(upbeat techno music) >> From Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering the 15th Annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the Computer History Museum for the 15th annual ACG SV Awards. And in Mountain View California excited to welcome to the Cube for the first time, John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet and the co-founder of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. JOHN, it's truly a pleasure to have you on the Cube today. >> Well delighted to be here, Lisa. >> So I was doing some research on you. And I see Marc Andreessen has called you the godfather of Silicon Valley. >> Marc very generous (loughs) >> so I thought I was pretty cool I'm going to sit down with the godfather tonight. (loughs) >> I have not done that yet. So you are keynoting the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight. Talk to us a little bit about the takeaways that the audience is going to hear from you tonight. >> Well, they're going to hear some things about leadership the importance of leadership, obviously the importance of innovation. We're in the middle of Silicon Valley innovation is a big thing. And the role that technology plays in our lives and how we should be thinking about that, and how do we ensure the technology is something that serves the public good. >> Definitely. So there's about I think over 230 attendees expected tonight over 100 sea levels, the ACG SV Is has been it's it's much more than a networking organization. there's a lot of opportunities for collaboration for community. Tell me a little bit about your experience with that from a collaboration standpoint? >> Well, I think collaboration is a critical ingredient. I mean, for so many years, you look at the collaboration is gone. Just take between between the universities, my own Stanford and Silicon Valley and how that collaboration has developed over time and lead the founding of great companies, but also collaboration within the valley. This is the place to be a technology person in the whole world it's the best place partly because of this collaboration, and this innovative spirit that really is a core part of what we are as a place. >> I agree. The innovative spirit is one of the things that I enjoy, about not only being in technology, but also living in Silicon Valley. You can't go to a Starbucks without hearing a conversation or many conversations about new startups or cloud technology. So the innovative spirit is pervasive here. And it's also one that I find in an in an environment like ASG SV. You just hear a lot of inspiring stories and I was doing some research on them in the last 18 months. Five CEO positions have been seated and materialized through ACG SV. Number of venture deals initiated several board positions. So a lot of opportunity in this group here tonight. >> Right, well I think that's important because so much of the leadership has got to come by recruiting new young people. And with the increase in concerned about diversity and our leadership core and our boards, I think building that network out and trying to stretch it a little bit from the from perhaps the old boys network of an earlier time in the Valley is absolutely crucial. >> Couldn't agree more. So let's now talk a little bit about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. Tell us a little bit about it. When was it founded? >> So we are we are in our very first year, actually, this year, our first year of scholars, we founded it in 2016. The motivation was, I think, an increasing gap we perceived in terms of the need for great leadership and what was available. And it was in government. It was in the nonprofit world, it was in the for profit world. So I being a lifelong educator said, What can we do about this? Let's try to recruit and develop a core of younger people who show that they're committed to the greater good and who are excellent, who are innovative, who are creative, and prepare them for leadership roles in the future. >> So you're looking for are these undergraduate students? >> They are graduate students, so they've completed their undergraduate, it's a little hard to tell when somebody's coming out of high school, what their civic commitment is, what their ability to lead is. But coming out of coming out of undergraduate experience, and often a few years of work experience, we can tell a lot more about whether somebody has the potential to be a future leader. >> So you said, found it just in 2016. And one of the things I saw that was very interesting is projecting in the next 50 years, there's going to be 5000 Knight-Hennessy scholars at various stages of their careers and government organizations, NGOs, as you mentioned, so looking out 50 years you have a strong vision there, but really expect this organization to be able to make a lasting impact. >> That's what our goal is lasting impact over decades, because people who go into leadership positions often take a decade or two to rise to that position. But that's what our investment is our investment is in the in the future. And when I went to Phil Knight who's my co-founder and donor, might lead donor to the program, he was enthusiastic. His view was that we had a we had a major gap in leadership. And we needed to begin training, we need to do multiple things. We need to do things like we're doing tonight. But we also need to think about that next younger generation is up and coming. >> Some terms of inspiring the next generation of innovative diversity thinkers. Talk to me about some of the things that this program is aimed at, in addition to just, you know, some of the knowledge about leadership, but really helping them understand this diverse nature in which we now all find ourselves living. >> So one of the things we do is we try to bring in leaders from all different walks of life to meet and have a conversation with our scholars. This morning, we had the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in town, Michelle Bachelet, and she sat down and talked about how she thought about her role as addressing human rights, how to move things forward in very complex situations we face around the world with collapse of many governments and many human rights violations. And how do you how do you make that forward progress with a difficult problem? So that kind of exposure to leaders who are grappling with really difficult problems is a critical part of our program. >> And they're really seeing and experiencing real world situations? >> Absolutely. They're seeing them up close as they're really occurring. They see the challenges we had, we had Governor Brown and just before he went out of office here in California, to talk about criminal justice reform a major issue in California and around the country. And how do we make progress on that on that particular challenge? >> So you mentioned a couple of other leaders who the students I've had the opportunity to learn from and engage with, but you yourself are quite the established leader. You went to Stanford as a professor in 1977. You are a President Emeritus you were president of Stanford from 2000 to 2016. So these students also get the opportunity to learn from all that you have experienced as it as a professor of Computer Science, as well as in one of your current roles as chairman of Alphabet. Talk to us a little bit about just the massive changes that you have seen, not just in Silicon Valley, but in technology and innovation over the last 40 plus years. >> Well, it is simply amazing. When I arrived at Stanford, there was no internet. The ARPANET was in its young days, email was something that a bunch of engineers and scientists use to communicate, nobody else did. I still remember going and seeing the first demonstration of what would become Yahoo. Well, while David Filo and Jerry Yang had it set up in their office. And the thing that immediately convinced me Lisa was they showed me that their favorite Pizza Parlor would now allow orders to go online. And when I saw that I said, the World Wide Web is not just about a bunch of scientists and engineers exchanging information. It's going to change our lives and it did. And we've seen wave after wave that with Google and Facebook, social media rise. And now the rise of AI I mean this this is a transformative technology as big as anything I think we've ever seen. In terms of its potential impact. >> It is AI is so transformative. I was I was in Hawaii recently on vacation and Barracuda Networks was actually advertising about AI in Hawaii and I thought that's interesting that the people that are coming to to Hawaii on vacation, presumably, people have you know, many generations who now have AI as a common household word may not understand the massive implications and opportunities that it provides. But it is becoming pervasive at every event we're at at the Cube and there's a lot of opportunity there. It's it's a very exciting subject. Last question for you. You mentioned that this that the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program is really aimed towards graduate students. What is your advice to those BB stem kids in high school right now who are watching this saying, oh, John, what, what? How do you advise me to be able to eventually get into a program like this? >> Well, I think it begins by really finding your passion, finding something you're really dedicated to pushing yourself challenging yourself, showing that you can do great things with it. And then thinking about the bigger role you want to have with technology. In the after all, technology is not an end in itself. It's a tool to make human lives better and that's the sort of person we're looking for in the knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, >> Best advice you've ever gotten. >> Best advice ever gotten is remember that leadership is about service to the people in the institution you lead. >> It's fantastic not about about yourself but really about service to those. >> About service to others >> JOHN, it's been a pleasure having you on the Cube tonight we wish you the best of luck in your keynote at the 15th annual ACG SV Awards and we thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. I've enjoyed it. Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube on the ground. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE. Presenting data, Silicon Valley brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Jose at our event, Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is George Gilbert and we are down the street from the Strata Data Conference. We are at a really cool venue: Forager Eatery Tasting Room. Come down and join us, hang out with us, we've got a cocktail par-tay tonight. We also have an interesting briefing from our analysts on big data trends tomorrow morning. I want to welcome back to theCUBE now one of our CUBE VIP's and alumna Tendu Yogurtcu, the CTO at Syncsort, welcome back. >> Thank you. Hello Lisa, hi George, pleasure to be here. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure to have you back. So, what's going on at Syncsort, what are some of the big trends as CTO that you're seeing? >> In terms of the big trends that we are seeing, and Syncsort has grown a lot in the last 12 months, we actually doubled our revenue, it has been really an successful and organic growth path, and we have more than 7,000 customers now, so it's a great pool of customers that we are able to talk and see the trends and how they are trying to adapt to the digital disruption and make data as part of their core strategy. So data is no longer an enabler, and in all of the enterprise we are seeing data becoming the core strategy. This reflects in the four mega trends, they are all connected to enable business as well as operational analytics. Cloud is one, definitely. We are seeing more and more cloud adoption, even our financial services healthcare and banking customers are now, they have a couple of clusters running in the cloud, in public cloud, multiple workloads, hybrid seems to be the new standard, and it comes with also challenges. IT governance as well as date governance is a major challenge, and also scoping and planning for the workloads in the cloud continues to be a challenge, as well. Our general strategy for all of the product portfolio is to have our products following design wants and deploy any of our strategy. So whether it's a standalone environment on Linux or running on Hadoop or Spark, or running on Premise or in the Cloud, regardless of the Cloud provider, we are enabling the same education with no changes to run all of these environments, including hybrid. Then we are seeing the streaming trend, with the connected devices with the digital disruption and so much data being generated, being able to stream and process data on the age, with the Internet of things, and in order to address the use cases that Syncsort is focused on, we are really providing more on the Change Data Capture and near real-time and real-time data replication to the next generation analytics environments and big data environments. We launched last year our Change Data Capture, CDC, product offering with data integration, and we continue to strengthen that vision merger we had data replication, real-time data replication capabilities, and we are now seeing even Kafka database becoming a consumer of this data. Not just keeping the data lane fresh, but really publishing the changes from multiple, diverse set of sources and publishing into a Kafka database and making it available for applications and analytics in the data pipeline. So the third trend we are seeing is around data science, and if you noticed this morning's keynote was all about machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, how to we make use of data science. And it was very interesting for me because we see everyone talking about the challenge of how do you prepare the data and how do you deliver the the trusted data for machine learning and artificial intelligence use and deep learning. Because if you are using bad data, and creating your models based on bad data, then the insights you get are also impacted. We definitely offer our products, both on the data integration and data quality side, to prepare the data, cleanse, match, and deliver the trusted data set for data scientists and make their life easier. Another area of focus for 2018 is can we also add supervised learning to this, because with the premium quality domain experts that we have now in Syncsort, we have a lot of domain experts in the field, we can infuse the machine learning algorithms and connect data profiling capabilities we have with the data quality capabilities recommending business rules for data scientists and helping them automate the mandate tasks with recommendations. And the last but not least trend is data governance, and data governance is almost a umbrella focus for everything we are doing at Syncsort because everything about the Cloud trend, the streaming, and the data science, and developing that next generation analytics environment for our customers depends on the data governance. It is, in fact, a business imperative, and the regulatory compliance use cases drives more importance today than governance. For example, General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, GDPR. >> Lisa: Just a few months away. >> Just a few months, May 2018, it is in the mind of every C-level executive. It's not just for European companies, but every enterprise has European data sourced in their environments. So compliance is a big driver of governance, and we look at governance in multiple aspects. Security and issuing data is available in a secure way is one aspect, and delivering the high quality data, cleansing, matching, the example Hilary Mason this morning gave in the keynote about half of what the context matters in terms of searches of her name was very interesting because you really want to deliver that high quality data in the enterprise, trust of data set, preparing that. Our Trillium Quality for big data, we launched Q4, that product is generally available now, and actually we are in production with very large deployment. So that's one area of focus. And the third area is how do you create visibility, the farm-to-table view of your data? >> Lisa: Yeah, that's the name of your talk! I love that. >> Yes, yes, thank you. So tomorrow I have a talk at 2:40, March 8th also, I'm so happy it's on the Women's Day that I'm talking-- >> Lisa: That's right, that's right! Get a farm-to-table view of your data is the name of your talk, track data lineage from source to analytics. Tell us a little bit more about that. >> It's all about creating more visibility, because for audit reasons, for understanding how many copies of my data is created, valued my data had been, and who accessed it, creating that visibility is very important. And the last couple of years, we saw everyone was focused on how do I create a data lake and make my data accessible, break the data silos, and liberate my data from multiple platforms, legacy platforms that the enterprise might have. Once that happened, everybody started worrying about how do I create consumable data set and how do I manage this data because data has been on the legacy platforms like Mainframe, IMBI series has been on relational data stores, it is in the Cloud, gravity of data originating in the Cloud is increasing, it's originating from mobile. Hadoop vendors like Hortonworks and Cloudera, they are creating visibility to what happens within the Hadoop framework. So we are deepening our integration with the Cloud Navigator, that was our announcement last week. We already have integration both with Hortonworks and Cloudera Navigator, this is one step further where we actually publish what happened to every single granular level of data at the field level with all of the transformations that data have been through outside of the cluster. So that visibility is now published to Navigator itself, we also publish it through the RESTful API, so governance is a very strong and critical initiative for all of the businesses. And we are playing into security aspect as well as data lineage and tracking aspect and the quality aspect. >> So this sounds like an extremely capable infrastructure service, so that it's trusted data. But can you sell that to an economic buyer alone, or do you go in in conjunction with anther solution like anti-money laundering for banks or, you know, what are the key things that they place enough value on that they would spend, you know, budget on it? >> Yes, absolutely. Usually the use cases might originate like anti-money laundering, which is very common, fraud detection, and it ties to getting a single view of an entity. Because in anti-money laundering, you want to understand the single view of your customer ultimately. So there is usually another solution that might be in the picture. We are providing the visibility of the data, as well as that single view of the entity, whether it's the customer view in this case or the product view in some of the use cases by delivering the matching capabilities and the cleansing capabilities, the duplication capabilities in addition to the accessing and integrating the data. >> When you go into a customer and, you know, recognizing that we still have tons of silos and we're realizing it's a lot harder to put everything in one repository, how do customers tell you they want to prioritize what they're bringing into the repository or even what do they want to work on that's continuously flowing in? >> So it depends on the business use case. And usually at the time that we are working with the customer, they selected that top priority use case. The risk here, and the anti-money laundering, or for insurance companies, we are seeing a trend, for example, building the data marketplace, as that tantalize data marketplace concept. So depending on the business case, many of our insurance customers in US, for example, they are creating the data marketplace and they are working with near real-time and microbatches. In Europe, Europe seems to be a bit ahead of the game in some cases, like Hadoop production was slow but certainly they went right into the streaming use cases. We are seeing more directly streaming and keeping it fresh and more utilization of the Kafka and messaging frameworks and database. >> And in that case, where they're sort of skipping the batch-oriented approach, how do they keep track of history? >> It's still, in most of the cases, microbatches, and the metadata is still associated with the data. So there is an analysis of the historical what happened to that data. The tools, like ours and the vendors coming to picture, to keep track, of that basically. >> So, in other words, by knowing what happened operationally to the data, that paints a picture of a history. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Interesting. >> And for the governance we usually also partner, for example, we partner with Collibra data platform, we partnered with ASG for creating that business rules and technical metadata and providing to the business users, not just to the IT data infrastructure, and on the Hadoop side we partner with Cloudera and Hortonworks very closely to complete that picture for the customer, because nobody is just interested in what happened to the data in Hadoop or in Mainframe or in my relational data warehouse, they are really trying to see what's happening on Premise, in the Cloud, multiple clusters, traditional environments, legacy systems, and trying to get that big picture view. >> So on that, enabling a business to have that, we'll say in marketing, 360 degree view of data, knowing that there's so much potential for data to be analyzed to drive business decisions that might open up new business models, new revenue streams, increase profit, what are you seeing as a CTO of Syncsort when you go in to meet with a customer, data silos, when you're talking to a Chief Data Officer, what's the cultural, I guess, not shift but really journey that they have to go on to start opening up other organizations of the business, to have access to data so they really have that broader, 360 degree view? What's that cultural challenge that they have to, journey that they have to go on? >> Yes, Chief Data Officers are actually very good partners for us, because usually Chief Data Officers are trying to break the silos of data and make sure that the data is liberated for the business use cases. Still most of the time the infrastructure and the cluster, whether it's the deployment in the Cloud versus on Premise, it's owned by the IT infrastructure. And the lines of business are really the consumers and the clients of that. CDO, in that sense, almost mitigates and connects to those line of businesses with the IT infrastructure with the same goals for the business, right? They have to worry about the compliance, they have to worry about creating multiple copies of data, they have to worry about the security of the data and availability of the data, so CDOs actually help. So we are actually very good partners with the CDOs in that sense, and we also usually have IT infrastructure owner in the room when we are talking with our customers because they have a big stake. They are like the gatekeepers of the data to make sure that it is accessed by the right... By the right folks in the business. >> Sounds like maybe they're in the role of like, good cop bad cop or maybe mediator. Well Tendu, I wish we had more time. Thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE and, like you said, you're speaking tomorrow at Strata Conference on International Women's Day: Get a farm-to-table view of your data. Love the title. >> Thank you. >> Good luck tomorrow, and we look forward to seeing you back on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I look forward to coming back and letting you know about more exciting both organic innovations and acquisitions. >> Alright, we look forward to that. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host George Gilbert. We are live at our event Big Data SV in San Jose. Come down and visit us, stick around, and we will be right back with our next guest after a short break. >> Tendu: Thank you. (upbeat music)