(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicone Valley, Palo Alto, California, Nick is a Cube conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to the Palo Alto Cube Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're here for great Cube conversation with Gilad Bracha who's a distinguished engineer at Shape Security, has a legacy in the programming world, one of the early folks working on Java, a variety of other great things: Small Talk, Newspeak, a variety of programming accomplishments. A legend in the industry, thanks for coming on. >> Well, thanks for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You know, one of the things we always talk about on the Cube is how I work for a company, they do this, they do this great, here's our differentiator, here's our advantage, a lot of marketing speak, and then we also do a lot of interviews around disruption, around cloud computing, getting to DevOps, network effect, changes of network, moving packets around store and compute, all the benefits of cloud computing but we don't really talk about the underlying languages that are driving all the changes and this is something that you're an expert in and I want to get your thoughts on this because, you know, computer science is at an all time high. You can't go to Berkeley, you see what's going on at Berkeley, the number one major is computer science, the data classes, dreams of starting a company, but computer science is changing a lot. More people are coding but does that mean there still more computer science going on? So, a lot of people are trying to understand where the future is going to be and underneath it all is the programming languages themselves. >> Yeah, well-- >> Your thoughts on computer science and the languages out there. >> So, too much to say. But computer science is a lot, there are trends and there's a lot of emphasis now on machine learning and things like that. And it's interesting because that affects, which language you use can make these tasks a lot easier or a lot harder. And we've, you see certain languages being picked up for that purpose and new languages being done for numerical stuff like Julia, people are using R, God forbid and it's really interesting to see that. To me, it's interesting because there's a whole set of languages, the APL family of languages which really go back to the early 60s. But they're just phenomenally designed for these kind of large arrays of data for doing mathematical operations in parallel on large arrays or multi-dimensional arrays, essentially, tensors, back before that word was used in programming. And there's huge potential for doing better in terms of programming with those things. So that is one new, not new but area that's been kind of coming alive again. >> Yeah. >> That's really cool. >> You know, it's interesting, too, you bring up a point. We were talking before we came on camera about Lisp and all these other cool science out there. With, now, the advent of unlimited compute with cloud and, now, kind of new connected devices, a lot of the old science is coming back into vogue because of some of the use cases. I mean, I remember when I graduated college in the 80s, we had departments that were actually called data processing departments. And they used data processing, that's what they did, they processed data. That's the number one use case today is processing data. So, a lot of the old is coming back because it's relevant in this new era. So, I got to ask you, what is your favorite science and computer science that you think is relevant? You mentioned APL, what concepts, we TensorFlow with Google, things like that coming back, you see machine learning and AI, these are not new concepts. >> Well, some of them, I mean-- >> What's your thoughts? >> Machine learning, definitely, there have been breakthroughs in the past, I don't know, 10, 15 years and but the basis of it, the beauty of this is the basis of this is the real hardcore math in calculus and statistics, that stuff is golden and wherever it applies throughout the universe and you look at reasoning about these things and it comes up again. That's the root of it all. Making it so that you can manipulate things closer to level you can with math is really challenge for programming languages, so that you don't spend your life dealing with, sort of, irrelevant, boring details, oh, this has to be lowercase, that has to be tab, this tool doesn't work on that operating system. Most of our effort as software engineers goes, we're dealing with junk, really, and we should try and abstract over that and get over that. >> What are some of the exciting things that get you excited for programming language because there's a lot more excitement, a lot more opportunities now; you're seeing you can stand up software very quickly these days, and so there's some really quick and dirty ways to get software written with languages. Some want more principle-based design languages that have all the integrated components. What's the trade-off, what are some of the things you like around the new trends? >> So I'll give you something that meets both of the criteria that is both very principled but actually makes it much easier to put something together. One of my favorite new things that have come in the past few years is a thing called Elm which is a language, essentially, the main application, so far, has been to build websites, essentially, UI that's targeting a website but it is a functional programming language but it is much more approachable than the traditional academic stuff, even though the ideas are basically the same, but they're very well engineered. Actually, better engineered in many respects than a lot of the traditional stuff that you see like the Haskells and OCamls and stuff. And it started for the web, so it's a different game but it's a joy to use, it has great error messages, it has a time traveling debugger which is one of my favorite hobby horses, so you can actually go back and roll the computation back to where a problem occurred. And that, kind of, is interesting because it meets both of those points. >> Talk about this live programming, you mentioned rolling back and this is around live programming. >> Yeah. >> This is an exciting area. >> Oh, yeah. >> Your thoughts on live programming because we're seeing collaboration where I can have a screen open. I saw a demo at Amazon Reinvent last year or year before where people can be in different parts of the world or different offices in the same building and coding the same, I get the collaboration piece but there's also live programming languages that have built-in compile that's changing the old ways of debugging. Your thoughts. >> Right, so, definitely, that is something that people who have a heritage in small talk or Lisp, kind of, remember those systems or, if they're very lucky, still get to use them. And the thing is that most program languages don't have that level of interactivity when you work with them as a developer because there is too much of a feedback loop between when you actually specify what you want to happen by writing code and when you actually see what actually happen when you run your code and it typically doesn't do remotely what you wanted it to. That feedback loop is too long 'cause you have to go through compiles and bills and whatever, and the idea of live programming is to shorten that so that you, ideally, instantly see you change something and you can see the output and the output gets changed accordingly and you don't have to wait and, in particular, you don't have to go and rerun your program, get to the same point where you were, especially when you're debugging, right? That's the beauty of fix and continue debugging which is sort of a small but important piece of live programming where you can basically go and change a function and, immediately, proceed with the computation. You don't have to restart, you don't have to get to where you were, recreate the state, make sure the heap is in the same thing and that just, A, it's productive, it saves time. It's just a joy to watch and play with this thing, it's much more tactile, you actually feel-- >> It's faster, too, you don't have to, all the steps involved, classic debugging, restart, do it all over again. >> It's faster and it's less error prone 'cause those steps, you make mistakes, you went through all these steps and you forgot one thing or whatever or you did something wrong and didn't notice and you chased some, you know, went on a wild goose chase trying to figure out a bug, so it really is a huge H to product, a huge help to productivity and it's just so much fun to work with these systems. >> Well, I got to get this question for you while you're here because I get this question all the time and it's common. A lot of the young kids want to program, they see the future, they know that coding is a good skill to have. What's your advice to parents out there or kids, whether they're in elementary, or high school, or college, that might have a focus on, say, you know, I'm a neuroscience major or I'm doing this but I want to learn how to code? What's your advice for how to learn how to code because I've seen, oh, learn Java, I'm like, okay-- >> God, no. >> Not really my first choice. >> Eat spinach. Do 50 push-ups. No, it's not that comfortable. >> No, no. >> Java's not my first choice for recomm-- >> It's also 50 push-ups and spinach are better for you. Java is actually possibly damaging, at an early age, you should not be doing that. >> Doing Java, in particular? >> No, no. >> Why is that, it's just too complex? >> Because it's a lot of irrelevant boiler plate. It's a lot of stuff that should've been obsolete before and will be obsolete by the time you, hopefully, get to work for real and it's painful and if you aren't really into it, it'll just turn you off of the whole field. >> What's going to get someone excited, is it Elm, is it gaming, is it some sort of-- >> Yeah, so, Elm is good because you can run it, you don't need much setup, you can run in a web browser. I'm a Smalltalker and I still love the Smalltalk systems and they're still, overall, is a complete programming experience, they're still unmatched. Except for list machines which are kind of hard to come by. And so, I'd focus on those-- >> People tend to talk about Python, they talk about some of these languages. If someone's going to tinker around, what's going to be the addictive, if someone's going to-- >> So, people get addicted to all kinds of things but I would-- >> In terms of a good-- >> I tend to avoid the mainstream. People tend to latch on to the mainstream because they think it's a good career move or whatever. My advice is, you get good, learn the fundamentals in the cleanest way possible, then the mainstream stuff will be easy, rather than focusing on it, 'cause there's so much irrelevant detail in those systems and the programming experience is not that great. So, try something a little less meaty, closure is a lisp that you can use and there's closure script as a version that runs on the web. Try Elm. Try Smalltalk. >> And all these languages, they can actually produce something of value? >> Yeah, they can definitely, I think, still 70% of the world's container traffic is still run by a Smalltalk application. >> Really, I did not know that. >> Yeah, well, few people do. In Smalltalk, you find that that sort of heyday, in some sense, for commercial applications was in the 90s or 80s, whatever, but replacing those applications, a typical story is, someone says, ah, we should use Java 'cause everybody's using Java and we can get lots of programmers and they spend a lot of money and the new application doesn't work 'cause they can't actually rebuild the thing they built in Smalltalk at any reasonable cost, at any reasonable reliability. So, there are a lot of those systems out there, Morgan Stanley's still running Capital, their Smalltalk system for managing money. So, yeah, you can certainly build things. >> Well, Gilad, I love your commentary here, so I love that you're not shy to hold back. I've got to get your thoughts on cryptocurrency and the Blockchain world. >> Oh, dear. >> A lot of different languages, you got Ethereum, you have, some say, oh, I'm going to use Linux. If you're using Java, we're going to import it in, Javascript supports it, so there's been kind of like this, every kind of crypto currency, Blockchain, has their own language for decentralized applications. Your general thoughts on this. >> So, there's a need for, to slow down and be more careful, all right. Ethereum lost God knows how much money. I've heard quotes but I don't know if it's 50 million or 150 million but a fair amount of money due to problems that were classical distributed programming problems and could have been avoided by, essentially, more careful design of language in the system. There's a pressure now to turn things out in a hurry, right? In the old days, these systems took years and years of research in their little corner and, now, everybody has to do something too fast and that hurts. And, often, it's people who don't have the expertise and the background 'cause there's lots of research on all kinds of problems and smart people get snippets of those and they don't quite know what they're doing. And I don't think there's a cure for that because the incentives are there but that's why we're seeing these problems. >> So be careful, the message is be careful. >> Be careful. >> But they're rushing, all this cash is rolling in, they got to have some language. >> Sure, as long it's not their 150 million dollars that they lost, that's fine, but someone was probably upset. >> And, by the way, the security problem was software-error based. >> Most of them are. >> So, this transitions into Shape Security where you're not working as a distinguished engineer, working on some hard problems. I know it's pretty confidential but you guys do power 200 million iOS apps, this is from the PR statement. >> Probably more by now but yeah. >> Past 24 hours, you blocked more than two billion fraudulent login attempts, two million legitimate attempts. Essentially, defending intrusion detects and seems to be the company's value properties, but I don't want to get too much into the company because you're, obviously, on the engineering side. But security from a programming language side is software and people. >> Mm-hm. >> Right, software gets bugs. >> And people make them worse. >> And people make mistakes. >> People make them worse. >> Yeah. >> This is the central process problem in security. Your thoughts in computer science. >> So, most of the time, I mean, Shape does real security and this is fascinating to me but, most of the time, I've been looking at security at the programming language level because, you know, still, I think 70% of intrusions often, not the intrusions but, basically, these big software fiasco security problems get down to array buffer overflows. Which is ridiculous 'cause this is problem that was solved decades ago. Why are we still dealing with this? That's because, you know, programming language design, the whole approach to security, access control lists, whatever, there was another approach which was capability-based. And these two grew up together in the 60 and the world, as typically, it makes the wrong choices, it takes what seems appealing in the short term and not what is sort of a more thorough thing. So, object capabilities is a really interesting way of looking at this thing. There are people working on putting some of this into Javascript so that you could use it somehow. Great work by Mark Miller and company at Agoric. I'll do a shout-out to them. So, I've usually been on that side of things, but real security, there's a lot more to it, that's just one small layer of things and, above that, there's all the humans and the multiple systems they build. The configurations, they're just mistakes, the things that happen through social engineering about which, basically, I don't know much about but I will say that making things simpler is key because that's why people make mistakes. Things are too complicated. Every piece of the system has some bunch of clever engineers who really think it through and make it really sophisticated but when you compose these, it becomes, no one understands, a thing that no one understands what's going on and we need to simplify. My work is to try to simplify at that programming language level which the typical languages people use are too complex. >> And this is really where the software always has holes in it and you just got to be on top of it and make it tight, as it were. >> Right, basically, you can't understand the consequences when you have too many moving parts, as it were, too many constructs in the programming language. The composition is endless and you can't, it's very hard to foresee how they're going to interact and what someone will come up with, eventually. Oh, you could use this to attack that. Or, this crates this bad scenario that people don't notice. And, really, there's no remedy to that. You can work and you should be careful, you should test things, you should verify, if you can, formally, but if you just try and keep it simple, clean abstractions that are very simple and composed well, you will simply avoid, by definition, most of these problems. >> Final talk track around open source. It's been well-documented that proprietary software that's funded by companies when kind of stopped and innovating, kind of, dies on the vine. Open source is great, got leverage, you get out in the open, yeah, it's great. So, open source has been growing like a weed over the past couple decades and, recently, it's been phenomenal. The open source people say, oh, security is better in open source. At the same time, you bring up the notion of language security and those programming languages. How do you see that rectifying itself? How is the security paradigm with open source going to be stabler? What do companies need to do because open source is being used everywhere. >> Open source is used everywhere for good reason but open source is not, by itself, a magic thing, right. It's still, you get problems, open source is also open to malicious contributors, to problems, and the systems are too big for, even though there are code reviews and everything, so it's a double-edged sword, in some respects and sometimes the quality just suffers. These are social organization and each one is different and they have problems, so I don't know that that is, it's good that you shine light on something, it tends to purify it, and certainly that's a great strength of open source that you cant have things buried in there that you don't know. By the same token, it is not a panacea because the other thing is someone has to fund this somehow. All the open source models have to find somewhere to keep this going. So it's a more complicated thing to pull off. >> Especially with all these appliances now, okay, which version of Linux are you running, do I review the code? How do people ensure the security know that whether it's an appliance, or a device, or phone, or anything and it doesn't have some sort of back door or security vulnerability? >> Well, backdoor, I don't-- >> Backdoor, side door. >> Or just code-- >> This is a conspiracy theory. >> Or poor code. >> Poor code, well, poor code, you know, the open source is full of poor code is the truth. And the other thing is that, one problem with the open source is it also makes it easier for people to attack it because they can see how it's engineered. So, there is a reason that secure systems tend to, actually, maintain a certain level of secrecy. So I wouldn't go overboard on the open source ideology that it's inherently more secure. It has the advantage that you can see what you're getting. It has the disadvantage that everyone, including your adversaries, can see that. >> You don't know that going in, buyer beware kind of philosophy. >> Yes. >> And so, ultimately, you need to trust, like, it always comes down to trust at some level 'cause there's no way you're going to verify the software or the hardware, the bits, the you know. You can have problems in the hardware, this is a big problem nowadays, actually, with certain vendors. I don't want to get into those political footballs but-- >> Yeah, super micro. >> Yeah, and so, you really have to see who, you do have to take a risk in who do you trust. Who has a reputation, who is responsible for things that have worked? And there are no easy answers and it's beyond my pay grade. >> Let me get your thoughts on Capital One because we know that story, as of this week and they're on an Amazon estuary bucket, firewall filtering failed, someone just stumbled into it. I mean, the person that hacked it wasn't like, probably, a famous hacker, she was bragging on Twitter and message groups like, saying, hey, I just got in. So, door's open, keys are running in the car, walked right to the safe, safe was open. >> So, I don't know anything about that incident specifically and, I mean, beyond what you and I have read on the web or somewhere-- >> That's a human error. >> But they're usually there's always, almost always human error involved. It's also why you need, sort of, it's like countermeasures, right, and counter, counter, countermeasures. You simply have to monitor, right? So that when something, when you have an intrusion, you check it, now, that's not easy but there are lots of clever things that people are doing. You can have security as an afterthought. It's really hard. That's generally the problem is that people don't think about it early enough. >> Final question before we break: What's the human problem that you see most with developers? 'Cause if humans make mistakes, which they do, what's the common mistake developers, programmers make when coding that could be avoided with just a little bit sharper focus? >> Well, it's not about focus but I'd say null pointer exceptions are the biggest, like, after array buffers, they're the other, Tony Hoare called it billion dollar mistake in 1980 in his award speech, I think. And we're talking now, it's probably a trillion dollars, right? And this is something that can be mechanically checked by the programming language and it's probably the number bang-for-a-buck feature that you might throw in. >> Just say no to null? >> Yeah. >> That's the philosophy. >> Yeah. >> Gilad, thanks for coming on the Cube, appreciate the conversation. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto at the Cube Studios. This has been a Cube Conversation, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

Sand Hill Road to the heart of Silicon Valley it's the cute presenting the people first Network insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders when I'm John Ferrari with the cube I'm the co-host also the founder of Silicon angle me we are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for the people first conversations I'm John furry with the cube weird Allen being global CTO and IT of innovation at Procter & Gamble formerly the same position at coca-cola has done a lot of innovations over the years also a reference account back in the day for web methods when they call on the financing of that one of the most famous IPOs which set the groundwork for web services and has a lot of history going back to the 80s we were just talking about it welcome this conversation on people first network thank you for inviting me so the people first network is all about people and it's great to have these conversations you're old school you were doing some stuff back on the 80s talking about doing RPA 3270 you've been old school here yeah I go back to APL as my first programming language went through the the third generation languages and of course the old 30 to 70 emulation which is what we know today is our PA one of the cool things I was excited to hear some of your background around your history web methods you were a reference call for venture financing of web methods which was financed on the credit card for the two founders husband and wife probably one of the most successful I appeals but more importantly at the beginning of the massive wave that we now see with web services this is early days this was very early days when I was at DHL we were looking at what we're gonna do for the future and in fact we built one of the first object-oriented frameworks in C++ at the time because that was all that was available to us or the best was available we rejected Corbis and we said look if we're gonna go this direction and one of my developers found web methods found philip merrick it was literally at the time working out of his garage and had this technology that was going to allow us to start moving into this object-oriented approach and I remember the day Robin Vasan form a field called and said hey I'm thinking about investing in web methods what do you think about it and not only was it one of the first startups that I ever worked with but it's actually the first time I met anybody in the venture community way back in nineteen I think 1997 is what had happened and that was a computing time in computer science and then the rest is history and then XML became what it became lingua franca for the web web services now Amazon Web Services you see in cloud computing micro services kubernetes service meshes this is a new stack that's being developed in the cloud and this is the new generation you've seen many waves and at Procter & Gamble formerly coca-cola you're the same role you have to navigate this so what's different now what's different say 15 20 years ago how are you looking at this market how you implementing some of the IT and infrastructure and software development environments I think what's change is you know when we got into the the early 2000s Nicolas car came out and said IT doesn't matter and I think anybody that was an IT had this very objectionable response initially but when you step back and you looked at it what she realised was in many cases IT didn't matter and those were those areas that were non-competitive those things that could be commoditized and it was completely right the reality is IT has always mattered that technology does give you a competitive advantage in certain markets and certain capabilities for a company but back then we had to go out and we had to purchase equipment we had to configure the equipment there was a lot of heavy lifting in corporations just did not want to invest the capital so they outsource the stuff wholesale I think General Motors was the first one that just out sourced everything and was followed by other companies including Procter & Gamble the decision at that time was probably right but as we go forward and we see what's happened with corporations we see the valuations of corporations the amount of return on equity based on the on the capital that's being invested we can see that data is important we can see that agility flexibility is key to competing in the future and therefore what's changing is we are now moving into an age of away from ERP so we're moving into an age away from these outsource providers on a wholesale basis and using it selectively to drive down costs and allowing us to free up money in order to invest in those things that are most important to the company so you're saying is that the folks naturally the server consolidation they've bought all this gear all this software over you know 18-month rollouts before they even see the first implementation those are the glory days of gravy trains for the vendor's yeah not good for the practitioners but you're saying that the folks who reinvested are investing in IT as a core competency are seeing a competitive advantage they certainly are you know I think I made the statement front of a number of the vendors and a few years ago and people were not comfortable with it but what I said was like you gone are the ears of these 10 20 million dollar deals gone are the ears of the million two million dollar deals we're in the ear of throwaway technology I need to be able to use and invest in technology for a specific purpose for a specific period of time and be able to move on to the next one it's the perfect time for startups but startups shouldn't be looking at the big picture they should be looking at the tail on these investments let me try things let me get out in the market let me have a competitive advantage in marketing which is most important to me or in supply chain those are the areas that I can make a difference with my consumers and my customers and that's where the investments have to go so just in constant of throwaway technology and you know you'd also be said of you know being more agile though interesting to look at the cloud SAS business model if Amazon for us I think that's the gold standard where they actually lower prices on a per unit basis and increase more services and value but in the aggregate you're still paying more but you have more flexibility and that's kind of a good tell sign so that you're seeing that ability to reuse either the infrastructure that's commoditized to shift the value this is are people having a hard time understanding this so I want to get your reaction to how should I tea leaders understand that the wave of cloud the wave of machine learning what a I can bring to the table these new trends how how should leaders figure this out is there a playbook as there are things that you've learned that you could share you know that there's really a playbook it's still early on everyone's looking for one cloud fits all the reality is whether it's Google whether it's Amazon whether it's Microsoft whether it's IBM all clouds are different all clouds have our special are purpose-built for different solutions and I think as an IT leader you have to understand you're not going to take everything and lift and shift that's what we used to do we're now in the position where we have to deconstruct our business we have to understand the services the capabilities that we want to bring to market and not lock ourselves in its building blocks its Legos we're in the period of Legos putting these things together in different manners in order to create new solutions if we try to lock ourselves in the past of how we've always financed things how we've always built things then we're not going to be any better off in the new world than we were in the old alan i want to get your reaction to to two words our PA and containers well as i said earlier our PA is 3270 emulation from the 1980s and for those of us that are old enough to remember that i I still remember scraping the the old green screens and and putting a little process around it it what's nice though is that we have moved forward machine learning and AI and other other capabilities are now present so that we can do this I actually played around with neural nets probably back in 1985 with an Apollo computer so that tells you how far back I go but technologies change processing speeds change everything the technology trends are allowing us to now to do these things the question that we have is also a moral dilemma is are we trying to replace people or are we trying to make improvements and I think that you don't look at our PA as a way simply to replace work it's a way to enhance what we're doing in order to create new value for the customer or for the consumer in our case I think in the in the area of containers you know again been around for a while been around for a while it's just another another approach that we're not we don't want lock in we don't want to be dependent on specific vendors we want the portability we want the flexibility and I think as we start moving containers out to the edge that's where we're gonna start seeing more value as the business processes and the capabilities are spread out again the idea of centralized cloud computing is very good however it doesn't need to be distributed what's interesting I find about the conversation here is that you mentioned a couple things earlier you mentioned the vendors locking you in and saying here's the ERP buy this and with this you have to have a certain process because this is our technology you got to use it this way and you were slave to their their tech on your process serve their tech with containers and say orchestration you now the ability to manage workloads differently and so an interesting time there's that does that change the notion of rip and replace lift and shift because if I a container I could just put a container around it and not have to worry about killing the old to bring in the new this is on the fundamental kind of debate going on do you have to kill the old to bring in the new well you need to kill the old sometimes just because it's old it's time to go other times you do need to repackage it and other times I hate to say it you do need to lift and shift if you're a legacy organization they have a long history such as most of the manufacturing companies in the world today we can't get rid of old things that quickly we can't afford to a lot of the processes are still valid as we're looking to the future we certainly are breaking these things down into services we're looking to containerize these things we're looking to move them into areas where we can compute where we want to when we want to at the right price we're just at the beginning of that journey in the industry I still think there's about five to seven years to go to get there now I'll talk about the role of the edge role of cloud computing as it increases the surface area of IT potentially combined with the fact that IT is a competitive advantage bring those two notions together what's the role of the people because you used to have people that would just manage the rack and stack I'm provisioning some storage I'm doing this as those stovepipes start to be broken down when the service area of IT is bigger how does that change the relationship of the people involved you know you win with people at the end of the day you don't win with technology you know a company of such as Proctor and Gamble and I think what's happened if you look at historically the ERP vendors came out probably 99 2000 and it used to be and remember these I'm old to be honest with you but I remember that we used to have to worry about the amount of memory we were managing we had to be able to tune databases in all of this and the vendors went ahead and they started automating all those processes with the idea that we can do it better than a human and a lot of people a lot of the technology talent then started leaving the organizations and organizations were left with people that we're focusing on process and people a process excuse me process and the the the business which is very good because you need the subject matter experts going forward we have to reinvest in people our people have the subject matter expertise they have some technology skills that they've developed over the years and they've enhanced it on their own but we're in this huge change right now where we have to think different we have to act different and we have to behave differently so doubling down on people is the best thing that you can do and the old outsource model of outsourcing everything kind of reduces the core competency of the people yeah now you got to build it back up again exactly I mean we when we left at P&G 15 years ago about 5,000 people left the organization when we outsource them when we outsource the technology to our partner at that time now it's time we're starting to bring it back in we've brought the network team back in and stood up our own sock in our own NOC for the first time in years just this past year we're doing the same thing by moving things out to the cloud more and more is moving to the cloud we're setting up our own cloud operations and DevOps capabilities I can tell you having been on both sides of it it's a lot harder to be able to bring it back in than it is to take it out and you know interesting proctoring games well known as being a very intimate with the data very data-driven company the data is valuable and having that infrastructure NIT to support the data that's important what's your vision on the data future of the data in the world well I think data is has a value to itself but when you tie it to products you tie it to your customers and consumers it's even more valuable and we're in the process now of things that we used to do completely internally with our own technology or technology partners we're now moving all of that out into the cloud now and I must say cloud its clouds plural again going back to certain clouds are better for certain things so you're seeing a dramatic shift we have a number of projects underway that are in the cloud space but for customers and consumers number of cloud projects in the way for our own internal employees it's all about collecting the data processing the data protecting that data because we take that very seriously and being able to use it to make better decisions I want to get your reaction on two points and two quite lines of questioning here because I think it's very relevant on the enterprise side you're a big account for the big whales the old ERP so the big cloud providers so people want to sell you stuff at the same time you're also running IT innovation so you want to play with the new shiny new toys and experiments start up so if startups want to get your attention and big vendors want to sell to you the tables have kind of turned it's been good this is a good it's a good buyers market right now in my opinion so what's your thoughts on that so you know start with the big companies what do they got to do to win you over well they got to look like how they got to engage and for startups how do they get your attention I think the biggest thing for either startup or large companies understanding the company you're dealing with whether it's Procter & Gamble whether it's coca-cola whether it was DHL if you understand how I operate if you understand how decisions are made if you understand how I'm organized that's gonna give you an a competitive advantage now the large corporations understand this because they've been around through the entire journey of computing with these large corporations the startups need to step back and take a look and see where do I add that competitive advantage many times when you're selling to a large corporate you're not selling to a large corporate you're selling two divisions you're selling two functions and that's how you get in I've been working with startups as I said back since web methods and it was just a two-person company but we brought them in for a very specific capability I then took web methods with me when I left DHL I took them to GE when I left GE I took them to ing because I trusted them and they matured along the way I think finding that right individual that has the right need is the key and working it slowly don't think you're gonna close the deal fast if you're start-up know it's gonna take some time and decide if that's in your best interest or not slow things down focus don't try to boil the ocean over too many of them try to boy you're right Jimmy people try to boil the ocean get that win one win will get you another one which will get you another win and that's the best way to succeed get that beachhead Ellen so if you could go back and knowing what you know now and you're breaking into the IT leadership's position looking forward what would you do differently can do a mulligan hey what would you do differently well you know I think one of the one of the dangers of being an innovator in IT is that you really are risk taker and taking risks is counterculture to corporations so I think I would probably try to get by in a little bit more I mean someone once told me that you know you see the force through the trees before anybody else does your problem is you don't bring people along with you so I think I would probably slow down a little bit not in the adoption of technology but I'd probably take more time to build the case to bring people along a lot faster so that they can see it and they can take credit for it and they can move that needle as well yeah always sometimes early adopters and pioneers had the arrows on the back as they say I've had my share now thanks for sharing your experience what's next for you what's the next mountain you're going to climb well I think that as we're looking forward latency is still an issue you know we have to find a way to defeat latency we're not going to do it through basic physics so we're gonna have to change our business models change our technology distribution change everything that we're doing consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and m/l right at the point where they want it and that means we're now dealing with milliseconds and nanoseconds of having to make decisions so I'm very interested in looking at how are we going to change consumer behavior and customer behavior by combining a lot of the new technology trends that are underway and we have to do it also with the security in mind now before we security was secondary now as we're seeing with all of the hacks and the malware and everything that's going on in the world we have to go in and think a little bit different about how we're gonna do that so I'm very much engaged in working with a lot of startups I live here in the Silicon Valley I commute to Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble I'm spending time and just flew in from tel-aviv literally an hour ago I'm in the middle of all the technology hotspots trying to find that next big thing and it's a global it's global innovation happens everywhere and anywhere the venture community if you look at the amount of funds it used to be invested out of the Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world it continues to be on a downward trend not because the funding isn't here in the Silicon Valley but because everyone is recognizing that innovation and technology is developed everywhere in the world Alan Bain was the CTO global CTO and IT innovator there at the cube conversation here in San Hill Road I'm John for a year thanks for watching you