every food company, every beer company that we've talked to. Every retailer that's worrying about the supermarket shelves. They're all worried about trying to get better product to the shelf, 'cause that's what the consumers are asking for. There is money, in this system, if you get the quality up. So that's really what we're focusing on with the food companies. >> People happy to pay for that and this eco-system is actually quite interesting. You talk a bit about, you talked about the banks. They're, even health care is part of the eco-system. >> It's the other constituent. >> They've said that people start making better food choices. It could ripple through to health effects. So, maybe you're paying more, as a consumer, for an individual product, but you could be living longer, having better health, maybe having lower health care costs. >> One analogy that I think you might find interesting, is that, just as all of us have an electronic medical record, that has all the images that would have been taken of our body, like an MRI, or our health history, our hospitalizations, what surgeries we've had. We're now, as IBM, bringing the electronic field record, which is an exact analogy to the electronic medical record, but it's about the field. What's been grown there? What have been the yields? What are the chemicals? When was the crop planted? What kind of tillage practices are being used? And we're trying to, essentially build that database of the electronic field record as the cornerstone for all the analytics for the AI that we're building, and running against, to help figure out benchmarks for all the corn growers in U.S.A., or the potato growers in the Netherlands. And beyond the benchmarks, best practices, so that we can say, what are the people that are 70th percentile doing, that the people that are 30th percentile aren't doing? We can bring all those people up. It's very cool. >> So we're talking about IBM, the computer company, right? So, what's the big picture of IBM's role? Obviously, there's a data angle. But what's the IBM story here? The holistic story. >> So, first pillar is data. Every piece of data coming off of a combine or a sprayer, so the equipment data, the machine data. All the environmental data, remotely-sensed data, soil-sensed data, stuff that's going on to the field, as well as the farm practices. So, there's a whole data story that, who better than IBM to handle massive amounts of data? Secondly, AI and analytics, right? So, we've got 13 or 14 different analytics and AI products embedded in our decision platform. All intending to give that grower a better first guess, a better recommendation of, here's what the data tells us about your field. It's still up to the grower and the agronomist to make the final call, but we can give them a much better guess than they have just based on their own personal fields experience. Then lastly, it's decisions that we can help that grower make. So, an example would be: we can help a banker understand exactly what crop is being grown on a piece of land without having the banker have to send somebody out and look at it. So, they can understand compliance-wise, Was a loan that I wrote being used in the purpose that was intended? But there are many enterprise examples of that. So it's data, AI, decisions. And that's then connected across the eco-system. It's a great IBM story 'cause we've been in business, we've been serving the USDA for 91 years. We've been in agriculture a long time. Lots of people in IBM don't know it, but we've been at this a long time. >> And if we look at the growers for a second, this is really kind of where it all starts, right? I understand this triangulation, and the constituents that are involved from the food companies, to the retailers, to the bankers. But, if we look at the growers, what are some of the benefits? Do you have a favorite success story where, whether it's a large-scale grower or something smaller, where their, maybe their loan terms are better? Or they have lower costs? Or they're actually making a better impact on the environment? What's your favorite grower impact story? >> There are lots actually, but let's pick a few. The first is, we have a lot of aspects of crop protection, where we can use satellite imagery to figure out where a crop is under stress. Where, what part of the field is under stress. Help them go out and scout that field. Take a picture with their smart phone and have Watson tell you what the disease is that's infecting that crop. And, essentially, be able to take faster action. When you're faster with crop protection, you are saving a lot of your crop. You get better yield, that's money in the bank. So crop protection is one. A second example is, with best practices, showing some of these growers what the 70th percentile growers are doing, that the 50th percentile guys are not doing. You can say, here are the four things that these 70th percentile guys are doing. You should try those four things. Or you might want to try two of them this year, two of them next year. But best practice is a huge impact. The last impact is, we help people with yield. So, we can now say okay, this is the projected yield that you're going to have at the end of the season. Here's what you can sell at the middle of the season. Here's what you're going to be able to sell at the end of the season. And we help them with market timing. Trading profitability can be easily 20, 30 bucks of incremental profit per acre. So, there's kind of a financial angle, there's a best practices angle, and there's a protecting your field angle, as the three examples I give you. >> Well, and that's huge from the standpoint of the debt loads that farmers face around the world. Over a trillion dollars in debt, in just, you know, a few countries. What does the future hold from that standpoint? What are the implications of that debt load? Obviously there's an imperative to improve yields and improve profitability, but your thoughts? >> So, first of all, you're correct that debt is a really enormous issue. So, for example, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal last week. Bankruptcies are at the highest level in the U.S. since the crash of 2008. So, this debt load, and the debt service is a really large problem. Here's how I'd like to try to focus it. Many growers have been taught to worry about better yield. When we should have been focusing more on better profit per acre. There are two ways you can get out that profit per acre. One is, you can do things with new chance fertilization, seed type, plant date, that can drive your yield better. But the other aspect is, there are parts of your land that are going to be lower productivity potential. Your smartest move is to put less inputs on those portions of the land and double down on the inputs on the highest productivity areas of the land. Because most farmers don't understand that there's 25% of their land, where they're actually losing money, and they'd be better to actually not be planting. But instead the idea is, plant at a lower population rate, put less input costs in, and then you can even make that area of less productive land profitable. If we improve the profitability of these growers, they can afford the debt service, and that's kind of the way to do it. The other aspect is that, everybody that's doing contract growing for a given food company is getting a premium on their crop. Oftentimes, 10%, or even 15% premium. That 10%, or 15%, solves the problem of the debt service for almost every grower, in the U.S. that's doing zero crops. >> That focus on profitability versus pure yield per acre. That's potentially involves a a different crop? And a shifting strategy? >> Usually it's a different farming practice. So, it's applying variable rate technology. It's essentially understanding how to treat each aspect of your field differently so that you're not treating it homogeneously. But you're actually saying, I'm going to do this practice, and with this level of input costs down over here, in this section of the land. And do a different practice over here. Because, every piece of land has low productivity areas, high productivity areas, and areas that are either high or low, depending on the weather. Understanding how the land varies is a huge data insight that we give growers with our data insights using AI. >> And that can drop right to the bottom line, obviously. >> It's all bottom line, baby. >> Last question before we have to wrap, this is, I feel like we're scratching just the surface here, of such an interesting topic of, and the massive global implications of IBM and agriculture can have on all of us. Where can people go on the IBM website for example, to learn more about this? >> You can go to the, well, so at the Think, there are a number of sections actually that we have right now. Talks that we're giving later on Friday morning. All related to the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture. And there's material at the Think exhibit stuff that you can go to. We're also exhibiting in the Watson Media and Weather section downstairs. We'd ask everybody to come there. >> Excellent, well Mark, thanks so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, really interesting conversation. >> Great story. >> Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching the Cube, I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. Live, from IBM Think 2019. Stick around, we'll be right back shortly with our next guest. (electronic music beat)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

>> It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit, New York, 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Here in New York City, we're live at Amazon Web Services AWS Summit. This is their big show that they take on the road. It kind of originates at Amazon re:Invent in Las Vegas, their big kickoff show for the year, and then goes out to the different geographies and goes out and talks to the customers, and actually rolls out all the greatest of the cloud from Amazon's perspective. Of course theCUBE covering it, wall-to-wall cloud coverage, I'm John Furrier, co-host with Jeff Frick here today in New York City for special coverage. Jeff, Amazon obviously continue to dominate, but competition is heating up, Google Nexus next week, we'll be there live. Microsoft's got a big show, Azure's gaining market share, Amazon's still racing ahead. They got a book they're giving out here called Ahead in the Cloud, Best Practices for Enterprise IT. Amazon, clearly we talk about this all the time, they've cleared the runway from winning the startups, small, medium-sized growing business in the cloud native, to actually putting big dent in the market share for acquiring large enterprise customers. That has been their mission, that's Andy Jackson's mission, that's the team. Their head count is growing, Jeff Bezos is the richest man in history of the world. Pretty impressive story, we've been covering it since 2012, >> What's crazy is it's barely got started, John. I mean, just looking up some numbers before we came on, Gardener has a bunch of projected public cloud cans, anywhere from 180 billion to 260 billion. So even with Amazon at the head of the pace, I can't remember their last statement, I think it was 18 billion run rate, and everybody's saying Microsoft's brewing so fast. They barely still scratch the surface, and that I think is what's really scary. There'll be 50,000 people probably at re:Invent, there's 10,000 here in New York, they have these summits all over the country, all over the world, and so as impressive as the story is, what I think is even crazier is we've barely just begun. You were just at Public Sector, that's a whole 'nother giant tranche that's growing. >> Well you started to see the ecosystem develop nicely, and cloud native certainly is a tailwind for overall Amazon. Obviously the have the winning cloud formula, they've been ahead for many, many years. But again, competition's keeping up. But if you look behind us, you probably can't see in the cameras, it doesn't give justice, but this show, it's in New York City, it's a regional kind of like event. Its now looking the size of what re:Invent was just a few years ago. Public Sector Summit, which is the global public sector that Teresa Carlson runs, in really its third year roughly since it got big, started out a couple years ago. That's now morphing into the size of re:Invent, so pretty massive. >> And they said there's 10,000 people here. I don't know how many were at Public Sector. 138 sponsors, just some of the numbers that Werner shared in the keynote. 80 sessions, really an education session, it's a one-day event. We're excited to be here, but what's amazing is even though pretty much every enterprise has something going on in the public cloud, in terms of the vast majority of the workload, still most of 'em are not, and you know, really an interesting play. We were there when the AWS VMware announcement was made a couple of years back in San Francisco, as kind of this migration path, that's both been really good for VMware, and also really good for Amazon, 'cause now they have an answer to the, kind of the enterprise legacy question. >> I mean Jeff, did you look at the big picture? If you want to squint through the noise of cloud, what's really going on is, one, the analysts that are looking at market share, I think are looking at old data. It's hard to know who's really winning when you look about revenue, 'cause everyone can bundle in, Microsoft bundles Office revenue in. So it's actually, that's hard to understand, but if you look at the overall big picture, the landscape that's happening is that the enterprise and IT market has moved from being consumerization of IT to digital transformation. Those are the two buzzwords. But really what's happening is the operational model of cloud has created two real personas in the enterprise from a technical perspective. The developers who are building apps, and operators who are running the infrastructure, running the software, running the dashboards, running the operations. And so you start to see that interplay between operators and developers working together but yet decoupled, different personas. These are the ones that are changing how work gets done. So the future of how work and computing is going to be applied for end user benefits, user benefits, consumers, whether it's B2B or B2C companies, the cloud is the power engine of innovation, and new apps are coming on faster, and the roles are changing, and this is causing a shift of value. This is what the analysts at Wikibon, theCUBE, insights team has been looking at is that this is really the big thing. And machine learning, and AI, really take advantage of that, and you're going to start to see IoT, security, AI, start to be the critical apps to take advantage of this power of the cloud, and as enterprises transform their operations and their development frameworks, then I think you're going to see a whole new level of innovation. >> Right. They just had Epic Games on, the company that makes Fortnite which is a huge global phenomenon. If you don't know anything about it, ask somebody who's under the age of 15, they'll tell you all about it. >> 135 million gamers. >> The core value proposition of cloud is still the same, its flexibility, its global reach, its ability to scale up and scale down, and we've asked this question before and we're getting closer and closer with each passing day, is if we live in a world, John, with infinite compute, infinite bandwidth and infinite store, basically priced at zero, asymptotically approaching zero. What could you build? And if you could get that to the entire world instantly, what could you build, and we're really getting closer and closer to that and it's a very different way to think about the world than where you have to provision at 50% overhead, and you got to buy it and plug it in and turn it on. You know, that world is over. We're not going back, I don't think. >> If you look at the cloud players you've got Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and then we throw Alibaba, that's more of a China thing. Those are the main ones, you got Oracle for Oracle and IBM in there. You look at the companies, and look at the ones that have consumer experience, and look at the ones that don't. Microsoft has failed on the consumer business, although they have some consumer stuff, really not really been successful. Oracle and Microsoft, IBM have been business to business companies. Google and Amazon have been consumer companies that have bolted on a cloud just to run their operations. So to me what's interesting is, which one of those sides of the street, which one will emerge as the victorious cloud platform. I think I would bet on the consumer side. I like Google, I like Amazon better than Azure and Oracle and IBM, mainly because they have consumer experience, they understand the ultimate end user, and built clouds for that, and now are rolling that business. So the question is will that be the better model than having Azure or Oracle or IBM, who know the business model-- >> Right. >> But yet, will the devices matter? So this is going to be a big thing that we're going to watch on theCUBE is, which cloud play will win, or does it matter? Is it winner take all, winner take most? >> Yeah. >> This is the questions. >> Pretty interesting. You know you interviewed Mark Hurd many moons ago, for a long time, and he talked about cloudifying all the Oracle applications. The problem is, Clayton Christensen's book, Innovator's Dilemma, is still the best business book ever written. It's really hard to knock off your own core business, especially when it's profitable. That I think is Oracle's biggest problem. The other thing I think they have is, they're a sales culture, it's built around a sales culture. People are going out and it's a hard sell. That's not what the cloud is all about. It's really the commercialization of shadow IT. I need it, I turn it on, I activate it, I don't need it anymore, I turn it down, I turn it off, I turn it over. So I think Oracle's in a tough position to eat their own business. IBM is you know, continues to try different things and you know, with The Weather Company and Ustream, and they're doing a lot of things. But the core three have such momentum, Google we'll see, we're excited to be there next week and kind of get an update on what their story is, but still in the enterprise they barely scratch the surface of the available workload. >> I think that's the main story, the surface is just being scratched. If this is like the first or second inning of this game, or the second game of a double header, as Matt Dew has said on theCUBE many times, he'll come on today, it's interesting because if you think about the clouds that are best position to take advantage of new technologies, like AI, like blockchain, like token economics, those are the ones that have to be adaptable and flexible enough to take on new things, because if we're just scratching the surface, the new things that are going to come out have to scale, have to be data driven, have to be mobile, have to use AI, have to have the compute power. If you're kind of stuck in the old model and you have a ME2 cloud, it's going to be always hard to ratchet up and kind of always rearchitect and change, you need an architecture that will essentially be flexible and be adaptive. To me I think that's what we're going to look for here in the interviews today, and of course, security, Jeff, continues to be the number one conversation, at AWS re:Invent, and AWS Public Sector Summit. Security is getting better and better in the cloud and some say it's better than on-premises security. >> I think the resources that can be applied at a company like AWS, the security teams, the technology, the hardening, the private fiber connections, I mean so many things that they can apply because they have such scale, that you just can't do as a private enterprise. The other thing, right, is that people usually take better care of their customers than their own, and we know a lot of security breaches and data breaches are just from employees or somebody lost a laptop. They're these types of things where if you're an actual vendor for someone else and you're responsible for their security, you're going to be a little bit different, a little bit more diligent than kind of protecting once you're already inside the wall. >> And it changes the infrastructure, I mean just in the news this week, obviously Trump was in Helsinki, all I can see in my mind is, the servers, where are the servers, where are the servers? With the cloud you don't need servers. The whole paradigm is shifting. If you use cloud you can get encryption, you can get security. These are things that are going to start that I think be the table stakes for security, the idea of having a server, provisioning a server, managing servers per se, unless you're a cloud service provider, at some level, you're tier two or tier one, you don't need servers. This is the serverless trend. Again, Lambda functions, AI, application developers, all driving change. Again, two personas, operators and developers. This is what the swim lanes are starting to look at, we're starting to get the visibility. And of course we'll get all the data here in theCUBE, and share that with you this week. Today in New York City, live theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Stay with us for coverage here for AWS Summit 2018. We'll be right back.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering Women Transforming Technology. >> Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto, with the third annual Women Transforming Technology event and I'm very excited to be joined by the CEO of Women Who Code, Alaina Percival. Alaina, nice to have you here. >> Hi, thank you very much for having me. >> So tell me about Women Who Code. You co-founded it a while ago. Give us a little bit of a background about what your organization is. >> Yeah, Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of technical women in the world. Our mission is to see women excel in technology careers, and that's because we have a vision of women becoming executives, technical executives, founders, board members, and of course through a pathway of being software engineers. >> So Women Who Code started, originally, back in 2011 as a community. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that and what you've transformed it into, today. >> Yeah, it started off as a local community, and it was just a space to get together with other technologists, and what we started to see is it was this thing that was just fun and kind of our little secret for, you know, that first year, and we realized-- at one point I said, "Hey other women around the world deserve to have this, as well." And, that's really where the focus to grow globally came about and focus on women: building on their skills and building up their leadership skills and if you invite software engineers to a leadership and networking event, they won't come, but we hold an average of five free technical events every single day, throughout the world, and at those events, they're primarily technology events where we weave in a little bit of leadership and networking, but it feels authentic and its an event that software engineers are excited to be. >> Five events per day, that's incredible. So, VMware became a partner back in 2015, when you had around nine or 10,000 members. Now, today, its over 137,000 global members. Talk to us about the strategic partnership with VMware and what that's enabled Women Who Code to achieve. >> Yeah, we can't accomplish what we accomplish without the partners that support us. We try not to charge our members for anything. So, those 1,900 events we put on last year were free. We've given away $2.8 million in our weekly newsletter of scholarships, and conference tickets, encouraging our community to go out there in the broader tech community and we can do those things, we can launch in the cities that we can launch in, we can elevate women as leaders around the world, but we can only do that through partners, and VMware is one of our founding partners and what that took is someone in executive leadership to see who we could be, because we're very small, and we were very local when we came to VMware and talked to them about what our vision was and what we were going to accomplish and I say now, what I said back then, is we've only scratched the surface of what we are going to achieve. >> There's some commonalities, some parallels that Women Who Code has with VMware. You know, this is the third annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware here and its sold out within hours. Walking into that room it's very empowering. The excitement and the passion are there and you just start to feel a sense of community. Tell me about the parallels that you see with VMware and some of the visions that they share about, not just raising awareness for the diversity gaps and challenges, but also taking a stand to be accountable in that space. And what they announced this morning with Stanford, with this massive $15 million investment in this Innovation Lab of actually wanting to dig deep into these barriers to help identify them to help eradicate them. What are some of the visionary similarities with Women Who Code and VMware? >> Yeah, so what you see with that is you know, you're investing in someone or an organization that already has the potential. Our average age of our community is 30. We have a lot of trouble claiming that you achieve what you achieve in your career, because of us. We know we play a part in it, but we know that potential, that raw power, exists within you, and when someone sees and knows that that's there and gives you what you need to be able to harness that potential, you are able to achieve great things, global things. You're able to change the world, and that's what we do for our members and their careers, and that's what our partners, like VMware do for us. >> I saw on your website: 80% of members experience a positive career impact, after joining Women Who Code. 80% of women, that's huge. >> Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people that you connect with, the sense of belonging. We had a women at the end of Hackathon, in Manila come up to our leaders, there, and she started crying. She said, "I was about to leave the industry and I realize I have a place." And that sense of belonging that you get from coming to a Women Who Code event that's very welcoming, it can really help to override all of those unconscious biases that you encounter every day, throughout the course of your career, and it helps you to realize, "I'm not alone. There's a lot of really smart, talented women in the tech industry, who want me to be in my job and being in my job isn't just for me. I'm lifting up the people around me, as well." >> So one of the things that we hear a lot about is a lot of focus on STEM programs and getting young girls interested in STEM fields to study in college, but another thing that's huge is the attrition rates. Women are leaving technology at alarming rates, and a lot of people think it's to go off and have children, and it's actually not the case. What are some of the things that have surprised you about women kind of in that, maybe, mid-stage of their career that are leaving, and how can Women Who Code help to impact that, positively? >> Yeah, so what you're speaking to is definitely the data showing that women are leaving their technical careers at a rate of 50% at the mid-career level, and they're leaving their overall careers, if you aggregate women in careers, at a rate of 20% over a 30 year period, so that gap is huge and the industry is a great industry for women. You've got a lot of job security, a lot of job opportunity, a lot of flexibility. All of these things are great for women and their careers, but what you're encountering is often being the only, or one of the only, and you really don't overcome that, until you're getting above 20%, 25%, 30% of that feeling of being the only on a team, and what I think is the biggest issue with women coming into their careers at what kind of wears you down is the unconscious bias. It's something that you encounter on a daily, or multiple times a day basis. That thing that if you complained about a single one of them, you'd be the weird person who complains, at your company. And so, what Women Who Code really does is: one, it helps to create a sense of belonging, it helps to build domain-specific and non-domain-specific skills, it helps you to envision your career, not just the next step in your career, but the step after that, and the step after that, so it's really working to combat those things that you're to, on a daily basis, to provide that sense of community, to remind you, you do belong, and to really help you envision and achieve your career goals, long-term. >> So you have about 137,000 members, globally. And when we had Lily Chang on earlier, she was talking about the Shanghai and Beijing and kind of what that sort of thing meant to her going back there now, on the board. Tell us, maybe give me an example of a real shining star, who joined Women Who Code and was able to get that support, and that guidance, and that camaraderie to continue to be successful, and actually be promoted, and succeed. >> Yeah, so one example that I love is a woman came up to me at an event, last year, and she said, "Hey Alaina, I was going to the Women Who Code Python events, and I now, today, because of what I learned, ended up choosing a path in data science. I'm a senior data scientist, and this year, I'm being flown across country to speak, as an expert in data science. I would not be in this career path, without Women Who Code." Another story that I love is a woman who came up to me at a Hackathon and she told me her story that she had joined Women Who Code, in February, and she was going to our events and kind of figured out what she wanted to do, and by the summer she had transitioned into a new job, gotten a job with The Weather Channel, as a software engineer, and she was making more than double any salary that she had had prior to that. >> Wow. >> And so its career direction, competing job offers, which really increases your likelihood of having a higher salary, those are kind of two examples that I love. The one thing that we haven't talked about is our leadership program. We have a global leadership program, which really actions you to build skill-based volunteering and become a local tech leader. It opens up lines of communication between you and executives at your company. You often get called in as a thought leader at companies. You typically will receive a promotion or a pay increase, at a higher rate than you would otherwise. Some of our leaders get press mentions, get invited to be speakers at conferences, or even advisors on advisory boards. And so, when I look at the stories that are coming from our leaders, one of my favorite stories is a woman in Atlanta. She had a master's in CS. She was inside of the box, you know, the person that every company wants to hire. She was incredibly shy, and when she stepped up as a Women Who Code leader she said, "Oh Alaina, I'm going to be the worst leader." And, okay you've got this. At her first event, she stoop up and she was like, "My name's Erica. Feel free to ask me questions," and kind of sat down, as quickly as possible, but she stood in the front of that room. She began to be perceived by the community, and by herself, as a leader. And in under one year, she was invited, she didn't even apply, to speak at three different tech conferences, and she went from barely being able to say her name in front of a nice community to giving a talk to a standing-room-only crowd. >> Wow, very impactful. And is that for other opportunities that you guys deliver, in terms of public speaking, or was that because she was able to, through Women Who Code, to start to get more confidence in her own capabilities and in her own skin? >> Experience, confidence, self-perception, community-perception, I had one lead at our community tell me that she became a leader at Women Who Code, by regularly attending events. One day, the leader was running late, so she said, "Oh, well, you know I can probably get this started. I've been coming enough," so she went and stood at the front of the room, welcomed everyone, got everything going, said our pitch and she said, by the end of that three-hour event, people thought she was a leader and she began to think, "Oh yeah, I'm a leader," and she says, "Hey, I know that I can get an interview anywhere I want. I know that this opens doors for me." I had one leader tell me that she interviewed with SpaceX, and they specifically told her in the interview that they were impressed with her Women Who Code leadership and that was one of the reasons they were interviewing her. >> Wow, what have been some of the things that have really blown you away, in the few years that this organization has been around? >> It's just the individual stories. It's, every step of the way, the impact that it has in the lives of our leaders in our community. And I honestly feel, everyday, that I get to do this for a job. >> With what VMware announced this morning, with Stanford and this huge investment that they're making into Women's Leadership and Innovation Lab, to look at some significant barriers that women in technology are facing and to identify those barriers that we can then eradicate, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, from that research and how you think that can actually benefit Women Who Code? >> Yeah, I'm very excited to see what comes out from there. I think we need a lot more research to help us to understand at what point things are happening and what things you can be doing that really help to overcome. I think that combining research with the real-world, in-person action that Women Who Code does and the work that we do with our community would have an even bigger impact. >> I also think what it speaks to is accountability. You know, a very large, very successful, 20-year-old organizations standing up saying, "We actually want to study this," and I think that there's a message there of accountability, which is, I think, a very important one that other organizations can definitely learn from. >> Yeah, I think that also they're going to an organization outside of them and funding that. And so, the research that comes out of there might come back and say, "You're doing this wrong. This is how you can be doing it better." And so, the fact that they're willing to make an investment and say, "Hey, we want to see this better, not only for us. It's not just going to be internal. This data's going out to the world." That's an investment in global change. That's not just holding that in at a personal or organizational level. >> Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, what are some of the things that you're going to walk away, from this third annual Women Transforming Technology event going, "Ah, that was awesome. Now, this gives me even more ideas for Women Who Code." >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to connect with, especially, women who are in leadership positions and figure out how we can better service women at the higher tiers of their career, because you don't stop needing support, and you don't stop growing your career, once you become a director or a vice president. You continue to invest in your career, and you continue to needs support. And so, I'm really looking for ways that we can better serve those women. >> And hopefully, we start to see that attrition number at 50% start to come down. >> Alaina: Definitely. >> Alaina, thanks so much for your time. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at VMware, for the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching. (funky electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM's inaugural Think conference. Mary Glackin's here, she's the vice president of weather business solutions, public, private partnerships, IBM Watson, and she's joined by Sheri Bachstein as the global head of consumer business at the Weather Company, an IBM company. Ladies, welcome to the Cube, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you, you're welcome. >> Thanks. >> Alright, Mary, going to start with the Weather Company. When IBM acquired the Weather Company, a lot of people were like, "What?", and they said, "Okay, data science, I get that.", and then, there was an IoT spin on that. Obviously, you have a lot of data, but, I got to ask you, what business are you in? >> So, what we like to say is we're in, not in the weather business, we're in the decision business. We're really dedicated, everyday, to help businesses, make the best decisions possible, and Sheri works on the consumer end of the business to do exactly the same thing. >> So, talk about your respective roles. Sheri, you're on the consumer side, as Mary just said, what does that entail? >> So, the consumer side is any touchpoint where we're bringing weather and weather insights to our consumers, whether it's on our weather channel app, whether it's on our web platform, mobile web, on wearables, so, it's anywhere where we're connecting with consumers, and, as Mary said, it's really about helping consumers make decisions. In our field, the forecast and some of the weather data has become a commodity almost, and we've actually shared our weather data with a lot of partners, and, so, now, we're using machine learning and data science to really come up with weather insights to help consumers make decisions, and it could be something just as simple as what to wear today, what's going to happen for a big event, or it can be around how do I keep people safe during severe weather. >> Yeah, I mean, we all look at the weather. I mean, I look at it everyday. >> Yeah. >> Of course, when you travel, like, what do I bring, what do I wear? Living in the East Coast these days, a lot of storms that we've >> That's right. >> encountered in the East Coast. I wonder if you could talk about life at IBM. I mean, again, it was a curious acquisition to a lot of people. Have you guys assimilated, how has it changed your business? >> I would say pretty dramatically. So, coming back to IBM acquiring us, they acquired us, really, for two reasons. One is we had some underlying technology that was really of interest to them that they're leveraging today, but the other part was because weather impacts so many businesses. So, as we've come into IBM, we've had alliances with IBM research. We're working on a pretty exciting project in bringing the next generation weather model to market, using high performance computing there. We've had alliances, definitely, through Watson in bringing AI into our products, and then, our product lines marry up with a lot of IBM product lines. So, we've rolled out a really exciting offering in closed captioning, and it really works well with some of the classical media business, weather media business that we have been providing. >> So, how do you guys make money? Maybe we could talk about the consumer side and the business side. A lot of people must ask that question. >> Yeah. >> They're advertising, okay, fine, >> Yeah. >> but that's not the core of what you guys do. >> Yeah, so, on the consumer side, a big majority of our revenue is drive by advertising, but we had to look at that business as well, 'cause as programmatic advertising has kind of taken up the landscape, how did we pivot to really generate more revenue, and, so, we've done that by creating Watson advertising, and that was one of the first implementations of Watson after the acquisition on the consumer side, and what we've done is we've created an open, scalable environment that, now, we can not only sell meaningful insights on our platform, but we can now give that to our partners, that they can go off our property and use the weather insights, we can use different data around location and media to help our partners really have a better experience, not only on our platform, but on any publisher's platform. >> So, that's your customers using Watson for advertising to drive their business. >> That's right. >> It's not like IBM is getting into the advertising business, per se, directly, is that right? >> Right, well, we're leveraging the power of Watson to create these insights. One of the products we created is called Weather FX, and, really, what it's doing, it's taking predictive analytics on the retail side, which is really an underused technology for retailers, but taking our historical weather data, mixing it with their retail data' to come up with insights so we can come up with interesting things that, say, in the northeast, like right now, during the winter, soda sells tremendously during very snowy or rainy winters. We can look at, you know, strawberry Pop-Tarts sell fairly well right before a hurricane, and, so, these are insights that we can bring to retailers, but it helps them with their supply chain, it helps them with their inventory, it can actually even help them with pricing, and, so, this is one of the ways we're taking our weather technology and marrying it with the advertising world to help provide those insights. >> For real, with the strawberry Pop-Tarts? >> For real, yeah, I guess, you know, you don't have to cook 'em or something. I don't know, so, yeah. >> Right, yeah, it's simple if the lights go out, okay. I mean, we want to ask you about your title, public and private partnerships. It's interesting, what is that all about? >> So, it's really about the fact that weather has really been something that's been shared globally around the world for hundreds of years at this point, and, so, the Weather Company and IBM take it very seriously that we be good partners in that community of weather providers. So, one of the things that we feel passionately about is we have a shared safety mission with national meteorological services globally. So, here in the US, we transmit, Sheri's team does, the warnings that come from the National Weather Service unaltered with attribution to the National Weather Service. We feel that it's really important that there's a sole authoritative voice when there's really danger. So, we share that safety mission, and then, we're trying to help in other parts of the world. We've had some partnerships to try to increase the observing in Africa which is really a part of the world that's under-observed. So, some of IBM's philanthropic efforts have been helping to fill in there and work with those national met services. So, it's really one of the really fun parts of my job. >> You know, we talk a lot about digital transformation, and Ginni Rometty was talking about the incumbent disruptors, and we've been riffing on that all week. We've made the observation that companies that are digital have data at their core, and they've organized, sort of, human expertise around that data. Most companies, Fortune 1000, are built around human expertise and built around other assets, the bottling plant or the factory, et cetera. I look at the Weather Company as a data company, that's probably fair. Did you evolve into that data is clearly at your core? Has it always been, and it's very interesting that IBM has acquired this company as it changes its DNA. I wonder if you could address that. >> Go ahead (laughs). >> So, I think there's a couple aspects around our data. There's obviously the weather data which is really powerful, but then, there's also location data. We're one of the largest location data providers besides Google and some of the others, because our weather accuracy starts with location which is really important. We have 250 million users that use our application, and we want to give them the most accurate forecast, and that starts with location. Because we add value, users will opt in to give us that data which is really important to us that we do keep their data private and opt in to that to get that location data. So, that's really powerful, because, now we can deliver products based on time and location and weather, and it just makes for better weather insights for, not only our consumers, but for our businesses. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Do you use, I mean, how do you use social? I mean, you know how Waze tells you where the traffic is and you report back. Do you guys rely heavily on that, or do you more rely on machines to help you with your forecast? Is it a combination? >> So, I could talk a little bit. One of our new market areas we've been going into is ground transportation. So, we do have a partner that's providing us some transportation, traffic information, but what we bring to it is being able to do, the predictive thing, is to take the weather piece and how that's going to influence that traffic. So, as the storm comes through, we know by looking at past events what that will mean and we bring that piece to the table. So, it's an example of how we go, not just giving you a weather forecast, but really forecasting the impacts and giving you insights, so that if you're running a large trucking operation, you can reroute fleets around it and avoid weather like that and keep people safe. >> Talk about, oh, go ahead, please. >> One of the brands within our portfolio is Weather Underground, and what they brought to the table for us is a personal weather station that works. So, we have about 270,000 around the world, and these are people that just really love the weather. They have a personal weather station in their backyard and they provide that data that then goes into Mary's team in helping looking at the forecast. So, that's one of the ways that we're using kind of a social network in sensoring to influence some of the work that we're doing. >> I mean, the weather forecast, for years, have been the butt of many jokes. You guys are data science oriented, data scientists, the data doesn't lie. We just keep iterating >> Yeah. >> and make it better and better and better. What could you tell us about the improvements of the forecast over the last decade? Maybe Bill Belichick makes jokes about the weather and you hear it, you say, "You know, actually "the weather's predictions have gotten much better." You guys measure it, what can you share with us? >> Oh, it's gotten so much better over the course of my career, it's pretty dramatic and it's getting better still. You're going to see some real breakthroughs coming up. So, one of the things that we've really put a lot of bets on in IBM is the internet of things, >> Dave: Right. >> and, so, we are, today, pulling off of cellphones atmospheric pressure data and that's going into our next generation model. So, this'll be more data than anybody has powering that model. So, you're able to augment traditional data sources like, you may or may not know, we still launch weather balloons twice a day to measure through the atmosphere, but, in our technology, we take data off of airplanes, we take data off of cellphones, we'll soon be taking data off of cars which will tell us when the windshield wipers are moving, is it raining or not, when the anti-lock brakes things lock, that roads are icy, all of that. So, all of that will come in to improve forecasting. >> So, this requires partnerships with all that and amazing supply chain. >> Absolutely. >> I presume IBM helps there as well, but did you have a lot of that in motion prior to the acquisition, how does that all work? >> I think we've really been empowered by IBM. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Yeah. >> There's no question about that, and it's about finding the win-win. When we work with car manufacturers they're looking to have safe experiences for their drivers and we can help in that regard, and, as we move into autonomous vehicles, there's just going to be even more demand for very high resolution, accurate weather information. >> Am I correct at all, the weather data from all these devices actually goes back to the IBM cloud, is that right, and that's where the models are iterated and developed, is that correct, or does some of it stay out in the network? >> It's all a cloud-based operation that's here. We do do some, I mentioned before that we're working with IBM research on next generation high-performance computing which is actually, it can be cloud-based, but it's also on Prim-based, because of the very large cores we need for computing these models. We're going to run a very high-resolution model globally at a very high frequency. >> So, thinking about some of the industries that you're helping, I mean, you mentioned retail before. Obviously, government's very interested in this. I would imagine investors are interested in the weather in a big way. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about some of the more interesting industries, use cases, business models. >> Yeah, there's a lot out there, there's traditional ones we've served for years like energy traders that are very interested in, you know, because they're trying to make decisions about that. The financial services sector is also very interested. When they can get some additional insights through footfall traffic, if they know certain stores are seeing more footfall traffic, that will give them some indication, a little edge up in the marketplace for that. So, we see those kind of things, and other traditional areas as well, agriculture, what you would expect there. >> So people, you know, you hear a lot of talk in the press about artificial intelligence and Elon Musk predictions and the like, but here's an example where machine intelligence, everybody welcomes, keeps getting better and better and better. How far could we take AI and weather? Where do you see this going in the next 10 years? >> So, on the consumer side, I think it's really about transforming the way that we're delivering weather on the digital platform, the new age of the weather app will say, and, really, users want a personalized experience. They want to know how the weather's going to impact me, but they don't want to personalize, right? So, that's where machine learning is coming in, that we can be able to provide those insights. We'll know that, maybe, you're an allergy sufferer or migraine sufferer, and we're going to tell you that the conditions are right for that you might have symptoms related to that around health. So, there's a lot of ways, on the consumer side, more personalized experience, giving you more assurance that you don't have to, necessarily, go to the app to find information. We're going to send it to you more proactively, and, so, machine learning is helping us do that cognitive science as well. So, it's a pretty exciting time to be part of the weather. >> Yeah, that bum knee I have, you know, you might want to get ahead of the pain. >> That's right, with the arthritis, yes, yes, so, definitely. >> Alright, Mary, we'll give you last word on IBM Think and, you know, the whole trend of AI and weather. >> So, I think it's really exciting. I think Ginni says it really well. It's about AI and the person as well. You know, AI doesn't take over. It's really finding the way to AI to really assist decision makers and that's we're going on the business end of things is really sorting through tons and tons of data to really provide the insights that people can make, businesses can make really great decisions. >> Well, it's always been a really fascinating acquisition to me, and, now, just to see how it's evolving is really amazing. So, Sheri and Mary, thanks very much for coming on the Cube >> Thank you. >> and sharing your experiences. >> Thanks so much. >> Great, thank you. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there, everybody, you're watching the Cube. We're live from Think 2018 and we'll be right back. (techno beat)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and this is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think 2018, the inaugural event, IBM's consolidated a number of events here, I've been joking there's too many people to count, I think it's between 30 and 40,000 people. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek is here, she's the president of >> Michelle: Good job. >> Global Marketing, Michelle B-B, for short >> Yes. >> Global Marketing, business solutions at IBM, and John Bobo, who's the managing director of Racing Ops at NASCAR. >> Yes. >> We're going to have, a fun conversation. >> I think it's going to be a fun one. >> Michelle B-B, start us off, why is weather such a hot topic, so important? >> Well, I think as you know we're both about to fly potentially into a snowstorm tonight, I mean weather is a daily habit. 90% of all U.S. adults consume weather on a weekly basis, and at the weather company, which is part of IBM, right, an IBM business, we're helping millions of consumers anticipate, prepare for, and plan, not just in the severe, but also in the every day, do I carry an umbrella, what do I do? We are powering Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, So if you're getting your weather from those applications, you're getting it from us. And on average we're reaching about 225 million consumers, but what's really interesting is while we've got this tremendous consumer business and we're helping those millions of consumers, we're also helping businesses out there, right? So, there isn't a business on the planet, and we'll talk a little bit about NASCAR, that isn't impacted by weather. I would argue that it is incredibly essential to business. There's something like a half a trillion dollars in economic impact from weather alone, every single year here in the U.S. And so most businesses don't yet have a weather strategy, so what's really important is that we help them understand how to take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage. >> Well let's talk about that, how does NASCAR take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage, what are you guys doing, John, with, with weather? >> Oh, it's very important to us, we're 38 weekends a year, we're probably one of the longest seasons in professional sports, we produce over 500 hours of live television just in our top-tier series a year, we're a sport, we're a business, we're an entertainment property, and we're entertaining hundreds of thousands of people live at an event, and then millions of people at home who are watching us over the internet or watching us on television through our broadcast partners. Unlike other racing properties, you know, open-wheeled racing, it's a lot of downforce, they can race in the rain. A 3,500 pound stock car cannot race in the rain, it's highly dangerous, so rain alone is going to have to postpone the event, delay the event, and that's a multi-million dollar decision. And so what we're doing with Weather Channel is we're getting real-time information, hyper-localized models designed around our event within four kilometers of every venue, remember, we're in a different venue every week across the country. Last week we're in the Los Angeles market, next week we're going to be in Martinsville, Virginia. It also provides us a level of consistency, as places we go, and knowing we can pick up the phone and get decision support from the weather desk, and they know us, and they care as much about us as we do, and what we need to do, it's been a big help and a big confidence builder. >> So NASCAR fans are some of the most fanatic fans, a fan of course is short for fanatic, they love the sport, they show up, what happens when, give us the before and after, before you kind of used all this weather data, what was it like before, what was the fan impact, and how is that different now? >> Going back when NASCAR first started getting on television, the solution was we would send people out in cars with payphone money, and they would watch for weather all directions, and then they would call it in, say, "the storm's about ten miles out." Then when it went to the bulky cell phones that were about as big as a bread box, we would give them to them and then they would be in the pullover lane and kind of follow the storm in and call Race Control to let us know. It has three big impacts. First is safety, of the fans and safety of our competitors through every event. The second impact is on the competition itself, whether the grip of the tires, the engine temperature, how the wind is going to affect the aerodynamics of the car, and the third is on the industry. We've got a tremendous industry that travels, and what we're going to have to do to move that industry around by a different day, so we couldn't be more grateful for where we're able to make smarter decisions. >> So how do you guys work together, maybe talk about that. >> Well, so, you know, I think, I think one of the things that John alluded to that's so important is that they do have the most accurate, precise data out there, right, so when we talk about accuracy, a single model, or the best model in the world isn't going to produce the best forecast, it's actually a blend of 162 models, and we take the output of that and we're providing a forecast for anywhere that you are, and it's specific to you and it's weighted differently based on where you are. And then we talk about that precision, which gets down to that four kilometer space that John alluded to that is so incredibly important, because one of the things that we know is that weather is in fact hyper-local, right, if you are within two kilometers of a weather-reporting station, your weather report is going to be 15% more accurate. Now think about that for a minute, analytics perspective, right, when you can get 15% more accuracy, >> Dave: Huge. >> You're going to have a much better output, and so that precision point is important, and then there's the scale. John talks about having 38 race weekends and sanctioning 1,200 races, but also we've got millions of consumers that are asking us for weather data on a daily basis, producing 25 billion forecasts for all of those folks, again, 2.2 billion locations around the world at that half a kilometer resolution. And so what this means is that we're able to give John and his Racing Operations Team the best, most accurate forecast on the planet, and not just the raw data, but the insight, so what we've built, in partnership with Flagship, one of our business partners, is the NASCAR Weather Track, and this is a race operations dashboard that is very specific to NASCAR and the elements that are most important to them. What they need to see right there, visible, and then when they have a question they can call right into a meteorologist who is on-hand 24/7 from the Wednesday leading up to a race all the way till that checkered flag goes down, providing them with any insight, right, so we always have that human intelligence, because while the forecast is great you always want somebody making that important decision that is in fact a multi-million dollar one. >> John, can you take us through the anatomy of how you get from data to insight, I mean you got to, it's amazing application here, you got the edge, you got the cloud, you got your operations center, when do you start, how do you get the data, who analyzes the data, how do you get to decision making? >> Yeah, we're data hogs in every aspect of the sport, whether it's our cars, our events, or even our own operations. We get through Flagship Solutions, and they do a fantastic job through a weather dashboard, the different solutions. We start getting reports on Monday for the week ahead. And so we're tracking it, and in fact it adds some drama to the event, especially as we're looking at the forecast for Martinsville this upcoming weekend. We work closely with our broadcast partners, our track partners, you know, we don't own the venues of where we go, we're the sports league, so we're working with broadcast, we're working with our track venues, and then we're also working with everyone in the industry and all our other official sponsors, and people that come to an event to have a great time. Sometimes we're making those decisions in the event itself, while the race is going on, as things may pop up, pop-up storms, things may change, but whether it's their advice on how to create our policy and be smarter about that, whether it's the real-time data that makes us smarter, or just being able to pick up a phone and discuss the various multi-variables that we see occurring in a situation, what we need to do live, to do, and it's important to us. >> So, has it changed the way, sometimes you might have to cancel an event, obviously, so has it changed the way in which you've made that decision and communicate to your, to your customers, your fans? >> Yeah, absolutely, it's made a lot of us smarter, going into a weekend. You know, weather is something everybody has an opinion about, and so we feel grateful that we can get our opinion from the best place in the country. And then what we do with that is we can either move an event up, we can delay an event, and it helps us make those smarter decisions, and we never like to cancel an event cause it's important to the competition, we may postpone it a day, run a race on a Monday or Tuesday, but you know a 10, 11:00 race on a Monday is not the best viewership for our broadcast partners. So, we're doing everything we can to get the race in that day. >> Yeah so it's got to be a pretty radical condition to cancel a race, but then. >> Yes, yeah. >> So what you'll do is you'll predict, you'll pull out the yellow flag, everybody slows down, and you'll be able to anticipate when you're going to have to do that, is that right, versus having people, you know. >> Right. >> Calling on the block phones? >> Or if we say, let's start the race two hours early, and that's good for the track, it's good for our broadcast partners, and we can get the race in before the bad weather occurs, we're going to do that. >> Okay, and then, so, where are you taking this thing, Michelle, I mean, what is John asking you for, how are you responding, maybe talk about the partnership a little bit. >> Well, you know, yes, so I, you know the good news is that we're a year into this partnership and I think it's been fantastic, and our goal is to continue to provide the best weather insights, and I think what we will be looking at are things like scenario plannings, so as we start to look longer-range, what are some of the things that we can do to better anticipate not just the here and now, but how do we plan for scenarios? We've been looking at severe weather playbooks too, so what is our plan for severe weather that we can share across the organization? And then, you know, I think too, it's understanding potentially how can we create a better fan experience, and how can we get some of this weather insight out to the fans themselves so that they can see what's going to happen with the weather and better prepare. It's, you know, NASCAR is such a tremendous partner for us because they're showcasing the power of these weather insights, but there isn't a business on the planet that isn't impacted, I mean, you know we're working with 140 airlines, we're working with utility companies that need to know how much power is going to be consumed on the grid tomorrow, they don't care as much about a temperature, they want to know how much power is going to be consumed, so when you think about the decisions that these companies have to make, yes the forecast is great and it's important, but it really is what are the insights that I can derive from all of that data that are going to make a big difference? >> Investors. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Airlines. >> Airlines, utility companies, retailers. >> Logistics. >> Logistics, you know, if you think about insurance companies, right, there's a billion dollars in damage every single year from hail. Property damage, and so when you think about these organizations where every single, we just did this great weather study, and I have to get you a copy of it, but the Institute of Business Value at IBM did a weather study and we surveyed a thousand C-level executives, every single one of them said that weather had an impact on at least one revenue metric, every single, 100%. And 93% of them said that if they had better weather insights it would have a positive impact on their business. So we know that weather's important, and what we've got to do is really figure out how we can help companies better harness it, but nobody's doing it better than these guys. >> I want to share a stat that we talked about off-camera. >> Sure. >> 'Cause we all travel, I was telling a story, my daughter got her flight canceled, very frustrating, but I like it because at least you now know you can plan at home, but you had a stat that it's actually improved the situation, can you share that? >> Right, yeah, so nobody likes to have their flights canceled, right, and we know that 70% of all airline delays are due to weather, but one of the things we talked about is, you know, is our flight going to go out? Well airlines are now operating with a greater degree of confidence, and so what they're doing is they trust the forecast more. So they're able to cancel flights sooner, and by doing so, and I know nobody really likes to have their flight canceled, but by doing so, when we know sooner, we're now able to return those airlines to normal operations even faster, and reduce cancellations in total by about 11%. That's huge. And so I think that when you look at the business impact that these weather insights can have across all of these industries, it's just tremendous. >> So if you're a business traveler, you're going to be better off in the long run. >> That's right, I promise. >> So John I have to ask you about the data science, when IBM bought the weather company a big part of the announcement was the number of data scientists that you guys brought to the table. There's an IOT aspect as well, which is very important. But from a data science standpoint, how much do you lean on IBM for the data science, do you bring your own data scientists to the table, how to they collaborate? >> No no, we lean totally on them, this is their expertise. Nobody's going to be better at it in the world than they are, but, you know, we know that at certain times past data may be more predictive, we know that at different times different data sets show different things and they show so much, we want to have cars race, we want to concentrate on officiating a race, putting on the bet entertainment we can for sports fans, it's a joy to look at their data and pick up the phone and not have to figure this out for myself. >> Yeah, great. Well John, Michelle, thanks so much for coming. >> Thank you. >> I'll give you the last word, Michelle, IBM Think, the weather, make a prediction, whatever you like. >> Well, I just have to say, for all of you who are heading home tonight, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, so good luck there. And if you haven't, this is the one thing I have to say, if you haven't had the opportunity to go to a NASCAR race, please do so, it is one of the most exciting experiences around. >> Oh, and I want to mention, I just downloaded this new app. Storm Radar. >> Oh yes, please do. >> Storm radar. So far, I mean I've only checked it out a little bit, but it looks great. Very high ratings, 13,600 people have rated it, it's a five rating, five stars, you should check it out. >> Michelle: I love that. >> Storm Radar. >> John: It is good isn't it. >> And just, just check it out on your app store. >> So, thanks you guys, >> Michelle: Love that. Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate it. And thank you for watching, we'll be right back right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018. (light jingle)