>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are here, day one of the PTC LiveWorx conference, IOT, blockchain, AI, all coming together in a confluence of innovation. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Wolfgang Ulaga is here. He's the AT&T Professor of Services Leadership and Co-Executive Director, the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University. Wolfgang, welcome to theCUBE, thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So services leadership, what should we know? Where do we start this conversation around services leadership? >> The Center of Services Leadership is a center that has been created 30 years ago around a simple idea, and that is putting services front and center of everything a company does. So this is all about service science, service business, service operations, people and culture. When you touch service, you immediately see that you have to be 360 in your approach. You have to look at all the aspects. You have to look at structures and people. You have to look at operations with a service-centric mindset. >> I mean, it sounds so obvious. Anytime we experience, as consumers, great service, we maybe fall in love with a company, we're loyal, we tell everybody. But so often, services fall down. I mean, it seems obvious. Why is it just not implemented in so many organizations? >> One of the problems is that companies tend to look at services as an afterthought. Think about the word after-sales service, which in my mind is already very telling about how it's from a cultural perspective perceived. It's something that you do after the sale has been done. That's why oftentimes, there is the risk that it falls back, it slips from the priority list. You do it once, you have done all the other things. But in reality, businesses are there to serve customers. Service should be the center of what the company does, not at the periphery. >> Or even an embedded component of what the company, I mean, is Amazon a good example of a company that has embraced that? Or is Netflix maybe even a better example? I don't even know what the service department looks like at Netflix, it's just there. Is that how we should envision modern-day service? >> It excites me at the conference at LiveWorx. We see so many companies talking about technology and changes. And you really can sense and see how all of them are thinking about how can they actually grow the business from historic activities into new data-enabled activities. But the interesting challenge for many firms is that this is going to be also journey of learning how to serve its customers through data analytics. So data-enabled services is going to be a huge issue in the next coming years. >> Wolfgang, you're speaking here at the conference. I believe you also wrote a book about advanced services. For those that aren't familiar with the term, maybe walk us through a little bit about what that is. >> Earlier this morning, I presented the book "Service Strategy in Action", which is a very managerial book that we wrote over 10 years of experience of doing studies, working with companies on this journey from a product-centric company that wants to go into a service and solution-centric world and business. Today we see many of the companies picking up the pace, going into that direction, and I would say that with data analytics, this is going to be an even more important phenomenon for the next years to come. >> A lot of companies struggle with service as well because they don't see it as a scale component of their business. It's harder to scale services than it is to scale software, for example. In thinking about embedding services into your core business, how do you deal as an organization with the scale problem? Is it a false problem? How are organizations dealing with that? >> No, you're absolutely right. Many companies know and learn when they are small and they control operations. It's easy to actually have your eyes on service excellence. Once you scale up, you run into this issue of how do you maintain service quality. How do you make sure that each and every time to replicate into different regions, into different territories, into different operations, that you keep that quality up and running. One way to do it is to create a service culture among the people because one way to control that quality level is to push responsibility as low as possible down so that each and every frontline employee knows what he or she has to do, can take action if something goes wrong, and can maintain that service quality at the level we want. That's where sometimes you see challenges and issues popping up. >> What role do you see machines playing? You're seeing a lot of things like Chatbox or voice response. What role will machines play in the services of the future? >> I think it's a fascinating movement that is now put in place where, machine, artificial intelligence, is there to actually enhance value being created for customers. Sometimes you hear this as a threat or as a danger, but I would rather see it as an opportunity to raise levels of service qualities, have this symbiosis between human and machine to actually provide better, outstanding service for customers. >> Could you share some examples of successes there or things that you've studied or researched? >> Yeah so for example, if I take a consumer marketing example. In Europe I worked with a company, which is Nespresso. They do this coffee machines and capsules. In their boutique, they don't call it a store, by the way, they call it a boutique, they have injected a lot of new technology into helping customers to have different touchpoints, get served the way they want to, at the time they want to, how they want to. So this multi-channel, multi-experience for customers, is actually a growing activity. When you look at it from a consumer perspective, I get more opportunities, I get more choices. I can pick and choose when, where, and how I want to be served. A similar example is Procter & Gamble here in the United States. P&G has recently rolled out a new service business, taking a brand, Tide, and creating Tide Dry Cleaners here in America. It's a fascinating example. They use technology like apps on a smartphone to give the customer a much better experience. I think there's many of these example we'll see in the future. >> When we talk about IOT, one of the things that caught our ear in the keynote this morning is, it's going to take 20 to 25 partners putting together this solution. Not only is there integration of software, but one of the big challenges there, I think, is how do you set up services and transform services to be able to live in this multi-vendor environment. I wonder if you could comment on that? >> I agree, I agree. What I see, which makes me as a business professor very excited and that is, of course there's technology, of course there's hardware and software. But one of the biggest challenges will be the business challenges. How do you implement all of these offers? How do you roll it out? One of my talk topics today were how do you commercialize it? How do you actually make money with it? How do you get paid for it? One of my research areas is what they call free to fee. How do you get the r out of the free, and make customers pay for value you create? What I find, especially in the digital services space, there's so much value being created, but not every company is able to capture the value. Getting adequately paid for the value, this is a huge challenge. In sum, I would say it's really an issue about business challenges as much as it's a technological issue or technical challenges. >> I think about IOT, so many of the different transfer protocols, it's open source, that free to fee. Any advice you can give to people out there as to how they capture that value and capture revenue? >> I think you have to be super careful where the commoditization will kick in. If over time, something that was a differentiator yesterday, with the open sources and everything, will become not so much differentiator tomorrow. So where is your competitive edge? How do you stand out from competition? I know these are very classic questions, but you know what? In the IOT and digital space, they resurface, they come back, and having the right answers on these questions will make the difference between you and competition. >> Last question, we got to go. The trend toward self-service, is that a good thing, a bad thing, a depends thing? >> I think everything that allows customers to have choices. Customers today want to be in charge. They want to be in control. They, in fact, want all of it. They want to have service when they want it, but they want to have a non-self-service option if they feel like. So I think the trick is to know, how can I be nimble and give customers all of these choices so that they are in charge and pick and choose. >> Wolfgang, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Appreciate it, >> It's a pleasure having you, >> thank you very much, >> good to see you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're here at the PTC LiveWorx show, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I wish we could be there in person, but we're doing remote because of the COVID and the pandemic. We've got a great guest, Paul Grist. Worldwide Public Sector, Head of Education International for AWS. Paul, thank you for coming on remotely. >> Great to be here, John. >> There's a lot of disruption in the education space this year with universities and schools still uncertain about what the future will look like. What are some of the biggest trends you're seeing? >> John, what we've seen is the rapid adoption of technology and the growth of flexible online learning, learning that can take place anytime, anywhere. What we've seen is universities, national education systems, and schools rapidly migrating systems and content to the cloud, spinning up new applications. And we've seen companies that provide technology and content and platforms, the ed techs and publishers of the world, increasing their capacity, increasing their capability to deliver new applications to education. >> What is some of this research that you're finding out there? >> Yeah. You know, a time of much change and things happening very, very fast. We responded fast to the changes, John. Got a load of customer conversations together, looking at speeches by educationalists who were responding to the changes at some of the online events that spun up very quickly at places like the University of Buckingham, ASU, JSV, Inside Higher Education, places like Blackboard World. And really just talked to those leaders about their responses to the change, what kinds of things they were doing, and brought that together into the research. It's underpinned by some in-depth research and insights from education reports and articles too. >> Thanks Paul, really appreciate it. Having that research is critical. I know you guys do a lot of work on that. I know you got some news, take a quick plug for the new research that's coming out. You guys just put out today, just take a minute to quickly explain what it's about and how to find it. >> We're publishing today some new research that shows the seven key emerging trends in this new world of education. Check it out on the AWS website. Two key trends, flexible learning and the new world of employability. >> So you guys got a lot of data. It's great with Amazon, got a lot of customers. Good to see you guys getting that research. The question I have for you Paul is, what amount of the research shows really the COVID situation? Because there's before COVID, there's kind of during, and then there's going to be a post-COVID mode. Was that prior research in place with COVID or after COVID? Can you share kind of the update on the relevance of your research? >> Yeah, I think the sector has changed. The sector has gone through the fastest change it's ever gone through. And undoubtedly most of the issues, most of the challenges and opportunities in the sector, predate the pandemic. But what we've seen is COVID accelerate many of the challenges and the opportunities, but also bring new opportunities. >> Yeah, one of the things we've seen with education is the disruption, and the forcing function with COVID. There's a problem, we all know what it is. It's important, there's consequences for those. And you can quantify the disruption with real business value and certainly student impact. There's been downsides with remote education. More teacher-parent involvement and students having to deal with isolation, less social interaction. How do you guys see that? Or what is Amazon doing to solve these problems? Can you talk about that? >> Yeah. I think you know, education is very much a people business. And what we've been trying to do is partner with organizations to ensure that the people are kept at the center of the business. So working with organizations such as LS, sorry, Los Angeles United School District in the US to spin up a call center to allow students to contact their tutors. And parents to interact with tutors, to get questions answered. >> So one of the challenges these academic institutions are facing is speed, it's pace of change. What's going on with competition? How are they competing? How are universities and colleges staying relevant? Obviously there's a financial crisis involved. There's also the actual delivery aspect of it. More and more mergers. You're starting to see ecosystem changes. Can you talk about what's going on in the educational ecosystem? >> Yeah I mean, educational institutions are being forced to rethink their business models. It's an international marketplace in higher education. It's been a growing marketplace for many, many years. That suddenly stopped overnight, so every university has had to rethink about where their revenues are coming from, where the students are coming from. There's been some surprises too. I mean in the UK, actually international enrollments are up post-COVID because one of the strange side effects of COVID is without being able to travel, there's actually a cost saving for students. And so we've seen universities in the UK benefit from students who want to study, perhaps travel and the cost of study was too high previously. Now being able to study remotely. It's an unexpected and unintended consequence. But it kind of shows how there are opportunities for all organizations during this time. >> Many countries had to cancel exams altogether this year, which has been a big, huge problem. I mean people are outraged and people want to learn. It's been, you know, the silver lining in all this is that you have the internet (laughs). You have the cloud. I want to get your thoughts. How are universities and schools dealing with this challenge? Because you have a multi-sided marketplace. You've got the institutions, you've got the students, you got the educators, they all have to be successful. How are universities dealing with this challenge? >> Yeah I think, you know, teaching and learning has been online for 20, 30 years. And I think a lot of organizations have adopted online teaching and learning. But I think assessment is the one big area of education that remains to be made available at scale at low cost. So most assessment is still a pen-and-paper-based. There's big trust and identity issues. And what we're seeing through this COVID change is organizations really getting to grip with both of those issues. So, having the confidence to put assessment online, to make it available at scale, and then also having the confidence to tackle trust and identity questions. So who is taking the exam, where are they sitting? Can we be sure that it's actually that person taking that exam? So you know, the rise of things like proctoring technologies giving organizations the opportunity to assess remotely. >> How has this crisis affected research at academic institutions? Because certainly we know that if you need a lab or something, certainly we're seeing students need to be physically in person. But with remote and all those changes going on with the scale and the pace of change, how has research at academic institutions been impacted? >> Yeah I mean, research has always been a really collaborative activity, but we've seen that collaboration increase. It's had to increase. Researchers have had to go remote. Many of them work in labs. They haven't been able to do that. They've needed to spin up applications and new technologies in the cloud to continue working. But what we're seeing is governments taking an increased interest in the research being applicable, making sure that it leads to innovation which is meaningful. Getting much more involved and insisting that the research is made available now. And of course there's no place that that's clearer than in health research and trying to find a cure for COVID. And then secondly, we're seeing that research is becoming much more collaborative not just across institutions but also countries. So one of the great projects we're involved in at the moment is with the University of Adelaide who are collaborating with researchers from the Breeding and Acclimatization Institute in Poland on a project to study the increase in crop yield of wheat. >> One of the things that's coming out of this, whether it's research or students is open online courses, virtual capabilities. But a concept called stackable learning. Can you explain what that is? >> Yeah. We're in a global marketplace in education and there's increased competition between universities and education providers to make new types of certificates and online badges available. We know that employers are looking for ever more agile methods of scaling and upskilling. And stackable learning is a concept that's been around for a couple of decades now, where learning is broken down into smaller chunks, put together in a more personalized way from a number of different providers. Spun up very, very quickly to respond to need and then delivered to students. We're seeing some of the big providers like edX and Coursera who, again have been around for over a decade become really prominent in the provision of some of these stackable credentials. Their systems run on the cloud. They're easy to access, in many, many cases they're free. We're seeing an increasing number of employers and education institutions adopt and embed these types of delivery systems into their curriculum. >> Totally a fan of stackable learning, it's called the Lego model, whatever I call it. But also online brings the nonlinear progressions. The role of data is super important. So I'm very bullish on education being disrupted by cloud providers and new apps. So you know, I wanted to call that out because I think it's super important. Let me get to a really important piece that it has to be addressed, and I want to get your thoughts on. Cyber security. Okay, cyber attacks and privacy of students are two areas that are super important for institutions to address. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I mean the use of more technology becomes, you know again, a target for cyber attack and unfortunately it's an increasing phenomenon. Simply put, every organization needs to put security first. Needs to operate as a security-first organization. They need to adopt technologies, people and processes that can protect their investments. And work with data management vendors, cloud vendors who've got the compliances and the common privacy and security frameworks such as GDPR in place to make sure that they provide secure services. AWS's security offerings include auditing, login and identity management, data encryption capabilities that offer more transparency and control, to allow institutions protect student data. >> Super important, thanks for sharing. Finally, what's the steps institutions can take to close the digital divide because now some people are taking gap years. Research is changing. People might not even have PCs or internet connections. There's still, this exposes the haves and have nots. What steps can institutions take to do their part? >> Yeah, digital learning is here to stay, John. We've learned that many learners do not have access to technology necessary for online learning. Whether those are devices or a reliable internet connection. But again, you know governments, states, educational authorities have all turned their attention to these issues over the last few months. And we're seeing organizations partner with technology providers that can provide internet connections. Partners in AWS, such as Kajeet who've installed hotspot devices on buses to deploy in areas with no connectivity. You know whether that's a place like Denver, Colorado or whether it's a place, you know, in Nigeria in Africa, remote connection remains a problem everywhere. And we're seeing everybody addressing that issue now. >> Paul, great to have you on theCUBE and sharing your insights on what's going on in international education. Final question for you. In your own words, why is this year at the AWS Public Sector Summit Online important? What's the most important story that people should walk away in this educational industry? >> The most important story, John, is it's a time of incredible change but also incredible opportunity. And we're seeing organizations who have wanted to change, who've wanted to deliver more to their students, who want to deliver a greater experience, who want to access more students and have much greater reach. Now with the appetite to do that. re:Invent is a great opportunity to work with AWS, to understand what's going on with our partners, with our customers. And look at some of the common solutions for the challenges that they're looking to solve. >> Paul Grist, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Worldwide Head of Education for International AWS. Thank you for sharing. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Remote, virtual, this is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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(upbeat techno music) >> Narrator: From New York, it's theCUBE, Covering Escape/19. >> Okay, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the first inaugural Multi-Cloud Conference called Escape/2019 as in gathering of industry thought leaders, experts, entrepreneurs, engineers, really having substantive conversations around what multi-cloud is, what it's going to look like, what are some of the thing, technical and business opportunities around that, really small intimate conference. Again first inaugural conference. I'm here with my next guest to talk about that Chris Smith, Vice President of Engineering, on Data Science at Ticketmaster. Chris, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much Don. >> Appreciate taking the time. >> Glad to talk to you. >> Practitioner out there, you know, we all go scar tissue. >> Yes we do. >> If you don't have scar tissue, if you're not breaking things and then the learning from it then you're not advancing. But sometimes you don't want to step too far forward right? >> Yep, yep. >> Can you get back it's like you know. So you guys have a great experience. Legacy business, I remember buying tickets when I was going to conference back in the day when I was in, you know, in college. >> Yep. >> Buy it at Ticketmaster. >> That's right, that was Ticketmaster then, Ticketmaster now. >> Now it's lot of online provisioning of all direct to consumer. So you guys are a journey, tell the story. >> Well certainly, the company Ticketmaster, has had an incredibly long journey, starting back our first concert was Electric Light Orchestra which kind of like puts that in in context. >> (laughs) I was in eighth grade, '79. >> Yeah, yeah that was back at ASU. And even then we were a very innovative technology company we were making ticketing platforms that performed better, got more capacity out of the hardware than anybody else could do, anything close to that. We were really pioneered that idea of the what was at the time called the electronic ticket. Which was the idea that, you know, you could go to any store that was selling tickets for an event and the same inventory would be available at each store instead of the old model of a bunch of tickets getting sent out to each place >> That was bad-ass back in the day. >> That was really cutting edge and we've been evolving ever since then for 40 years. We were also very early onto the web scene. We were selling tickets online before anybody else was and before most people were selling anything online really to a degree. So we've been pioneers in a lot of areas, we see ourselves as the technology partner for the live events business. That's really what we are. And as a consequence, we're always sitting on that edge right? Trying to innovate and move to new opportunities but at the same time trying to provide that quality of experience at scale. >> Yeah. >> That is so critical to the business. >> And there's a big business so it's not like it's your nimble start up but you got to be agile. What are the learnings? Take us through the cloud learnings as you guys pioneered and started to go into that pioneering mode which was okay, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what a cloud's going to do. So you guys probably said hey, we got to go look at this, let's go pioneer our impact, take us through that what happened? >> Yeah absolutely, and I think there's two interesting contexts that started that conversation right? One was we're one of the few online businesses that launches a denial of services attack against itself on a regular basis, basically every day, right? And so we have traffic patterns that are unusual even for a typical e-commerce site where we might see loads that are a hundred x, you know beginning of a Taylor Swift on sale. There's going to be traffic like no one's business. And then when all her tickets are sold, there's not going to be nearly as much traffic right? And so that is the nature of our business and cloud is very attractive for its elastic capacity. When we were running on prim, we have to provide all that capacity all the time, just to have it for that one peak moment that might literally be the highest traffic level we see all year, right? So that drew a lot of the interest in looking at the cloud in the first place. And then the other aspect was we'd been working on, you know we'd been running on prim for nearly 40 years at the time and there is a lot of technical debt that had accumulated in the system at that point. And so, there was an interest in maybe potentially being able to leverage cloud vendors' infrastructure, and migrate systems onto that and then sort of declare bankruptcy on some of that technical debt rather than trying to pay it off. And so that, those were the two thoughts that were driving that conversation. I think we got really excited by the possibility and we committed really heavily to the idea of a strategy of just moving aggressively into the cloud as fast as we possibly could. And we knew that in the process, that we would be breaking some things, we'd be you know discovering some challenges et cetera, and that's definitely what happened, right? >> (laughs) What was the big learning? >> I think the biggest learning was that, you know, we had been developing systems for decades literally, with our on prim environment and so the systems were actually very well tuned for that on prim environment and that on prim environment was very well tuned for them. >> Yeah, yeah exactly. >> And it clouds use-- >> On all levels, hardware, software. >> Yeah, all the way through 'cause it's a fully integrated, vertically integrated solution. We build a lot of this stuff custom ourselves. >> John: Yeah, and we would decompose all that. >> And so it was very difficult to migrate some parts of that to the cloud and more importantly we're pretty smart guys, we can figure out how to move stuff into the cloud. But then to do it in a cost effective manner. Required in a lot of cases, really dramatically changing the design and architecture even of the software at a pretty fundamental level that you just can't do overnight. And so ironically, you know, the technical debt that we had in our infrastructure didn't seem quite so huge once you start thinking about the technical debt of the entire stack, right? And so then we realized that we could be much more strategic about how we went after our cloud strategy and that's kind of where we are now. Where we are being smart about, there's a lot of new products that are being developed, that, you know, we can build from the get go with the idea of them being designed for the cloud. >> Cloud native. >> Exactly, so we have a lot of stuff like that, that's just being built, in fact, the bulk of our website now when you go to visit it as a consumer, the bulk of that is running in the cloud right now. But, there are some really critical systems that are core to that experience, that are still running on prim. >> So you guys had to essentially re-architect the operating environment to take into account hybrid operating. >> Yes. >> Decoupling the critical systems that can't be tampered with, maybe put some containers of Kubernetes move some services around. But for the most part treat Cloud Native as Cloud Native, Greenfield apps and nurture-- >> Yeah but there's also refactoring opportunities. So there's a lot of opportunities where you need to go in and change the product anyway and that can be an opportunity to make things a lot more cloud friendly and better take advantage of the capabilities that the cloud has, so it's actually a mix of both. >> Give an example of a good opportunity to refactory, 'cause this comes up a lot in my CUBE interviews. Like okay, 'cause it's all opportunity, opportunistic, but what are the characteristics for a great refactoring opportunity the tune up? >> So a lot of times when you want to refactor really what you want to do is take a set of capabilities that you may have in a much larger system and pull 'em out and manipulate them and play around with them and do things differently. So, our ticket purchasing process we're constantly looking at tweaking the process. Now the core pieces of it remain the same right? But we might want to change the experience and provide something more innovative that's different from what people used to do. And so one of the areas we're working on for this as an example is reserve-less checkout. Where you just buy the ticket without ever actually reserving the seat. That's a very small minor change in the flow, but to make that really work you have to pull out the pieces of the system anyway right? And grab, say I want these four pieces to rearrange differently, so that's a great refactoring opportunity. You can make all those pieces, what we actually did is we've made those pieces into lambdas that are sitting in AWS, they're basically not running most of the time which is great. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Really cheap when it's not running right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Very efficient. But then when we need them they run very efficiently and more importantly we can now manipulate the order of operations for this stuff. So breaking things out into those composable parts whenever you know you need to do that anyway, it's a great opportunity to change it. >> So great for work flow refactoring there. >> Absolutely. >> Final question for you, I know we got to break for lunch, but, then really appreciate you coming and sharing your insight. >> Absolutely. >> As a pioneer in data science and data you got machine learning certainly is the engine of AI. AI gets math and cognition are kind of coming into it. Learning machines, deep learning, bla bla bla, what's your, in your opinion, what are some pioneering areas that are ripe pioneering grounds to dig into in data science and data? When you think about CloudScale, Hybrid and just, in general what are the ripe opportunities for people to pioneer in daily. What's the next frontier in your mind? >> So I think the trend right now that's maybe not the frontier, but it's now where the main shift is, is to moving into what I would call real time learning, right? Where you're doing refactor, reinforcement learning, or online learning of some form. Where you're literally, the data's arriving in real time, transforming your model in real time, learning in real time, that's key to our strategy and it's very very common. But I think in terms of where the frontiers are it's actually kind of everywhere, in the sense that the name of the game is the cost of doing that work is getting lower and lower. You know, data's getting cheaper, computes' getting cheaper, and also the products for doing it are getting more productized, so you need less expertise and you can deploy them more quickly. So what you want to look at is businesses that are traditionally been too low margin right? To apply machine learning to but have large scale, right? Which is like the commodity, everything in that's commoditized, right? Now there's an opportunity to, there's the cost have gone so low-- >> To squeeze insight out of those areas. >> That you can now optimize that small margin and get value from it with you know, otherwise like 10 years ago it would have been so costly to build a machine learning infrastructure for it. You would've lost more money than you would've gained. >> So you could, what your saying is, these areas that were not attractive because of cost in the past, that have large scale, there's penetration opportunities to create value and insight that could-- >> Absolutely. >> Bring in new franchises and new capabilities. >> And that's why I think you know the Andreessen's software's eating the world thing, that's what that's really about is as those costs get lower, as the ability to deploy gets easier, suddenly businesses that before didn't make any sense to invest in this way, they totally make sense and in fact there's huge opportunities to completely transform the landscape by getting in. >> Chris you're a man of our world, we love you, thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> That's great insight. >> Look at this we're getting insider on the future of data, which I believe everything that he just said is totally relevant. You're an entrepreneur out there, you can attack big markets and get in there with a position with great IP, great intellectual property, again this is the modern world of computer science. >> It is. >> Don't ya think? >> It absolutely is. >> This is the benefit of scale and cloud. >> Absolutely. >> I wish I was 20 something years old again. (laughs) We've been through the ringer. >> Yes. >> Chris, thanks for coming on. Keep coverage here in New York for the first inaugural conference, Escape/2019, I'm John Furrier here, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE! Covering IMAGINE: A Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington at the AWS IMAGINE education event. First time ever as part of the public sector series. Theresa Carlson kicked it off earlier today. 900 registered people watched this thing grow, like every other Amazon event that we've ever covered. And really, this is all about education. We're excited to be here. Our next guest has been working on this for awhile, He's Lou Pugliese, he's the Senior Innovation Fellow and Managing Director of Technology Innovation at Action Lab, Arizona State. Welcome. >> Thanks for letting me interview here. >> Absolutely. So just before we get started, kind of general impressions of this event? >> You know, it's amazing. I was just saying just a few minutes ago that you go to a lot of conferences, and you know, you go to so many conferences that the goal is to sort of try to meet 80% of the time new people. And you don't ever do that. Here you do, you know. And so there's a lot of people here that I've known for years, that I haven't seen. And there are a lot of new faces here too, so it's great. >> Right. It's really interesting, we cover a lot of conferences and kind of the lifecycle as they grow. But when they're small like this and just getting started you know, it's so intimate. There's so much hall conversations going on, there's so much just genuine sharing of best practices 'cause everybody's still trying to figure it out. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what you're doing here now. >> Absolutely. So, one of the things you're involved in, that caught my eye doing the research for this, is working on research based approach to really understand what works for the student learning experience. So there's all kinds of conversations we can have about higher education. Does it work, does it not work, is it broken? There's a lot of interesting things. Here, you know, it's been really interesting to focus on community colleges specifically and this kind of direct path between skills and getting a job. And it almost feels like the old apprenticeship model, kind of back in the day. You're at a big four year institution and really exploring. What is changing in the education interaction between kids and teachers, kids and curriculum, and how that stuff gets communicated and what's effective? 'Cause it's a new world, it's not the old world. >> No, it is. And you know, at ASU, what's interesting is is that there's a significant digital presence. You know, 35 thousand students very historically, back to 2009. So with that comes a significant amount of footsteps, digital footsteps, that students have taken. And so now you have the ability to be able to analyze that at a much higher level. And so now what we can do, and the part of what we're doing at the Action Lab is: looking specifically at the efficacy of these digital programs, finding out what course design elements do work, and what needs to be changed. And that gives us the ability to sort of feed that information back into the instructional design process, and continue to iterate on that improvement. The unique thing about the lab is that, it's a persistent lab. Most universities are sort of stop and start research initiatives, and they learn a lot and they publish a lot of papers. We've been around for three years, and we'll be around for 10 more, and it's a persistent examination of what we're doing at a digital environment, and we're taking it one step further, we're trying to understand how students behave in a digital environment. We know a lot about how students behave in a classroom or traditional learning setting, but we don't know how they how they learn in a digital environment. >> Right. I love, you said digital footprints, not digital exhaust, (both laugh) and it kind of reminds me of kind of these older you know, long term longitudinal studies, because it's still pretty early days in trying to figure out how these educational tools and mobile and stuff are impacting the way these kids learn. But we know they spend so much time on them, that is their interface to the world. It's almost like your remote control to life is actually this little thing that you carry around in your hand. So I'm curious, what are some of the things you've discovered that are working? What are some of the things that maybe that were kind of surprising that didn't work? What's some of the early findings that's coming out of that research? >> Sure, so in the early studies, we looked specifically at how demographic populations succeed or don't succeed in an environment. And what we found out is: there are certain demographics of students that flourish in an online environment, and consistently perform well. There are some that don't. The second thing we learned specifically is: what types of design features within a course, like the interaction within students, or exposing learning objectives, or getting students to really understand what rubrics of measurement, how content is being used and paced throughout our curriculum. A lot of really detailed information that faculty need to reorient and redesign their instruction, and so we can see a direct predictive value of improvement based on those changes. >> Right. So are you getting stuff out now that's impacting curriculum development? Or are you still kind of pulling the data together and there has not been enough time to really implement it? >> We are doing that, absolutely. One of the elements that we're introducing into the research now is: this notion of, it sounds like a fancy term, non cognitive or social and emotional learning; things that are a predispositions of learning about a student in their, you know, sort of soft skills world. Grit, determination, goal orientation, a variety of different soft skills, and their disposition, and how that impacts how they learn, and how they succeed in a classroom. >> And how important is that? I would imagine it's got to be super important. >> It's a field that is just still early in its science, but we're learning a lot. Not necessarily just about how students will succeed in a course environment, but those types of social/emotional learning skills that are required for them to be successful in a workplace environment. >> Right, right. And then the other factors that were discussed earlier in the key note are some of the, you know, what's happening at home? You know, there's all these other factors that are in a student's life that aren't directly tied to their education, but it can have a significant impact on their ability to learn, either temporarily, or-- >> They're all predispositions, yeah absolutely, yeah. >> Yeah, or full time. That's great. So, as you look forward now, and I think it came up too in the keynote, there's no shortage of data (chuckles) in this education environment. It's really been the time to grab it, analyze it, and put it to work. So, how are, you know, your engagement with Amazon kind of helping you to move your objectives forward? >> Well the Amazon engagement allows us to sort of off load all of the technological constraints, and gives us ultimate possibilities of not necessarily focusing on the tough stuff; the hardware, the integration, the specific tool sets that are required to extract data and analyze data, and focusing specifically on the research. So ultimately, it allows us to redirect our focus in what's really important in our world, because it's not necessarily about the technology, it's how the technology can point and draw a direct line between what the data says and how we create an intervention with students. >> Right. So I'm just curious to get your perspective. You said before we turned on the cameras, you've been involved in this field for a long time, trying to figure out how people can learn, how they can learn better, more effectively. Are there some big, kind of macro themes, that maybe people don't think about enough, that you've seen repeated time and time again, that people should be thinking about when they think about effective education and how to get kids to actually learn what we're trying to teach them? >> Sure, so a couple things. I mean, what we're focused on is not necessarily what we call big data, what we typically know big data as, it's really more about small data, which shows us causality. So for instance, one of the things that we are learning is that peer-to-peer engagement is really, really important in many courses in engaging in asynchronous and synchronous organizations within the course to learn from peers. Also avenues specifically to faculty, so faculty can actually look at the map of the entire classroom and understand who's achieving and focus just only on those people. >> Interesting. Well, good stuff, and, I'm sure, as you get more and more of the digital footprints, the insights will only increase by leaps and bounds. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, Lou, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time >> Thank you. and we'll look forward to catching up next year and getting some new information. >> Thanks. >> He's Lou, I'm Jeff, thanks for watchin', we're in Seattle, signing off from AWS IMAGINE educate, See ya next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by PureStorage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Man: Graduated ASU. >> Welcome back to PureStorage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with The Cube, sporting the clong of Prince, formerly known as, today because we are at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a really cool concert venue that's been here since 1950 and I'm joined by Dave The Who Vellante today. >> Play the toast and tea. (laughs) >> Pretty groovy T-shirt there. And we're joined by a couple of guys, next we've got Axel Streichart, the senior director of business application solutions from Pure and John Meng, senior director of IT operations at Simpson Strong-Tie. Hi guys! >> Hi. >> Lisa: Welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So John, first question to you. Tell us about Simpson Strong-Tie. Who are you guys, obviously you're a Pure customer, but give us a little bit of an orientation to the business. >> Sure, so Simpson Strong-Tie, we're a public company based out of Pleasanton, California. We've been in business since about 1956, if I've got my history right, so we've been around for quite a long time. We're a manufacturing organization. Basically, if you're building a home or a deck or if you're needing to put two by fours together, our niche is that little connector, that bracket that connects those two by fours and we do pretty well in that business. Overall our revenue is just shy of a billion dollars, so a pretty decent sized organization. >> Dave: So Pure passed you. >> Yes, last year, you know. >> You okay with that or? >> I'm okay with that. (all laugh) >> So tell us about, from a business perspective, the need for PureStorage specifically with respect to your SAP journey. >> So a couple of years ago when I came on board, the business had made a decision that they were going to get off of their old ERP system onto a new ERP system. When I say old ERP system, I'm being a little respectful there. It's a homegrown application running on SQL which is basically, they lovingly called it Blue Screen because you go to fileshare and you double click on the executable that you need, for example, if you're doing accounts payable or accounts receivables or purchase orders or what have you, you double click on the executable you want, opens up a nice little blue screen and it's a DOS based blue screen and you tab around and enter all your information. They had been running on that application for about 30 years. >> Lisa: Is that all? (laughs) >> Yeah, so quite a while. >> Dave: It works. >> It works, right. If it ain't broke don't fix it, but it was developed by a single person and it was time that the company put on some bootstraps and hitched them up, so they went to market to decide on what ERP application they were going to move to and SAP won out. They had actually been running for a year on a test system hosted by SAP when I came on board, so the decision had already been made, the application wise from an ERP perspective, but the next step in our journey for Simpson, and my challenge, was how do we host this environment? Do we host it in a cloud, do we host it on-prem? And so as I took a, looking at our environment, a very distributed environment, I said, alright, well first and foremost, SAP is a centralized solution. Is there a way for us to create a single environment that our entire company could run on, not only for SAP but everything else, a mixed use environment? And I started having conversations with Pure. They actually let me talk to a couple of their existing customers who were very happy about their mixed use workload including ServiceNow who talked today, so definitely a shout out to them on the conversations we had back a couple of years ago. Anyways, Pure ended up being our foundation for currently our core tenant, which is SAP, but also the future tenant for everything else that we're going to throw on there. And it's been an incredible journey over these last couple of years with them. >> And why the decision to stay on-prem, versus go to the cloud? Was it a function of SAP really not being there in the cloud or your data, you didn't just want to shove your business into the public cloud? >> So there was definitely a lot of analysis that went into that. Just from a financial perspective, I worked with the CFO and we put together a 12 year ROI on cloud versus on-prem and just to kind of really give ourselves some understanding over time what the impact would be of renting versus owning and it was very clear that on-prem financially made sense. Then we had to talk about the business, what was the best for the business. We looked at it from a, when I came there, there was some, the project team looking at SAP had really already made their mind up. They wanted it off of IT. They wanted it in an environment that they trusted, so when I came on board I said, look this is something I've done before. We have experience, we have the in-house expertise, you just trust me that this is the right thing and let me show you how and that's where, honestly, a lot of the information that I was able to pull off of FlashStack, off of SAP, it's a certified solution, talking to ServiceNow I was able to prove to the business that look, hosting it internally made the most sense financially as well as for our business and what we were trying to achieve. >> Made you happy. >> Yeah and it's not just that, but this is a story we're hearing more often now. So customers actually trying this out in the cloud and realizing, number one, the cost, it's not that cost-efficient and effective as they were planning for and seeing, especially when you're making multiple copies of this SAP environments. The costs go through the roof and the other thing is also what a lot of customers then realize is how do you actually get your data and get your communication from your data center back to the cloud provider? You need a big pipe and this communication cost just to get the data out is huge, is sometimes huge. The other thing is SLAs. It sounds like a good thing, but in many cases, SLA's because they're not flexible, you're ending up quarter end you need help and they're saying, nope, talk to you in four days. It's not really acceptable. And the third one is, there's this whole concept around I don't really have to invest now into the knowledge, into the skill set, because I put it all in the cloud. It's not the reality. The reality, you still have to invest into the skills. Isn't that? >> Everything he has said is actually the conversations that we had in-house, absolutely. If you want to do a data migration from QA to Dev or Dev to Production or whatever your landscape is and how you want to move the data, oh, well, that's going to be a charge. Oh well, okay, well I need to spin up this extra project. Oh, well there's another charge. I mean, it's just constant nickel and diming and another key component that you hit on that I failed to mention was hosting it internally allowed us to control the end to end experience for our end users. When you're talking about hosting it in the cloud, your data is somewhere else and you can not control end to end. You can control it up to a certain extent, but then from there all you can rely on is the SLAs and, to his point, the SLAs are only what's on paper, they're not very flexible at all. >> So the business case didn't pan out for the cloud. >> Correct. >> But there's certainly attributes of the cloud that are attractive, so what are those attributes and how are you bringing those on-prem? >> So flexibility. Flexibility is huge for us, the ability to just quickly be able to spin things up and scale them back as needed. I kind of look of it as, look, there's a water line that you're going to use on a day in and day out basis for your organization. Maximize your investment there. On the peaks and valleys that you're going to have, that's where the cloud can really help and so, is cloud completely off the table for us? No, that's where we're going to be able to burst into that sort of scenario. If we need more compute, we need more spin cycles, whatever we need from the cloud, we can throw it up there and then bring it back down, so have much more controllable costs in our mind. >> So a major change in the application environment, migration, from an old platform. You had to freeze the app. Does that freeze the code? >> John: Yep. >> How long did you have to freeze the code for? >> So, when we're talking about, just making sure I understand your question. >> Your home-grown ERP, blue screen, C prompt to the SAP environment. >> Yeah, so the landscape as we have it today, we actually just went live on SAP early February and it's not company wide. It's only a certain branch. In its strength, the beauty of that previous application, it was very de-centralized and each branch where we have a high consolidation of users and workers, each branch had their own data center hosting their own ERP for their branch, so we could freeze their environment just during their time window. >> I see. >> Now the challenge for us today is as we start consolidating, those windows start to overlap, but that's honestly why we've invested in technologies like FlashStack and so forth that come with the redundancy built in so we can work on the environment without having to freeze it or bring it down. >> So you need the speed to compress those discontinuities. >> Yes, yes. >> Dave: In data. >> Absolutely. >> What about data protection? How do you, I know that's an area of expertise of yours. How do you approach data protection in this new environment? Are you doing anything differently? Where does Pure fit? >> It's actually a huge shift for us on how we do things. From a data protection standpoint, we're talking about disaster recovery, business continuity and so we have active passive data centers. We're utilizing what Pure has under the hood to be able to replicate in multiple ways. And that's the beauty of our setup that we've designed is the ability to replicate in multiple ways, because in a multi-tenant environment, yes, there are certain parts of the stack that one shoe will fit all sizes. I would say that PureStorage is that, but when you start getting to the details of each of the applications, they don't all play the same way when it comes to DR or it comes to replication or data protection and we will need to look at each one of those applications and design a data protection strategy around it as we import it in, so for SAP, we do have differencing of how we're going to protect that versus when we bring in our web servers, versus when we bring in SharePoint and other core applications to the business. >> So Axel, you mentioned, well actually it was John, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to talk to ServiceNow and maybe another customer of Pure as well when you were in this decision making process. I imagine ServiceNow's business is probably quite different from Simpson Strong-Tie, so what, Axel, I guess both of you, help us understand, what were some of the similar changes that, say, a ServiceNow faced that you were facing and then Axel, to your point, tell us a little bit about the SAP alliance that you have with Pure and how customers as big as ServiceNow and Simpson Strong-Tie are helping to evolve that relationship? >> Me first? >> Go for it. >> Alright, so one of the biggest strategies, the focus that I had when I was making the decision around hosting SAP, I really wanted to make sure I understood, did I have to go a siloed approach? Was I buying architecture specifically for SAP or could I do a multi-use workload? Multi-purpose was huge for me. I was really, I couldn't understand how, in 2016 when I was looking at this, I'm like, look, it's 2016, I know there's a solution out there that can solve this problem and so that's what I was challenging Pure and they're like, who do you want to talk to? And I said, "Well I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP and I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP in a mixed-workload environment." And that's where ServiceNow came into play. And when I was having conversations with them, I said, alright, so you're running mixed workload. Yes, okay, when you have an SAP performance problem, do you have to, is there a lot of effort to show that there's, where the problem in the performance is? And there was a pause on the phone and the guy actually giggled over the phone. I don't know how else to say it. And he's like, "Performance problems? "We don't have any." And so, when you hear that, especially when you're talking about SAP, which is a known beast of an application inside any environment and it will use whatever resource you throw at it and it won't play nice with other apps, when I heard that, I was like, okay, where do I sign? So it was basically that conversation that really said, alright, let's give this a try. The other thing, honestly, for us is SAP is our first tenant and as we start applying other applications to it, we already have our baseline established and we can watch as the other applications are thrown in and it's not impacting anything, SAP, or on their own. >> So FlashStack is going to be able to give you a foundation to not only scale your SAP infrastructure-- >> Absolutely. >> But also to expand to multiple workloads. >> Yeah, for example, some of our public web facing applications, we've already moved them in-house. We used to use a public service provider, a public cloud offering for this web service that I'm talking about. It would take, so you'd go out there and you'd say, you know what, I want a product catalog of all Simpson products and you hit the button. 45 minutes later, it's downloaded, 45 minutes. I took that workload and I put it in our data center. Three minutes. 45 minutes to three minutes. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then another test was a web crawler, so we did a web crawler across that same web application to confirm when we moved it from one location to the other we didn't miss anything. In the old environment, running on a public cloud infrastructure, it took 20 minutes. 17 seconds on our own. And it was run from the same PC. There was no, it was pretty clear and honestly, when marketing felt that increase in performance and saw it and realized it, they bragged to the CFO and now the CFO's like, okay, when are we going to get this out of SAP? Well we have to get the whole company on SAP before we can really realize this investment, but they're very excited about the opportunities. >> And how long have you had the Pure infrastructure? >> We installed it probably about year and a half ago, because we had to get it prepared. We installed it about a year and a half ago. >> So you haven't had to do any upgrades yet. >> No, not major ones. We actually have our first major one this week. We're actually scheduling it, but one of the questions I was asked on an earlier panel was how due you handle outages with Pure and how has your experience been with support. Well, I'm sorry we haven't had to call support yet. I've heard great stories about it (Lisa laughs) and I know that our guys that are working with support right now to get our upgrades done, they've had nothing but praise, but honestly we haven't had a lot of interaction yet with their support, just because we haven't needed it yet. >> And you have an in-house development staff, application development team? >> Yes. >> Has their work flow changed at all in terms of being able to share data, share copies of data, are you there yet or? >> We're not there yet, but one of the goals of our environment, so we have two data centers and we have load balancers in front of the two data centers. When it comes to hosting our public web side of things, the goal is to have a green and a red environment where you develop on the red, green is your production and when it comes time, you just flip the switch and your development becomes your active. And so, basically, a lot of the nuances and strategies that you get out of public cloud, we're going to attain those using our private cloud infrastructure. >> Essentially use live data of the test environment-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then cutting over immediately. You couldn't have done that three, four, five years ago. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So Axel, we're just about out of time, but how common is John's story with Simpson Strong-Tie in terms of, we haven't had to call support yet. Are you hearing this resonate pretty pervasively in your SAP install base across industries? >> This is a very typical environment. I would call it almost green field, but most of the environments that we are dealing with are brown field, so customers are long-time SAP users and customers and they're going from, let's say, the Oracle environment into a HANA environment and the nice thing about this is that we are actually providing a platform that can help customers no matter where they are in their journey. If they are still in Oracle, they're already on HANA, they're moving onto AI, whatever it might be, they don't have to change anything on the infrastructure, per se, because there is no configuration or tuning necessary, whether it's Oracle, whether it's HANA, whether it's AI, so you're running it off the same platform. The other thing is that I want to mention is, because you asked me about our relationship with SAP. It's a very strong relationship, so we're actually working with SAP worldwide in their core innovation labs, so they have labs around the world where they develop new solutions together with hardware and software partners and they love to work with PureStorage because it is so simple and they're coming from a functional side. They don't care about the infrastructure at all. They're saying as long as it's simple and you can imagine they are pretty much the Switzerland of ERP. We actually recently published a white paper together with SAP around how to actually save license cost, SAP license cost, of up to 75%. Now you would ask yourself, why would SAP do that? Why would they promote something, push something, that actually cuts into their revenue? But for SAP it is more important to increase the adoption rate of HANA rather than the revenue that's behind it, so that's why we are publishing, and it's on the SAP website that you can download and you can see, together with PureStorage. It's an amazing story that we have. >> Let-- >> And honestly, that was part of why we chose Pure in the beginning, they're certified and now I didn't have to go to the business and try to convince them. It was all on paper for us. >> I can't help but notice that you brought a little kitty cat to the set, Axel. Tell us about this little stuffed animal. >> Maybe you heard it in the keynote this morning. We were talking about PureStorage is actually moving from their solution development towards engineered solutions. We want to actually put more application specific functionality and embed it directly into the array and one of the big challenges that a lot of customers have is how do I create copies, clones, and refreshes of my SAP environment? And we have customers it takes them sometimes nine days just for one copy, nine days. Why? Because it's a very complex and complicated end to end process, so we thought about why don't we take this entire process, automate this entire process, and embed it into our array, and we call this tool that we developed and that's available for everybody that, it's included in the maintenance. We call it Copy Automation Tool, CAT. >> The cat! >> That's the cat. (all laugh) >> And that's what we are, and so if people are asking, why is a cat, Copy Automation Tool. >> That's good. >> Very nice. >> I was like, where is this going? >> I like it. >> Brought it home, brought it home. >> Like you said. >> Do I get to keep this cat? Is this, oh. >> You can. >> Ah, very nice. >> This is pretty cool swag. Well Axel and John, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us the innovations that Pure and SAP are doing, how you are being successful, and now you are a reference customer for what you guys are achieving. >> Great story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks guys, appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Yep. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and cat. We are live from PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back, here on the Cube along with Dave Vellante, I am John Walls. We're live at .conf2017, as Splunk continues with day two of its get together here the nation's capital, Washington D.C. Home game for me, I love it. Dave's up the road in Boston, so, hey, you had to hit the road a little bit, but not as bad as it can be sometimes for you. >> No, I'll take D.C. over Vegas. Sorry, Vegas. >> Yeah, but you travel a lot, man, you do, you're on the road. Chris Kurtz travels a lot, too. He's come with us from Arizona State University, he's a systems architect out there. Chris, always good to see you, we had a chance to visit last year for the first time. >> Yep. >> A member of the Splunk trust. And a gentleman with quite a diverse background, I mean. You supported Mars missions. As far as the... >> The Spirit and Opportunity. >> Facilitated out in Phoenix. Working now, as you said, at Arizona State, but also the Trust. Let's talk about that a little bit, because there was some conversation yesterday from the keynote stage about expanding that group? >> Absolutely. >> Adding 14 new members. And for a lot of people at home, who might not be familiar with the Splunk trust, talk about the concept and how you put it into practice. >> Absolutely, so, the Splunk trust is the organization that Splunk set up as a community leader, as a community activist. Our, kind of, watch word is, is that, "We're not the smartest people in the room, "but we'll be the most helpful." and, so, our purpose is... >> John: I'm not sure about that first part, too, by the way. >> Thank you, very much. >> John: I think you're short-changing yourself. >> So, our organization preface is we act as members of the community to help direct community people who have issues and help them externally, but also, to help Splunk and what direction they should go. "Hey, we see this pain point from a lot of the customers, "this is something that maybe Splunk should concentrate on." We're often given access to betas or even earlier, or, you know, even potential products. It's, "How should we build this, is this something that "you would use? "Is this something that you would like?" Table data sets was a feature that I worked on for a year, that was released last year. You know, "Is this something that you would use, "is this something that you would want?" and, sometimes, you know, users fall through the cracks in the support system and they don't know how to get support help, or they don't know where to get directed, and we can volunteer and say, you know, "Show them where the Splunk answers group is very powerful." There's an app for that, we can show them Splunkbase and help them when those things fall through the cracks. So, we provide community enrichment and support, but we're not an official representative of Splunk, even though we're appointed by Splunk on a year-to-year basis. >> John: There aren't that many of ya, right? >> Well, there's a couple, 42 this time. And, you serve for a year and it can be renewed each year, you reapply. Or you can be volunteered, you know, somebody else can... >> Nominate you. >> Can nominate for us. And there's no guarantee. We, the members of the trust vote and then that goes to Splunk and Splunk makes the final decision. Some companies allow that, some don't, it depends. ASU is very generous and let's me participate and give them my time to the organization. >> And I said ASU, Arizona State University. >> That's what I was thinking. >> I never fully introduced that, I'm sorry. >> What do you have to do to qualify and what's the hurdle? >> So, be the most helpful person in the room, that's what you need to do to qualify. So you need to be a part... You can't work for Splunk, you have to be a partner or a customer, and you need to give to the community in some way. So, you need to give back to the community. You participate on Answers, which is the online, kind of, self-support forum. You need to speak in the community, maybe run a user group, a lot of us do run the user groups. I run the user group in Arizona. And, you need to be respected amongst the community and, people go, you know, "I want to go to them, "they'll help me or at least get me to the right person." >> Is it predominantly or exclusively technical practitioners, or not necessarily? >> This year, they divided us in to, kind of, organizational units, so there's architects, and practitioner, and developer. So, we're all technical, but, this year we're going to have the ability to focus a little more on a specific area. You know, "What do you do for a living, "what do you do with Splunk? "Do you architect with Splunk internally, "do you just provide Splunk practice? "Are you a Splunk developer that makes apps? "How do you use Splunk on a daily basis?" And, again, there are partners as well. So, Aplura and Defense Point, I think, are both tied with four members a piece. So that's one of those things that, you know, they're going out to individual customers and helping them everyday. >> So, it's really taking this notion of a customer advisory board to a whole another level. I mean, it's not a passive, you know, group of people that, maybe, meets once a year. >> Right. >> It's an ongoing, active, organic institution essentially. >> Absolutely, we have quarterly meetings online and at those meetings a different Splunk, sometimes executives, sometimes product managers or engineering managers, you know, come and speak to us. And it can be anything from, "Hey, we're developing this "internal product and are we interested, you know, "is that useful to you?" Or, "What enhancements do you feel the product need?" Or, you know, "This is a new feature we're working on "to look and feel." I was consulted about the conf logo. "Hey, Chris, you're an average customer, "which of these four logos do you think really, you know, "kind of helps set the mood?" And, you know, did they take my advice? Does it really matter, no, but they were willing to just... I'm not associated, I'm not in the bowels of the company. >> So this isn't your logo over here? >> That is actually the one that I chose. >> Oh, excellent, I would assume so, right. >> Who organizes the quarterly meetings? >> So, the quarterly meetings are organized by Splunk in the community. There's a community group that's underneath Brian Goldfarb, who's the Chief Marketing Officer. So, he organizes the quarterly meetings. He gets to herd all the cats, because we're all across the world. You know, you have to figure out a time zone, you have to figure out where, you have to figure out when. But, most of the time, there's some suggestions. "Hey, you know, the engineering manager "for section x would like to speak." But, sometimes it's like, "Yeah, we would like to talk "to the person in charge of Search Head Clustering," for example. "We see some pain points in the community," or something like that, so, it's wide-ranging. But, you know, we're not just a group to rubber stamp anything that Splunk does, but we're also not a group to just sit there and complain about things we don't like. It's really very much a give and take. Splunk is generous and open enough to give us that access, and we take that very seriously. To be able to help guide Splunk in making their product the best it can be. It's an amazing product, I'm an evangelist, have been since I started using it. But, also, to help the customers. If the customers are having a pain point, we're probably going to hear about that first. >> Dave: When did you start using? >> I've been using Splunk for about five years. And when I started using Splunk at ASU, it had been a 50GB license and they'd just bought another 100GB, and it needed re-working, it needed architecting. So, when I came in, our chief information security officer and our VP for operations are the ones who directed me. And I said, "What do you want to grow for?" And they said, "Architect it for a terabyte, "assume it's going to take us several years to get there." So, I rebuilt the current environment and we architected it for a terabyte and here we are, four-and-a-half, five years later, we're at a terabyte. And, we're still growing and we're looking at Cloud, you know, we're looking at other use-cases. I think the biggest ship for us is that, we talked about this briefly last year, is that I work for John Rome, who's the Deputy CIO for Arizona State, and he's in charge of business intelligence and analytics. So, it is an enterprise application for data at ASU. It is not part of the security office, it's not part of operations, it's not part of depth. Those are all customers. And, so, internally those are customers and I think that's an amazing opportunity to say that, "Those are customers of mine." So, I'm not beholden to, you know, building the system so it's only useful for security, or building it so it's only useful for operations. They're my customers, and we avoid any appearance of, "Oh, I don't want to put my data in a security product. "I don't want to put my data in an operations product." Nobody questions putting their data in the data warehouse, that's the appropriate place for the data to go. So, that's the beauty of the system that we've developed, is they're both customers of mine. >> All right, so let's talk about your work at Arizona State, little bit. I don't know the size now, I'm trying to think of it, a huge... >> Chris: We're the largest single university in the United States. >> Probably what, 60,000-70,000? >> Total enrollment 104-110,000. A lot of that's online, I think we have about 78,000 or more at the main campus. But, we're the single largest university in the U.S. There are groups like the University of California that's larger overall, but not single institution. >> So, you know... >> Massive. >> Big project, yeah. Where are you now, then? What have you been using Splunk for that maybe you weren't last year when you and I had a chance to visit? >> Yeah, so, we started using it as a security product. It was brought in to make security more agile in getting that information from the operations and the networking groups, firewalls was the first thing we were brought in for. Now, we're starting to look at other use-cases, we're starting to look at edge cases. "Are we using it for academic integrity?" So, the very beginning so that we're looking at, "If a student is taking a test, are they the person "taking the test?" We're looking at it to make sure the students' accounts are safe and not compromised. We're looking at rolling out multi-factor to the university and being able to protect that. And, we're taking a lot of those functions and pushing them down to our help desk, so the help desk has all of the tools they need to be able to support the student and take care of their issue on the first call. That's really important, we have an amazing help desk organization, amazing care organization. And that's the goal is, it doesn't matter how long the call takes, you do that on the first call. And Splunk is a key portion of that to be able to provide them with the right information. And they don't have to go and try to get somebody from network engineering just to solve the student problem, they can see what the problem is from the beginning. >> Academic integrity, explain that. >> Yeah, so, you know, I don't think that there's any student who doesn't want to do their own work and do the best possible thing they can. But, sometimes, students get in a position where they need some help and, maybe, that isn't always exactly what they should do. So, you need to make sure that the student is taking the test that they're signed up for, that they didn't have any assistance, especially in online classes. We need to keep our degree important and valid, and, obviously, none of our students want to, but occasionally you find somebody who hasn't done exactly what they're supposed to. And we need to be able to validate that. So, we need to be able to validate that someone did what they said they did or did the work that they said they did. It's just like, nobody wants to plagiarize, but, occasionally it does happen and we need to protect ourselves and protect the students. >> And you can do that with data? >> We can absolutely do. >> You can ensure that integrity, how? Explain that a little bit. >> A little bit, yeah. So, we look at where the student logs in from. If the login routinely from Tempe, Arizona and then, suddenly there's a login from someplace else. Oftentimes, that has nothing to do with academic integrity, that has to do with there is an account compromise. We need to protect the students' personal information, both HIPAA and FIRPA. We need to protect their privacy information, just generally available PII. So we look at when they logged in, where they logged in, how they logged in. Did the how-to factor worked? I think academic integrity is really a much smaller portion of that, I think the more thing is we need to protect those students. So, we look at how they logged in, when they logged in, what type of machine they logged in from. I mean, if you're using a Surface and you've been using a Surface to login for months and then, all of a sudden, you login from an iPhone, you might have gotten a new iPhone, but, you know, you might not have. So, we put all those pieces of information, all those launch together to build a case that, "Do we need to reset this user's password for safety?" >> But I think academic integrity's important from the brand as well, because the consumers of your students, the employers out there, they may be leery of online courses. So, to the extent that you can say, "Hey, we've got this covered, we actually can ensure "that academic integrity through data." That enhances the value of the degree and the ASU brand, right? >> Absolutely, we don't think that any student wants to do anything that they're not supposed to. It does happen, you know. >> But even if it's one, right, or even if it's the perception of the employer that it can happen? >> John: The possibility. >> Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, is that we need to protect that brand and we need to protect the students. I think protecting students is the number one thing, protecting employees is the number one thing. Everything else falls from that. >> Okay, what about other student behaviors? I mean, you're sort of trafficking around campus, maybe, food consumption, dorm living, I mean, all these kinds of things that with sensors or, what have you, you could extract reams of data? >> We're doing a lot of that. We're partnering with Amazon to look at the Amazon Echo and using them in dorms to provide them voice interface. "Echo, where is my next class?" Or, "What time does the Memorial Union open?" Or, "How late can I get a pizza," and that type of thing. We want to build an environment that's not only fun for the students, but very powerful, and uses the latest technology. >> Pricing, I want to talk pricing, all right? I dig for the one little wart in Splunk and it's hard to find. But, I've heard some chirping about pricing because pricing is a function of the volume of data. The data curve is growing, it's reshaping. What are your thoughts? What do you tell Splunk about pricing? >> So, a lot of people say, "Man, Splunk is expensive." And, I don't think Splunk is expensive. Once you've achieved a volume, it's got a good pricing structure. I think that anything that Splunk tries to do to change the pricing model is a bad direction. >> Dave: So you like it the way it is? >> I like it the way it is. I believe that we've made an investment in a perpetual-licensed product and I certainly don't think that what we're spending on it, for a maintenance year is a bad thing. And i think that we get a good value for the product. And we're going to continue to use it for years to come. >> I've always felt, like, "Your price is too high," has never been a deal-breaker for software companies. They've generally navigated through that criticism. And it's been, you know, ultimately an indicator of success more than anything else. But, your point is if the values there, you pay for it. Are you able to find ways to save money using Splunk that essentially pay for that premium? >> Absolutely, so one of the very first things we did with Splunk, is we looked at our employee direct deposit, we talked about this briefly last year. We looked at employee direct deposit and we were being targeted by a Malaysian hacking group who was using phishing emails to phish credentials from us. You know, you send an email that looks very much like a university login and says, "You need to login "and change your password or you're not going to be able "to work in an hour." A lot of employees, especially employees in areas that aren't high tech, you know, in the psychology department, they may fill-in that information and then the hackers login and change their direct deposit. And then the university ends up paying the employee again and eating those costs. Our original use-case was on-the-fly, we saved $30,000 in a single payroll run. Pretty easy to pay for Splunk when you do that. And so, that was our very original use-case. And that came from just looking at the data. "Is this useful, where are these people logging in from?" There's a change, you know, and I think that that's very important. The thing I love about Splunk is, because it's schema on demand, because there's no hard schema, and that it's use-case on demand. Is that, every single good use-case in the very beginning was standing around the water cooler, having a drink and saying, "I wonder if combine data set A, "we combine data set B, we come up with something that "nobody was asking about." And now when we something that we can help fix, we can help grow, we can make more efficient. To the question of how you deal with all that data is, you tune, you decide what data is important, you decide what data is unimportant, you clean up the logs that you don't care about. And we spent a year, we didn't buy Splunk for one year, we didn't buy a new license, or didn't buy an expansion license, because we took a year to compact and say, "Okay, all the data we're getting "from this firewall, is that all necessary, "is there anything redundant?" "Does it have redundant dates, does it have redundant "time stamps, et cetera." >> Right. >> And I pulled that information out and that just gave us a little bit of breathing room, and then we're going to turn around and take another chunk. >> Help. >> No schema on right sounds icky but it's profound. >> You mentioned the word, help, again, big word, key word. Chris Kurtz, one of the most helpful guys in the community of the Splunk. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for being with us, Chris Kurtz. Back with more, Dave and I are going to take a short break, about a half-hour, we'll continue our coverage here live at .conf2017. (upbeat music)

(lively synth music) >> Announcer: Live, from Santa Clara, California, it's The Cube, covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are at Open Networking Summit, joined here in this segment by Scott Raynovich, my guest host for the next couple days, great to see you again Scott. >> Good to see you. >> And real excited to have a long-time Cube alumni, a many-time Cube alumni always up to some interesting and innovative thing. (Scott laughs) Sam Greenblat, he's now amongst other things the CTO of Nano Global, nano like very very small. Sam, great to see ya. >> Great to see you too Jim. >> So you said before we went offline, you thought you would retire, but there's just too many exciting things going on, and it drug you back into this crazy tech world. >> Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in. (all laugh) >> All right, so what is Nano Global, for people that aren't familiar with the company? >> Nano Global is a Amosil-Q, which is the compound, which is a nano compound that basically kills viruses, pathogens, funguses, and it does it by attaching itself at the nano level to these microbiol, microlife, and it implodes it, and technically that term is called lysis. >> (Jeff) That sounds very scary. >> It's very scary, because we try to sell it as a hand processing. >> You just told me it kills everything, I don't know if I want to put that on my hands, Sam. (all laugh) >> No it's good, that it kills some of the good bacteria, but it basically protects you for 24 hours. You don't have to reapply it, you can wash your hands. >> (Scott) It's like you become Superman or something. >> Absolutely, I literally use it to wash off the trays on the planes, and the armrests, while the guy next to me is sneezing like crazy, to try to kill any airborne pathogens. >> So what about the nanotechnology's got you traveling up to Santa Clara today for? >> Well, what I'm doing is, one of the things we're working on, besides that, is we're working on genomics, and I worked with some other companies on genomics besides Nano, and genomics has me totally fascinated. When I was at Dell, I went to ASU, and for the first time, I saw, pediatric genomics being processed quickly, and that was in a day. Today, a day is unheard of, it's terrible, you want to do it in less than an hour, and I was fascinated by how many people can be affected by the use of genomic medicine, and genomic pharmacology. And you see some of the ads on TV like Teva, that's genomic medicine, added tax, a genomic irregularity in your DNA, so it's amazing. And the other thing I'm very interested in is eradicating in my lifetime, which I don't know if it's going to happen, cancer, and how you do that is very simple. They found that chemotherapy is interesting, but not fascinating, it doesn't always work, but what they're finding is if they can find enough biometric information from genomes, from your proteomics, from your RNA, they can literally customize, it's called precision medicine, a specific medicine track for you, to actually fight the cancer successfully. >> I can't wait for the day, and hopefully it will be in your lifetime, when they look back at today's cancer treatments, and said "now what did you do again? (Sam laughs) You gave them as much poison as they could take, right up to the time they almost die, and hopefully the cancer dies first?" >> I'll take the - >> It's like bloodletting, it will not be that long from now that we look back at this time and say that was just archaic, which is good. >> It's called reactive medicine. It's funny, there's a story, that the guy who actually did the sequencing of the DNA, the original DNA strand tells, that when he was younger, he basically were able to see his chromosomes, and then he was able to get down to the DNA and to the proteins, and he could see that he had an irregularity that was known for basically cancer. And he went to the doctor, and he said "I think I have cancer of the pancreas." And the guy said "your blood tests don't show it." and by the way you don't get that blood test until you're over 40 years old, PS-1, the PS scan. And what happened was they actually found out that he had cancer of the pancreas, so... >> Yeah, it's predictive isn't it? So basically what you're doing is you're data mining the human and the human genome, and trying to do some sort of - >> We're not doing the 23andme, which tells you you have a propensity to be fat. >> Right, right, but walk us through what you're doing. You're obviously, you're here at an IT cloud conference so you're obviously using cloud technology to help accelerate the discovery of medicine, so walk us through how you're doing that. >> What happens is, when you get the swab, or the blood, and your DNA is then processed, it comes in and it gets cut to how many literal samples that they need. 23andme uses the 30x, that's 30 pieces. That's 80, by the way, gigabytes of data. If you were to take a 50x, is what you need for cancer, which is probably low, but it's, that takes you up to 150 gigabytes per person. Now think about the fact, you got to capture that, then you got to capture the RNA of the person, you got to capture his biometrics, and you got to capture his electronic medical record, and all the radiology that's done. And you got to bring it together, look at it, and determine what they should do. And the problem is the oncologic doctors today are scared to death of this, because they know how, if you have this, I'm going to take you in and basically do some radiation. I'm going to do chemotherapy on you and run the course. What's happening is, when you do all of this, you got to correlate all this data, it's probably the world's largest big data outside of Youtube. It's number two in number of bytes, and we haven't sequenced everybody on the planet. Everybody should get sequenced, it should be stored, and then when you get, that's called a germline you're healthy, then you take the cancer and you look at the germline and compare it, and then you're able to see what the difference is. Now open source has great technology to deal with this flood of data. LinkedIn, as you know open source, cacafa and one of the things that's great about that is it's a pull model, it's a producer, broker, subscriber model, and you can open up multiple channels, and by opening up multiple channels, since the subscribers are doing the pull instead of trying to send it all and overflow it, and we all know what it's like to overflow a pipe. It goes everywhere. But doing it through a cacafa model or a NiFi model, which is, by the way, donated by the NSA. We're not going to unmask who donated it but, (laughs) no, I'm only kidding, but the NSA donated it, and data flows now become absolutely critical, because as you get these segments of DNA, you got to send it all down, then what you got to do is do, and you're going to love this, a hidden Markovian chain, and put it all back together, so you can match the pattern, and then once you match the pattern, then you got to do quality control to see whether or not you screwed it up. And then, beyond that, you then have to do something called Smith-Waterman, which is a QC time, and then you can give it to somebody to figure out where the variant is. The whole key is all three of us share 99.9% of the same DNA. That one percent, tenth of a percent, is what is a variant. The variant is what causes all the diseases. We're all born with cancer. You have cancer in you, I have it, Jeff has it, and the only difference between a healthy person and a sick person is your killer cell went to sleep and doesn't attack the cancer. The only way to attack cancer is not chemotherapy, and I know every oncologic person who sees this is going to have a heart attack, it's basically let your immune system fight it. So what this tech does is it moves all that massive data into the variant. Once you get the variant, then you got to look at the RNA and see if there's variance there. Then you got to look at the radiology, the germline, and the biometric data, and once you get that, you can make a decision. I'll give you the guy who's my hero in this is the guy named Dr. Soon. He's the guy who came up with Abroxane. Abroxane is for pancreatic -- >> Jeff: Who is he with now? >> NantHealth. (both laugh) And why I, he discovered, he knew all about medicine, but he didn't know anything about technology. So then this becomes probably the best machine learning issue that you can have, because you have all this data, you're going to learn what it works on patients. And you're going to get all the records back, so what I'm going to talk about, because they wanted to talk about using SDM, using NFA, opening up hundreds of channels from source to, from provider to the subscriber, or consumer, as they call it, with the broker in the middle. And moving that data, then getting it over there, and doing the processing fast enough that it can be done while the patient still hasn't had any other problems. So I have great charts of what the genome looks like. I sent it to you. >> So it's clear these two fields are going to continue to merge, and the bioinformatics, and IT cloud. >> Sam: They're merging, as fast as possible. >> And we just plug our brain and our bodies into the health cloud, and it tells us what's up. >> Exactly, if Ginni was here, Ginni Rometty from IBM, she would tell you that quantum, she'd just announce it first commercially, an available quantum computer. Her first use for it is genomics, because genomics is a very repetitive process that is done in parallel. Remember you just cut this thing into 50 pieces, you put it back together, and now you're looking to see what's hidden, and it doesn't look like it's normal. If you looked at my genetics, one of the things you'll notice, that I will not consume a lot of caffeine. And how they know that is because there's a set of chromosomes, and my 23 chromosomes, that basically says I won't consume it. Turns out to be totally wrong, because of my behavior over the day. (all laugh) But what the Linux Foundation was interesting is everybody here wants to talk about, are we going to use this technology or that technology. What they want is an application, using the technology, and NantHealth that I talked about, can transport a terabyte of data virtually. In other words, it's not really doing it, but it's doing it through multiple sources and multiple consumers, and that's what people are fascinated by. >> All right, well like I said, Sammy gets into the wild and wooly ways and exciting new things. (Sam laughs) So sounds great, and a very bright future on the health care side. Thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. I hope I didn't bore you with... (Jeff and Sam laugh) >> No, no, no, we don't want more chemotherapy, so that's definitely better to have less chemotherapy and more genetic fixing of sickness. So Sam, nice to see you again, thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> Scott Raynovich, Jeff Frick, you're watching The Cube, from Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, we'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (synth music) >> Announcer: Robert Hershevech.