(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is a global special open program we're doing every year. We're going to continue it every quarter. We're going to do more and more content, getting the voices out there and celebrating the diversity. And I'm excited to have an amazing guest here, LaDavia Drane, who's the head of Global Inclusion Diversity & Equity at AWS. LaDavia, we tried to get you in on AWS re:Invent, and you were super busy. So much going on. The industry has seen the light. They're seeing everything going on, and the numbers are up, but still not there, and getting better. This is your passion, our passion, a shared passion. Tell us about your situation, your career, how you got into it. What's your story? >> Yeah. Well, John, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad that we finally got this opportunity to speak. How did I get into this work? Wow, you know, I'm doing the work that I love to do, number one. It's always been my passion to be a voice for the voiceless, to create a seat at the table for folks that may not be welcome to certain tables. And so, it's been something that's been kind of the theme of my entire professional career. I started off as a lawyer, went to Capitol Hill, was able to do some work with members of Congress, both women members of Congress, but also, minority members of Congress in the US Congress. And then, that just morphed into what I think has become a career for me in inclusion, diversity, and equity. I decided to join Amazon because I could tell that it's a company that was ready to take it to the next level in this space. And sure enough, that's been my experience here. So now, I'm in it, I'm in it with two feet, doing great work. And yeah, yeah, it's almost a full circle moment for me. >> It's really an interesting background. You have a background in public policy. You mentioned Capitol Hill. That's awesome. DC kind of moves slow, but it's a complicated machinery there. Obviously, as you know, navigating that, Amazon grew significantly. We've been at every re:Invent with theCUBE since 2013, like just one year. I watched Amazon grow, and they've become very fast and also complicated, like, I won't say like Capitol, 'cause that's very slow, but Amazon's complicated. AWS is in the realm of powering a generation of public policy. We had the JEDI contract controversy, all kinds of new emerging challenges. This pivot to tech was great timing because one, (laughs) Amazon needed it because they were growing so fast in a male dominated world, but also, their business is having real impact on the public. >> That's right, that's right. And when you say the public, I'll just call it out. I think that there's a full spectrum of diversity and we work backwards from our customers, and our customers are diverse. And so, I really do believe, I agree that I came to the right place at the right time. And yeah, we move fast and we're also moving fast in this space of making sure that both internally and externally, we're doing the things that we need to do in order to reach a diverse population. >> You know, I've noticed how Amazon's changed from the culture, male dominated culture. Let's face it, it was. And now, I've seen over the past five years, specifically go back five, is kind of in my mental model, just the growth of female leaders, it's been impressive. And there was some controversy. They were criticized publicly for this. And we said a few things as well in those, like around 2014. How is Amazon ensuring and continuing to get the female employees feel represented and empowered? What's going on there? What programs do you have? Because it's not just doing it, it's continuing it, right? And 'cause there is a lot more to do. I mean, the half (laughs) the products are digital now for everybody. It's not just one population. (laughs) Everyone uses digital products. What is Amazon doing now to keep it going? >> Well, I'll tell you, John, it's important for me to note that while we've made great progress, there's still more that can be done. I am very happy to be able to report that we have big women leaders. We have leaders running huge parts of our business, which includes storage, customer experience, industries and business development. And yes, we have all types of programs. And I should say that, instead of calling it programs, I'm going to call it strategic initiatives, right? We are very thoughtful about how we engage our women. And not only how we hire, attract women, but how we retain our women. We do that through engagement, groups like our affinity groups. So Women at Amazon is an affinity group. Women in finance, women in engineering. Just recently, I helped our Black employee network women's group launch, BEN Women. And so you have these communities of women who come together, support and mentor one another. We have what we call Amazon Circles. And so these are safe spaces where women can come together and can have conversations, where we are able to connect mentors and sponsors. And we're seeing that it's making all the difference in the world for our women. And we see that through what we call Connections. We have an inclusion sentiment tracker. So we're able to ask questions every single day and we get a response from our employees and we can see how are our women feeling, how are they feeling included at work? Are they feeling as though they can be who they are authentically at Amazon? And so, again, there's more work that needs to be done. But I will say that as I look at the data, as I'm talking to engaging women, I really do believe that we're on the right path. >> LaDavia, talk about the urgent needs of the women that you're hearing from the Circles. That's a great program. The affinity circles, the groups are great. Now, you have the groups, what are you hearing? What are the needs of the women? >> So, John, I'll just go a little bit into what's becoming a conversation around equity. So, initially I think we talked a lot about equality, right? We wanted everyone to have fair access to the same things. But now, women are looking for equity. We're talking about not just leveling the playing field, which is equality, but don't give me the same as you give everyone else. Instead, recognize that I may have different circumstances, I may have different needs. And give me what I need, right? Give me what I need, not just the same as everyone else. And so, I love seeing women evolve in this way, and being very specific about what they need more than, or what's different than what a man may have in the same situation because their circumstances are not always the same and we should treat them as such. >> Yeah, I think that's a great equity point. I interviewed a woman here, ex-Amazonian, she's now a GSI, Global System Integrator. She's a single mom. And she said remote work brought her equity because people on her team realized that she was a single mom. And it wasn't the, how do you balance life, it was her reality. And what happened was, she had more empathy with the team because of the new work environment. So, I think this is an important point to call out, that equity, because that really makes things smoother in terms of the interactions, not the assumptions, you have to be, you know, always the same as a man. So, how does that go? What's the current... How would you characterize the progress in that area right now? >> I believe that employers are just getting better at this. It's just like you said, with the hybrid being the norm now, you have an employer who is looking at people differently based on what they need. And it's not a problem, it's not an issue that a single mother says, "Well, I need to be able to leave by 5:00 PM." I think that employers now, and Amazon is right there along with other employers, are starting just to evolve that muscle of meeting the needs. People don't have to feel different. You don't have to feel as though there's some kind of of special circumstance for me. Instead, it's something that we, as employers, we're asking for. And we want to meet those needs that are different in some situations. >> I know you guys do a lot of support of women outside of AWS, and I had a story I recorded for the program. This woman, she talked about how she was a nerd from day one. She's a tomboy. They called her a tomboy, but she always loved robotics. And she ended up getting dual engineering degrees. And she talked about how she didn't run away and there was many signals to her not to go. And she powered through, at that time, and during her generation, that was tough. And she was successful. How are you guys taking the education to STEM, to women, at young ages? Because we don't want to turn people away from tech if they have the natural affinity towards it. And not everyone is going to be, as, you know, (laughs) strong, if you will. And she was a bulldog, she was great. She's just like, "I'm going for it. I love it so much." But not everyone's like that. So, this is an educational thing. How do you expose technology, STEM for instance, and making it more accessible, no stigma, all that stuff? I mean, I think we've come a long way, but still. >> What I love about women is we don't just focus on ourselves. We do a very good job of thinking about the generation that's coming after us. And so, I think you will see that very clearly with our women Amazonians. I'll talk about three different examples of ways that Amazonian women in particular, and there are men that are helping out, but I'll talk about the women in particular that are leading in this area. On my team, in the Inclusion, Diversity & Equity team, we have a program that we run in Ghana where we meet basic STEM needs for a afterschool program. So we've taken this small program, and we've turned their summer camp into this immersion, where girls and boys, we do focus on the girls, can come and be completely immersed in STEM. And when we provide the technology that they need, so that they'll be able to have access to this whole new world of STEM. Another program which is run out of our AWS In Communities team, called AWS Girls' Tech Day. All across the world where we have data centers, we're running these Girls' Tech Day. They're basically designed to educate, empower and inspire girls to pursue a career in tech. Really, really exciting. I was at the Girls' Tech Day here recently in Columbus, Ohio, and I got to tell you, it was the highlight of my year. And then I'll talk a little bit about one more, it's called AWS GetIT, and it's been around for a while. So this is a program, again, it's a global program, it's actually across 13 countries. And it allows girls to explore cloud technology, in particular, and to use it to solve real world problems. Those are just three examples. There are many more. There are actually women Amazonians that create these opportunities off the side of their desk in they're local communities. We, in Inclusion, Diversity & Equity, we fund programs so that women can do this work, this STEM work in their own local communities. But those are just three examples of some of the things that our Amazonians are doing to bring girls along, to make sure that the next generation is set up and that the next generation knows that STEM is accessible for girls. >> I'm a huge believer. I think that's amazing. That's great inspiration. We need more of that. It's awesome. And why wouldn't we spread it around? I want to get to the equity piece, that's the theme for this year's IWD. But before that, getting that segment, I want to ask you about your title, and the choice of words and the sequence. Okay, Global Inclusion, Diversity, Equity. Not diversity only. Inclusion is first. We've had this debate on theCUBE many years now, a few years back, it started with, "Inclusion is before diversity," "No, diversity before inclusion, equity." And so there's always been a debate (laughs) around the choice of words and their order. What's your opinion? What's your reaction to that? Is it by design? And does inclusion come before diversity, or am I just reading it to it? >> Inclusion doesn't necessarily come before diversity. (John laughs) It doesn't necessarily come before equity. Equity isn't last, but we do lead with inclusion in AWS. And that is very important to us, right? And thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about it. We lead with inclusion because we want to make sure that every single one of our builders know that they have a place in this work. And so it's important that we don't only focus on hiring, right? Diversity, even though there are many, many different levels and spectrums to diversity. Inclusion, if you start there, I believe that it's what it takes to make sure that you have a workplace where everyone knows you're included here, you belong here, we want you to stay here. And so, it helps as we go after diversity. And we want all types of people to be a part of our workforce, but we want you to stay. And inclusion is the thing. It's the thing that I believe makes sure that people stay because they feel included. So we lead with inclusion. Doesn't mean that we put diversity or equity second or third, but we are proud to lead with inclusion. >> Great description. That was fabulous. Totally agree. Double click, thumbs up. Now let's get into the theme. Embracing equity, 'cause this is a term, it's in quotes. What does that mean to you? You mentioned it earlier, I love it. What does embrace equity mean? >> Yeah. You know, I do believe that when people think about equity, especially non-women think about equity, it's kind of scary. It's, "Am I going to give away what I have right now to make space for someone else?" But that's not what equity means. And so I think that it's first important that we just educate ourselves about what equity really is. It doesn't mean that someone's going to take your spot, right? It doesn't mean that the pie, let's use that analogy, gets smaller. The pie gets bigger, right? >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And everyone is able to have their piece of the pie. And so, I do believe that I love that IWD, International Women's Day is leading with embracing equity because we're going to the heart of the matter when we go to equity, we're going to the place where most people feel most challenged, and challenging people to think about equity and what it means and how they can contribute to equity and thus, embrace equity. >> Yeah, I love it. And the advice that you have for tech professionals out there on this, how do you advise other groups? 'Cause you guys are doing a lot of great work. Other organizations are catching up. What would be your advice to folks who are working on this equity challenge to reach gender equity and other equitable strategic initiatives? And everyone's working on this. Sustainability and equity are two big projects we're seeing in every single company right now. >> Yeah, yeah. I will say that I believe that AWS has proven that equity and going after equity does work. Embracing equity does work. One example I would point to is our AWS Impact Accelerator program. I mean, we provide 30 million for early stage startups led by women, Black founders, Latino founders, LGBTQ+ founders, to help them scale their business. That's equity. That's giving them what they need. >> John: Yeah. >> What they need is they need access to capital. And so, what I'd say to companies who are looking at going into the space of equity, I would say embrace it. Embrace it. Look at examples of what companies like AWS is doing around it and embrace it because I do believe that the tech industry will be better when we're comfortable with embracing equity and creating strategic initiatives so that we could expand equity and make it something that's just, it's just normal. It's the normal course of business. It's what we do. It's what we expect of ourselves and our employees. >> LaDavia, you're amazing. Thank you for spending the time. My final couple questions really more around you. Capitol Hill, DC, Amazon Global Head of Inclusion, Diversity & Equity, as you look at making change, being a change agent, being a leader, is really kind of similar, right? You've got DC, it's hard to make change there, but if you do it, it works, right? (laughs) If you don't, you're on the side of the road. So, as you're in your job now, what are you most excited about? What's on your agenda? What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I'm most excited about the potential of what we can get done, not just for builders that are currently in our seats, but for builders in the future. I tend to focus on that little girl. I don't know her, I don't know where she lives. I don't know how old she is now, but she's somewhere in the world, and I want her to grow up and for there to be no question that she has access to AWS, that she can be an employee at AWS. And so, that's where I tend to center, I center on the future. I try to build now, for what's to come, to make sure that this place is accessible for that little girl. >> You know, I've always been saying for a long time, the software is eating the world, now you got digital transformation, business transformation. And that's not a male only, or certain category, it's everybody. And so, software that's being built, and the systems that are being built, have to have first principles. Andy Jassy is very strong on this. He's been publicly saying, when trying to get pinned down about certain books in the bookstore that might offend another group. And he's like, "Look, we have first principles. First principles is a big part of leading." What's your reaction to that? How would you talk to another professional and say, "Hey," you know this, "How do I make the right call? Am I doing the wrong thing here? And I might say the wrong thing here." And is it first principles based? What's the guardrails? How do you keep that in check? How would you advise someone as they go forward and lean in to drive some of the change that we're talking about today? >> Yeah, I think as leaders, we have to trust ourselves. And Andy actually, is a great example. When I came in as head of ID&E for AWS, he was our CEO here at AWS. And I saw how he authentically spoke from his heart about these issues. And it just aligned with who he is personally, his own personal principles. And I do believe that leaders should be free to do just that. Not to be scripted, but to lead with their principles. And so, I think Andy's actually a great example. I believe that I am the professional in this space at this company that I am today because of the example that Andy set. >> Yeah, you guys do a great job, LaDavia. What's next for you? >> What's next. >> World tour, you traveling around? What's on your plate these days? Share a little bit about what you're currently working on. >> Yeah, so you know, at Amazon, we're always diving deep. We're always diving deep, we're looking for root cause, working very hard to look around corners, and trying to build now for what's to come in the future. And so I'll continue to do that. Of course, we're always planning and working towards re:Invent, so hopefully, John, I'll see you at re:Invent this December. But we have some great things happening throughout the year, and we'll continue to... I think it's really important, as opposed to looking to do new things, to just continue to flex the same muscles and to show that we can be very, very focused and intentional about doing the same things over and over each year to just become better and better at this work in this space, and to show our employees that we're committed for the long haul. So of course, there'll be new things on the horizon, but what I can say, especially to Amazonians, is we're going to continue to stay focused, and continue to get at this issue, and doing this issue of inclusion, diversity and equity, and continue to do the things that work and make sure that our culture evolves at the same time. >> LaDavia, thank you so much. I'll give you the final word. Just share some of the big projects you guys are working on so people can know about them, your strategic initiatives. Take a minute to plug some of the major projects and things that are going on that people either know about or should know about, or need to know about. Take a minute to share some of the big things you guys got going on, or most of the things. >> So, one big thing that I would like to focus on, focus my time on, is what we call our Innovation Fund. This is actually how we scale our work and we meet the community's needs by providing micro grants to our employees so our employees can go out into the world and sponsor all types of different activities, create activities in their local communities, or throughout the regions. And so, that's probably one thing that I would like to focus on just because number one, it's our employees, it's how we scale this work, and it's how we meet our community's needs in a very global way. And so, thank you John, for the opportunity to talk a bit about what we're up to here at Amazon Web Services. But it's just important to me, that I end with our employees because for me, that's what's most important. And they're doing some awesome work through our Innovation Fund. >> Inclusion makes the workplace great. Empowerment, with that kind of program, is amazing. LaDavia Drane, thank you so much. Head of Global Inclusion and Diversity & Equity at AWS. This is International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching and stay with us for more great interviews and people and what they're working on. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>We are back in the final stretch at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I'm your host Paul Gillum with my co-host Dave Nicholson, and we've been talking to so many smart people this week. It just, it makes, boggles my mind are next guest. J Poso is the HPC and AI technology strategist at Dell. Jay also has a PhD in astronomy from the University of Texas. And I'm guessing you were up watching the Artemis launch the other night? >>I, I wasn't. I really should have been, but, but I wasn't, I was in full super computing conference mode. So that means discussions at, you know, various venues with people into the wee hours. >>How did you make the transition from a PhD in astronomy to an HPC expert? >>It was actually really straightforward. I did theoretical astrophysics and I was modeling what white dwarfs look like when they create matter and then explode as type one A super Novi, which is a class of stars that blow up. And it's a very important class because they blow up almost exactly the same way. So if you know how bright they are physically, not just how bright they appear in the sky, but if you can determine from first principles how bright they're, then you have a standard ruler for the universe when they go off in a galaxy, you know how far the galaxy is about how faint it is. So to model these though, you had to understand equations of physics, including electron degeneracy pressure, as well as normal fluid dynamics kinds of of things. And so you were solving for an explosive burning front, ripping through something. And that required a supercomputer to have anywhere close to the fat fidelity to get a reasonable answer and, and hopefully some understanding. >>So I've always said electrons are degenerate. I've always said it and I, and I mentioned to Paul earlier, I said, finally we're gonna get a guest to consort through this whole dark energy dark matter thing for us. We'll do that after, after, after the segment. >>That's a whole different, >>So, well I guess super computing being a natural tool that you would use. What is, what do you do in your role as a strategist? >>So I'm in the product management team. I spend a lot of time talking to customers about what they want to do next. HPC customers are always trying to be maximally productive of what they've got, but always wanting to know what's coming next. Because if you think about it, we can't simulate the entire human body cell for cell on any supercomputer day. We can simulate parts of it, cell for cell or the whole body with macroscopic physics, but not at the, you know, atomic level, the entire organism. So we're always trying to build more powerful computers to solve larger problems with more fidelity and less approximations in it. And so I help people try to understand which technologies for their next system might give them the best advance in capabilities for their simulation work, their data analytics work, their AI work, et cetera. Another part of it is talking to our great technology partner ecosystem and learning about which technologies they have. Cause it feeds the first thing, right? So understanding what's coming, and Dell has a, we're very proud of our large partner ecosystem. We embrace many different partners in that with different capabilities. So understanding those helps understand what your future systems might be. That those are two of the major roles in it. Strategic customers and strategic technologies. >>So you've had four days to wander the, this massive floor here and lots of startups, lots of established companies doing interesting things. What have you seen this week that really excites you? >>So I'm gonna tell you a dirty little secret here. If you are working for someone who makes super computers, you don't get as much time to wander the floor as you would think because you get lots of meetings with people who really want to understand in an NDA way, not just in the public way that's on the floor, but what's, what are you not telling us on the floor? What's coming next? And so I've been in a large number of customer meetings as well as being on the floor. And while I can't obviously share the everything, that's a non-disclosure topic in those, some things that we're hearing a lot about, people are really concerned with power because they see the TDP on the roadmaps for all the silicon providers going way up. And so people with power comes heat as waste. And so that means cooling. >>So power and cooling has been a big topic here. Obviously accelerators are, are increasing in importance in hpc not just for AI calculations, but now also for simulation calculations. And we are very proud of the three new accelerator platforms we launched here at the show that are coming out in a quarter or so. Those are two of the big topics we've seen. You know, there's, as you walk the floor here, you see lots of interesting storage vendors. HPC community's been do doing storage the same way for roughly 20 years. But now we see a lot of interesting players in that space. We have some great things in storage now and some great things that, you know, are coming in a year or two as well. So it's, it's interesting to see that diversity of that space. And then there's always the fun, exciting topics like quantum computing. We unveiled our first hybrid classical quantum computing system here with I on Q and I can't say what the future holds in this, in this format, but I can say we believe strongly in the future of quantum computing and that this, that future will be integrated with the kind of classical computing infrastructure that we make and that will help make quantum computing more powerful downstream. >>Well, let's go down that rabbit hole because, oh boy, boy, quantum computing has been talked about for a long time. There was a lot of excitement about it four or five years ago, some of the major vendors were announcing quantum computers in the cloud. Excitement has kind of died down. We don't see a lot of activity around, no, not a lot of talk around commercial quantum computers, yet you're deep into this. How close are we to have having a true quantum computer or is it a, is it a hybrid? More >>Likely? So there are probably more than 20 and I think close to 40 companies trying different approaches to make quantum computers. So, you know, Microsoft's pursuing a topol topological approach, do a photonics based approach. I, on Q and i on trap approach. These are all different ways of trying to leverage the quantum properties of nature. We know the properties exist, we use 'em in other technologies. We know the physics, but trying the engineering is very difficult. It's very difficult. I mean, just like it was difficult at one point to split the atom. It's very difficult to build technologies that leverage quantum properties of nature in a consistent and reliable and durable way, right? So I, you know, I wouldn't wanna make a prediction, but I will tell you I'm an optimist. I believe that when a tremendous capability with, with tremendous monetary gain potential lines up with another incentive, national security engineering seems to evolve faster when those things line up, when there's plenty of investment and plenty of incentive things happen. >>So I think a lot of my, my friends in the office of the CTO at Dell Technologies, when they're really leading this effort for us, you know, they would say a few to several years probably I'm an optimist, so I believe that, you know, I, I believe that we will sell some of the solution we announced here in the next year for people that are trying to get their feet wet with quantum. And I believe we'll be selling multiple quantum hybrid classical Dell quantum computing systems multiple a year in a year or two. And then of course you hope it goes to tens and hundreds of, you know, by the end of the decade >>When people talk about, I'm talking about people writ large, super leaders in supercomputing, I would say Dell's name doesn't come up in conversations I have. What would you like them to know that they don't know? >>You know, I, I hope that's not true, but I, I, I guess I understand it. We are so good at making the products from which people make clusters that we're number one in servers, we're number one in enterprise storage. We're number one in so many areas of enterprise technology that I, I think in some ways being number one in those things detracts a little bit from a subset of the market that is a solution subset as opposed to a product subset. But, you know, depending on which analyst you talk to and how they count, we're number one or number two in the world in supercomputing revenue. We don't always do the biggest splashy systems. We do the, the frontier system at t, the HPC five system at ENI in Europe. That's the largest academic supercomputer in the world and the largest industrial super >>That's based the world on Dell. Dell >>On Dell hardware. Yep. But we, I think our vision is really that we want to help more people use HPC to solve more problems than any vendor in the world. And those problems are various scales. So we are really concerned about the more we're democratizing HPC to make it easier for more people to get in at any scale that their budget and workloads require, we're optimizing it to make sure that it's not just some parts they're getting, that they are validated to work together with maximum scalability and performance. And we have a great HPC and AI innovation lab that does this engineering work. Cuz you know, one of the myths is, oh, I can just go buy a bunch of servers from company X and a network from company Y and a storage system from company Z and then it'll all work as an equivalent cluster. Right? Not true. It'll probably work, but it won't be the highest performance, highest scalability, highest reliability. So we spend a lot of time optimizing and then we are doing things to try to advance the state of HPC as well. What our future systems look like in the second half of this decade might be very different than what they look like right. Now. >>You mentioned a great example of a limitation that we're running up against right now. You mentioned an entire human body as a, as a, as an organism >>Or any large system that you try to model at the atomic level, but it's a huge macro system, >>Right? So will we be able to reach milestones where we can get our arms entirely around something like an entire human organism with simply quantitative advances as opposed to qualitative advances? Right now, as an example, let's just, let's go down to the basics from a Dell perspective. You're in a season where microprocessor vendors are coming out with next gen stuff and those next NextGen microprocessors, GPUs and CPUs are gonna be plugged into NextGen motherboards, PCI e gen five, gen six coming faster memory, bigger memory, faster networking, whether it's NS or InfiniBand storage controllers, all bigger, better, faster, stronger. And I suspect that systems like Frontera, I don't know, but I suspect that a lot of the systems that are out there are not on necessarily what we would think of as current generation technology, but maybe they're n minus one as a practical matter. So, >>But yeah, I mean they have a lifetime, so Exactly. >>The >>Lifetime is longer than the evolution. >>That's the normal technologies. Yeah. So, so what some people miss is this is, this is the reality that when, when we move forward with the latest things that are being talked about here, it's often a two generation move for an individual, for an individual organization. Yep. >>So now some organizations will have multiple systems and they, the system's leapfrog and technology generations, even if one is their real large system, their next one might be newer technology, but smaller, the next one might be a larger one with newer technology and such. Yeah. So the, the biggest super computing sites are, are often running more than one HPC system that have been specifically designed with the latest technologies and, and designed and configured for maybe a different subset of their >>Workloads. Yeah. So, so the, the, to go back to kinda the, the core question, in your opinion, do we need that qualitative leap to something like quantum computing in order to get to the point, or is it simply a question of scale and power at the, at the, at the individual node level to get us to the point where we can in fact gain insight from a digital model of an entire human body, not just looking at a, not, not just looking at an at, at an organ. And to your point, it's not just about human body, any system that we would characterize as being chaotic today, so a weather system, whatever. Do you, are there any milestones that you're thinking of where you're like, wow, you know, I have, I, I understand everything that's going on, and I think we're, we're a year away. We're a, we're, we're a, we're a compute generation away from being able to gain insight out of systems that right now we can't simply because of scale. It's a very, very long question that I just asked you, but I think I, but hopefully, hopefully you're tracking it. What, what are your, what are your thoughts? What are these, what are these inflection points that we, that you've, in your mind? >>So I, I'll I'll start simple. Remember when we used to buy laptops and we worried about what gigahertz the clock speed was Exactly. Everybody knew the gigahertz of it, right? There's some tasks at which we're so good at making the hardware that now the primary issues are how great is the screen? How light is it, what's the battery life like, et cetera. Because for the set of applications on there, we we have enough compute power. We don't, you don't really need your laptop. Most people don't need their laptop to have twice as powerful a processor that actually rather up twice the battery life on it or whatnot, right? We make great laptops. We, we design for all of those, configure those parameters now. And what, you know, we, we see some customers want more of x, somewhat more of y but the, the general point is that the amazing progress in, in microprocessors, it's sufficient for most of the workloads at that level. Now let's go to HPC level or scientific and technical level. And when it needs hpc, if you're trying to model the orbit of the moon around the earth, you don't really need a super computer for that. You can get a highly accurate model on a, on a workstation, on a server, no problem. It won't even really make it break a sweat. >>I had to do it with a slide rule >>That, >>That >>Might make you break a sweat. Yeah. But to do it with a, you know, a single body orbiting with another body, I say orbiting around, but we both know it's really, they're, they're both ordering the center of mass. It's just that if one is much larger, it seems like one's going entirely around the other. So that's, that's not a super computing problem. What about the stars in a galaxy trying to understand how galaxies form spiral arms and how they spur star formation. Right now you're talking a hundred billion stars plus a massive amount of inter stellar medium in there. So can you solve that on that server? Absolutely not. Not even close. Can you solve it on the largest super computer in the world today? Yes and no. You can solve it with approximations on the largest super computer in the world today. But there's a lot of approximations that go into even that. >>The good news is the simulations produce things that we see through our great telescopes. So we know the approximations are sufficient to get good fidelity, but until you really are doing direct numerical simulation of every particle, right? Right. Which is impossible to do. You need a computer as big as the universe to do that. But the approximations and the science in the science as well as the known parts of the science are good enough to give fidelity. So, and answer your question, there's tremendous number of problem scales. There are problems in every field of science and study that exceed the der direct numerical simulation capabilities of systems today. And so we always want more computing power. It's not macho flops, it's real, we need it, we need exo flops and we will need zeta flops beyond that and yada flops beyond that. But an increasing number of problems will be solved as we keep working to solve problems that are farther out there. So in terms of qualitative steps, I do think technologies like quantum computing, to be clear as part of a hybrid classical quantum system, because they're really just accelerators for certain kinds of algorithms, not for general purpose algorithms. I do think advances like that are gonna be necessary to solve some of the very hardest problem. It's easy to actually formulate an optimization problem that is absolutely intractable by the larger systems in the world today, but quantum systems happen to be in theory when they're big and stable enough, great at that kind of problem. >>I, that should be understood. Quantum is not a cure all for absolutely. For the, for the shortage of computing power. It's very good for certain, certain >>Problems. And as you said at this super computing, we see some quantum, but it's a little bit quieter than I probably expected. I think we're in a period now of everybody saying, okay, there's been a lot of buzz. We know it's gonna be real, but let's calm down a little bit and figure out what the right solutions are. And I'm very proud that we offered one of those >>At the show. We, we have barely scratched the surface of what we could talk about as we get into intergalactic space, but unfortunately we only have so many minutes and, and we're out of them. Oh, >>I'm >>J Poso, HPC and AI technology strategist at Dell. Thanks for a fascinating conversation. >>Thanks for having me. Happy to do it anytime. >>We'll be back with our last interview of Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. This is Paul Gillen with Dave Nicholson. Stay with us.

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's covering of AWS Public Sector Summit. In-person here in Washington, DC. I'm John Furrier, your host, great to be back face to face. We've got a great, special guest Clint Crosier, who is the Director of AWS' Aerospace & Satellite. Major General of The Air Force/Space Force. Retired. Great to see you in person again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. >> First of all, props to you for doing a great job at Amazon, bringing all your knowledge from Space Force and Air Force into the cloud. >> Thank you. >> So that's great, historical context. >> It's been valuable and it's provided a whole lot of insight into what we're building with the AWS space team, for sure. >> So number one question I get a lot is: We want more space content. What's the coolest thing going on in space? Is there a really a satellite behind the moon there, hidden there somewhere? What's the coolest thing going on in space? >> Well, the coolest thing that's going on in space, I think is you're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, I mean, to me. I've been in the space industry for 34 years now, and there have been periods where we projected lots of growth and activity and it just didn't really come about, especially in the 80's and the 90's. But what we're seeing today is that growth is taking place. Whether it's the numbers of satellites that are being launched around the globe every year, there's some 3,000 objects on orbit today. Estimates are that there'll be 30,000 objects at the end of the decade, or the number of new companies, or the number of global spinning. It is just happening right now, and it's really exciting. >> So, when people say or hear space, there's a lot of economic changes in terms of the cost structures of how to get things deployed into space. That brings up the question of: Is space an opportunity? Is it a threat vector? What about congestion and security? >> Yeah, well three great things, absolutely an opportunity. We're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, and we're seeing more commercialization than ever before. In my whole career, The Air Force or, NASA, or the NRO would sort of, hold things and do them themselves Today, you're seeing commercial contracts going out from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, from The Air Force, from the Space Force. So lots of opportunity for commercial companies. Security. Absolutely, priority number one should be security is baked into everything we do at AWS. And our customers, our Government classified customers tell us the reason they came to AWS is our security is top notch and certified for all their workloads. And as you well know, we have from unclassified all the way up to top secret capabilities on the AWS cloud. So just powerful opportunities for our customers. >> Yeah. And a lot of competitors will throw foot on that. I know, I've reported on some of that and not a lot of people have that same credential. >> Sure. >> Compared to the competition. >> Sure. >> Now I have to ask you, now that you have the top secret, all these clouds that are very tailorable, flexible with space: How are you helping customers with this Aerospace Division? Is it is a commercial? In the public sector together? What's the... >> All of the above. >> Take us through the value proposition. >> Yeah, happy to do this. So what we recognized over the last two years or so we, at AWS, recognized all this rapid growth that we're talking about within the space industry. Every sector from launch to on-orbit activities, to space exploration, all of it. And so AWS saw that and we looked at ourselves and said: "Do we have the right organization and expertise in place really to help our customers lean into that?" And the answer was: we decided to build a team that had deep experience in space, and that was the team that we grew because our thesis was: If you have a deep experience in space, a deep experience in cloud, you bring those two together and it's a powerful contribution. And so we've assembled a team with more than 500 years of collective hands-on experience, flying satellites, launching rockets. And when we sit down with our customers to innovate on their behalf, we're able to come up with some incredible solutions and I'm happy to talk about those. >> I'd love to, but tell you what, first of all, there's a lot of space nerds out there. I love space. I love space geeking out on the technology, but take us through the year you had, you've had a pretty incredible year with some results. You have that brain trust there. I know you're hiring. I know that people want to work for you. I'm sure the resumes are flying in, a lot of action. >> There is. >> What are the highlights from this year? >> So the highlights I think is, we've built a team that the industry is telling us was needed. Again, there was no organization that really served the space cloud industry. And so we're kind of building this industry within the industry, the space cloud industry. And so number one, just establishing that team and leaning into that industry has been valuable. The other thing that we're real proud of is we built a global team, because space is a global enterprise. We have teams in Europe and in Asia and South America here in the U.S., so we built a global team. One of the things that we did right up front, we weren't even six months old, when we envisioned the idea of doing the AWS Space Accelerator. And some of the folks told me: "Clint, six months under your belt, maybe you ought to get your feet under you." And I said: "No, no. We move fast to support our customers." And so we made a call for any space startup that wanted to come on board with AWS and go through our four week Space Accelerator. We partnered with Sarah from Capital. And the idea was: if you're a small company that wants to grow and build and learn how you can use the cloud to gain competitive advantage, come with us. And so John, I would have been happy if we had 50 companies applied, we had 194 companies across 44 countries that applied to our accelerator. We had to down select a 10, but that was a tremendous accomplishment, two of those are speaking this afternoon, where they met each other at our accelerator and now have formed a partnership: Ursa Space and HawkEye 360 on how they build on the cloud together. Fascinating. >> Well, I love that story. First of all, I love the military mindset. No, we're not going to wait. >> Move it out. >> It's not take that hill, it's take that planet. >> Our customers won't wait, innovation, doesn't wait, the future doesn't wait. We have to move out. >> So, this brings up the entrepreneurship angle. We got there a little early, but I want to talk about it because it's super important. There's an entrepreneurial culture happening right now in the space community >> There is. At large, and it's getting bigger and wider. >> Bigger every day. >> What is that? What if someone says: "Hey, what's going on with entrepreneurship in this space? What are the key dynamics? What's the power dynamics?" It's not money, there's money out there, but like what's the structural thing happening? >> The key dynamic, I think, is we're seeing that we can unlock things that we could never do before. And one of our goals is: the more space data we can make more accessible to more people around the world. It unlocks things we couldn't do. We're working with space companies who are using space data to track endangered whales off the coast of California. We're working with companies that are using space data to measure thermal and greenhouse emissions for climate change and climate management. We're working with one company, Edgybees, who has a small satellite constellation, and they're using it to build satellite based, augmented reality, to provide it to first responders as they go into a disaster response area. And they get a 3D-view of what they're going into. None of those workloads were possible five years ago. And the cloud and cloud-based technologies are really what opens those kinds of workloads up. >> What kind of higher level services do you see emerging from space cloud? Because you know, obviously you have to have some infrastructure. >> Absolutely. Got to put some stuff into space. That's a supply chain, reliability, also threat. I mean, I can have a satellite attack, another satellite, or I'm just making that up, but I'm sure there's other scenarios that the generals are thinking about. >> So space security and cyberspace security is critical. And as I said, it's built into everything we do in all of our platforms, so you're absolutely right about that, but when we think about the entrepreneurship, you know, what we're seeing is, and I'll give you a good example of why the industry is growing so fast and why cloud. So one company we work with, LeoLabs. So Leo identified the growth in the LEO: Low Earth Orbit segment. 3,000 objects on orbit today, 30,000 tomorrow. Who's going to do the space traffic management for 30,000 objects in space that are all in the same orbital regime? And so LeoLabs built a process to do space traffic management, collision avoidance. They were running it on premises. It took them eight hours to do a single run for a single satellite conjunction. We got them to help understand how to use the cloud. They moved all that to AWS. Now that same run they do in 10 seconds. Eight hours to 10 seconds. Those are the kind of workloads as space proliferates in and we grow, that we just can't execute without cloud and cloud-based technologies. >> It's interesting, you know, the cloud has that same kind of line: move your workloads to the cloud and then refactor. >> Yeah. So space workloads are coming to the cloud. >> They are. >> Just changing the culture. So I have to ask you, I know there's a lot of young people out there looking for careers and interests. I mean, Cal poly is going into the high school now offering classes. >> Yeah So high school, there's so much interest in space and technology. What is the cultural mindset to be successful? Andy Jassy last year, reading and talk about the mindset of the builder and the enterprise CXO: "Get off your butt and start building" There's a space ethos going on. What is the mindset? Would you share your view on it? >> The mindset is innovation and moving fast, right? We, we lived, most of my career, in the time where we had an unlimited amount of money and unlimited amount of time. And so we were really slow and deliberate about how we built things. The future won't wait, whether it's commercial application, or military application, we have to move fast. And so the culture is: the faster we can move, The more we'll succeed, and there's no way to move faster than when you're building on the AWS cloud. Ground station is a good example. You know, the proposition of the cloud is: Don't invest your limited resources in your own infrastructure that doesn't differentiate your capability. And so we did that same thing with ground station. And we've said to companies: "Don't spend millions of dollars on developing your own ground station infrastructure, pay by the minute to use AWS's and focus your limited resources back in your product, which differentiate your space mission." and that's just been power. >> How is that going from customer perspective? >> Great. It's going great. We continue to grow. We added another location recently. And just in the last week we announced a licensed accelerator. One of the things our customers told us is it takes too long to work with global governments to get licensed, to operate around the world. And we know that's been the case. So we put together a team that leaned in to solve that problem, and we just announced the licensed accelerator, where we will work with companies to walk them through that process, and we can shave an 18 month process into a three or four month process. And that's been... we've gotten great response on that from our company. >> I've always said: >> I remember when you were hired and the whole space thing was happening. I remember saying to myself: "Man, if democratization can bring, come to space" >> And we're seeing that happening >> You guys started it and you guys, props to your team. >> Making space available to more and more people, and they'll dazzle us with the innovative ways we use space. 10 years ago, we couldn't have envisioned those things I told you about earlier. Now, we're opening up all sorts of workloads and John, real quick, one of the reasons is, in the past, you had to have a specific forte or expertise in working with space data, 'cause it was so unique and formatted and in pipeline systems. We're making that democratized. So it's just like any other data, like apps on your phone. If you can build apps for your phone and manage data, we want to make it that easy to operate with space data, and that's going to change the way the industry operates. >> And that's fundamentally, that's great innovation because you're enabling that. That's why I have to ask you on that note Of the innovation trends that you see or activities: What excites you the most? >> So a lot of things, but I'll give you two examples very quickly: One is high-performance compute. We're seeing more and more companies really lean in to understanding how fast they can go on AWS. I told you about LeoLabs, eight hours to 10 seconds. But that high-performance computes going to be a game changer. The other thing is: oh, and real quick, I want to tell you, Descartes Labs. So Descartes Labs came to us and said: "We want to compete in the Annual Global Top 500 supercomputer challenge" And so we worked with them for a couple of weeks. We built a workload on the AWS standard platform. We came in number 40 in the globe for the Top 500 super computer lists, just by building some workloads on our standard platform. That's powerful, high-performance compute. But the second example I wanted to give you is: digital modeling, digital simulation, digital engineering. Boom Aerospace is a company, Boom, that we work with. Boom decided to build their entire supersonic commercial, supersonic aircraft, digital engineering on the AWS cloud. In the last three years, John, they've executed 6,000 years of high-performance compute in the last three years. How do you do 6,000 years in compute in three years? You spin up thousands of AWS servers simultaneously, let them do your digital management, digital analysis, digital design, bring back a million different perturbations of a wing structure and then pick the one that's best and then come back tomorrow and run it again. That's powerful. >> And that was not even possible, years ago. >> Not at that speed, no, not at that speed. And that's what it's really opening up in terms of innovation. >> So now you've done it so much in your career, okay? Now you're here with Amazon. Looking back on this past year or so, What's the learnings for you? >> The learning is, truly how valuable cloud can be to the space industry, I'll admit to you most people in the space industry and especially in the government space industry. If you ask us a year ago, two years ago: "Hey, what do you think about cloud?" We would have said: "Well, you know, I hear people talk about the cloud. There's probably some value. We should probably look at that" And I was in the same boat, but now that I've dug deeply into the cloud and understand the value of artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, a ground station infrastructure, all those things, I'm more excited than ever before about what the space industry can benefit from cloud computing, and so bringing that, customer by customer is just a really fulfilling way to continue to be part of the space industry. Even though I retired from government service. >> Is there a... I'm just curious because you brought it up. Is there a lot of people coming in from the old, the space industry from public sector? Are they coming into commercial? >> Absolutely. >> Commercial rising up and there's, I mean, I know there's a lot of public/private partnerships, What's the current situation? >> Yeah, lots of partnerships, but we're seeing an interesting trend. You know, it used to be that NASA led the way in science and technology, or the military led the way in science and technology, and they still do in some areas. And then the commercial industry would follow along. We're seeing that's reversed. There's so much growth in the commercial industry. So much money, venture capital being poured in and so many innovative solutions being built, for instance, on the cloud that now the commercial industry is leading technology and building new technology trends that the military and the DOD and their government are trying to take advantage of. And that's why you're seeing all these commercial contracts being led from Air Force, Space Force, NASA, and NRO. To take advantage of that commercialization. >> You like your job. >> I love my job. (laughing) -I can tell, >> I love my job. >> I mean, it is a cool job. I kind of want to work for you. >> So John, space is cool. That's our tagline: space is cool. >> Space is cool. Space equals ratings in the digital TV realm, it is really, super exciting a lot of young people are interested, I mean, robotics clubs in high schools are now varsity sports, eSports, all blend together. >> Space, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics. It's all becoming a singular sector today and it's open to more people than ever before, for the reasons we talked about. >> Big wave and you guys are building the surf boards, everyone a ride it, congratulations. Great to see you in person. >> Thank you. Again, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate that. >> Thanks for having us. >> Clint Crosier is the Director of AWS Aerospace & Satellite. Legend in the industry. Now at AWS. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>>no real filter and that kind of stuff. But you're also an entrepreneur, right? And you know the business, you've been in software, you detect business. I'm instructing you get a lot of pictures, this entertainment business on our show, we're a bubble. We don't do a lot of tech deals that were talking because it's boring tv tech people love tech consumers love the benefit of text. No consumer opens up their iphone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my, what's it been like being on the shark tank? You know, filming is fun and hang out just fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first your head gets really big and you get a really good tables at restaurants and who says texas has got a little possessed more skin in the game today in charge of his destiny. Great robert Herjavec. No, these two stars cube alumni >>welcome back to the cubes coverage of A W. S. Public sector seven. I'm john for your host of the cube got a great segment here on healthcare startup accelerators of course. Sandy carter is co hosting media. This one Vice President Aws. She's awesome on the cuBA and jennifer Blumenthal co founder and C of one record entrepreneur, very successful. Thanks for coming on jennifer. Thank good to see you. Sandy thanks for joining me again. You >>are most welcome, >>jennifer. Before we get into the whole accelerated dynamic, just take a minute to explain what you guys do. One record. >>Sure. So one record is a digital health company that enables users to access aggregate and share their healthcare information. So what that means is we help you as a person get your data and then we also help companies who would like to have workflows were consumers in the loop to get their data. So whether they're sharing it with a provider, researcher payer. >>So, Sandy, we've talked about this amazon web services, healthcare accelerator cohort batches. What do you call cohort batches? Cohorts explain what's going on with the healthcare accelerator? >>Yeah. So, um, we decided that we would launch and partner an accelerator program and accelerator program just provides to a start up a little bit extra technical help. A little bit extra subject matter expertise and introductions to funders. And so we decided we were going to start one for health care. It's one of the biggest disruptive industries in public sector. Um, and so we weren't sure how it's gonna go. We partnered with Kids X. Kids X is part of the Los Angeles system for medical. And so we put out a call for startups and we had 427 startups, we were told on average and accelerating it's 50-100. So we were blown away 31 different countries. So it was really amazing. And then what we've been doing is down selecting and selecting that Top 10 for our first cohort. So we're going from 427 down to 10. And so obviously we looked at the founders themselves to see the quality of the leadership of the company, um the strength of their technology and the fit of the technology into the broader overall healthcare and healthcare ecosystem. And so we were thrilled that jennifer and one record was one of the top 10 start ups in this space that we chose to be in the, in the cohort. And so now we're going to take it to the six weeks intensive where we'll do training, helping them with AWS, provide them A W. S. Credits and then Kid X will also provide some of the health care uh subject matter >>expertise as well. Can I get some of those credits over here to maybe? >>Yes, you can actually, you can talk to me don you can't >>Talk to me, Jennifer, I gotta ask you. So you're an entrepreneur. So doing start doing cos it's like a roller coaster. So now to make the top 10 but also be in the area of his accelerator, it's a partnership, right? You're making a bet. What's your take on all this? >>Well, we've always been partners with a W. S. We started building on AWS in the very beginning. So when I was setting up the company a huge decision early on with infrastructure and when I saw the launch of the accelerator, I had to apply because we're at the point in the company that we're growing and part of growing is growing with the VW. So I was really excited to take advantage of that opportunity and now in the accelerator, it's more of thinking about things that we weren't thinking about the services that we can leverage to fill in the gaps within our platform so we can meet our customers where they are >>using award winning MSP cloud status city, your partners, great relationship with the ecosystem. So congratulations Sandi. What's the disruption for the healthcare? Because right now education and health care, the two top areas we're seeing and we're reporting on where cloud scale developed two point or whatever buzzword digital transformation you want to use is impacting heavily healthcare industry. There's some new realities. What's your, what's your vision, what's your view? >>Hey john before she does that, I have to give a plug to Claudius city because they just made premier partner as well, which is a huge deal. Uh and they're also serving public sector. So I just wanted to make sure that you knew that too. So you can congratulate. Go ahead, jennifer >>Well, so if I zoom in, I think about a P. I. S. Every day, that's what I think about and I think about microservices. So for me and for one record, what we think about is legislation. So 21st century Cures act says that you as a consumer have to be able to access your healthcare data from both your providers and from your players and not just your providers, but also the underlying technology vendors and H. I. E. S. H. I am and it's probably gonna extend to really anyone who plays within the healthcare ecosystem. So you're just going to see this explosion of A. P. I. S. And we're just your one of that. I mean for the payers that we went into effect on july 1st. So I mean when you think about the decentralization of healthcare where healthcare is being delivered plus an api economy, you're just going to have a whole new model developing and then throwing price transparency and you've got a whole new cake. >>I'm smiling because I love the peacocks. In fact, last night I shouldn't have tweeted this but there's a little tweet flames going on around A. P. Is being brittle and all this stuff and I said, hey developer experience about building great software apps are there for you. It's not a glue layer by itself. You got to build software around the so kind of a little preaching to the younger generation. But this health care thing is huge because think about like old school health care, it was anti ap I was also siloed. So what's your take on has the culture is changing health care because the user experience, I want my records, I want my privacy, I want to maintain everything confidential but access. That's hard. >>I think well health care to be used to just be paper was forget about a. P. I. Is it was just paper records. I think uh to me you think about uh patient journey, like a patient journey starts with booking an appointment and then everything after that is essentially an api call. So that's how I think about it is to all these micro transactions that are happening all the time and you want your data to go to your health care provider so they can give you the proper care, you want your data to go to your pair so they can pay for your care and then those two stakeholders want your data so that they can provide the right services at the right time to the right channel. And that is just a series of api calls that literally sits on a platform. >>What's interesting, I'd love to get your take on the where you think the progress bar is in the industry because Fintech has shown the way you got defy now behind a decentralized finance, health care seems to be moving on in a very accelerated rate towards that kind of concept of cloud, scale, decentralization, privacy. >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big question, what's interesting to me around that is how healthcare stakeholders are thinking about where they're providing care. So as they're buying up practices primary care specialty care and they're moving more and more outside of the brick and mortar of the health care system or partnering with your startups. That's really where I think you're going to see a larger ecosystem development, you could just look at CVS and walmart or the dollar store if they're going to be moving into health care, what does that look like? And then if you're seeking care in those settings, but then you're going to Mayo clinic or Kaiser permanente, there's so many new relationships that are part of your hair circle >>delivery is just what does that even mean now, delivery of health >>care. It's wherever you it's like the app economy you want to ride right now, you want a doctor right now, that's where we're heading its ease of use. >>This is this exciting startups, changing the game. Yes, I love it. I mean, this is what it's all about this health >>Care, this is what it's all about. And if you look at the funding right now from VCS, we're seeing so much funding pour into health care, we were just looking at some numbers and in the second quarter alone, the funding went up almost 700%. And the amount of funding that is pouring into companies like jennifer's company to really transform healthcare, 30% of it is going into telehealth. So when you talked about, you know, kind of ai at the edge, getting the right doctor the right expert at the right time, we're seeing that as a big trend in healthcare to >>well jennifer, I think the funding dynamics aside the opportunity for market total addressable market is massive when the application is being decomposed, you got front end, whether it's telemedicine, you got the different building blocks of healthcare being radically reconfigured. It's a re factoring of healthcare. Yeah, >>I think if you just think about where we're sitting today, you had to use an app to prove proof of vaccination. So this is not just national, this is a global thing to have that covid wallet. We at one record have a covid wallet. But just a couple years from now, I need more than just by covid vaccination. I need all my vaccinations. I need all my lab results. I need all my beds. It's opening the door for a new consumer behavior pattern, which is the first step to adoption for any technology. >>So somebody else covid wallet. So I need >>that was California. Did the, did a version of we just have a pen and it's pretty cool. Very handy. I should save it to my drive. But my phone, but I don't jennifer, what's the coolest thing you're working on right now because you're in the middle of all the action. >>I get very excited about the payer app is that we're working on. So I think by the end of the month we will be connected to almost to all the blues in the United States. So I'm very excited when a user comes into the one record and they're able to get their clinical data from the provider organization and then their clinical financial and formulary data from their payers because then you're getting a complete view, You're getting the records for someone who gave you care and you're getting the records from someone who paid for your care. And that's an interesting thing that's really moving towards a complete picture. So from a personal perspective that gets exciting. And then from a professional perspective, it's really working with our partners as they're using our API s to build out workflows and their applications. >>It's an api economy. I'd like to ask you to on the impact side to the patient. I hear a lot of people complaining that hey, I want to bring my records to the doctor and I want to have my own control of my own stuff. A lot of times, some doctors don't even know other historical data points about a patient that could open up a diagnosis and, or care >>or they can't even refer you to a doctor. Most doctors really only refer within a network of people that they know having a provider directory that allows doctors refer, having the data from different doctors outside of their, you know, I didn't really allows people to start thinking beyond just their little box. >>Cool. Well, great to have you on and congratulations on being in the top 10 saying this is a wonderful example of how the ecosystem where you got cloud city, your MSP. You mentioned the shout out to them jerry Miller and his team by working together the cloud gives you advantages. So I have to ask, we look at amazon cloud as an entrepreneur. It's kind of a loaded question, but I'm going to ask it. I love it. >>You always do it >>when you look at amazon, what do you see as opportunities as an entrepreneur? Because I'll see the easy ones. They have computing everything else. But like what's the, what does cloud do for you as an entrepreneur? What does it, what does it make you do? >>Yeah. So for been working with jerry since the beginning for me when I think about it, it's really the growth of our company. So when we start building, we really just thinking about it from a monolithic build and we move to microservices and amazon has been there every step of the way to support us as that. And now, you know, the things that I'm interested in are specifically health lake and anything that's NLP related that we could plug into our solution for when we get data from different sources that are coming in really unstructured formats and making it structured so that it's searchable for people and amazon does that for us with their services that we can add into the applications. >>Yeah, we announced that data health like and july it has a whole set of templates for analytics, focused on health care as well as hip hop compliance out of the box as well. >>The I think I think that's what's important is people used to think application first. Now it's creating essentially a data lake, then analytics and then what applications you build on top of that. And that's how our partners think about it and that's how we try and service them using amazon as our problem. So >>you're honing in on the value of the data and how that conflicts and then work within the whatever application requests might come >>in. Yes, >>it's interesting. You know, we had an event last month and jerry Chen from Greylock partners came on and gave a talk called castles in the cloud. He's gonna be cute before. He's a, he's a veces, they talk about moats and competitive manage so having a moat, The old school perimeter moz how cloud destroyed that. He's like, no, now the castles are in the cloud, he pointed snowflake basically data warehouse in the cloud red shifts there too. But they can be successful. And that's how the cloud, you could actually build value, sustainable value in the cloud. If you think that way of re factoring not just hosting a huge, huge, huge thing. >>I think the only thing he, this was customer service because health care is still very personal. So it's always about how you interact with the end user and how you can help me get to where they need to be going >>and what do you see that going? Because that's, that's a good point. >>I think that is a huge opportunity for any new company that wants to enter healthcare, customer service as a service in health care for all the different places that health care is going to be delivered. Maybe there's a company that I don't know about, but when they come out, I'd like to meet them. >>Yeah, I mean, I can't think of one cover that can think of right now. This is what I would say is great customer service for health care. >>And if there is one out there contacted me because I want to talk to you about AWS. >>Yeah. And you need the app from one record that make it all >>happen. That's where Omni channel customer service across all health care entities. Yeah, that's >>a great billion dollar idea for someone listening to our show right now. >>Right, alright. So saying they had to give you the opportunity to talk more because this is a great example of how the world's very agile. What's the next step for the AWS Healthcare accelerator? Are there more accelerators? Do you do it by vertical? >>What happens next? So, with the healthcare accelerator, this was our first go at the accelerator. So, this is our first set of cohorts, Of course, all 427 companies are going to get some help from a W. S. as well. We also you'll love this john We also did a space accelerator. Make sure you ask Clint about that. So we have startups that are synthesizing oxygen on mars to sending an outpost box to the moon. I mean, it's crazy what these startups are doing. Um, and then the third accelerator we started was around clean energy. So sustainability, we sold that one out to, we had folks from 66 different countries participate in that one. So these have been really successful for us. So it reinvent. When we talk again, we'll be announcing a couple of others. So right now we've got healthcare, space, clean energy and we'll be announcing a couple other accelerators moving forward. >>You know, it's interesting, jennifer the pandemic has changed even our ability to get stories. Just more stories out there now. So you're seeing kind of remote hybrid connections, ap ideas, whether it's software or remote interviews or remote connections. There's more stories being told out there with digital transformation. I mean there wasn't that many before pandemic has changed the landscape because let's face it, people were hiding some really bad projects behind metrics. But when you pull the pandemic back and you go, hey, everyone's kind of emperors got no clothes on. Those are bad projects. Those are good projects that cloud investment worked or I didn't have a cloud investment. They were pretty much screwed at that point. So this is now a new reality of like value, you can't show me value. >>It's crazy to me when I meet people who tell me like we want to move to the cloud of like, why are you not on the cloud? Like this really just blows my life. Like I don't understand why you have on prem or while you did start on the cloud, this is more for larger organizations, but younger organizations, you know, the first thing you have to do, it's set up that environment. >>Yeah. And then now with the migration plans and seeing here, uh whereas education or health care or other verticals, you've got, now you've got containers to give you that compatibility and then you've got kubernetes and you've got microservices, you've got land. Uh I mean, come on, that's the perfect storm innovation. There's no excuses in my opinion. So, you know, if you're out there and you're not leveraging it, then you're probably gonna be out of business. That's my philosophy. Thank you for coming up. Okay. Sandy, thank you. Thank you, john Okay. Any of his coverage here, summit here in D. C. I'm john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mm >>mm mm mhm. I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had >>the opportunity

>>Yeah, yeah. Welcome back to the third session in our building, A vibrant data ecosystem track. This session is unleash the power of your cloud data warehouse. So what comes after you've moved your data to the cloud in this session will explore White Enterprise Analytics is finally ready for the cloud, and we'll discuss how you can consume Enterprise Analytics in the very same way he would cloud services. We'll also explore where analytics meets cloud and see firsthand how thought spot is open for everyone. Let's get going. I'm happy to say we'll be hearing from two folks from thought spot today, Michael said Cassie, VP of strategic partnerships, and Vika Valentina, senior product marketing manager. And I'm very excited to welcome from our partner at AWS Gal Bar MIA, product engineering manager with Red Shift. We'll also be sharing a live demo of thought spot for BTC Marketing Analytics directly on Red Shift data. Gal, please kick us off. >>Thank you, Military. And thanks. The talks about team and everyone attending today for joining us. When we talk about data driven organizations, we hear that 85% of businesses want to be data driven. However, on Lee. 37% have been successful in We ask ourselves, Why is that and believe it or not, Ah, lot of customers tell us that they struggled with live in defining what being data driven it even means, and in particular aligning that definition between the business and the technology stakeholders. Let's talk a little bit. Let's look at our own definition. A data driven organization is an organization that harnesses data is an asset. The drive sustained innovation and create actionable insights. The super charge, the experience of their customers so they demand more. Let's focus on a few things here. One is data is an asset. Data is very much like a product needs to evolve sustained innovation. It's not just innovation innovation, it's sustained. We need to continuously innovate when it comes to data actionable insights. It's not just interesting insights these air actionable that the business can take and act upon, and obviously the actual experience we. Whether whether the customers are internal or external, we want them to request Mawr insights and as such, drive mawr innovation, and we call this the for the flywheel. We use the flywheel metaphor here where we created that data set. Okay, Our first product. Any focused on a specific use case? We build an initial NDP around that we provided with that with our customers, internal or external. They provide feedback, the request, more features. They want mawr insights that enables us to learn bringing more data and reach that actual data. And again we create MAWR insights. And as the flywheel spins faster, we improve on operational efficiencies, supporting greater data richness, and we reduce the cost of experimentation and legacy environments were never built for this kind of agility. In many cases, customers have struggled to keep momentum in their fleet, flywheel in particular around operational efficiency and experimentation. This is where Richie fits in and helps customer make the transition to a true data driven organization. Red Shift is the most widely used data warehouse with tens of thousands of customers. It allows you to analyze all your data. It is the only cloud data warehouse that sits, allows you to analyze data that sits in your data lake on Amazon, a street with no loading duplication or CTL required. It is also allows you to scale with the business with its hybrid architectures it also accelerates performance. It's a shared storage that provides the ability to scale toe unlimited concurrency. While the UN instant storage provides low late and say access to data it also provides three. Key asks that customers consistently tell us that matter the most when it comes to cost. One is usage based pricing Instead of license based pricing. Great value as you scale your data warehouse using, for example, reserved instances they can save up to 75% compared to on the mind demand prices. And as your data grows, infrequently accessed data can be stored. Cost effectively in S three encouraged through Amazon spectrum, and the third aspect is predictable. Month to month spend with no hitting charges and surprises. Unlike and unlike other cloud data warehouses, where you need premium versions for additional enterprise capabilities. Wretched spicing include building security compression and data transfer. >>Great Thanks. Scout um, eso. As you can see, everybody wins with the cloud data warehouses. Um, there's this evolution of movement of users and data and organizations to get value with these cloud data warehouses. And the key is the data has to be accessible by the users, and this data and the ability to make business decisions on the data. It ranges from users on the front line all the way up to the boardroom. So while we've seen this evolution to the Cloud Data Warehouse, as you can see from the statistic from Forrester, we're still struggling with how much of that data actually gets used for analytics. And so what is holding us back? One of the main reasons is old technology really trying to work with today's modern cloud data warehouses? They weren't built for it. So you run into issues of trying to do data replication, getting the data out of the cloud data warehouse. You can do analysis and then maintaining these middle layers of data so that you can access it quickly and get the answers you need. Another issue that's holding us back is this idea that you have to have your data in perfect shape with the perfect pipeline based on the exact dashboard unique. Um, this isn't true. Now, with Cloud data warehouse and the speed of important business data getting into those cloud data warehouses, you need a solution that allows you to access it right away without having everything to be perfect from the start, and I think this is a great opportunity for GAL and I have a little further discussion on what we're seeing in the marketplace. Um, one of the primary ones is like, What are the limiting factors, your Siegel of legacy technologies in the market when it comes to this cloud transformation we're talking about >>here? It's a great question, Michael and the variety of aspect when it comes to legacy, the other warehouses that are slowing down innovation for companies and businesses. I'll focus on 21 is performance right? We want faster insights. Companies want the ability to analyze MAWR data faster. And when it comes to on prem or legacy data warehouses, that's hard to achieve because the second aspect comes into display, which is the lack of flexibility, right. If you want to increase your capacity of your warehouse, you need to ensure request someone needs to go and bring an actual machine and install it and expand your data warehouse. When it comes to the cloud, it's literally a click of a button, which allows you to increase the capacity of your data warehouse and enable your internal and external users to perform analytics at scale and much faster. >>It falls right into the explanation you provided there, right as the speed of the data warehouses and the data gets faster and faster as it scales, older solutions aren't built toe leverage that, um, you know, they're either they're having to make technical, you know, technical cuts there, either looking at smaller amounts of data so that they can get to the data quicker. Um, or it's taking longer to get to the data when the data warehouse is ready, when it could just be live career to get the answers you need. And that's definitely an issue that we're seeing in the marketplace. I think the other one that you're looking at is things like governance, lineage, regulatory requirements. How is the cloud you know, making it easier? >>That's That's again an area where I think the cloud shines. Because AWS AWS scale allows significantly more investment in securing security policies and compliance, it allows customers. So, for example, Amazon redshift comes by default with suck 1 to 3 p. C. I. Aiso fared rampant HIPPA compliance, all of them out of the box and at our scale. We have the capacity to implement those by default for all of our customers and allow them to focus. Their very expensive, valuable ICTY resource is on actual applications that differentiate their business and transform the customer experience. >>That's a great point, gal. So we've talked about the, you know, limiting factors. Technology wise, we've mentioned things like governance. But what about the cultural aspect? Right? So what do you see? What do you see in team struggling in meeting? You know, their cloud data warehouse strategy today. >>And and that's true. One of the biggest challenges for large large organizations when they moved to the cloud is not about the technology. It's about people, process and culture, and we see differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud and ones that actually do it. And first of all, you wanna have senior leadership, drive and be aligned and committed to making the move to the cloud. But it's not just that you want. We see organizations sometimes Carol get paralyzed. If they can't figure out how to move each and every last work clothes, there's no need to boil the ocean, so we often work with organizations to find that iterative motion that relative process off identifying the use cases are date identifying workloads in migrating them one at a time and and through that allowed organization to grow its knowledge from a cloud perspective as well as adopt its tooling and learn about the new capabilities. >>And from an analytics perspective, we see the same right. You don't need a pixel perfect dashboard every single time to get value from your data. You don't need to wait until the data warehouse is perfect or the pipeline to the data warehouse is perfect. With today's technology, you should be able to look at the data in your cloud data warehouse immediately and get value from it. And that's the you know, that's that change that we're pushing and starting to see today. Thanks. God, that was That was really interesting. Um, you know, as we look through that, you know, this transformation we're seeing in analytics, um, isn't really that old? 20 years ago, data warehouses were primarily on Prem and the applications the B I tools used for analytics around them were on premise well, and so you saw things like applications like Salesforce. That live in the cloud. You start having to pull data from the cloud on Prem in order to do analytics with it. Um, you know, then we saw the shift about 10 years ago in the explosion of Cloud Data Warehouse Because of their scale, cost reduced, reduce shin reduction and speed. You know, we're seeing cloud data. Warehouses like Amazon Red Shift really take place, take hold of the marketplace and are the predominant ways of storing data moving forward. What we haven't seen is the B I tools catch up. And so when you have this new cloud data warehouse technology, you really need tools that were custom built for it to take advantage of it, to be able to query the cloud data warehouse directly and get results very quickly without having to worry about creating, you know, a middle layer of data or pipelines in order to manage it. And, you know, one company captures that really Well, um, chick fil A. I'm sure everybody has heard of is one of the largest food chains in America. And, you know, they made a huge investment in red shift and one of the purposes of that investment is they wanted to get access to the data mawr quickly, and they really wanted to give their business users, um, the ability to do some ad hoc analysis on the data that they were capturing. They found that with their older tools, the problems that they were finding was that all the data when they're trying to do this analysis was staying at the analyst level. So somebody needed to create a dashboard in order to share that data with a user. And if the user's requirements changed, the analysts were starting to become burdened with requests for changes and the time it took to reflect those changes. So they wanted to move to fought spot with embrace to connect to Red Shift so they could start giving business users that capability. Query the database right away. And with this, um, they were able to find, you know, very common things in in the supply chain analysis around the ability to figure out what store should get, what product that was selling better. The other part was they didn't have to wait for the data to get settled into some sort of repository or second level database. They were able to query it quickly. And then with that, they're able to make changes right in the red shift database that were then reflected to customers and the business users right away. So what they found from this is by adopting thought spot, they were actually able to arm business users with the ability to make decisions very quickly. And they cleared up the backlog that they were having and the delay with their analysts. And they're also putting their analysts toe work on different projects where they could get better value from. So when you look at the way we work with a cloud data warehouse, um, you have to think of thoughts about embrace as the tool that access that layer. The perfect analytic partner for the Cloud Data Warehouse. We will do the live query for the business user. You don't need to know how to script and sequel, um Thio access, you know, red shift. You can type the question that you want the answer to and thought spot will take care of that query. We will do the indexing so that the results come back faster for you and we will also do the analysis on. This is one of the things I wanted to cover, which is our spot i. Q. This is new for our ability to use this with embrace and our partners at Red Shift is now. We can give you the ability to do auto analysis to look at things like leading indicators, trends and anomalies. So to put this in perspective amount imagine somebody was doing forecasting for you know Q three in the western region. And they looked at how their stores were doing. And they saw that, you know, one store was performing well, Spot like, you might be able to look at that analysis and see if there's a leading product that is underperforming based on perhaps the last few quarters of data. And bring that up to the business user for analysis right away. They don't need to have to figure that out. And, um, you know, slice and dice to find that issue on their own. And then finally, all the work you do in data management and governance in your cloud data warehouse gets reflected in the results in embrace right away. So I've done a lot of talking about embrace, and I could do more, but I think it would be far better toe. Have Vika actually show you how the product works, Vika. >>Thanks, Michael. We learned a lot today about the power of leveraging your red shift data and thought spot. But now let me show you how it works. The coronavirus pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges for many businesses, and some industries have fared better than others. One industry that seems to weather the storm pretty well actually is streaming media. So companies like Netflix and who Lou. And in this demo, we're going to be looking at data from B to C marketing efforts. First streaming media company in 2020 lately, we've been running campaigns for comedy, drama, kids and family and reality content. Each of our campaigns last four weeks, and they're staggered on a weekly basis. Therefore, we always have four campaigns running, and we can focus on one campaign launch per >>week, >>and today we'll be digging into how our campaigns are performing. We'll be looking at things like impressions, conversions and users demographic data. So let's go ahead and look at that data. We'll see what we can learn from what's happened this year so far, and how we can apply those learnings to future decision making. As you can already see on the thoughts about homepage, I've created a few pin boards that I use for reporting purposes. The homepage also includes what others on my team and I have been looking at most recently. Now, before we dive into a search, will first take a look at how to make a direct connection to the customer database and red shift to save time. I've already pre built the connection Red Shift, but I'll show you how easy it is to make that connection in just three steps. So first we give the connection name and we select our connection type and was on red Shift. Then we enter our red shift credentials, and finally, we select the tables that we want to use Great now ready to start searching. So let's start in this data to get a better idea of how our marketing efforts have been affected either positively or negatively by this really challenging situation. When we think of ad based online marketing campaigns, we think of impressions, clicks and conversions. Let's >>look at those >>on a daily basis for our purposes. So all this data is available to us in Thought spot, and we can easily you search to create a nice line chart like this that shows US trends over the last few months and based on experience. We understand that we're going to have more clicks than impressions and more impressions and conversions. If we started the chart for a minute, we could see that while impressions appear to be pretty steady over the course of the year, clicks and especially conversions both get a nice boost in mid to late March, right around the time that pandemic related policies were being implemented. So right off the bat, we found something interesting, and we can come back to this now. There are few metrics that we're gonna focus on as we analyze our marketing data. Our overall goal is obviously to drive conversions, meaning that we bring new users into our streaming service. And in order to get a visitor to sign up in the first place, we need them to get into our sign up page. A compelling campaign is going to generate clicks, so if someone is interested in our ad, they're more likely to click on it, so we'll search for Click through Rape 5% and we'll look this up by campaign name. Now even compare all the campaigns that we've launched this year to see which have been most effective and bring visitors star site. And I mentioned earlier that we have four different types of campaign content, each one aligned with one of our most popular genres. So by adding campaign content, yeah, >>and I >>just want to see the top 10. I could limit my church. Just these top 10 campaigns automatically sorted by click through rate and assigned a color for each category so we could see right away that comedy and drama each of three of the top 10 campaigns by click through rate reality is, too, including the top spot and kids and family makes one appearance as well. Without spot. We know that any non technical user can ask a question and get an answer. They can explore the answer and ask another question. When you get an answer that you want to share, keep an eye on moving forward, you pin the answer to pin board. So the BBC Marketing Campaign Statistics PIN board gives us a solid overview of our campaign related activities and metrics throughout 2020. The visuals here keep us up to date on click through rate and cost per click, but also another really important metrics that conversions or cost proposition. Now it's important to our business that we evaluate the effectiveness of our spending. Let's do another search. We're going to look at how many new customers were getting so conversions and the price cost per acquisition that we're spending to get each of these by the campaign contact category. So >>this is a >>really telling chart. We can basically see how much each new users costing us, based on the content that they see prior to signing up to the service. Drama and reality users are actually relatively expensive compared to those who joined based on comedy and kids and family content that they saw. And if all the genres kids and family is actually giving us the best bang for our marketing >>buck. >>And that's good news because the genres providing the best value are also providing the most customers. We mentioned earlier that we actually saw a sizable uptick in conversions as stay at home policies were implemented across much of the country. So we're gonna remove cost per acquisition, and we're gonna take a daily look how our campaign content has trended over the years so far. Eso By doing this now, we can see a comparison of the different genres daily. Some campaigns have been more successful than others. Obviously, for example, kids and family contact has always fared pretty well Azaz comedy. But as we moved into the stay at home area of the line chart, we really saw these two genres begin to separate from the rest. And even here in June, as some states started to reopen, we're seeing that they're still trending up, and we're also seeing reality start to catch up around that time. And while the first pin board that we looked at included all sorts of campaign metrics, this is another PIN board that we've created so solely to focus on conversions. So not only can we see which campaigns drug significant conversions, we could also dig into the demographics of new users, like which campaigns and what content brought users from different parts of the country or from different age groups. And all this is just a quick search away without spot search directly on a red shift. Data Mhm. All right, Thank you. And back to you, Michael. >>Great. Thanks, Vika. That was excellent. Um, so as you can see, you can very quickly go from zero to search with thought Spot, um, connected to any cloud data warehouse. And I think it's important to understand that we mentioned it before. Not everything has to be perfect. In your doubt, in your cloud data warehouse, um, you can use thought spot as your initial for your initial tool. It's for investigatory purposes, A Z you can see here with star, Gento, imax and anthem. And a lot of these cases we were looking at billions of rows of data within minutes. And as you as your data warehouse maturity grows, you can start to add more and more thoughts about users to leverage the data and get better analysis from it. So we hope that you've enjoyed what you see today and take the step to either do one of two things. We have a free trial of thoughts about cloud. If you go to the website that you see below and register, we can get you access the thought spots so you can start searching today. Another option, by contacting our team, is to do a zero to search workshop where 90 minutes will work with you to connect your data source and start to build some insights and exactly what you're trying to find for your business. Um thanks, everybody. I would especially like to thank golf from AWS for joining us on this today. We appreciate your participation, and I hope everybody enjoyed what they saw. I think we have a few questions now. >>Thank you, Vika, Gal and Michael. It's always exciting to see a live demo. I know that I'm one of those comedy numbers. We have just a few minutes left, but I would love to ask a couple of last questions Before we go. Michael will give you the first question. Do I need to have all of my data cleaned and ready in my cloud data warehouse before I begin with thought spot? >>That's a great question, Mallory. No, you don't. You can really start using thought spot for search right away and start getting analysis and start understanding the data through the automatic search analysis and the way that we query the data and we've seen customers do that. Chick fil a example that we talked about earlier is where they were able to use thoughts bought to notice an anomaly in the Cloud Data Warehouse linking between product and store. They were able to fix that very quickly. Then that gets reflected across all of the users because our product queries the Cloud Data Warehouse directly so you can get started right away without it having to be perfect. And >>that's awesome. And gal will leave a fun one for you. What can we look forward to from Amazon Red Shift next year? >>That's a great question. And you know, the team has been innovating extremely fast. We released more than 200 features in the last year and a half, and we continue innovating. Um, one thing that stands out is aqua, which is a innovative new technology. Um, in fact, lovely stands for Advanced Square Accelerator, and it allows customers to achieve performance that up to 10 times faster, uh, than what they've seen really outstanding and and the way we've achieved that is through a shift in paradigm in the actual technological implementation section. Uh, aqua is a new distributed and hardware accelerated processing layer, which effectively allows us to push down operations analytics operations like compression, encryption, filtering and aggregations to the storage there layer and allow the aqua nodes that are built with custom. AWS designed analytics processors to perform these operations faster than traditional soup use. And we no longer need to bring, you know, scan the data and bring it all the way to the computational notes were able to apply these these predicates filtering and encourage encryption and compression and aggregations at the storage level. And likewise is going to be available for every are a three, um, customer out of the box with no changes to come. So I apologize for being getting out a little bit, but this is really exciting. >>No, that's why we invited you. Call. Thank you on. Thank you. Also to Michael and Vika. That was excellent. We really appreciate it. For all of you tuning in at home. The final session of this track is coming up shortly. You aren't gonna want to miss it. We're gonna end strong, come back and hear directly from our customer a T mobile on how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot in which >>pro, It's >>up next, see you then.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBES coverage, of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. We're not there in person this year because of the pandemic, but we're doing the remote. This is special coverage of the public sector, we got two great guests, Manpreet Mattu, who was the Worldwide Public Sector of Startups and Venture Capital team with AWS, and Michael Jackson who's the leader, general manager of Public Health and Venture Capital and Startups. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. Thanks for coming up. >> Okay, it's my pleasure, thanks for having. >> I loved love welcome to theCUBE. I just want to say that Amazon never forgets the startups, that's where are they were born and bred it's been a startup. It's always day one as the expression goes, but truly even with the success, not just in the enterprise and starts within public sector, it's still a startup agility mindset, just want to call that out and say congratulations. Okay, let's get into it. Tell us about your roles and your backgrounds and why you're here. >> So, I believe so, I'm the head of AWS Public Sector, VC and Startups team, and our mission really is to help our public sector customers, adopt innovation that is built by the startups. I've been with AWS for about two and a half years. And prior to that, I was in a similar role with Booz Allen, helping our public sector customers, adopt innovation data as well. >> Michael. >> Yeah, so I am the general manager of Public Health, for on the Venture Capital and Startups team. My career here at AWS began just over four years ago. I was brought on to the state and local government team, initially building the public health practice from inception, and I also built and led our U S elections business. And I'm really excited now to transition into this global role, to lead our public health VC and startups practice, and really democratize access to innovation for our startups in the healthcare space. >> Well, great journey. You guys are converging, the VC and startup teams are coming together. A lot of macro trends certainly are tailwinds for you guys. Obviously, the pandemic is forcing, more accelerated modern applications in public sector, and we've been covering more and more success stories, of the change happening quickly. As access to capital continues to be great, and agility with the cloud, how has that impacted your teams and your approach? Can you guys share how that's changed this year? Because there's more pressure now to be digital, there's more opportunities, there's more still capital flowing, how has it impacted your roles? >> Now, so at the very high level, Amazon invests in companies because, we want those companies to be successful. And AWS itself makes a substantial investment, in agility, the startup customers success. We have things like service credits and things like, business nurturing programs that we have built over the course of the last seven, eight years. For example, over the past, you had a loan, Amazon has provided more than a billion dollars in credits, through AWS Activate program, to help startups grow and scale their businesses. And not only that a total of more than three and a half billion dollars in credit to more than 140,000 startups, over the last seven years, all through the course of the Activate program. From more so, on the healthcare side, I would want, certainly MJ to also, speak through or speak to, the challenges that the health system has faced in the COVID times, and how AWS is helping the provider, healthcare providers and the startups, really achieve success, and help the patient populations on that note. >> Michael, weighing on this new programs, you guys are launching in the impact healthcare, I see where we're seeing the frontline workers, I mean, it's everyone seeing it on TV and the newspaper, and it's impacting friends and family, give us the update. >> Absolutely, so we're here today to launch a new program. We call it the Healthcare Acceleration program. And basically, there are two halves to the program, with an undercurrent or a recurring undercurrent, I should say. Just really quickly before I touch on that though, I'd be remissed if I didn't make note of the fact that, you're right capital is still flowing, and it's a really big deal particularly, as healthcare and public health becomes such a priority, but one of the strategic imperatives of our team's role, similar to the way we democratize access to innovation for startups, we also find it really important to democratize access, to resources for founders, underrepresented founders, so, that everyone can have a level playing field, and equal access to those resources and funding, and things of that nature. Getting back to some of the healthcare priorities, in particular, I don't have to tell you about, this pandemic where on the third, and possibly the deadliest wave losing over 1000 Americans per day. And so, not only are we interested in helping our customers, our enterprise customers inject innovation from startups so that they can address clinical aspects, of the pandemic and beyond, but there are underlying rippling societal implications as well. Things that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Things like mental health, behavioral health, including substance use abuse, clinical clinician burnout, things like social determinants of health, which lead to disproportionately impacted demographics. So, there's a whole lot to unpack and I'm sure we will, but at the highest level, that's what we're looking to help, our enterprise customers address, with the help of our innovative high potential startups. >> I mean, strategic focus, just go a little bit further on how important this is, because, programs are needed, there is burnout, okay. >> Yeah. >> You have mental health, physical health, everything in between. What are you guys launching? What's new? What can people take away right now from AWS, and what startups and when, 'cause a lot of people are changing their focus. I was seeing people leave their jobs, to have to get on this new mission. They're seeing the pain, there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy, happening right now here. Go further, please. >> So, you touched right on it. So, there are two sides. I mentioned there are two halves, and an underlying current, right? So, the two halves are the supply and the demand. The supply side is what we refer to as the startups, vetted high potential, high growth startups, in the health tech space, that we can help to accelerate their go to market, right? We can pair them with mentorship, credits, we call it the 4Cs. There's capital, mapping them potentially to investors, who are interested into accelerating their growth. There's code, technical support, whether it's cloud formation templates, or technical expertise, connections such as other startups, incubators, accelerators, etcetera, and finally mapping them to customers. So, that's, what's in it for the startups. And then on the other side, the enterprise side, again, there are so many enterprises from payers to providers and others who are looking to accelerate their efforts, to digitally transform their enterprise. And so, by partnering with AWS, and the Healthcare Acceleration program, they can trust that there are AWS powered startups, that are vetted and prepared, to inject that sense of urgency, that sense of innovation. And the underlying current, the dots that are being connected is, workforce modernization or economic development, because in many cases, you're right, people are losing their jobs, people are looking at ways that they can, modernize the workforce is locally leverage local talent. And so, entrepreneurship is a great way, to stimulate the local economy, and help older workers or workers who are looking to transition into a more relevant occupations, to do just that. So, this is an all encompassing program. >> Let's get into this health accelerator from AWS. This is something that is on the table, AWS Health Accelerator, who are the stakeholders, and what are the benefits of this program? >> Well, I mean, before we actually, go to the accelerator for me, I think there's this focus on the healthcare, as an industry, as a vertical, is very important to talk about. The industry is experiencing transformation. It is experiencing disruption and the COVID-19 pandemic, has only accelerated that. If you made, it has sort of magnified some of the stressors, which were already there in the system. If you combine that with the sort of the undercurrent that MJ mentioned from a technological perspective, the delivery of healthcare globally is going digital. So, you see technology is like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, augmented reality, IoT based variables. All of these technologies are coming together, to enable applications, such as remote diagnostics, patient monitoring, predictive prescriptive healthcare. And we truly feel that this presents a tremendous opportunity to improve the patient experience, and more importantly, the patient outcomes, using these technologies, and these newly enabled applications through those technologies. And as an example, in the U S alone, there are 22 key healthcare AI use cases, that are projected to grow by, or to approximately around $22 billion by 2025. So, in AWS, we are collaborating with the wide spectrum of healthcare providers, with public health organizations, with government agencies, all around the globe to support their effort, to cope with the rippling effects of the COVID-19. And arguably, many of them are visible to us today, but I would argue that many many are not even yet, have been begun to understand by us and by our customers. So, that is the reason why we want to put some emphasis, on healthcare from a public sector standpoint. >> Yeah, that's a great call-out Manpreet, I want to just highlight that, maybe get an additional commentary because, the old days it was just the institution, the hospital and then you're done. And then it was okay, hospital plus the caregiver, the doctors, and the workers, and now the patient. So, holistically, you're calling out the big picture, the patient care, right. Their families, their environment, the caregivers, and the institution, and now the supply chain, all of it integrated together. That's where the action is. And that's where the data comes in, that's where cloud scale can come in. Is that right? Am I getting that right there? >> Yeah, that's absolutely. I'm sorry Manpreet. >> Welcome MJ, go on. >> I was going to say you're absolutely right. In fact, we like to look at it almost like a bullseye, right? So, at the center of the bullseye, like you said, usually, the first stakeholder that comes to mind, is the provider or the coordinator of care. Outside of there, you have the payer, outside of there, you have researchers. And in any even further outside still are your regulators, your healthcare agencies at the local state, and federal levels, including military health. So, it's a rippling effect of customers on that side, as well as you asked about stakeholders on the startup side, there's also a bullseye of influence. Starting with the founder herself, the founder, and her executive team, moving out from there to the startup, as an organization outside from there, we've got incubators and accelerators that are in place, to help accelerate that growth as well. And then farther out you've got investors, VCs, and investors, and so on both sides, supply and demand we're looking to tap into, and accelerate the growth, and make connections between the two. >> Yeah, (indistinct) but when I, in back in real life, when we used to go to games, you walk into the stadium, you buy your ticket with your phone, you go to your seat, concessions guys, deliver things there for you, the fan experience, the players are there. I mean, why can't we have that in healthcare? I was just everything is happening, right. Go for good, yeah. And I think that's the Nirvana, hopefully soon. >> We're working on it. >> Good stuff. I know, I just love the vision, I think is so relevant and super important. Now, let's get into this health accelerator. What's this all about? Let's get into that. >> So, the health accelerator will be, a multi-week on-demand program. Where we're going to map high potential vetted startups, to a number of resources, right. I mentioned before that there will be mentorship, there will be technical experts who will be able to, take these startups who have established some presence, but we want to accelerate their ability to go deeper specifically into public health, throughout that ecosystem that I just described, right? Starting with providers and coordinators, payers, researchers, regulators. We want to give them a way to go deep into this, heavily regulated industry, so that they can not only have access to the innovation that many startups would not otherwise, like Manpreet mentioned machine learning AI, but they also have access to the resources, to ensure their success. >> What kind of problems are you guys trying to solve with this? I mean, is there a specific vetting process, is there a criteria? Is there a bar to all over share some specifics? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, for the past few years, a lot of the major change challenges, for our public health customers have been the same, but they require a new approach. And I like to call our approach the HIGH FIVE. So, some of those challenges that have been traditionally, lingering for the past few years, equal social determinants of health. Social determinants, when we talk about that, we not only refer to the nonclinical contributors to a person's overall wellness. So, you think about issues like food deserts or recidivism homelessness, all of that transportation to access to care, right, all of that contributes. But then there's also disparities and health outcomes. When you think about socioeconomic differences, rural health, ethnic and racial minorities, so, that all factors into social determinants of health. Then there's also aging. Now, these are the strategic pillars that we like to focus on, or that we are focusing on. When I mentioned aging every day in the U S, 10,000 people celebrate their 65th birthday. Many of those individuals are suffering from comorbidities, from hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and now the lingering impact of COVID-19. And so, as these aging individuals continue to live longer, the goal is to improve the quality of their life as well. And so, many of them look to technology to age independently at home, etcetera. So, that's our second strategic pillar. The third, is mental and behavioral health. So, when I talk about mental health, I mean, everything from mild depression, all the way through suicide prevention, and especially these days with COVID-19, we see a lot of clinicians suffering from burnout. And so, it's important, that we take care of the frontline workers, those healthcare providers, and even outside of COVID-19, you think about the ways that the patient population, has continued to expand, and the growth within the provider market has not, or the pool of providers has not nearly expanded at the same rate. We've got people living longer, we've got more people than ever insured. And so, we need to leverage technology to help a stagnant, number of providers to treat a growing pool of patients, without sacrificing the quality of care. And then finally, we've got environmental health. From air quality to water purity. It's important to understand the correlation between, the environment and the health care of our population. So, those are the pillars. I know I mentioned the HIGH FIVE, the fifth is not specific to healthcare. I touched on it a little bit earlier, but the fifth is, it is democratizing access to innovation, to resources, specifically for founders from underrepresented communities. >> And that's great insight, Michael great, great Schaeffer pointed that out. Manpreet take us on the final word here. Venture Capital, Startups, AWS, what's the current state share with us, the current worldview from your perspective. >> Oh, so, bringing home this point that MJ mentioned, the strategic plan of focus areas. And if you, look at all those strategic areas there's, you can really sort of put those into two buckets. One is the patient side of the bucket, and then there's the provider side of the bucket, or the caretaker side of the bucket. And if the patient side, what we want to do is work with startups that are, really working across a broad spectrum of use cases, but to solve those two key challenges of the, one on the patient's side and other on the provider side. Then the end goal of providing patient experience, and patient outcomes. For the patient side, it's the patient experience, patient engagement, patient outcomes. So, the startups looking on those sides, on those use cases of criteria. And then we have the provider side where, we want to ensure that the providers have the right set of technologies, the right set of solutions, right set of innovation, to help them where healthcare operations. You have all seen in COVID times, how the provider systems are getting overwhelmed. And that's where the healthcare operations comes into play. Clinical decision support. Now, many patients cannot get to the hospitals. So, how do we provide through our startup partners for startup customers, those solutions where remote diagnostics, remote imaging or remote health delivery could be provided. Things like predictive and prescriptive health solutions. How can we work with our startups to provide, those sort of solutions to the providers, to again, at the end, the better the outcome of the patients, right? So, that's what we were looking at. And that's what this program is all about. Working with public sector provider side of the house and the customers understanding, and helping them understand the need as well, and then bringing the right set of startup solutions, and help solve those challenges that they are facing, and the patients are facing as well. MJ, I'm sure you want to close it out, with some thoughts too. >> Okay. >> Absolutely, I would just close it with this, our goal, like Manpreet said, is to match the high potential startups, with the, the enterprises who are desiring those solutions, and success for us, we'll have three traits. It will be valuable, meaning that there will be a true alignment between what our startups offer and what the market needs. It will be measurable, so that we can quantify the improvement and outcomes. And finally, it will be sustainable. So, beyond COVID-19 beyond the opioid crisis, beyond any situation or condition, we look to bring solutions to market through our startups, that are going to truly sustain a transformative approach to modernizing public health enterprises. >> Great job again, and important work and DevOps, impacting healthcare in all kinds of ways. And it's super important work. I'm glad you guys are doing it, and it's going to develop out beautifully, and if I can give you a high five, Michael, I'll give you a high five off in-person, but remotely, >> Virtual. >> Get virtual high five great program. We're going to spread the word, good work. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for doing it, I appreciate it. >> Thank you very much for your time. >> Okay, it's theCUBE coverage virtual, we are theCUBE virtual bringing all the coverage, super important work being done in public sector, cloud enabling it, great people important, and of course, happening at re:Invent. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Virtual Conversation. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today, I'm joined by Hermanth Manda. He is the Executive Director, IBM Data and AI, responsible for Cloud Pak for Data. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Hermanth. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> So we're talking now about the release of Cloud Pak for Data version 3.5. I want to explore it for, from a lot of different angles, but do you want to just talk a little bit about why it is unique in the marketplace, in particular, accelerating innovation, reducing costs, and reducing complexity? >> Absolutely, Rebecca. I mean, this is something very unique from an IBM perspective. Frankly speaking, this is unique in the marketplace because what we are doing is we are bringing together all of our data and AI capabilities into a single offering, single platform. And we have continued, as I said, we made it run on any cloud. So we are giving customers the flexibility. So it's innovation across multiple fronts. It's still in consolidation. It's, in doing automation and infusing collaboration and also having customers to basically modernize to the cloud-native world and pick their own cloud which is what we are seeing in the market today. So I would say this is a unique across multiple fronts. >> When we talk about any new platform, one of the big concerns is always around internal skills and maintenance tasks. What changes are you introducing with version 3.5 that does, that help clients be more flexible and sort of streamline their tasks? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. We are doing a lot of things with respect to 3.5, the latest release. Number one, we are simplifying the management of the platform, made it a lot simpler. We are infusing a lot of automation into it. We are embracing the concept of operators that are not open shelf has introduced into the market. So simple things such as provisioning, installation, upgrades, scaling it up and down, autopilot management. So all of that is taken care of as part of the latest release. Also, what we are doing is we are making the collaboration and user onboarding very easy to drive self service and use the productivity. So overall, this helps, basically, reduce the cost for our customers. >> One of the things that's so striking is the speed of the innovation. I mean, you've only been in the marketplace for two and a half years. This is already version 3.5. Can you talk a little bit about, about sort of the, the innovation that it takes to do this? >> Absolutely. You're right, we've been in the market for slightly over two and a half years, 3.5's our ninth release. So frankly speaking, for any company, or even for startups doing nine releases in 2.5 years is unheard of, and definitely unheard of at IBM. So we are acting and behaving like a startup while addressing the go to market, and the reach of IBM. So I would say that we are doing a lot here. And as I said before, we're trying to address the unique needs of the market, the need to modernize to the cloud-native architectures to move to the cloud also while addressing the needs of our existing customers, because there are two things we are trying to focus, here. First of all, make sure that we have a modern platform across the different capabilities in data and AI, that's number one. Number two is also how do we modernize our existing install base. We have six plus billion dollar business for data and AI across significant real estates. We're providing a platform through Cloud Pak for Data to those existing install base and existing customers to more nice, too. >> I want to talk about how you are addressing the needs of customers, but I want to delve into something you said earlier, and that is that you are behaving like a startup. How do you make sure that your employees have that kind of mindset that, that kind of experimental innovative, creative, resourceful mindset, particularly at a more mature company like IBM? What kinds of skills do you try to instill and cultivate in your, in your team? >> That's a very interesting question, Rebecca. I think there's no single answer, I would say. It starts with listening to the customers, trying to pay detailed attention to what's happening in the market. How competent is it reacting. Looking at the startups, themselves. What we did uniquely, that I didn't touch upon earlier is that we are also building an open ecosystem here, so we position ourselves as an open platform. Yes, there's a lot of IBM unique technology here, but we also are leveraging open source. We are, we have an ecosystem of 50 plus third party ISVs. So by doing that, we are able to drive a lot more innovation and a lot faster because when you are trying to do everything by yourself, it's a bit challenging. But when you're part of an open ecosystem, infusing open source and third party, it becomes a lot easier. In terms of culture, I just want to highlight one thing. I think we are making it a point to emphasize speed over being perfect, progress over perfection. And that, I think, that is something net new for IBM because at IBM, we pride ourselves in quality, scalability, trying to be perfect on day one. I think we didn't do that in this particular case. Initially, when we launched our offense two and a half years back, we tried to be quick to the market. Our time to market was prioritized over being perfect. But now that is not the case anymore, right? I think we will make sure we are exponentially better and those things are addressed for the past two and one-half years. >> Well, perfect is the enemy of the good, as we know. One of the things that your customers demand is flexibility when building with machine learning pipeline. What have you done to improve IBM machine learning tools on this platform? >> So there's a lot of things we've done. Number one, I want to emphasize our building AI, the initial problem that most of our customers concerned about, but in my opinion, that's 10% of the problem. Actually deploying those AI models or managing them and covering them at scales for the enterprise is a bigger challenge. So what we have is very unique. We have the end-to-end AI lifecycle, we have tools for all the way from building, deploying, managing, governing these models. Second is we are introducing net new capabilities as part of a latest release. We have this call or this new service called WMLA, Watson Machine Learning Accelerator that addresses the unique challenges of deep learning capabilities, managing GPUs, et cetera. We are also making the auto AI capabilities a lot more robust. And finally, we are introducing a net new concept called Federator Learning that allows you to build AI across distributed datasets, which is very unique. I'm not aware of any other vendor doing this, so you can actually have your data distributed across multiple clouds, and you can build an aggregated AI model without actually looking at the data that is spread across these clouds. And this concept, in my opinion, is going to get a lot more traction as we move forward. >> One of the things that IBM has always been proud of is the way it partners with ISVs and other vendors. Can you talk about how you work with your partners and foster this ecosystem of third-party capabilities that integrate into the platform? >> Yes, it's always a challenge. I mean, for this to be a platform, as I said before, you need to be open and you need to build an ecosystem. And so we made that a priority since day one and we have 53 third party ISVs, today. It's a chicken and egg problem, Rebecca, because you need to obviously showcase success and make it a priority for your partners to onboard and work with you closely. So, we obviously invest, we co-invest with our partners and we take them to market. We have different models. We have a tactical relationship with some of our third party ISVs. We also have a strategic relationship. So we partner with them depending on their ability to partner with us and we go invest and make sure that we are not only integrating them technically, but also we are integrating with them from a go-to-market perspective. >> I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the current environment that we're in. Of course, we're all living through a global health emergency in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. So much of the knowledge work is being done from home. It is being done remotely. Teams are working asynchronously over different kinds of digital platforms. How have you seen these changes affect the team, your team at IBM, what kinds of new kinds of capabilities, collaborations, what kinds of skills have you seen your team have to gain and have to gain quite quickly in this environment? >> Absolutely. I think historically, IBM had quite a, quite a portion of our workforce working remotely so we are used to this, but not at the scale that the current situation has compelled us to. So we made a lot more investments earlier this year in digital technologies, whether it is Zoom and WebEx or trying to use tools, digital tools that helps us coordinate and collaborate effectively. So part of it is technical, right? Part of it is also a cultural shift. And that came all the way from our CEO in terms of making sure that we have the necessary processes in place to ensure that our employees are not in getting burnt out, that they're being productive and effective. And so a combination of what I would say, technical investments, plus process and leadership initiatives helped us essentially embrace the changes that we've seen, today. >> And I want you to close us out, here. Talk a little bit about the future, both for Cloud Pak for Data, but also for the companies and clients that you work for. What do you see in the next 12 to 24 months changing in the term, in terms of how we have re-imagined the future of work. I know you said this was already version nine. You've only been in the marketplace for, for not even three years. That's incredible innovation and speed. Talk a little bit about changes you see coming down the pike. >> So I think everything that we have done is going to get amplified and accelerated as we move forward, shift to cloud, embracing AI, adopting AI into business processes to automate and amplify new business models, collaboration, to a certain extent, consolidation of the different offerings into platforms. So all of this, we, I obviously see that being accelerated and that acceleration will continue as we move forward. And the real challenge I see with our customers and all the enterprises is, I see them in two buckets. There's one bucket which are resisting change, like to stick to the old concepts, and there's one bucket of enterprises who are embracing the change and moving forward, and actually get accelerating this transformation and change. I think it will be successful over the next one to five years. You know, it could be under the other bucket and if you're not, I think it's, you're going to get, you're going to miss out and that is getting amplified and accelerated, as we speak. >> So for those ones in the bucket that are resistant to the change, how do you get them onboard? I mean, this is classic change management that they teach at business schools around the world. But what are some advice that you would have to those who are resisting the change? >> So, and again, frankly speaking, we, at IBM, are going through that transition so I can speak from experience. >> Rebecca: You're drinking the Kool-Aid. >> Yeah, when, when I think, one way to address this is basically take one step at a time, like as opposed to completely revolutionizing the way you do your business. You can transform your business one step at a time while keeping the end objective as your goal, as your end goal. So, and it just want a little highlight that with full factor, that's exactly what we are enabling because what we do is we enable you to actually run anywhere you like. So if most of your systems, most of your data and your models, and analytics are on-premise, you can actually start your journey there while you plan for the future of a public cloud or a managed service. So my advice is pretty simple. You start the journey, but you can take, you can, you don't need to, you don't need to do it as a big bang. You, it could be a journey, it could be a gradual transformation, but you need to start the journey today. If you don't, you're going to miss out. >> Baby steps. Hey Hermanth Manda, thank you so much for joining us for this Virtual CUBE Conversation >> Thank you very much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE Virtual. (soft electronic music)

>>artificial intelligence. The words are full of possibility. Yet to many it may seem complex, expensive and hard to know where to get started. How do you make AI really for your business? At Dell Technologies, we see AI enhancing business, enriching lives and improving the world. Dell Technologies is dedicated to making AI easy, so more people can use it to make a real difference. So you can adopt and run AI anywhere with your current skill. Sets with AI Solutions powered by power edge servers and made portable across hybrid multi clouds with VM ware. Plus solved I O bottlenecks with breakthrough performance delivered by Dell EMC Ready solutions for HPC storage and Data Accelerator. And enjoy automated, effortless management with open manage systems management so you can keep business insights flowing across a multi cloud environment. With an AI portfolio that spans from workstations to supercomputers, Dell Technologies can help you get started with AI easily and grow seamlessly. AI has the potential to profoundly change our lives with Dell Technologies. AI is easy to adopt, easy to manage and easy to scale. And there's nothing artificial about that. Yeah, yeah, from >>the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston >>connecting with >>thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm Stew Minimum. And welcome to this special launch with our friends at Dell Technologies. We're gonna be talking about AI and the reality of making artificial intelligence real happy to welcome to the program. Two of our Cube alumni Rob, depending 90. He's the senior vice president of server product management and very Pellegrino vice president, data centric workloads and solutions in high performance computing, both with Dell Technologies. Thank you both for joining thanks to you. So you know, is the industry we watch? You know, the AI has been this huge buzz word, but one of things I've actually liked about one of the differences about what I see when I listen to the vendor community talking about AI versus what I saw too much in the big data world is you know, it used to be, you know Oh, there was the opportunity. And data is so important. Yes, that's really But it was. It was a very wonky conversation. And the promise and the translation of what has been to the real world didn't necessarily always connect and We saw many of the big data solutions, you know, failed over time with AI on. And I've seen this in meetings from Dell talking about, you know, the business outcomes in general overall in i t. But you know how ai is helping make things real. So maybe we can start there for another product announcements and things we're gonna get into. But Robbie Interior talk to us a little bit about you know, the customers that you've been seeing in the impact that AI is having on their business. >>Sure, Teoh, I'll take us a job in it. A couple of things. For example, if you start looking at, uh, you know, the autonomous vehicles industry of the manufacturing industry where people are building better tools for anything they need to do on their manufacturing both. For example, uh, this is a good example of where that honors makers and stuff you've got Xeon ut It's actually a world war balcony. Now it is using our whole product suite right from the hardware and software to do multiple iterations off, ensuring that the software and the hardware come together pretty seamlessly and more importantly, ingesting, you know, probably tens of petabytes of data to ensure that we've got the right. They're training and gardens in place. So that's a great example of how we are helping some of our customers today in ensuring that we can really meet is really in terms of moving away from just a morning scenario in something that customers are able to use like today. >>Well, if I can have one more, Ah Yanai, one of our core and more partners than just customers in Italy in the energy sector have been been really, really driving innovation with us. We just deployed a pretty large 8000 accelerator cluster with them, which is the largest commercial cluster in the world. And where they're focusing on is the digital transformation and the development of energy sources. And it's really important not be an age. You know, the plan. It's not getting younger, and we have to be really careful about the type of energies that we utilize to do what we do every day on they put a lot of innovation. We've helped set up the right solution for them, and we'll talk some more about what they've done with that cluster. Later, during our chat, but it is one of the example that is tangible with the appointment that is being used to help there. >>Great. Well, we love starting with some of the customer stories. Really glad we're gonna be able to share some of those, you know, actual here from some of the customers a little bit later in this launch. But, Robbie, you know, maybe give us a little bit as to what you're hearing from customers. You know, the overall climate in AI. You know, obviously you know, so many challenges facing, you know, people today. But you know, specifically around ai, what are some of the hurdles that they might need to overcome Be able to make ai. Really? >>I think the two important pieces I can choose to number one as much as we talk about AI machine learning. One of the biggest challenges that customers have today is ensuring that they have the right amount and the right quality of data to go out and do the analytics percent. Because if you don't do it, it's giggle garbage in garbage out. So the one of the biggest challenges our customers have today is ensuring that they have the most pristine data to go back on, and that takes quite a bit of an effort. Number two. A lot of times, I think one of the challenges they also have is having the right skill set to go out and have the execution phase of the AI pod. You know, work done. And I think those are the two big challenges we hear off. And that doesn't seem to be changing in the very near term, given the very fact that nothing Forbes recently had an article that said that less than 15% off, our customers probably are using AI machine learning today so that talks to the challenges and the opportunities ahead for me. All right, >>So, Ravi, give us the news. Tell us the updates from Dell Technologies how you're helping customers with AI today, >>going back to one of the challenges, as I mentioned, which is not having the right skin set. One of the things we are doing at Dell Technologies is making sure that we provide them not just the product but also the ready solutions that we're working with. For example, Tier and his team. We're also working on validated and things are called reference architectures. The whole idea behind this is we want to take the guesswork out for our customers and actually go ahead and destroying things that we have already tested to ensure that the integration is right. There's rightsizing attributes, so they know exactly the kind of a product that would pick up our not worry about me in time and the resources needed you get to that particular location. So those are probably the two of the biggest things we're doing to help our customers make the right decision and execute seamlessly and on time. >>Excellent. So teary, maybe give us a little bit of a broader look as to, you know, Dell's part participation in the overall ecosystem when it comes to what's happening in AI on and you know why is this a unique time for what's happening in the in the industry? >>Yeah, I mean, I think we all live it. I mean, I'm right here in my home, and I'm trying to ensure that the business continues to operate, and it's important to make sure that we're also there for our customers, right? The fight against covered 19 is eyes changing what's happening around the quarantines, etcetera. So Dell, as a participant not only in the AI the world that we live in on enabling AI is also a participant in all of the community's s. So we've recently joined the covered 19 High Performance Computing Consortium on. We also made a lot of resources available to researchers and scientists leveraging AI in order to make progress towards you're and potentially the vaccine against Corbyn. 19 examples are we have our own supercomputers in the lab here in Austin, Texas, and we've given access to some of our partners. T. Gen. Is one example. The beginning of our chat I mentioned and I So not only did they have barely deport the cluster with us earlier this year that could 19 started hitting, so they've done what's the right thing to do for community and humanity is they made the resource available to scientists in Europe on tack just down the road here, which had the largest I can't make supercomputer that we deployed with them to. Ai's doing exactly the same thing. So this is one of the real examples that are very timely, and it's it's it's happening right now we hadn't planned for it. A booth there with our customers, the other pieces. This is probably going to be a trend, but healthcare is going through and version of data you mentioned in the beginning. You're talking about 2.3000 exabytes, about 3000 times the content of the Library of Congress. It's incredible, and that data is useless. I mean, it's great we can We can put that on our great ice on storage, but you can also see it as an opportunity to get business value out of it. That's going to be we're a lot more resource is with AI so a lot happening here. That's that's really if I can get into more of the science of it because it's healthcare, because it's the industry we see now that our family members at the M. Ware, part of the Dell Technologies Portfolio, are getting even more relevance in the discussion. The industry is based on virtualization, and the M ware is the number one virtualization solution for the industry. So now we're trying to weave in the reality in the I T environment with the new nodes of AI and data science and HPC. So you will see the VM Ware just added kubernetes control plane. This fear Andi were leveraging that to have a very flexible environment On one side, we can do some data science on the other side. We can go back to running some enterprise class hardware class software on top of it. So this is is great. And we're capitalizing on it with validates solutions, validated design on. And I think that's going to be adding a lot of ah power in the hands of our customers and always based on their feedback. And they asked back, >>Yeah, I may ask you just to build on that interesting comment that you made on we're actually looking at very shortly will be talking about how we're gonna have the ability to, for example, read or V Sphere and Allah servers begin. That essentially means that we're going to cut down the time our customers need to go ahead and deploy on their sites. >>Yeah, excellent. Definitely been, you know, very strong feedback from the community. We did videos around some of the B sphere seven launch, you know, theory. You know, we actually had done an interview with you. Ah, while back at your big lab, Jeff Frick. Otto, See the supercomputers behind what you were doing. Maybe bring us in a little bit inside as who? You know, some of the new pieces that help enable AI. You know, it often gets lost on the industry. You know, it's like, Oh, yeah, well, we've got the best hardware to accelerate or enable these kind of workloads. So, you know, bring us in its But what, You know, the engineering solution sets that are helping toe make this a reality >>of today. Yeah, and truly still you've been there. You've seen the engineers in the lab, and that's more than AI being real. That that is double real because we spend a lot of time analyzing workloads customer needs. We have a lot of PhD engineers in there, and what we're working on right now is kind of the next wave of HPC enablement Azaz. We all know the consumption model or the way that we want to have access to resources is evolving from something that is directly in front of us. 1 to 1 ratio to when virtualization became more prevalent. We had a one to many ratio on genes historically have been allocated on a per user. Or sometimes it is study modified view to have more than one user GP. But with the addition of big confusion to the VM our portfolio and be treated not being part of these fear. We're building up a GPU as a service solutions through a VM ware validated design that we are launching, and that's gonna give them flexibility. And the key here is flexibility. We have the ability, as you know, with the VM Ware environment, to bring in also some security, some flexibility through moving the workloads. And let's be honest with some ties into cloud models on, we have our own set of partners. We all know that the big players in the industry to But that's all about flexibility and giving our customers what they need and what they expect in the world. But really, >>Yeah, Ravi, I guess that brings us to ah, you know, one of the key pieces we need to look at here is how do we manage across all of these environments? Uh, and you know, how does AI fit into this whole discussion between what Dell and VM ware doing things like v Sphere, you know, put pulling in new workloads >>stew, actually a couple of things. So there's really nothing artificial about the real intelligence that comes through with all that foolish intelligence we're working out. And so one of the crucial things I think we need to, you know, ensure that we talk about is it's not just about the fact that it's a problem. So here are our stories there, but I think the crucial thing is we're looking at it from an end to end perspective from everything from ensuring that we have direct workstations, right servers, the storage, making sure that is well protected and all the way to working with an ecosystem of software renders. So first and foremost, that's the whole integration piece, making sure they realized people system. But more importantly, it's also ensuring that we help our customers by taking the guess work out again. I can't emphasize the fact that there are customers who are looking at different aliens off entry, for example, somebody will be looking at an F G. A. Everybody looking at GP use. API is probably, as you know, are great because they're price points and normal. Or should I say that our needs our lot lesser than the GP use? But on the flip side, there's a need for them to have a set of folks who can actually program right. It is why it's called the no programming programmable gate arrays of Saas fee programmable. My point being in all this, it's important that we actually provide dried end to end perspective, making sure that we're able to show the integration, show the value and also provide the options, because it's really not a cookie cutter approach of where you can take a particular solution and think that it will put the needs of every single customer. He doesn't even happen in the same industry, for that matter. So the flexibility that we provide all the way to the services is truly our attempt. At Dell Technologies, you get the entire gamut of solutions available for the customer to go out and pick and choose what says their needs the best. >>Alright, well, Ravi interior Thank you so much for the update. So we're gonna turn it over to actually hear from some of your customers. Talk about the power of ai. You're from their viewpoint, how real these solutions are becoming. Love the plan words there about, you know, enabling really artificial intelligence. Thanks so much for joining after the customers looking forward to the VM Ware discussion, we want to >>put robots into the world's dullest, deadliest and dirtiest jobs. We think that if we can have machines doing the work that put people at risk than we can allow people to do better work. Dell Technologies is the foundation for a lot of the >>work that we've done here. Every single piece of software that we developed is simulated dozens >>or hundreds of thousands of times. And having reliable compute infrastructure is critical for this. Yeah, yeah, A lot of technology has >>matured to actually do something really useful that can be used by non >>experts. We try to predict one system fails. We try to predict the >>business impatience things into images. On the end of the day, it's that >>now we have machines that learn how to speak a language from from zero. Yeah, everything >>we do really, at Epsilon centered around data and our ability >>to get the right message to >>the right person at the right >>time. We apply machine learning and artificial intelligence. So in real time you can adjust those campaigns to ensure that you're getting the most optimized message theme. >>It is a joint venture between Well, cars on the Amir are your progress is automated driving on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Centre is really based on safety on how we can actually make lives better for you. Typically gets warned on distracted in cars. If you can take those kind of situations away, it will bring the accidents down about 70 to 80%. So what I appreciate it with Dell Technologies is the overall solution that they have to live in being able to deliver the full package. That has been a major differentiator compared to your competitors. >>Yeah. Yeah, alright, welcome back to help us dig into this discussion and happy to welcome to the program Chris Facade. He is the senior vice president and general manager of the B sphere business and just Simon, chief technologist for the High performance computing group, both of them with VM ware. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. Thank >>you for having us. >>All right, Krish. When vm Ware made the bit fusion acquisition. Everybody was looking the You know what this will do for space Force? GPU is we're talking about things like AI and ML. So bring us up to speed. As to you know, the news today is the what being worth doing with fusion. Yeah. >>Today we have a big announcement. I'm excited to announce that, you know, we're taking the next big step in the AI ML and more than application strategy. With the launch off bit fusion, we're just now being fully integrated with VCF. They're in black home, and we'll be releasing this very shortly to the market. As you said when we acquire institution A year ago, we had a showcase that's capable days as part of the animal event. And at that time we laid out a strategy that part of our institution as the cornerstone off our capabilities in the black home in the Iot space. Since then, we have had many customers take a look at the technology and we have had feedback from them as well as from partners and analysts. And the feedback has been tremendous. >>Excellent. Well, Chris, what does this then mean for customers? You know What's the value proposition that diffusion brings the VC? Yeah, >>if you look at our customers, they are in the midst of a big ah journey in digital transformation. And basically, what that means is customers are building a ton of applications and most of those applications some kind of data analytics or machine learning embedded in it. And what this is doing is that in the harbor and infrastructure industry, this is driving a lot of innovation. So you see the advent off a lot off specialized? Absolutely. There's custom a six FPs. And of course, the views being used to accelerate the special algorithms that these AI ml type applications need. And unfortunately, customer environment. Most of these specialized accelerators uh um bare metal kind of set up, but they're not taking advantage off optimization and everything that it brings to that. Also, with fusion launched today, we are essentially doing the accelerator space. What we need to compute several years ago and that is essentially bringing organization to the accelerators. But we take it one step further, which is, you know, we use the customers the ability to pull these accelerators and essentially going to be couple it from the server so you can have a pool of these accelerators sitting in the network. And customers are able to then target their workloads and share the accelerators get better utilization by a lot of past improvements and, in essence, have a smaller pool that they can use for a whole bunch of different applications across the enterprise. That is a huge angle for our customers. And that's the tremendous positive feedback that we get getting both from customers as well. >>Excellent. Well, I'm glad we've got Josh here to dig into some of the thesis before we get to you. They got Chris. Uh, part of this announcement is the partnership of VM Ware in Dell. So tell us about what the partnership is in the solutions for for this long. Yeah. >>We have been working with the Dell in the in the AI and ML space for a long time. We have ah, good partnership there. This just takes the partnership to the next level and we will have ah, execution solution. Support in some of the key. I am el targeted words like the sea for 1 40 the r 7 40 Those are the centers that would be partnering with them on and providing solutions. >>Excellent. Eso John. You know, we've watched for a long time. You know, various technologies. Oh, it's not a fit for virtualized environment. And then, you know, VM Ware does does what it does. Make sure you know, performance is there. And make sure all the options there bring us inside a little bit. You know what this solution means for leveraging GPS? Yeah. So actually, before I before us, answer that question. Let me say that the the fusion acquisition and the diffusion technology fits into a larger strategy at VM Ware around AI and ML. That I think matches pretty nicely the overall Dell strategy as well, in the sense that we are really focused on delivering AI ml capabilities or the ability for our customers to run their am ai and ml workloads from edge before the cloud. And that means running it on CPU or running it on hardware accelerators like like G fuse. Whatever is really required by the customer in this specific case, we're quite excited about using technology as it really allows us. As Chris was describing to extend our capabilities especially in the deep learning space where GPU accelerators are critically important. And so what this technology really brings to the table is the ability to, as Chris was outlining, to pull those resources those hardware resource together and then allow organizations to drive up the utilization of those GP Resource is through that pooling and also increase the degree of sharing that we support that supported for the customer. Okay, Jeff, take us in a little bit further as how you know the mechanisms of diffusion work. Sure, Yeah, that's a great question. So think of it this way. There there is a client component that we're using a server component. The server component is running on a machine that actually has the physical GPU is installed in it. The client machine, which is running the bit fusion client software, is where the user of the data scientist is actually running their machine machine learning application. But there's no GPU actually in that host. And what is happening with fusion technology is that it is essentially intercepting the cuda calls that are being made by that machine learning app, patience and promoting those protocols over to the bit fusion server and then injecting them into the local GPU on the server. So it's actually, you know, we call it into a position in the ability that remote these protocols, but it's actually much more sophisticated than that. There are a lot of underlying capabilities that are being deployed in terms of optimization who takes maximum advantage of the the networking link that sits between the client machine and the server machine. But given all of that, once we've done it with diffusion, it's now possible for the data scientist. Either consume multiple GP use for single GPU use or even fractional defuse across that Internet using the using technology. Okay, maybe it would help illustrate some of these technologies. If you got a couple of customers, Sure, so one example would be a retail customer. I'm thinking of who is. Actually it's ah, grocery chain. That is the flowing, ah, large number of video cameras into their to their stores in order to do things like, um, watch for pilfering, uh, identify when storage store shelves could be restocked and even looking for cases where, for example, maybe a customer has fallen down in denial on someone needs to go and help those multiple video streams and then multiple app patients that are being run that part are consuming the data from those video streams and doing analytics and ml on them would be perfectly suited for this type of environment where you would like to be ableto have these multiple independent applications running but having them be able to efficiently share the hardware resources of the GP use. Another example would be retailers who are deploying ml Howard Check out registers who helped reduce fraud customers who are buying, buying things with, uh, fake barcodes, for example. So in that case, you would not necessarily want to employ a single dedicated GPU for every single check out line. Instead, what you would prefer to do is have a full set of resource. Is that each inference operation that's occurring within each one of those check out lines could then consume collectively. That would be two examples of the use of this kind of pull in technology. Okay, great. So, Josh, a lot last question for you is this technology is this only for use and anything else. You can give us a little bit of a look forward to as to what we should be expecting from the big fusion technology. Yeah. So currently, the target is specifically NVIDIA GPU use with Cuda. The team, actually even prior to acquisition, had done some work on enablement of PJs and also had done some work on open CL, which is more open standard for a device that so what you will see over time is an expansion of the diffusion capabilities to embrace devices like PJs. The domain specific a six that first was referring to earlier will roll out over time. But we are starting with the NVIDIA GPU, which totally makes sense, since that is the primary hardware acceleration and for deep learning currently excellent. Well, John and Chris, thank you so much for the updates to the audience. If you're watching this live, please throwing the crowd chat and ask your questions. This faith, If you're watching this on demand, you can also go to crowdchat dot net slash make ai really to be able to see the conversation that we had. Thanks so much for joining. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you. Managing your data center requires around the clock. Attention Dell, EMC open manage mobile enables I t administrators to monitor data center issues and respond rapidly toe unexpected events anytime, anywhere. Open Manage Mobile provides a wealth of features within a comprehensive user interface, including >>server configuration, push notifications, remote desktop augmented reality and more. The latest release features an updated Our interface Power and Thermal Policy Review. Emergency Power Reduction, an internal storage monitoring download Open Manage Mobile today.

(rhythmic techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. We're excited to be here, it's a pretty interesting event. Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. It's kind of like an accelerator but not really, it's kind of like Y Combinator but not really, it's a little bit different. But it's a community of tech start-ups focusing on sports with a real angle on getting beyond sports. We're excited to have our next guest, who's an investor and also a mentor, really part of the program to learn more about it and she is Gayatri Sarkar, the managing partner from Hype Capital. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >> Pretty nice, huh? (laughs) >> Oh, I just love the view. >> So you said before we turned on the cameras, well first off Hype Capital, what do you guys invest in? What's kind of your focus? >> So Hype Capital is part of one of the biggest ecosystems in sports which is Hype Sports Innovation. We have 13 accelerators all around the world. We are just launching the world's first E-sports accelerator with Epsilon and SK Gaming, one of the biggest gaming company. So we are part of the ecosystem for a pretty long time. And now, we have Hype Capital, VC Fund investing in Europe, Israel, and now in U.S. >> So you mentioned that being a mentor is part of this organization. It's something special. I think you're the first person we've had on who's been a mentor. What does that mean, what does that mean for you? But also what does it mean for all the portfolio companies? >> Sure, I'm a mentor at multiple accelerators. But being a part of Sports Tech Tokyo I saw the very inclusive community that is created by them and the opportunity to look at various portfolio companies and also including our portfolio companies as part of it. One of our portfolio company where we had the lead investors, 'Fun with Balls' they're part of this. >> What's it called, Fun with Balls? >> Fun with Balls, very interesting name. >> Good name. (laughs) >> Yeah, they're from Germany and they came all the way from Germany to here. So, yeah, I'm very excited, because as I said it's an inclusive community, and sports is big. So we are looking at opportunities where deep-techs, where it can be translated into various other verticals, but sports can also be one of the use cases, and that's our focus as investors. >> Right, you said your focus was really on AI, machine learning, you have a big data background a tech background. So when you look at the application of AI in sports what are some of the things that you get excited about. >> Yeah, so for me when I'm looking at investments definitely the diversification of sports portfolio. How can I build my portfolio from esports, gaming, behavioral science in sports to AI, ML, AR, opportunities in material science and various other cases. Coming back to your question it's like how can I look into the market and see the opportunities that, okay can I invest in this sector? Like what's the next big trend? And that's where I want to invest. Obviously, product/market fit, promise/market fit because there's a fan engagement experience that you get in sports, not in any other market the network effect is huge, and I think that's what VVC's are very excited in sports and I think this is right now the best time to invest in sports. >> So promise/market fit, I've never heard that before what does that mean when you say promise/market fit? >> Interesting question so promise/market fit was coined by Union Square Venture VC fund. And they think that where there's the network effect or your engagement with your consumers, with your clients, and with your partners can create a very loyal fan base and I think that is very important. You may see that in other technology sector but, not, it is completely unparalelled when it comes to sports. So, I request all the technologies that are actually trying to build they are use cases, they should focus on sports because the fan engagement, the loyal experience the opportunities, you will not get anywhere else. >> Right >> And I think this is the market that I, and other investors are looking for that, if deep-tech investors and deep-tech technologies are coming into this market we see the sports ecosystem not to be a trillion dollar but a multi-trillion dollar market. >> Right, but it's such a unique experience though, right? I mean some people will joke that fans don't necessarily root for the team, they root for the jersey, right? The players come and go, we're here at Oracle Park which was AT&T park, which was SBC Park, which was I can't even remember, Pac bell I think as well. So you know, is it reasonable for a regular company that doesn't have this innate connection to a fanbase that a lot of sports organizations do that's historical, and family-based, and has such deep roots that can survive maybe down years, can survive a crappy product, can survive kind of the dark days and generally they'll be there when things turn back around. Is that reasonable for a regular company to get that relationship with the customer? >> So, you asked me one of the most important questions in the investors relationship, or investors life which is the cyclicality of the industry and I feel like sports is one industry that has survived the cyclicality of that industry. Because, as you say, a crappy product will not survive you have to focus on customer service so you have to focus, that, okay even if you have the best product in the world how can I make my product sticky? These are the qualities that we are looking into when we are investing in entrepreneurs. But the idea is that if we are targeting startups and opportunities, our focus is that okay, you may have the worlds best product but the founder's should have the ability to understand the market. Okay, there are opportunities, if you look at Facebook if you look at various other companies they started with a product that was maybe like okay, friend site, dating site and they pivoted, so you need to understand the economy you need to understand the market and I think that's what we are looking into the entrepreneurs. And, to answer your question, the family offices they are actually part of this whole startup ecosystem they are saying if there is an opportunity because they are big, they are giant and they are working with legacy techs like Microsoft, Amazon. It's very difficult for the legacy techs to be agile and move fast, so it's very important for them if they can place themselves at a 45 degree angle with the startup ecosystem, and they can move faster. So that's the opportunity for them in the sport's startup ecosystem. >> All right, well Gayatri thanks for taking a few minutes and hopefully you can find some new investments here. >> No, thank you so much thank you so much for your time. >> Absolutely, she's Gayatri, I'm Jeff you're watching The Cube, we are at Oracle Park On the shores of historic McCovey Cove I got to get together with Big John and practice this line thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (rhythmic techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. We're excited to be here. It's a pretty interesting event. Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. It's kind of like an accelerator, but not really. It's kind of like YCombinator, but not really. It's a little bit different, but it's a community of tech start-ups focusing on sports with a real angle on getting beyond sports. We're excited to have our next guest who's an investor and also a mentor, really part of the program to learn more about it, and she is Gayatri Sarkar, the managing partner from HYPE Capital. Welcome. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >> Pretty nice, huh? >> Oh, I just love the view. >> So you said before we turned on the cameras... Well, first off, HYPE Capital, what do you guys invest in? What's kind of your focus? >> So HYPE Capital is one of the biggest ecosystem in sports, which is HYPE Sports Innovation. We have 13 accelerators all around the world. We are just launching the world's first Esports accelerator with FC Koeln and SK gaming, one of the biggest gaming company. So we are part of the ecosystem for a pretty long time. And now we have HYPE Capital or VC Fund investing in Europe, Israel, and now in US. >> So you mentioned that being a mentor, as part of this organization, as something special. Think you're the first person we've had on who's been a mentor. What does that mean? What does it mean for you, but also what does it mean for all the portfolio companies? >> Sure. I'm a mentor at multiple accelerators, but being a part of Sports Tech Tokyo, I saw the very inclusive community that is created by them. And the opportunity to look at various portfolio companies and also including our portfolio companies as part of it. One of our portfolio company where we are the lead investors, Fund with Balls, they are part of this. So-- >> What's it called? Fun with Balls? >> Fun with Balls, very interesting name. >> Good name. >> Yeah. (laughing) They're from Germany and they came all the way from Germany to here. So, yeah, I'm very excited because as I said, it's an inclusive community and sports is big. So we are looking at opportunities where deep techs, where it can be translated into various other verticals, but sports can also be one of the use cases. And that's our focus as investors. >> Right. You said your focus is really on AI, machine learning. You have a big data background, a tech background. So when you look at the application of AI in sports, what are some of the things that you get excited about? >> Yeah, so for me, when I'm looking at investments, definitely the diversification of sports portfolio, how can I build my portfolio from Esports gaming, behavioral science in sports to AI, ML, AR opportunities in material science, and various other cases? Coming back to your question, it's like how can I look into the market and see the opportunities that, okay, can I invest in this sector? As I said, what's the next big trend? And that's where I want to invest. Obviously, founder market fit, product market fit, promise market fit because there's the fan engagement experience that you get in sports, not in any other market. The network effect is huge and I think that's what we VCs are very excited in sports. And I think this is, right now, the best time to invest in sports. >> So promise market fit, I've never heard that before. What does that mean when you say promise market fit? >> Interesting question. So promise market fit was coined by Union Square Venture VC Fund. And they think that where there's the network effect, or your engagement with your consumers, with your clients, with your partners, can create a very loyal fan base and I think that's very important. You may see that in other technology sector, but it is completely unparallel when it comes to sports. So I request all the technologies that are actually trying to build their use cases. They should focus on sports because the fan engagement, the loyal experience, they opportunities, you'll not get anywhere else. >> And I think this is the market that I and other investors are looking forward. If deep tech investors and deep tech technologies are coming into this market, we see the sports ecosystem, not to be a trillion-dollar, but a multi-trillion dollar market. >> Right. But it's such a unique experience, though, right? I mean, some people will joke their fans don't necessarily root for the team, they root for the jersey, right? The players come and go. We're here at Oracle Park, which was AT&T Park, which was SBC Park, which was I can't even remember. Pac Bell, I think, as well. So is it reasonable for a regular company that doesn't have this innate, kind of, a connection to a fan base that a lot of sports organizations do that's historical and family-based, and has such deep roots that can survive, maybe, down years, can survive a crappy product, can survive, kind of, the dark days and generally they'll be there when things turn back around. Is that reasonable for a regular company to try to get that relationship with a customer? >> So you asked me one of the most important question in the investor's relationship or investor's life, which is the cyclicality of the industry. And I feel like sports is one industry that has survived the cyclicality of that industry. Because, as you said, a crappy product will not survive. You have to focus on customer service. You have to focus that, okay, even if you have the best product in the world. How can I make my product sticky? I think these are the qualities that we're looking into when we are investing in entrepreneurs. But the idea is that if we are targeting start-ups and opportunities, our focus is that, okay, you may have the world's best product, but the founders should have the ability to understand the market. Okay, there are opportunities. If you look at Facebook, if you look at various other companies, they started with a product, which maybe, okay, friends saw a dating site and they pivoted. So you need to understand the economy. You need to understand the market. And I think that's what we are looking into the entrepreneurs. And as to answering your question, the family offices, they're actually part of this world start-up ecosystems. They're seeing if there's an opportunity, because they're big, they're giant, and they're working with legacy techs like Microsoft, Amazon. It's very difficult for the legacy techs to be agile and move fast. So it's very important for them if they can place themselves at a 45 degree angle with the start-up ecosystem and they can move faster. So that's the opportunity for them in the sports start-up ecosystem. >> All right. Well, Gayatri, thanks for taking a few minutes and hopefully you can find some new investments here-- >> No, thank you so much. >> over the course of the day. >> Thank you so much for your time. >> Absolutely, she's Gayatri, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We are at Oracle Park on the shores of historic McCovey Cove. I got to get together with big John and practice this line. (laughing) Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Camera Crew: Clear. >> Jeff: John Miller. >> Gayatri: Oh, yeah.

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here in Bahrain for exclusive coverage for AWS Summit, part of Amazon's new region being launched here in the Middle East. I'm John Furrier, your host, we have two great guests from C5 Accelerator in Washington D.C., now kicking it out in Bahrain. Hadyah Fathalla, executive director C5 Accelerate and Eva Dimitriadis, good to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Chief operating officer. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, congratulations. Bahrain, D.C. >> The world. >> The world, it's global. >> Thank you, yeah. >> C5 Global. >> It's great to be here. >> It's an exciting time. I mean, I got to ask you Eva, because we had previously met, talked about interviews in D.C. Smart people that known Amazon, because Teresa and Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos always say, "We're going to be misunderstood for a while." Come on, that's not true. (laughing) A region in this area is going to explode the entrepreneurial scene. What's your take? >> I think that's absolutely true. As we see today at the Summit, there's just such a growing number of entrepreneurs and people who are excited to embrace digital innovation. Three years ago I think the story would have been different but ever since we set up the accelerator here, which was the first once in Bahrain, we've just seen an explosion of interest and not just from Bahrain but from around the GCC. Even start ups from abroad coming and setting up here as their Middle East practice. >> Talk about C5 for a second. Let's take a minute, to explain what you guys do. I jumped ahead a little bit because I'm excited because I just love the entrepreneurial energy. This is a really important thing happening and you guys are playing a role. Talk about C5 Accelerate, what are you guys doin'? What's your business model? Just take a minute to explain as a set up. >> So I'll let Eva talk maybe more about our global operations but really C5 Accelerate a few years ago, branch the business which was largely an investment business, including innovation business and we built Bahrain's first and one the regions, in fact, first cloud enabled accelerators and Bahrain's very first technology accelerator and we did that in partnership with the Economic Development Board, the labor firm Tamkeen and obviously with AWS. Really we benefited from the first mover advantage and the thinking around that was that as Amazon grows it's geographic footprint there is great opportunity to build on the cloud in places like the Middle East where the ecosystem is nascent and there is an amazing first mover advantage. >> Yeah. >> So when we partnered with the government to build this, we realized as we do that, we also need to contribute to building a healthy ecosystem so we built this first accelerator and we have felt-- >> When was that, by the way? >> 2016. >> Great, thank you. >> Actually September marks our two year. We've since graduated five cohorts. We're gearing up for six and we have 34 start ups under our belt. Our first cohort was an all Bahraini cohort and today we're very proud to say that actually half of the start ups that have graduated from this program that is based out of Bahrain are international start ups. That's what we're doing locally. Maybe Eva can tell you a little bit more about what we're doing on a global scale. >> You know and that's important. I want to make sure you got that out about having a bunch of start ups under your belt because when I went to the start up Bahrain session yesterday I was really, really impressed by two things. One is, just the smart energy, the smart people who like understand entrepreneurship. Either went to school for it or have learned through the scar tissue of trial and tribulations like myself. And then the entrepreneurs were there themselves. >> Mm-hmm. >> And you know a healthy entrepreneurial community when they start bitchin' and moanin', they're all chirping away, they're hungry. There's a hungry appetite for entrepreneurship here and creating but it's not fake entrepreneurship. They're really hungry. They're, where's the cash? Where's the capital? So this is really a positive sign. >> It is and I want to add something really quick before Eva jumps in, I think in the past two years what's great about a small ecosystem and the ability to pivot and build fast is you actually see the impact that you can have as an individual and as a company and as a community really on the landscape. But also regionally we've had great collaborative efforts across the GCC and in the region with partners in Saudi and Kuwait and Egypt and in Jordan so I think there's a lot of momentum that we're riding on now, and I think it's a great time to be building in the tech space. >> Well Eva, before you get to your comments. I just want to follow up on the comment around Saudi and different regions because this is a trend that has been happening for a while in Silicon Valley, as you know. People have been leaving Silicon Valley, because it's cost to live there, but people have been putting engineering teams outside of Silicon Valley. I mean, 20 years ago, you only went outside of Silicon Valley or the US to outsource which is not really product development, it's just coding. Then the trend became real engineering and product development, real chops outside. We just had Abdul on from Saudi and he was talking about his shape of his team, the psychology, the make up of the people, it's just not in Saudi Arabia. It's in China, it's all over the world. As developers are working across the world, this is a really big deal. I mean this is the new dynamic. >> Yep. >> Diverse teams, geo located, no borders, this is going to change the political landscape. It's a cultural shift. >> Definitely, I mean I think it's a while before we have here the same secret sauce that exists in Silicon Valley or that has existed there for the past decade or so. But the emphasis on training and upscaling is huge and as we've heard a number of times today, there are so many incentives to do so for free so you can actually learn to code, you can become a certified AWS coder for free in Bahrain. Which is a phenomenal advantage and step up. I mean, no one would pay me to do that in the UK. I think that, along with a number of other initiatives are really going to leap frog the development here. And in terms of what you talk about, the sort of the landscape and geo location, it goes in so many different directions now. There's no single focus so we had a Swiss company last year come and incorporate in Bahrain, and hire developers here to grow their business. It can go in so many different directions. >> Yeah, the winner take all business model is an old business model and now it's everyone's winning so it's a little bit of flattening of the wealth and the opportunities but the pie is getting bigger. >> Yes. >> I think this is the dynamic that cloud and Amazon continues to demonstrate that the Oracles, for instance, of the world, we got to win it all, lock everyone in and we got to own it. That ethos is not, that dog's not hunting, as they say. This is changing the entrepreneurial landscape and the other thing I observe is the younger generation. Leveling up is very easy to them. It's like a video game, right? Leveling up is AI, blockchain, I think one of your companies I talked to, oh we're doing a blockchain implementation. They will eat up the cloud. >> Mm. >> I mean it's going to be like, pretty fast. >> You mentioned-- >> So I'm expecting some accelerated. >> Definitely. I mean you mentioned hungry but they're also fearless. The entrepreneurs that we work with have that perfect mix of a super smart idea and an understanding of a niche sector of the market but also this resilience and recklessness that you need to embrace the opportunity. And all the scary stuff that comes with it. >> And I think adding to that, I think what's great with Amazon coming to Bahrain, with us working across the globe, it's a cross pollination that happens because whether we like it or not, like Eva said, we are not Silicon Valley yet and maybe we don't aspire to be specifically Silicon Valley and we want to build our own unique ecosystem but the lessons learned from the likes of Silicon Valley and London and Singapore and China and everywhere else in the world. >> Yeah. >> Really helps build, not just the skills required but the grit that could otherwise be absent. >> The grit's key, yeah. >> And it can engender the kind of cultural shift that's necessary so you need, so you can develop these robust and resilient qualities that are necessary for a founder. >> Well, that's a really great point. I moved from the east coast in the US to California with my first start up because that's where the action was and I can tell ya, I've been there 20 years and I've been an entrepreneur doing things ever since. And there's a fallacy of trying to emulate Silicon Valley. Every i dotted, t crossed and trying to take the playbook. There's no direct match, however, there's some consistencies in there. That's grit, creativity, openness, capital markets and community and this is something that you guys kind of have in place. And then adapting that to your culture. Now I will say that my impression here is it feels a little bit Silicon Valley because it's a little bit more open and loose. People like to go fast. Fast and loose is the Silicon Valley way. Dubai's a little bit more like New York to me. So I can feel more, valley-like here. I'm not saying that Dubai's bad, I'm just saying it's different cultures. Bigger, its more ... >> There's definitely a lot of agility here. I think one of the other advantages which leads back into what C5 is as a whole, we're primarily an investment business. We have a venture capital fund based in the UK. What we're really looking for is investible, scalable business models where we're de risking the cost of capital with cloud computing because that is how ultimately these start ups scale. Another benefit that we really see in this market is value for money. If you're a start up in Silicon Valley and you get to the stage that some of our start ups get to when they finish their program, your valuation is pretty much always triple what we would see here, so valuation's a very sensitive subject. Our start ups hate talking about it. We structure our deals with them in a way that generally avoids having a valuation. >> It's very easy to do business here. You just keep on increasing the valuation, all the stars will come dropping to your doorstep. >> It's a nuanced area. >> Yeah. >> But that being said, you can get really good value for money businesses but more importantly you're investing in the teams and the entrepreneurs and there's no shortage of that here. >> Let's talk about the ecosystem here and then let's talk about the women in tech because one of the things that blew me away yesterday was Teresa Carlson held a women breakfast and for the first time I got kicked off a table because they wanted to make room for the workshop. >> Sorry about that. (laughing) >> I'm like, wait a minute. This is not an inclusive environment. Sorry, no, we need the table. Okay, I know, I was happy to tap out. But I wasn't expecting that and the energy and the, just really, again, this event, they had to lock the doors for the keynote so there's really a big interest across the board. Talk about the ecosystem and then the women in tech situation. >> So I think the ecosystem is an interesting question because, I mean, we work very collaboratively. Like I said, even though this initiative largely was kind of envisioned by the government and mainly by the Economic Development Board and I'm sure you got a chance to speak to Khalid Humaidan, he might have given you a bit of an idea of how this started off but really the EBD threw this idea of start up Bahrain to the community and said, "Look, you guys lead on it." And it took a little bit of time for the community to figure out what that really means and what it's going to look like but it really made the community and ourselves also think pragmatically about what we want this ecosystem to look like. So even though it's not as mature, like I said, as other ecosystems further away and especially in the west, it is coming together very nicely because it's coming together as a collaborative effort. You see a very good continuous consultative work between private sector, public sector, the start ups and then the other stakeholders, including ourselves, and academia. We still have a long way to go, I think specially in areas and this is something that I always emphasize, is to shift the culture you really need to start at a much younger age so at schools, at universities. We engage with them and are keen to do more on that front but I think we are laying the foundation for what I hope in the next five, 10 years will be a pretty competitive entrepreneurial and start up-- >> It might be sooner. >> Hopefully sooner. >> Yeah. >> I think we have the right recipe now to build a robust ecosystem. >> Yeah, I can say I can attest to that after what I saw yesterday. Your thoughts? >> Yeah I mean our team in Bahrain is 100% Bahraini. I'm based in London, but Hadyah here leads a phenomenal team who are all Bahraini citizens. Being the island that it is, we know everybody so Hadyah's done an excellent job of engaging with everyone from schools to universities to post grads to public sector, private sector. So really all the stakeholders in the ecosystem are engaged and everyone from the oil and gas industry to the finance sphere are thinking about how innovation can advance their businesses so that they don't get left behind at the train station. >> Yeah. >> It's really top of mind and top of agenda which is a very invigorating scenario. I think, going back to some of the initiatives, from bankruptcy laws to having a fintech bay with the Central Bank of Bahrain, there's just so much, like they're constantly pushing the envelope to make this a friendly environment for entrepreneurs to come and do business. >> And I want to add one thing. There's always this question of, does government have a role to drive innovation and create an ecosystem? >> They do. >> I think Bahrain is a good example for others in the region and even beyond to say actually government does have an important role. >> They do. >> If you look at Bahrain, it's government that has been very flexible and nimble in terms of moving to accommodate. Whether it's the new bankruptcy laws or allowing for the fintech sandbox and a cloud first policy and shaping the start up Bahrain. The government has taken the lead on a lot of these initiatives so it's a good example of how there can be a top down approach to building an entrepreneurial landscape but also where the bottom needs to come and meet the top so I think Bahrain a good example. >> Just to reiterate, my observation is that they know how to get things going and sponsor but they're also listening and self aware and even on theCUBE here, we heard comments like, we'll get out of the way. >> Mm-hmm. >> Now that's the difference between good judgment. >> Mm-hmm. >> You know? And, no, no I funded you, I own you, I mean I've seen that in the public sector or, we're going to fund you as an NGO and then I kind of own you so come to my receptions and be my show horse-- >> Mascot. >> Show all of my people how good I am, donating money. So there's a little bit of a balance between enabling. >> Yep. >> But at the end of the day, this is going to be a fast pace and that's where I think the speed, knowing when to get out of the way and letting the community go. I mean, people like speed here. Cars are driving fast, you got a Formula 1 race track up at 14 months. >> They like speed but sometimes things are surprisingly slow. >> Yes. >> So it's incredible that we are where we are. You asked about women in tech and I think there's something there that we're really proud of. C5 globally, 43% of the start up founders that we've supported through our accelerators are women. In terms of diversity, we're thrilled about that statistic. We'd like it be 50%. >> Yep. >> And I think that the Middle East, we're seeing so much hunger from women entrepreneurs and women who want to learn to code to be founders and we want to do everything in our power to enable that. >> Computer science degrees coming out of the university? >> Absolutely. Hadyah here had this fantastic idea a year ago to found what we call C5 Nebula. I'll let Hadyah talk about why we came up with that name and how it relates to our business but this is now a new stream of our business which really it's a membership platform where all women globally are invited to join and we provide education, upscaling, jogs, connectivity, mentorships and through this network we are allowing a complete globalization of the talent and skills that we have. >> Yeah. >> So you can be a student in D.C. wanting to come and volunteer to work for a company here and we will make that match happen. I think it's a very exciting phase for us and we've seen so much demand for this program. Maybe Hadyah can talk about why we came up with this name? >> Yeah, so like Eva said, we, I'm Bahraini, we've always had, we've been lucky to have been pioneering and have work very closely men and have had really equal opportunity but in industries like tech, globally, women's representation is lower than that of men and there are areas where there's still work to be done. >> A lot of work to be done, yeah. >> So last year, actually, with the first AWS Summit, when Teresa was out here, we figured we do a women in tech breakfast. When we were curating that guest list we couldn't find that many women and we didn't know if wasn't that we didn't know them or that they didn't exist and we realized really we need to put together something to bring all the women together and work more closely so we built Nebula, really to, like Eva said, do three things and a little more. One is the connectivity side of things and then the upscaling but also to raise awareness and appreciation. >> What is Nebula? >> What is? >> What is Nebula? >> So Nebula, scientifically it's an astrological, astronomical phenomenon-- >> But it's your network group, is that what it's called? >> It's a platform. >> Okay. >> So it's actually been officially launched three weeks ago, you can go online and visit it and it's a platform that allows you to become a member of Nebula and gives you access to mentorship, to opportunities to upscale and train but also to raise awareness and appreciation for the amazing opportunities for women in the tech space. >> Is there a URL? >> There is a URL, it's-- >> We've been debating what is is today. (laughing) >> It's www.c5nebula.com. >> Okay, I'll put it up, publish it with the video. >> And what it means, it's the Latin word for cloud and it's where stars are born. >> Yeah. It's also, what's important, is it's a compilation of a bunch of different clouds and electrons and it's a mess, it's a bit of a mess but it's a lot of forces working together and I guess the moral of the story is, we can create stars in the space but we all have to work together and it all has to come together to-- >> And it's powerful when you work together. >> Only 10% of VC funding worldwide goes to women founder companies and 1% of that goes to women of color so there's some staggering statistics there. Globally, this is not a Middle East problem, this is globally a real big area of disparity that we're trying to help address. >> Well you guys know our door's open in California and Boston, and certainly the women in tech, we got a big network, we can merge them into the Nebula connect our networks. >> We would love that. >> We would love that. >> We're open and anything you guys have to share with us we love co-creating with the communities, that's what we do at theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure. >> You got a great mission. Big supporter. C5 Accelerate, they're the ones on the ground, making things happen, gettin' those sparks of entrepreneurship and helping them capture them into one community, create some energy and some momentum and help people create value and also capture the value, that's what it's all about here. You got Amazon Web Services' region in the Middle East, CUBE coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering the 12th annual MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium, brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> We are wrapping up a day of coverage here at theCUBE for MIT CDOIQ here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm Rebecca Knight, along with Peter Burris. We've been here all day, folks. We've learned a lot, we've had a lot of great conversations here, a lot of lively debate and interest. So, Peter, this morning, you were talking about this fundamental idea that data needs to be viewed as an asset within an organization. Obviously we're here with a bunch of people who are drinking that Kool-Aid, but-- >> Living that Kool-Aid. >> Living that Kool-Aid, embodying that Kool-Aid. So based on what we heard today, do you think that business has caught up? >> Well, I would say two things. First of all, this has been, as you said, it's been absolutely marvelous series of conversations in many respects. This is what theCUBE is built for, right? Smart people in conversation on camera. And we've had some smart people here today. What I got out of it on that particular issue is that there is general agreement among CDOs that they have to start introducing this notion of asset and what that means in their business. There's not general agreement, or there's a general, I guess not agreement, but there's general concern that we still aren't there yet. I think that everybody that we talk to I think, would come back and say, yes we grew those practices, but the conventions are not as established and mature as they need to be for everybody in our business to agree so that we can acculturate. Now we did hear some examples of folks that have done it. So that great BBDA case we talked about was an example. There was a company that is actually becoming, is really truly institutionalizing, acculturating that notion of data as an asset that performs work, but I think we've got general agreement that that's the right way of thinking about it, but also a recognition that more work needs to be done, and that's why conferences like this are so important. >> Well, one of the things that really struck me about what BBDA did was this education campaign of its 130,000 employees, and as you said, really starting from the ground and saying, this is how we're going to do things. This is who we are as an organization. >> Yeah, and it was a great conversation because one of the points I made was, specifically, that BBDA is a bank. It is an information-based business that has very deep practices and principles associated with information, and when they decided that they need to move beyond that, they were able to get the entire bank to adopt a set of practices that are leading to new types of engagement models, product orientations, service capabilities. That's a pretty phenomenal feat. So, it's happening and it can get done, and there are examples of it happening. Another thing we talked about was the fact that over the course of the next few years, one of the big, one of the most exciting things about digital business is not just digital business and digital, what people call digital maintenance, but that transformation practices. That way forward. And we talked about the idea of how you wrapper existing goods and services and offerings with data to turn them into something else, and the incumbents are going to find ways of doing that so they can re-establish themselves as leaders in a lot of different markets. >> And that's what will separate the people who really get this from the people who, or from the organizations that are going to lag. >> Yeah, we're starting to hear that a lot more from clients, is that the idea increasingly is, okay, I've already got customers. I've already got offers. How do I wrapper them? Using a term we heard from a professor at MIT. How do I wrapper them to improve them utilizing data? And that's a big challenge, but it's happening. >> One of the other fun interviews we had was all about clinical trials, and the use of data in these clinical trials. There are so many challenges about, with clinical trials because of the time it takes to conduct one of these, the cost that it takes, and then at the end you are dealing with patients who just say, "oh, I think I'm not going to take that drug today." Or other factors that take place here. I mean, what do you see, I know your dad is a physician, what do you see as the most exciting thing about the use of data in clinical trials, but also just in the healthcare industry in general? >> Well, so what we heard, and it was a great combination of interviews, but what we heard is that to bring a new drug to market can cost $4 billion and take 15 years. And the question is, can data, first off, reduce the cost of bringing a new drug to market? And we heard numbers like, yeah, by $1 billion or even more. So imagine having the cost of bringing a new drug to market, but also reducing the time by as much as two thirds. That's very, very powerful stuff when we come down to it. And as you said, the way you do that is you have to protect your data to make sure you're complying with various regulations, but as you said, for example, sustaining someone in the trial even though they're starting to feel better because the drug's working. Well, people opt out. They abandon the trial. Well can you use data to keep them tied in, to provide new types of benefits and new types of capabilities so they want to sustain their participation in the trial. >> Or at least the pharma company, hey, this person's dropping out, you need to explain that to the FDA, and that's going to become a point, yeah. >> Or you need to provide an incentive to keep them in. >> Right. >> Or another example that was used was, if we can compress the amount of time, but then recognize that we can sustain an engagement with a patient and collect data longer, that even though we can satisfy the specific regulatory mandates of a trial, shorter, we can still be collecting data because we have a digital engagement model as part of this whole process subject to keeping privacy in place and ownership notions in place, and everything else, complying with regulatory notions. So that is I think a very powerful example. And again, Santi, Dr. Santi was talking specifically about how ERT is helping to accelerate this whole process because over the course of the next dozen years, we're going to learn more about people, the genome is going to become better understood. Genomics is going to continue to evolve. Data is going to become increasingly central to how we think about defining disease and disease processes, and one of the key responses is to learn from that and apply data so that we can more rapidly build the new procedures, devices, and drugs that are capable of responding. >> When we're thinking about what keeps the chief data officers up at night, we know that data security, data fidelity, privacy, the other thing we really heard about from Melana Goldban from PwC Accelerator is the idea about bias, and that is a real concern. From the way she is talking about, it sounded as though companies are more aware of this. It really is an organizational challenge that they recognize that not just matters for social reasons but really for business reasons too, frankly. It affects your bottom line. Where do you come out on that? Do you think we're moving in the right direction? >> First of all, it was a great interview, and a lot of what Melana said was illuminating to me, and I agree with virtually everything she said. We're doing a piece of research on that right now. I would say that, in fact, most companies are not fully factoring the role that bias plays in a lot of different ways. That's one of the things that absolutely must happen as part of the acculturation process, what's known as evidence-based management starts to take grip more within businesses is to understand not only what bias introduced into data now, but as you create derivatives on that data, how that bias changes, delays that data. And that is a relatively poorly understood problem. >> But it's a big problem. >> Oh, it's going to be even bigger because we're going to utilize AI and it's actually going to limit the range of options that people consider as they make a decision, or make the decisions directly for the individual, act on behalf of the brand, what we call agency, a system of agency. And not understanding that range, not having it be auditable, not understanding what the inherent bias is can very quickly send a business off the rails in unexpected ways. So we're devoting a lot of time and energy into understanding that right now. But here's the challenge, that we've got business decision makers who are very familiar with certain kinds of information. There's nobody gets to be the CEO or the COO or a senior person in business if they don't have a pretty decent understanding of findings. So financial information is absolutely adopted within the board room and the senior ranks of management in virtually all businesses of any consequential size today. What we're asking them to do is to learn about wholly new classes of data. New data conventions, what it means, how to apply it, how you should factor it, how to converge agreement around things, that allows them to be as mature in their use of customer data or production data or partner data or any other number of metrics as they are with financial data. That's a real tall order. It's one of the significant challenges that a lot of businesses face today. So it's not that they don't get data or they don't understand data. It's that the sources of data and therefore the range of options that are going to be shaped by data are becoming that much more significant in business. >> And it's how they need to think about data too. I mean I was really struck by Tom Sasala at the very beginning saying, one of the reasons the intelligence community didn't predict 9/11 is that we didn't have people who were thinking like Hollywood people, thinking audaciously enough about what could happen and that similarly we need to have business leaders and executives, who may be very good at crunching numbers, really think much more broadly about the kinds of-- >> And Tom is absolutely right. We also, cuz I was very close to the DoD at the time, there was serious confirmation bias that was going on at that time too. >> Exactly. But clearly he's right, that the objective is for executives to, as a group, acknowledge the powerful role that data can play, have a data-first mentality as opposed to a bias or experience-first mentality. Because my experience is very private relative to your experience. And it takes a lot of time for us to negotiate that before we can make a very, very consequential move. That's not going to go away. We're human beings. But we increasingly need to look at data, which can provide a common foundation for us to build our biases upon so that we can be more specific and more transparent about articulating my interpretations. You can't start doing that until you are better, more willing to utilize data as a potentially unifying tool and mechanism for thinking about, thinking about how we move forward with something. >> That's great. And it's a great way to end our day of coverage here at M.I.T CDOIQ. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, >> As always, Rebecca. >> hosting with you. And thanks to the crew and everyone here. It's been really a lot of fun. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris. We will see you next time on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 Orlando. Getting to the end of two days of three days of wall to wall coverage, happy to welcome to the program Wayne Ogozaly who's a cloud architect with Cisco. From my neck of the woods up in New England. Thanks so much for joining us down here. >> Pleasure to be here. It's getting towards the end of the day which means thundershowers will probably hit for an hour or so. >> Exactly, exactly, it's sunny in the morning and I brought an umbrella, who knew. >> Absolutely, so Wayne you've been with Cisco for a few years Why don't you give us a little bit about your background before we get into it. >> Sure, I started out with Cisco as an engineer. Actually before Cisco, a rocket scientist at Raytheon Company, so I had all sorts of fun before I got hooked on the internet stuff. So I've been a data center architect, spent quite a few years in the media area providing mogul applications, as well as some of the content development side of the media part of Cisco And now I'm into service provider markets which is fantastic >> So before we get into service providers give us your impression of the show this year It'd been a few years since I've come and it's changed quite a bit you know. Big crowd here, we're in the DevNet zone definitely some of the buzz of the show here. What's your impression of the show so far? >> I feel a huge amount of energy. I deal with service providers and we've had so many service providers come by our booth. There's a huge amount of excitement about bringing new managed services to market. DNA Center launch was huge for us. We're showing live demonstrations of that at our booth as well, and I feel like it's almost at a tipping point, where we're going to be talking about software defined networking and NFV. It's been a long time coming but now we're actually kind of crossing the chasm hopefully where we'll be sharing with you some pretty big announcements very soon on large customers deploying those exact services at massive scale. >> Yeah, so we love talking about service providers, we're talking to service providers on theCUBE because when you talk about scale, when you talk about pace of change, when you talk about pressures of financials. Well there's very few places where they all come together for the service providers. Why don't tell us about the product solution set that you're working on and what the news is here. >> Sounds great So I'm part of the Managed Services Accelerator group that has developed a new cloud product. It's been around for a couple years. We've had some major deployments namely at Verizon and Vodafone and a couple other tier ones. A couple huge announcements coming out very shortly. But Managed Services Accelerator allows service providers to deploy many different services across a multi-tenant platform that runs exclusively in the cloud. So we'll talk about what cloud native means what some of the services are. But we're able to bring services to market much more quickly than you were ever able to do in the past. We're able to go from service creation to actual service deployment in literally weeks As some of our major SP's, and those services span a wide range of opportunities, like deploying Meraki or deploying Viptela SD-WAN, or deploying a managed routed service Or even deploying DNA center for a managed SD access. So it's a broad spectrum of services that we can help service providers bring to market very quickly. >> Yeah I love that 'cause if you look at the service providers the applications are so critically important. >> It all starts with the app. If you don't have a compelling app nobody wants to buy it. >> Look the public cloud players are adding new application and new services on practically a daily clip these days. And service providers, many of them partnering with the public cloud but there's still lots of things that they need to do themselves, locally or in certain verticals. So give us some insight, what are some of the things your customers are looking for. How do they keep up with that pace of change and how does this offering help them do that? >> So the cool thing about MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator is it provides a service provider platform for multi tenancy, many different customers in one platform many different services from both Cisco and third party vendors, and those services span both physical devices, traditional ISRs, ASRs, third-party Juniper boxes, whatever, as well as VNFs, virtual network functions. That run in a public cloud like AWS or in your private data center, as a service provider or, in a universal CPE, or a virtual branch or for our Cisco folks, ENCS, Enterprise Network Compute System. It's a virtual branch x86, where we can run service chains down there, we provide a wide range of services that provide the ability to configure and deploy multiple services toward a single customer all from one place. Some of the challenges that our service providers have, is that they have many different service offers but each of those service offers is in its own silo. And every time they want to bring a new service to market, they have to spend many millions of dollars trying to integrate whether they're northbound OSS or BSS system. Or integrate with a new set of vendors. We, from a singe cloud platform allow them a single platform to integrate many different services from one place in a beautiful sort of cloud managed way. >> There's a large portfolio that customers need to sort out. One of the areas we're hearing a lot of discussion about has been the SD-WAN, how does that fit into this whole discussion? >> The SD-WAN service is one of our most popular services. It's being deployed at scale at Vodafone and Verizon. The Viptela acquisition for Cisco Cisco SD-WAN, now that it's named, has been very popular in that it allows customers, enterprises to have a choice of NPLS, internet, or even 4G or soon to be 5G backbone networks that they can run the traffic of their choice across. Enterprises want SD-WAN not just for the ability to choose policies and map applications to certain overlays or tunnels. But they're also using it to lower their cost significantly. So they can, from the cloud, kind of like a Meraki cloud. Manage many different devices with a single click of a button, I can push a new policy down in a software defined way to a hundred different devices and maybe move Netflix that might have been running on an NPLS circuit, to a internet access circuit with the click of a button. That's the power that SD-WAN provides and it provides enterprises that capability natively. Service providers offer it as a managed service, enterprises can log into our MSX platform and be able to control the traffic that they want and steer it with clicks of buttons, not large amounts of configurations. >> Wayne you've mentioned a couple of very large customers that are using this, is this something that is geared for the top 20 large service providers or will it hit hundreds, thousands of services providers around the globe? >> It's really both, it's targeted, and I can say that because architecturally it's a cloud-native platform. It's built with Docker containers, Kubernetes microservice framework, when Google, it's built on a similar architecture of Google. So when Google's rolling out 1,500 services a year, the MSX platform's goal is to get more than 100 services a year rolled out in this platform. So the service creation portion of it allows large service providers, like Verizon or Vodafone or many others to be able to offer those services more efficiently from the cloud and manage them. But the smaller guys, are also able to tap into these services because we offer a kind of a pay as you grow model. We offer a one year of three year term license to purchase the product which is very small And then there's like a little three to five dollar a month management fee for every device you have under management. So there's a very low cost of entry that you're able to tap into this powerful cloud management platform and offer any sort of service that you want for both large service providers as well as small service providers. >> You touched on some of the pricing there. How does that work today, do you look and feel like you know most cloud models today, really more of a Opex and a Capex? >> It's a tremendous opex savings. This is really an opex play when we look at it from a service provider perspective. Service providers are challenged today because they're trying to offer many different services but each service is a unique silo. And they've got to integrate a wide range of different pieces of that silo for every new service. So in a multi-tenant environment I need to have billing, I need to have northbound OSS BSS integration, I need to have a consistent user interface, I need to have notifications, I need to have tenancy, user roles, single sign on. Do I really want to integrate that uniquely for every new service or do I want to have Managed Services Accelerator manage all of that for me and then the service provider can focus more on the service. So it's an opex play to allow them to not only bring new services to market more quickly, but once they're brought to market through both REST APIs and our Network Services Orchestrator configure them very rapidly. >> Wanna step back for a second. When we look at this whole kinda cloud discussion for a while, you know there was discussion of like oh well maybe, how much is really going to go to the public cloud or fighting the public cloud and the service providers were caught being pulled from the old world in the new world. I don't think we've really hit equilibrium yet but service providers really understand and the message that I've heard from Cisco this week and really for the last year or so has been that hybrid multi cloud world is where we live. It's not going to be an answer. We always know everything's an additive in IT and nothing really ever dies. What do you hear from your service provider partners you know, how are they feeling, what do they think about, the changing dynamic of this world? >> Like John Chambers used to say, "We need to deal with the world the way it is "and not the way we'd wish it to be." Service providers realize that it is a multi cloud environment. They need to be able to accommodate different services and different service models based on what their customers are looking for. They also need to be able to achieve operational efficiency when they're rolling out those services to be able to make it commercially viable. So what we're hearing from our service providers is that they want a multi service environment that MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, provides them where they can manage maybe deploying a device in AWS, to front end and application space for a particular tenant and then connect that device. Whether it be a Meraki virtual managed device or a Viptela vEdge device, to an SD-WAN that's connected to rest of their enterprises And then when they walk out of one of their branch devices and they get on their mobile network we can enable through Cisco, the connection between 5G slicing and a SD-WAN service so that the service that they get on their phone and the policies that are applied on their phone are identical to those that they've worked so hard to deploy actually in their branches, in their headquarters, in their campuses, or in the cloud. It is a multi-cloud environment. Almost every single application domain spans all of those components. MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, allows you to kind of centrally manage all of those functions from one place. >> Okay, so Wayne MSX, new branding, some new features some new customers, give us a little bit of what we can expect to see through the rest of this year with this solution. >> You're going to see some pretty big announcements of some new service providers doing some new services with MSX. Those new services include the deployment of new SD-WAN networks, very exciting on our virtual branch platform where our ENCS, or X86 based branch will be rolled out at large scale with a couple service providers. Where you can decide what VNFs you want to put on there. What service chains they represent and how you want to monetize them. Been talking about universal CPs for a long time, this is the year it's going to happen at scale using MSX and ENCS, and then you're going to see managed devices cloud connect to AWS and wide range of other services including Meraki and others that build out the portfolio. But bottom line with MSX is, we know our service providers want a diversity of services. It's a service creation platform. We expect service providers to bring their service to the table, we can accommodate it, monetize it, bring it to market very rapidly. And I would expect to hear a wide range of wonderful announcements from Cisco and the MSX team in the next few months. >> Alright well Wayne really appreciate you bringing this service provider angle to us. We're at the end of two days of three days of live coverage covering all the angles from Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the replays as well as all the shows that we will be at in the future. For Stu Miniman and my co-host John Furrier, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose, it's The Cube. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube, our continuing coverage of our event, Big Data SV. We're on day two of this event. I'm Lisa Martin, with George Gilbert. We've had a great day yesterday learning a lot and really peeling back the layers of big data, looking at it from different perspectives, from challenges to opportunities. Joining us next is one of our Cube alumni, Chris Selland, the VP of Strategic Alliances from Unifi Software. Chris, great to meet you, welcome back! >> Thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. I have to say, as a alumni and a many time speaker, this venue is spectacular. Congratulations on the growth of The Cube, and this is an awesome venue. I've been on The Cube a bunch of times and this is as nice as I've ever seen it, >> Yeah, this is pretty cool, >> Onward and upward. This place is great. Isn't it cool? >> It really is. This is our 10th Big Data event, we've been having five now in San Jose, do our fifth one in New York City in the fall, and it's always interesting because we get the chance, George and I, and the other hosts, to really look at what is going on from different perspectives in the industry of big data. So before we kind of dig into that, tell us a little bit about Unifi Software, what do you guys do, what is unique and differentiating about Unifi. >> Sure, yeah, so I joined Unifi a little over a year ago. You know, I was attracted to the company because it really, I think, is aligned with where the market is going, and Peter talked this morning, Peter Burris was talking this morning about networks of data. Unifi is fundamentally a data catalog and data preparation platform, kind of combined or unified together. So, you know, so people say, "What do you do?" We're a data catalog with integrated data preparation. And the idea behind that, to go to Peter's, you know, mention of networks of data, is that data is becoming more and more distributed in terms of where it is, where it lives, where it sits. This idea of we're going to put everything in the data warehouse, and then we're going to put everything in the data lake, well, in reality, some of the data's in the warehouse, some of the data's in the lake, some of the data's in SAS applications, some of the data's in blob storage. And where is all of that data, what is it, and what can I do with it, that's really the fundamental problem that we solve. And, by the way, solve it for business people, because it's not just data scientists anymore, it's really going out into the entire business community now, you know, marketing people, operations people, finance people, they need data to do their jobs. Their jobs are becoming more data driven, but they're not necessarily data people. They don't know what schemas are, or joins are, but they know, "I need better data "to be able to do my job more effectively." So that's really what we're helping with. So, Chris, this is, it's kind of interesting, if you distill, you know, the capability down to the catalog and the prep-- >> Chris: Yep. So that it's ready for a catalog, but that sort of thing is, it's like investment in infrastructure, in terms of like building the highway system, but there're going to be, you know, for those early highways, there's got to be roots that you, a reason to build them out. What are some of those early use cases that justifies the investment in data infrastructure? >> There absolutely are, I mean, and by the way, those roots don't go away, those roots, you know, just like cities, right? New roots get built on top of them. So we're very much, you know, about, there's still data sitting in mainframes and legacy systems and you know, that data is absolutely critical for many large organizations. We do a lot of working in banking and financial services, and healthcare. They're still-- >> George: Are there common use cases that they start with? >> A lot of times-- >> Like, either by industry or just cross-sectional? >> Well, it's interesting, because, you know, analysts like yourselves have tended to put data catalog, which is a relatively new term, although some other big analyst firm that's having another conference this week, they were telling us recently that, starts with a "G," right? They were telling us that data catalog is now the number one search term they're getting. But it's been, by many annals, also kind of lumped in, lumped in's the wrong word, but incorporated with data governance. So traditionally, governance, another word that starts with "G," it's been the term. So, we often, we're not a traditional data governance platform, per se, but cataloging data has to have a foundation of security in governance. You know, think about what's going on in the world right now, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion, things like GDPR, right? So GDPR sort of says any customer data you have needs to be managed a certain way, with a certain level of sensitivity, and then there's other capabilities you need to open up to customers, like the right to be forgotten, so that means I need to have really good control, first of all, knowledge of, control over, and governance over my customer data. I talked about all those business people before. Certainly marketers are a great example. Marketers want all the customer data they can get, right? But there's social security numbers, PII, who should be able to see and use what? Because, if this data is used inappropriately, then it can cause a lot of problems. So, IT kind of sits in a-- they want to enable the business, but at the same time, there's a lot of risk there. So, anyway, going back to your question, you know, the catalog market is kind of evolved out of the governance market with more of a focus on kind of, you know, enabling the business, but making sure that it's done in a secure and well-governed way. >> George: Guard rails. >> Yes, guard rails, exactly, good way to say it. So, yep, that's good, I said about 500 words, and you distilled it to about two, right? Perfect, yep. >> So, in terms of your role in strategic alliances, tell us a little about some of the partnerships that Unifi is forging, to help customers understand where all this data is, to your point earlier, the different lines of business that need it to drive, identify where's their value, and drive the business forward, can actually get it. >> Absolutely, well, certainly to your point, our customers are our partners, and we can talk about some of them. But also, strategic alliances, we work very closely with a number of, you know, larger technology companies, Microsoft is a good example. We were actually part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, which I think they've now rebranded Microsoft for Startups, but we've really been given tremendous support by that team, and we're doing a lot of work to, kind of, we're to some degree cloud agnostic, we support AWS, we support Azure, we support Google Cloud, but we're doing a lot of our development also on the Azure cloud platform. But you know, customers use all of the above, so we need to support all of the above. So Microsoft's a very close partner of ours. Another, I'll be in two weeks, and we've got some interesting news pending, which unfortunately I can't get into today, but maybe in a couple weeks, with Adobe. We're working very closely with them on their marketing cloud, their experience cloud, which is what they call their enterprise marketing cloud, which obviously, big, big focus on customer data, and then we've been working with a number of organizations and the sort of professional services system integration. We've had a lot of success with a firm called Access Group. We announced the partnership with them about two weeks ago. They've been a great partner for us, as well. So, you know, it's all about an ecosystem. Making customers successful is about getting an ecosystem together, so it's a really exciting place to be. >> So, Chris, it's actually interesting, it sounds like there's sort of a two classic routes to market. One is essentially people building your solution into theirs, whether it's an application or, you know, >> Chris: An enabling layer. >> Yes. >> Chris: Yes. >> Even higher layer. But with corporate developers, you know, it's almost like we spent years experimenting with these data lakes. But they were a little too opaque. >> Chris: Yes. >> And you know, it's not just that you provide the guard rails, but you also provide, sort of some transparency-- >> Chris: Yes. >> Into that. Have you seen a greater success rate within organizations who curate their data lakes, as opposed to those who, you know, who don't? >> Yes, absolutely. I think Peter said it very well in his presentation this morning, as well. That, you know, generally when you see data lake, we associate it with Hadoop. There are use cases that Hadoop is very good for, but there are others where it might not be the best fit. Which, to the early point about networks of data and distributed data, so companies that have, or organizations that have approached Hadoop with a "let's use it what it's good for," as opposed to "let's just dump "everything in there and figure it out later," and there have been a lot of the latter, but the former have done, generally speaking, a lot better, and that's what you're seeing. And we actually use Hadoop as a part of our platform, at least for the data preparation and transformation side of what we do. We use it in its enabling technology, as well. >> You know, it's funny, actually, when you talk about, as Peter talked about, networks of data versus centralized repositories. Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks, was on yesterday, and he was talking about how he had originally come from Teradata, and that they had tried to do work, that he had tried to push them in the direction of recognizing that not all the analytic data was going to be in Teradata, you know, but they had to look more broadly with Hadapt, and I forgot what the rest of, you know-- >> Chris: Right, Aster, and-- >> Aster, yeah. >> Chris: Yes, exactly, yep. >> But what was interesting is that Hortonworks was moving towards the "we believe "everything is going to be in the data lake," but now, with their data plane service, they're talking about, you know, "We have to give you visibility and access." You mediate access to data everywhere. >> Chris: Right. >> So maybe help, so for folks who aren't, like, all bought into Hortonworks, for example, how much, you know, explain how you work relative to data plane service. >> Well, you know, maybe I could step back and give you a more general answer, because I agree with that philosophically, right? That, as I think we've been talking about here, with the networks of data, that goes back to my prior statement that there's, you know, there's different types of data platforms that have different use cases, and different types of solutions should be built on top of them, so things are getting more distributed. I think that, you know, Hortonworks, like every company, has to make the investments that are, as we are, making their customers successful. So, using Hadoop, and Hortonworks is one of our supported Hadoop platforms, we do work with them on engagements, but you know, it's all about making customers successful, ultimately. It's not about a particular product, it's about, you know, which data belongs in which location, and for what use case and what purpose, and then at the same time, when we're taking all of these different data sets and data sources, and cataloging them and preparing them and creating our output, where should we put that and catalog that, so we can create kind of a continuous improvement cycle, as well, and for those types-- >> A flywheel. >> A flywheel, exactly, continuous improvement flywheel, and for those types of purposes, you know, that's actually great use case for, you know, Hortonworks, Hadoop. That's a lot of what we typically use it for. We can actually put the data any place our customers define, but that's very often what we do with it, and then, but doing it in a very structured and organized way. As opposed to, you know, a lot of the early Hadoop, and not specific to any particular distro that went bad, were, it was just like, "Let's just dump it all "into Hadoop because it's cheaper." You know, "Let's, 'cause it's cheaper than the warehouse, "so let's just put it all in there, "and we'll figure what to do with it later." That's bad, but if you're using it in a structured way, it can be extremely useful. At the same point, and at the same time, not everything's going to go there belongs there, if you're being thoughtful about it. So you're seeing a lot more thoughtfulness these days, which is good. Which is good for customers, and it's good for us in the vendor side. Us, Hortonworks, everybody, so. >> So is there, maybe you can tell us of the different approaches to, like, the advantage of integrating the data prep with the catalogized service, because as soon as you're done with data prep it's visible within the catalog. >> Chris: Absolutely, that's one, yep. >> When, let's say when people do derive additional views into the data, how are they doing that in a way that then gets also registered back in the catalog, for further discovery? >> Yeah, well, having the integrated data preparation which is a huge differentiator from us, there are a lot of data catalog products out there, but our huge differentiator, one of them, is the fact that we have integrated data preparation. We don't have to hand off to another product, so that, as you said, gives us the ability to then catalog our output and build that flywheel, that continuous improvement flywheel, and it also just basically simplifies things for customers, hence our name. So, you know, it really kind of starts there. I think I, the second part of your question I didn't really, rewind back on that for me, it was-- >> Go ahead. >> Well, I'm not sure I remember it, right now, either. >> We all need more coffee. >> Exactly, we all need more coffee. >> So I'll ask you this last question, then. >> Yes, please. >> What are, so here we are in March 2018, what are you looking forward to, in terms of momentum and evolution of Unifi this year? >> Well, a lot of it, and tying into my role, I mentioned we will be at Adobe Summit in two weeks, so if you're going to be at Adobe Summit, come see us there, some of the work that we're doing with our partner, some of the events we're doing with people like Microsoft and Access, but really it's also just customer success, I mean, we're seeing tremendous momentum on the customer side, working with our customers, working with our partners, and again, as I mentioned, we're seeing so much more thoughtfulness in the market, these days, and less talk about, you know, the speeds and feeds, and more around business solutions. That's really also where our professional services, system integration partners, many of whom I've been with this week, really help, because they're building out solutions. You know, GDPR is coming in May, right? And you're starting to really see a groundswell of, okay, you know, and that's not about, you know, speeds and feeds. That's ultimately about making sure that I'm compliant with, you know, this huge regulatory environment. And at the same time, the court of public opinion is just as important. You know, we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing with data. Spread it throughout organization, make ourselves successful and make our customers successful. So, it's a lot of fun. >> That's, fun is good. >> Exactly, fun is good. >> Well, we thank you so much, Chris, for stopping back by The Cube and sharing your insights, what you're hearing in the big data industry, and some of the momentum that you're looking forward to carrying throughout the year. >> It's always a pleasure, and you, too. So, love the venue. >> Lisa: All right. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, George. >> Absolutely. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. You're watching our coverage of our event, Big Data SV, hashtag BigDataSV, for George, I almost said George Martin. For George Gilbert. >> George: I wish. >> George R.R., yeah. You would not be here if you were George R.R. Martin. >> George: No, I wouldn't. >> That was a really long way to say thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin, for this George. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington, D.C. it's CUBEConversations with John Furrier. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to special on the ground here with theCUBE in Washington, D.C. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, and co-founder of SiliconANGLE, as we explore the disruption in Washington, D.C. with cloud computing and all the hot stories we have Timothy Kotin who is the founder of SuperFluid Labs. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks so much, John. >> So you guys are doing some pretty disruptive stuff, obviously, societal change, and ventures for good. Social change is a big part of the stories we're covering. You're in the middle of it here at PeaceTech Accelerator. We're here at the United States Peace Institute. What's your story? >> Thanks for having me. SuperFluid Labs, my organization, is a data analytics firm working in Africa. What we do is we help small businesses to unlock their potential using the power of data. For some organizations, this means being able to deliver essential services to millions more people, so for some organizations, it means increasing revenues, and for some organizations, it means understanding opportunities for greater efficiency and productivity. >> Y'know, PeaceTech Labs and PeaceTech Accelerator as part of this global movement where people want to apply AI for good, data for good, and in some cases good is just business, right? Economists, economies are thriving with big data and cloud. You guys are are using the cloud to bring new business models to Africa, to start. You're going to land and expand and take over the world. What's the key thing for you? >> Great, thanks. So the key thing for us is really that in the last few years, there's been an explosion in data, globally. 90% of the data in the world was created in just the last two years, and this presents a huge opportunity to unlock impact for businesses, and so some of the clients that we work with, for example, one of our clients is providing off-grid solar systems for households in sub-Saharan Africa, and they innovate, the innovation, the key innovation behind this model is the ability to deliver energy access as a service, where individuals pay on a pay-as-you-go basis. >> It's interesting, you know, helping society is not just donating money, but enabling entrepreneurs to be successful. You're an entrepreneur, you're here at the Accelerator. How do you get off the ground? I mean, what's great about the cloud is you don't need to provision all these servers, you're using the cloud. How are you guys going from a zero-stage start to getting into the market? What technology are you using, what strategy are you deplyong? >> Excellent. I think innovations such as the cloud have really been essential to our business model. A decade ago, it would have been impossible to launch a business similar to ours, so we use several cloud providers. Obviously, Amazon Web Services is one of them and many others, and what these services have allowed us to do is they've allowed us to focus on the innovation that we are delivering, the solutions that we are delivering, and less on infrastructure, provisions, and worrying about power outages, networking and all of that. >> In Africa, what's the conditions there? I mean, obviously, mobile is everywhere, but there's no telephone lines, and you've got mobile RF flying all over the world. >> Mobile is huge in Africa. I'm going to tell you an interesting stat. In the next three years, there are going to be an additional three hundred million smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa. That's more than the population of the U.S. and that's just in the next three years. >> Huge growth market. >> Huge growth market. >> How are businesses adapting, 'cause this is there you're taking your angle, right, using data, and how does that connect to the proliferation of phones, and how do business folks use it? Is that where you want to target in terms of your solution. >> Excellent question. So, the most innovational businesses that we have seen have taken advantage of access to mobile phones to develop innovative business models. So we have banks, for example, in Kenya, that have developed mobile-only lending and savings products, and they've expanded from 40,000 customers in 2012, to over twenty million customers at the end of last year. >> What's the ecosystem like in Africa, and what's the entrepreneurial cross-over when you go outside the borders of Africa? Obviously, you know in other continents, other economies. How does it all working together? Is it Bitcoin, is it blockchain, is it just standard cloud, how is the emerging landscape in tech impacting the emerging growth inside Africa. >> It's really phenomenonal, and what is most exciting, especially for me, given my experience in the U.S. and in the West and also in Africa is that a lot of the patented technologies, whether that is AI or cryptocurrency, or blockchain, is actually being used to good effect, it's actually being used to deliver essential services in Africa, and you'd be shocked. I was telling someone the other day that when you talk about payments, money-transfer innovation, Africa is really the hotbed for this. >> So you see crypto and blockchain hot in Africa right now. >> It is, and it's being applied in many other use cases beyond payment. So, you have some companies are innovating in land title administration, using that for growth tech and many other use cases. >> Great for property, great for store of value. Talk about your journey here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. How is that working, obviously they're helping you guys, with they're providing a lot of services. Tell us about what those guys are doing. >> Great, well the time here, this is actually the third week of our time here, it's really been very interesting. We've been exposed to mentors who have generously given their time to come and share their experience as other previous or experienced entrepreneurs, or executives that run large corporations, and there's mentoring sessions, we're exposed to investors, we're exposed to a cohort of other similarly minded entrepreneurs. >> That's great because you've accelerated. I've got to ask you a question, as the entrepreneur, you're always seeking for, most entrepreneurs are always seeking for that data edge, y'know, trying to understand the market force, there's all that good stuff. What have you learned here at the PeaceTech Accelerator? What was the something that you said, "Wow, that's something that I never would have gotten." >> Very interesting. So one of the things that has really stood out during my time here is really the emphasis on the fact that business, that delivering great business, or delivering business for good can cut across multiple sectors, I mean, for profit businesses like mine, and I think that is very reassuring, to know that there's a growing recognition globally around the impact and the social good that businesses can deliver. >> So you're using mobile as your backbone for your connectivity, how is the Internet of Things, or IOT, and AI going to be part of your plan? You see that consuming most of your IP and lots of property? >> Very much so. So given the stats I gave earlier on around the growth and explosive growth of data, and the explosive growth of mobile access, that is going to be essential to our IP and our patents, and we thing that's what will really give us the edge in this market. >> Great, final question for you, does D.C. get this? I mean, D.C. certainly is trying to be more global, you're actually here in D.C. at Accelerator, what's your assessment of the Washington, D.C. culture here? >> I think D.C. really gets it. I mean I think D.C. is really the hub of a lot of international development, international outreach by the U.S. government and many other international organizations. So, my being here is actually of the fact that D.C. gets it, and I'm originally from Ghana and from Africa, and we have other members of our cohorts who are flying in from all over the world, and that's the true evidence. >> How's the cloud impacting you? The U.S. is helping you to bring that innovation, what kind of edge are you bringing with cloud computing? >> It's providing speed, it's providing cost-effectiveness, and it's also providing scalability, rapid scalability. >> All right, I'm John Furrier on the ground in Washington, D.C. where all the innovation's happening here, in the United States Peace Institute, we're here with PeaceTech Accelerator, I see great stuff happening, entrepreneurship in social sectors are really happening, AI is a big part of that, IOT, cloud, all the trends are helping out a new generation of start-ups. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. It's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. (upbeat music) Hi everyone, welcome to special on the ground. This is the Cube in Washington D.C. Chain of all the innovations at Peace Tech labs here in the Peace Tech accelerator here with Tania Pinto. Is SEaB Energy one of the startups here with the United States Institute of Peace? Acceleration displacement, you're one of the startups. (Tania chuckles) >> Yes, exactly. >> What do you guys do? >> Hi John, thanks for interviewing me. I'm from SEaB Energy, and we came up with ways to power in a box. Essentially, appliances that are made to tackle climate change. Extract the water content to value of water out of the waste. I don't remember-- >> And turn it into energy? >> Actually, no. The other thing that I was going to say, exactly, it's down the throat. Providing a source of energy, where the infrastructure can't reach. >> So, the Peace Tech accelerator, you're part of, What's that like here? I mean as a startup, you got to get your idea off the ground, it's a venture for good, and some applications for society with it. >> Yes. >> What's it like at the accelerator? >> Definitely. The accelerator is amazing. Lots of great people with great ideas to help us. Kickoff essentially, we are actually about to launch the kickstarter to get into India, and fund two of our systems going to a smart village there. And I'm pretty sure, all the team that is at the Peace Tech accelerator is going to help us in that direction. >> As a startup here in Venture for Good, with the Peace Tech accelerator. What are some of your challenges that you guys have that you're overcoming with the accelerator and how you guys are going to take your venture to the marketplace? >> Well, we are a U.K. based company and the U.S. market is actually our biggest and most important market, so, it's super relevant in the sense that we're being immersed in the market itself in the U.S. It gives us a different perspective on how we can expand to the U.S. So that's very important. >> Listening to the technology involve, I'll say that's seems like there's a lot of cloud there. What are you guys using for technology and how's that helping you? >> Yeah, so, we did all the research and development. We have our systems fit into shipping containers. And, we can remote monitor them, and we collect all the data. So we can, ultimately-- Actually, we are working with the AWS, to come up with the user-interface that is more attractive, so that customers can actually optimize their energy production by playing around with how their handling their own waste. >> So turning waste into energy is kind of taking something that you can turn into good, but also energy. This sounds like a great idea. Where did it come from? How does this all start? >> It's actually a fun story. The CEO and CTO of the company are a couple. They love horses. And, one day they were going to move a pony called ladybird. And, it was England, it was miserable, rainy, dark, and there was a pile of manure on the ground. And, Sandra, the CEO, told Nick, the CTO and the inventor, "How can-- "You need to come up with a way of taking this manure, "and make a light so that I can see what I'm doing "and I'm not stepping on the manure." (John laughs) And that's how the idea came up, actually. Turning poop to energy. (laughs) >> And this is great skill, became very interesting because now the challenge around a greener planet, becomes interesting if you can focus the energy of the technology. How does the technology apply to this? Can you take us through real quick on how it works? >> Essentially, it's a biological process that it's behind. It's a anaerobic digestion and it's a thing that has millions of years, and it's just giving them the right feed stock and they will make the work for us. >> How about the kickstart you mentioned. What's the plans for funding? You guys house an accelerator. How are you going to go to the market and explain how the kickstart will work? What are some of of your plans? >> Okay, so, there's... an idea that came out of UC Berkeley, that's called, Smart villages in India. And, we are one of the partners. We are doing the kickstarter to fund the first two systems that we would like to deploy there. And after we're in the first two villages, our goal is to find local manufacturing, and actually expand to all of these remote places that have no access to energy, and actually also supply the water, of course. >> So, seed the market with a little kickstart, and get in place, prototype it, get up and running, then find partners to scale it out. >> Exactly. That's exactly it. >> Wow, interesting. >> You explain much better. (laughs) >> Well you're in it. So I got to ask you, What have you learned in the accelerator? Any interesting observations that have come out of the work here? >> Yes. It's very interesting to be continuing, practicing, the way we deliver to the customer. I think our technology is a bit complicated to explain, and we tend to get too technical because it's technology. And, being with a group from all different backgrounds, actually helps us clarify and deliver a better, cleaner message. >> Awesome. Tania, thanks for spending some time with me. >> Tania: Thank you. >> We are here on the ground in Washington D.C. It's the Cube's coverage seeing all the innovation, the sile entrepreneurship action happening in D.C. Like we've never seen before. Normally, it's look and value. You see it here in D.C., non-profits. Ventures for Good that are not only for good, but also for profit economies. We're checking it out here, all powered by the cloud and data, AI, IoT. This is exclusive Cube coverage. Thanks for watching.