>>The cube is back at Vemo 2022. I was happy to be live. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson and Dave Russell three Daves. Dave is the vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Great to see you again, my friend. Thanks for coming >>On. Uh, it's always a pleasure. And Dave, I can remember your name. I can't remember >>Your name as well. <laugh> so wow. How many years has it been now? I mean, add on COVID is four years now. >>Yeah, well, three, three solid three. Yeah, Fallon blue. Uh, last year, Miami little secret. We're gonna go there again next year. >>Okay, so you joined Veeam >>Three. Oh, me four. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Four is four, right? Okay. Wow. >>Um, time flies, man. >>Interesting. What your background, former analyst analyze your time at Veeam and the market and the changes in the customer base. What, what have you seen? What are the big takeaways? Learnings? >>Yeah. You know, what's amazing to me is we've done a lot more research now, ourselves, right? So things that we intuitively thought, things that we experienced by talking to customers, and of course our partners, we can now actually prove. So what I love is that we take the exact same product and we go down market up market. We go across geographies, we go different verticals and we can sell that same exact product to all constituencies because the differences between them are not that great. If it was the three Dave company or the 3m company, what you're looking for is reliable recovery, ease of use those things just transcend. And I think there used to be a time when we thought enterprise means something very different than mid-market than does SMB. And certainly your go to market plans are that way, but not the product plans. >>So the ransomware study, we had Jay buff on earlier, we were talking about it and we just barely scratched the surface. But how were you able to get people to converse with you in such detail? Was it, are you using phone surveys? Are you, are, are you doing web surveys? Are you doing a combination? Deep >>Dives? Yeah. So it was web based and it was anonymous on both ends, meaning no one knew VE was asking the questions. And also we made the promise that none of your data is ever gonna get out, not even to say a large petroleum company, right. Everything is completely anonymized. And we were able to screen people out very effectively, a lot of screener questions to make sure we're dealing with the right person. And then we do some data integrity checking on the back end. But it's amazing if you give people an opportunity, they're actually very willing to tell you about their experience as long as there's no sort of ramification about putting the company or themselves at risk. >>So when I was at IDC, we did a lot of surveys, tons of surveys. I'm sure you did a lot of surveys at Gartner. And we would look at vendor surveys like, eh, well, this kind of the questions are rigged or it's really self-serving. I don't sense that in your surveys, you you've, you've always, you've still got that independent analyst gene. Is that, I mean, it's gotta be, is it by design? Is it just happen that ransomware is a topic that just sort of lends itself to that. Maybe you could talk about your philosophy there. >>Yeah. Well, two part answer really, because it's definitely by design. We, we really want the information. I mean, we're using this to fuel or inform our understanding of the market, what we should build next, what we should message next. So we really want the right data. So we gotta ask the right questions. So Jason, our colleague, Julie, myself, we work really hard on trying to make sure we're not leading the witness down a certain path. We're not trying to prove our own thesis. We're trying to understand what the market really is thinking. And when it comes to ransomware, we wanna know what we don't know, meaning we found a few surprises along the way. A lot of it was confirmational, but that's okay too. As long as you can back that up, cuz then it's not just Avenger's opinion. Of course, a vendor that says that they can help you do something has data that says, they think you uni have a problem with this, but now we can actually point to it and have a more interesting kind of partnership conversation about if you are like 1000 other enterprises globally, this may be what you're seeing. >>And there are no wrong answers there. Meaning even if they say that is absolutely not what we're seeing. Great. Let's have that conversation that's specific to you. But if you're not sure where to start, we've got a whole pool of data to help guide that conversation. >>Yeah. Shout out to Julie Webb does a great job. She's a real pro and yes. And, and really makes sure that, like you say, you want the real, real answers. So what were some of the things that you were excited about or to learn about? Um, in the survey again, we, we touched just barely touched on it in 15 minutes with Jason, but what, what's your take? Well, >>Two that I'd love to point out. I mean, unfortunately Jason probably mentioned this one, you know, only 19% answered when we said, did you pay the ransom? And only 19% said, no, I didn't pay the ransom. And I was a hundred percent successful in my recovery. You know, we're in Vegas, one out of five odds. That's not good. Right? That's a go out of business spot. That's not the kind of 80 20 you want to hear. That's not exactly exactly. Now more concerning to me is 5% said no ransom was asked for. And you know, my phrase on that is that's, that's an arson event. It's not an extortion event. Right. I just came to do harm. That's really troubling. Now there's a huge percentage there that said we paid the ransom about 24% said we paid the ransom and we still couldn't restore the data. So if you add up that 24 in that five, that 29%, that was really scary to me. >>Yeah. So you had the 19%. Okay. That's scary enough. But then you had the wrecking ball, right? Ah, we're just gonna, it's like the mayhem commercial. Yes. Yeah. See ya. Right. Okay. So <laugh>, that's, that's wild. So we've heard a lot about, um, ransomware. The thing that interests me is, and we've had a big dose of ransomware as analysts in these last, you know, 12, 18 months and more. But, but, but it's really escalated. Yeah. Seems like, and by the way, you're sharing this data, which is amazing. Right. So I actually want to dig in and steal some of the, the data. I think that's cool. Right? Definitely. You gave us a URL this morning. Um, so, but you, your philosophy is to share the data. So everybody sees it, your customers, your prospects, your competitors, but your philosophy is to why, why are you sharing that data? Why don't you just keep it to yourself and do it quietly with customers? >>Yeah. You know, I think this is such a significant event. No one vendor's gonna solve it all. Realistically, we may be tied for number one in market share statistically speaking, but we have 12.5%. Right. So we're not gonna be able to do greater good if we're keeping that to ourselves. And it's really a notion of this awareness level, just having the conversation and having that more open, even if it's not us, I think is gonna be beneficial. It speaks to the value of backup and why backup is still relevant this day and age. >>I dunno if you're comfortable answering this, but I'll ask anyway, when you were a Gartner analyst, did you get asked about ransomware a lot? >>No. >>Very rarely or never. >>Almost never. Yeah. And that was four years ago. Literally. Like it >>Was a thing back then, right? I mean it wasn't of course prominent, but it was, it was, I guess it wasn't that >>20 16, 20 17, you know, it's, it's interesting because at a couple of levels you have the, um, the willingness of participants to share their stories, which is a classic example of people coming together to fight a common fo. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the best of times, that's what happens. And now you're sharing that information out. One of the reasons why some would argue we've gotten to this place is because day zero exploits have been stockpiled and they haven't been shared. So you go to, you know, you go, you go through the lineage that gets you to not pet cat as an example. Yes. And where did it come from? Hey, it was something that we knew about. Uh, but we didn't share it. Right. We waited until it happened because maybe we thought we could use it in, in some way. It's, it's an, it's an interesting philosophical question. I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, if that's, uh, the third, it's the one, the third rail you don't want to touch, but basically we're, we are, I guess we're just left to sort through whatever, whatever we have to sort through in that regard. But it is interesting left to industry's own devices. It's sharing an openness. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I almost think it's like open source code. Right? I mean, the promise there is together, we can all do something better. And I think that's true with this ransomware research and the rest of the research we do too. We we've freely put it out there. I mean, you can download the link, no problem. Right. And go see the report. We're fine with that. You know, we think it actually is very beneficial. I remember a long time ago, it was actually Sam Adams that said, uh, you know, Hey, there's a lot of craft brewers out there now, you know, is, are you as a craft brewery now? Successful? Are you worried about that? No. We want every craft brewery to be successful because it creates a better awareness. Well, an availability market, it's still Boston reference. >>What did another Boston reference? Yes. Thank you, >>Boston. And what <laugh>. >>Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I feel like we've seen these milestone, you know, watershed events in, in security. I mean, stucks net sort of yeah. Informed us what's possible with nation states, even though it's highly likely that us and Israel were, were behind that, uh, the, the solar winds hack people are still worried about. Yes. Okay. What's next. Even, even something now. And so everybody's now on high alert even, I don't know how close you guys followed it, but the, the, uh, the Okta, uh, uh, breach, which was a fairly benign incident. And technically it was, was very, very limited and very narrow in scope. But CISOs that I talked to were like, we are really paranoid that there's another shoe to drop. What do we do? So the, the awareness is way, way off the charts. It begs the question. What's next. Can you, can you envision, can you stay ahead? It's so hard to stay ahead of the bad guys, but, but how are you thinking about that? What this isn't the end of it from your standpoint? >>No, it's not. And unfortunately it's because there's money to be made, right? And the barrier to entry is relatively low. It's like hiring a Hitman. You know, you don't actually have to even carry out the bad act yourself and get your own hands dirty. And so it's not gonna end, but it it's really security is everyone's responsibility. Veeam is not really a full time security company, but we play a role in that whole ecosystem. And even if you're not in the data center as an employee of a company, you have a role to play in security. You know, don't click that link, lock the door behind you, that type of thing. So how do you stay ahead of it? I think you just continually keep putting a focus on it. It's like performance. You're never gonna be done. There's always something to tune and to work on, but that can be overwhelming. So the positive I try to tell someone is to your point, Dave, look, a lot of these vulnerabilities were known for quite some time. If you were just current on your patch levels, this could have been prevented, right? You could have closed that window. So the thing that I often say is if you can't do everything and probably none of us can do something and then repeat, do it again, try to get a little bit better every period of time. Whether that's every day, every quarter, what case may be, do what you can. >>Yeah. So ransomware obviously very lucrative. So your job is to increase the denominator. So the ROI is lower, right? And that's a, that's a constant game, right? >>Absolutely. It is a crime of opportunity. It's indiscriminate. And oftentimes non-targeted now there are state sponsored events to your point, but largely it's like the fishermen casting the net out into the ocean. No idea with certainty, what's gonna come back. So I'm just gonna keep trying and trying and trying our goal is to basically you wanna be the house on the neighborhood that looks the least inviting. >>We've talked about this. I mean, any, anyone can be a, a, a ransomware as to go in the dark web, ransomware's a service. Oh, I gotta, I can put a stick into a server and a way I go and I get some Bitcoin right. For it. So, so that's, so, so organizations really have to take this seriously. I think they are. Um, well you tell me, I mean, in your discussions with, with, with customers, >>It's changed. Yeah. You know, I would say 18 months ago, there was a subset of customers out there saying vendors, crying Wolf, you know, you're trying to scare us into making a purchase decision or move off of something that we're working with. Now. I think that's almost inverted. Now what we see is people are saying, look, my boss or my boss's boss's boss, and the security team are knocking on my door asking, what are we gonna do? What's our response? You know, how prepared are we? What kind of things do we have in place? What does our backup practice do to support ransomware? The good news though, going back to the awareness side is I feel like we're evangelizing this a little less as an industry. Meaning the security team is well aware of the role that proper backup and availability can play. That was not true. A handful of years ago. >>Well, that's the other thing too, is that your study showed the closer the practitioner was to the problem. Yes. The more problems there were, that's an awareness thing. Yes. That's not a, that's not, oh, just those guys had visibility. I wanna ask you cuz you've You understand from an application view, right. There's only so much Veeam can do. Um, and then the customer has to have processes in place that go beyond just the, the backup and recovery technology. So, so from an application perspective, what are you advising customers where you leave off and they really have to take over this notion of shared responsibility is really extending beyond cloud security. >>Yeah. Uh, the model that I like is interestingly enough, what we see with Caston in the Kubernetes space. Mm-hmm <affirmative> is there, we're selling into two different constituencies, potentially. It's the infrastructure team that they're worried about disaster recovery. They're worried about backup, but it's the app dev DevOps team. Hey, we're worried about creating the application. So we're spending a lot of focus with the casting group to say, great, go after that shift, left crowd, talk to them about a data availability, disaster recovery, by the way you get data movement or migration for free with that. So migration, maybe what you're first interested in on day one. But by doing that, by having this kind of capability, you're actually protecting yourself from day two issues as well. >>Yeah. So Let's see. Um, what haven't we hit on in this study? There was so much data in there. Uh, is that URL, is that some, a private thing that you guys shared >>Or is it no. Absolutely. >>Can, can you share the >>URL? Yeah, absolutely. It's V E E so V two E period am so V with the period between the E and the a forward slash RW 22. So ransomware 22 is the research project. >>So go there, you download the zip file, you get all the graphics. Um, I I'm gonna dig into it, uh, maybe as early as this, this Friday or this weekend, like to sort of expose that, uh it's you guys obviously want this, I think you're right. It's it's it's awareness needs to go up to solve this problem. You know, I don't know if it's ever solvable, but the only approach is to collaborate. Right. So I, I dunno if you're gonna collaborate with your head-to-head competitors, but you're certainly happy to share the data I've seen Dave, some competitors have pivoted from data protection or even data management to security. Yes. I see. I wonder if I could run a premise by, I see that as an adjacency to your business, but not sort of throwing you into the security bucket. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah. You know, certainly respect everything other competitors are doing, you know, and some are getting very, you know, making some good noise and getting picked up on that. However, we're unapologetically a backup company. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we're a backup company. First. We're worried about security. We're worried about, you know, data reuse and supporting shift, left types of things, but we're not gonna apologize for being in the backup availability business, not, not at all. However, there's a role that we can play. Having said that that we're a role. We're a component. If you're in the secondary storage market, like backup or archiving. And you're trying to imply that you're going to help prevent or even head off issues on the primary storage side. That might be a little bit of a stretch. Now, hopefully that can happen that we can go get better as an industry on that. >>But fundamentally we're about ensuring that you're recoverable with reliability and speed when you need it. Whether we're no matter what the issue is, because we like to say ransomware is a disaster. Unfortunately there's other kind of disasters that happen as well. Power failures still happen. Natural issues still occur, et cetera. So all these things have to be accounted for. You know, one of our survey, um, data points basically said all the things that take down a server that you didn't plan on. It's basically humans at the top human error, someone accidentally deleted something and then malicious humans, someone actually came after you, but there's a dozen other things that happened too. So you've gotta prepare for all of that. So I guess what I would end up with saying is you remember back in the centralized data centers, especially the mainframe days, people would say, we're worried about the smoking hole or the smoking crater event. Yeah. Yeah. The probability of a plane crashing into your data bunker was relatively low. That was when it got all the discussion though, what was happening every single day is somebody accidentally deleted a file. And so you need to account on both ends of the spectrum. So we don't wanna over rotate. And we also, we don't want to signal to 450,000 beam customers around the world that we're abandoning you that were not about backup. That's still our core >>Effort. No, it's pretty straightforward. You're just telling people to back up in a way that gives them a certain amount of mitigation yes. Or protection in the event that something happens. And no, I don't remember anything about mainframe. He does though though, much older than me >>EF SMS. So I even know what it stands for. Count key data don't even get me started. So, and, and it wasn't thank you for that answer. I didn't mean to sort of a set up question, but it was more of a strategy question and I wish wish I could put on your analyst hat because I, I feel, I'll just say it. I feel as though it's a move to try to get a tailwind. Maybe it's a valuation play. I don't know. But I, I, it resonated with me three years ago when everybody was talking data management and nobody knew what that meant. Data management. I'm like Oracle. >>Right. >>And now it's starting to become a little bit more clear. Um, but Danny Allen stuff and said, it's all about the backup. I think that was one of his keynote messages. So that really resonated with me cuz he said, yeah, it starts with backup and recovery. And that's what, what matters most to these customers. So really was a strategy question. Now maybe it does have valuation impact. Maybe there's a big market there that can be consolidated. You know, uh, we, this morning in the analyst session, we heard about your new CEO's objectives of, you know, grabbing more market share. So, and that's, that's an adjacency. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out far too many security vendors. As, as we know, the backup and recovery space is getting more crowded and that is maybe causing people to sort of shift. I don't know, whatever right. Or left, I guess, shift. Right. I'm not sure, but um, it's gonna be really interesting to watch because this has now become a really hot space after, you know, it's been some really interesting momentum in certain pockets, but now it's everywhere it's coming ubiquitous. So I'll give you the last word Dave on, uh, day one, VEON 20, 22. >>Yeah. Well boy, so many things I could say to kind of land the plane on, but we're just glad to be back in person. It's been three years since we've had a live event in those three years, we've gone from 300,000 customers to 450,000 customers. The release cadence, even in the pandemic has been the greatest in the company's history in 2020, 2021, there's only about three dozen software only companies that have hit a billion dollars and we're one of them. And that, you know, that mission is why hasn't changed and that's why we wanna stay consistent. One of the things Danny always likes to say is, you know, we keep telling the same story because we're not wanting to deviate off of that story and there's more work to be done. And to honors point, you know, Hey, if you have ambitious goals, you're gonna have to look at spreading your wings out a little bit wider, but we're never gonna abandon being a backup. Well, >>It's, it's clear to me, Dave on was not brought in to keep you steady at a billion. I think he's got a site set on five and then who knows what's next? Dave Russell, thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Great to >>See always a pleasure. Thank you. >>All right. That's a wrap for Dave one. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson will be backed tomorrow with a full day of coverage. Check out Silicon angle.com for all the news, uh, youtube.com/silicon angle. You can get these videos. They're all, you know, flying up Wiki bond.com for some of the research in this space. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the eight of us startup showcase open cloud innovations. This is season two episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from ABC ecosystems today. Uh, episode one, steam is the open source community and open cloud innovations. I'm Sean for your host got two great guests, Webb brown CEO of coop costs and as Thielen, head of business development, coop quest, gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube for the showcase 80, but startups. >>Thanks for having a Sean. Great to be back, uh, really excited for the discussion we have here. >>I keep alumni from many, many coupons go. You guys are in a hot area right now, monitoring and reducing the Kubernetes spend. Okay. So first of all, we know one thing for sure. Kubernetes is the hottest thing going on because of all the benefits. So take us through you guys. Macro view of this market. Kubernetes is growing, what's going on with the company. What is your company's role? >>Yeah, so we've definitely seen this growth firsthand with our customers in addition to the broader market. Um, you know, and I think we believe that that's really indicative of the value that Kubernetes provides, right? And a lot of that is just faster time to market more scalability, improved agility for developer teams and, you know, there's even more there, but it's a really exciting time for our company and also for the broader cloud native community. Um, so what that means for our company is, you know, we're, we're scaling up quickly to meet our users and support our users, every, you know, metric that our company's grown about four X over the last year, including our team. Um, and the reason that one's the most important is just because, you know, the, the more folks and the larger that our company is, the better that we can support our users and help them monitor and reduce those costs, which ultimately makes Kubernetes easier to use for customers and users out there on the market. >>Okay. So I want to get into why Kubernetes is costing so much. Obviously the growth is there, but before we get there, what is the background? What's the origination story? Where did coop costs come from? Obviously you guys have a great name costs. Qube you guys probably reduced costs and Kubernetes great name, but what's the origination story. How'd you guys get here? What HR you scratching? What problem are you solving? >>So yeah, John, you, you guessed it, uh, you know, oftentimes the, the name is a dead giveaway there where we're cost monitoring cost management solutions for Kubernetes and cloud native. Um, and backstory here is our founding team was at Google before starting the company. Um, we were working on infrastructure monitoring, um, both on internal infrastructure, as well as Google cloud. Um, we had a handful of our teammates join the Kubernetes effort, you know, early days. And, uh, we saw a lot of teams, you know, struggling with the problems we're solving. We were solving internally at Google and we're we're solving today. Um, and to speak to those problems a little bit, uh, you know, you, you, you touched on how just scale alone is making this come to the forefront, right. You know, there's now many billions of dollars being spent on CU, um, that is bringing this issue, uh, to make it a business critical questions that is being asked in lots of organizations. Um, you know, that combined with, you know, the dynamic nature and complexity of Kubernetes, um, makes it really hard to manage, um, you know, costs, uh, when you scale across a very large organization. Um, so teams turned to coop costs today, you know, thousands of them do, uh, to get monitoring in place, you know, including alerts, recurring reports and like dynamic management insights or automation. >>Yeah. I know we talked to CubeCon before Webb and I want to come back to the problem statement because when you have these emerging growth areas that are really relevant and enabling technologies, um, you move to the next point of failure. And so, so you scaling these abstraction layers. Now services are being turned on more and more keeping it as clusters are out there. So I have to ask you, what is the main cost driver problem that's happening in the cube space that you guys are addressing? Is it just sheer volume? Is it different classes of services? Is it like different things are kind of working together, different monitoring tools? Is it not a platform and take us through the, the problem area? What do you guys see this? >>Yeah, the number one problem area is still actually what, uh, the CNCF fin ops survey highlighted earlier this year, um, which is that approximately two thirds of companies still don't have kind of baseline to visibility into spend when they moved to Kubernetes. Um, so, you know, even if you had a really complex, you know, chargeback program in place, when you're building all your applications on BMS, you move to Kubernetes and most teams again, can't answer these really simple questions. Um, so we're able to give them that visibility in real time, so they can start breaking these problems down. Right. They can start to see that, okay, it's these, you know, the deployments are staple sets that are driving our costs or no, it's actually, you know, these workloads that are talking to, you know, S3 buckets and, you know, really driving, you know, egress costs. Um, so it's really about first and foremost, just getting the visibility, getting the eyes and ears. We're able to give that to teams in real time at the largest scale Kubernetes clusters in the world. Um, and again, most teams, when they first start working with us, don't have that visibility, not having that visibility can have a whole bunch of downstream impacts, um, including kind of not getting, you know, costs right. You know, performance, right. Et cetera. >>Well, let's get into that downstream benefit, uh, um, problems and or situations. But the first question I have just throw naysayer comment at you would be like, oh, wait, I have all this cost monitoring stuff already. What's different about Kubernetes. Why what's what's the problem I can are my other tool is going to work for me. How do you answer that one? >>Yeah. So, you know, I think first and foremost containers are very dynamic right there. They're often complex, often transient and consume variable cluster resources. And so as much as this enables teams to contract construct powerful solutions, um, the associated costs and actually tracking those, those different variables can be really difficult. And so that's why we see why a solution like food costs. That's purpose built for developers using Kubernetes is really necessary because some of those older, you know, traditional cloud cost optimization tools are just not as fit for, for this space specifically. >>Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Alex. And I would add to that just the way that software is being architected deployed and managed is fundamentally changing with Kubernetes, right? It is deeply impacting every part of scifi software delivery process. And through that, you know, decisions are getting made and, you know, engineers are ultimately being empowered, um, to make more, you know, costs impacting decisions. Um, and so we've seen, you know, organizations that get real time kind of built for Kubernetes are built for cloud native, um, benefit from that massively throughout their, their culture, um, you know, cost performance, et cetera. >>Uh, well, can you just give a quick example because I think that's a great point. The architectures are shifting, they're changing there's new things coming in, so it's not like you can use an old tool and just retrofit it. That's sometimes that's awkward. What specific things you see changing with Kubernetes that's that environments are leveraging that's good. >>Yeah. Yeah. Um, one would be all these Kubernetes primitives are concepts that didn't exist before. Right. So, um, you know, I'm not, you know, managing just a generic workload, I'm managing a staple set and, or, you know, three replica sets. Right. And so having a language that is very much tailored towards all of these Kubernetes concepts and abstractions, et cetera. Um, but then secondly, it was like, you know, we're seeing this very obvious, you know, push towards microservices where, you know, typically again, you're shipping faster, um, you know, teams are making more distributed or decentralized decisions, uh, where there's not one single point where you can kind of gate check everything. Um, and that's a great thing for innovation, right? We can move much faster. Um, but for some teams, um, you know, not using a tool like coop costs, that means sacrificing having a safety net in place, right. >>Or guard rails in place to really help manage and monitor this. And I would just say, lastly, you know, uh, a solution like coop costs because it's built for Kubernetes sits in your infrastructure, um, it can be deployed with a single helmet stall. You don't have to share any data remotely. Um, but because it's listening to your infrastructure, it can give you data in real time. Right. And so we're moving from this world where you can make real time automated decisions or manual decisions as opposed to waiting for a bill, you know, a day, two days or a week later, um, when it may be already too late, you know, to avoid, >>Or he got the extra costs and you know what, he wants that. And he got to fight for a refund. Oh yeah. I threw a switch or wasn't paying attention or human error or code because a lot of automation is going on. So I could see that as a benefit. I gotta, I gotta ask the question on, um, developer uptake, because develop, you mentioned a good point. There that's another key modern dynamic developers are in, in the moment making decisions on security, on policy, um, things to do in the CIC D pipeline. So if I'm a developer, how do I engage with Qube cost? Do I have to, can I just download something? Is it easy? How's the onboarding process for your customers? >>Yeah. Great, great question. Um, so, you know, first and foremost, I think this gets to the roots of our company and the roots of coop costs, which is, you know, born in open-source, everything we do is built on top of open source. Uh, so the answer is, you know, you can go out and install it in minutes. Like, you know, thousands of other teams have, um, it is, you know, the, the recommended route or preferred route on our side is, you know, a helm installed. Um, again, you don't have to share any data remotely. You can truly not lock down, you know, namespace eat grass, for example, on the coop cost namespace. Um, and yeah, and in minutes you'll have this visibility and can start to see, you know, really interesting metrics that, again, most teams, when we started working with them, either didn't have them in place at all, or they had a really rough estimate based on maybe even a coop cost Scruff on a dashboard that they installed. >>How does cube cost provide the visibility across the environment? How do you guys actually make it work? >>Yeah, so we, you know, sit in your infrastructure. Um, we have integrations with, um, for on-prem like custom pricing sheets, uh, with card providers will integrate with your actual billing data, um, so that we can, uh, listen for events in your infrastructure, say like a nude node coming up, or a new pod being scheduled, et cetera. Um, we take that information, join with your billing data, whether it's on-prem or in one of the big three cloud providers. And then again, we can, in real time tell you the cost of, you know, any dimension of your infrastructure, whether it's one of the backing, you know, virtual assets you're using, or one of the application dimensions like a label or annotation namespace, you know, pod container, you name it >>Awesome. Alex, what's your take on the landscape with, with the customers as they look the cost reductions. I mean, everyone loves cost reductions as a, certainly I love the safety net comment that Webb made, but at the end of the day, Kubernetes is not so much a cost driver. It's more of a, I want the modern apps faster. Right? So, so, so people who are buying Kubernetes usually aren't price sensitive, but they also don't want to get gouged either on mistakes. Where is the customer path here around Kubernetes cost management and reduction and a scale? >>Yeah. So I think one thing that we're looking forward to hearing this upcoming year, just like we did last year is continuing to work with the various tools that customers are already using and, you know, meeting those customers where they are. So some examples of that are, you know, working with like CICT tools out there. Like we have a great integration with armoring Spinnaker to help customers actually take the insights from coop costs and deploy those, um, in a more efficient manner. Um, we're also working with a lot of partners, like, you know, for fauna to help customers visualize our data and, you know, integrate with or rancher, which are management platforms for Kubernetes. And all of that I think is just to make cost come more to the forefront of the conversation when folks are using Kubernetes and provide that, that data to customers and all the various tools that they're using across the ecosystem. Um, so I think we really want to surface this and make costs more of a first-class citizen across, you know, the, the ecosystem and then the community partners. >>What's your strategy of the biz dev side. As you guys look at a growing ecosystem with CubeCon CNCF, you mentioned that earlier, um, the community is growing. It's always been growing fast. You know, the number of people entering in are amazing, but now that we start going, you know, the S curves kicking in, um, integration and interoperability and openness is always a key part of company success. What's Qube costs is vision on how you're going to do biz dev going forward. >>Absolutely. So, you know, our products opensource that is deeply important to our company, we're always going to continue to drive innovation on our open source product. Um, as Webb mentioned, you know, we have thousands of teams that are, that are using our product. And most of that is actually on the free, but something that we want to make sure continues to be available for the community and continue to bring that development for the community. And so I think a part of that is making sure that we're working with folks not just on the commercial side, but also those open source, um, types of products, right? So, you know, for Fanta is open source Spinnaker's are open source. I think a lot of the biz dev strategies just sticking to our roots and make sure that we continue to drive it a strong open source presence and product for, for our community of users, keep that >>And a, an open source and commercial and keep it stable. Well, I got to ask you, obviously, the wave is here. I always joke, uh, going back. I remember when the word Kubernetes was just kicked around pre uh, the OpenStack days many, many years ago. It's the luxury of being a old cube guy that I am 11 years doing the cube, um, all fun. But if we remember talking to him in the early days, is that with Kubernetes was, if, if it worked, the, the phrase was rising, tide floats all boats, I would say right now, the tides rising pretty well right now, you guys are in a good spot with the cube costs. Are there areas that you see coming where cost monitoring, um, is going to expand more? Where do you see the Kubernetes? Um, what's the aperture, if you will, of the, of the cost monitoring space at your end that you think you can address. >>Yeah, John, I think you're exactly right. This, uh, tide has risen and it just keeps riding rising, right? Like, um, you know, the, the sheer number of organizations we use C using Kubernetes at massive scale is just mind blowing at this point. Um, you know, what we see is this really natural pattern for teams to start using a solution like coop costs, uh, start with, again, either limited or no visibility, get that visibility in place, and then really develop an action plan from there. And that could again be, you know, different governance solutions like alerts or, you know, management reports or, you know, engineering team reports, et cetera. Um, but it's really about, you know, phase two of taking that information and really starting to do something with it. Right. Um, we, we are seeing and expect to see more teams turn to an increasing amount of, of automation to do that. Um, but ultimately that is, uh, very much after you get this baseline highly accurate, uh, visibility that you feel very comfortable making, potentially critical, very critical related to reliability, performance decisions within your infrastructure. >>Yeah. I think getting it right key, you mentioned baseline. Let me ask you a quick follow-up on that. How fast can companies get there when you say baseline, there's probably levels of baseline. Obviously all environments are different now. Not all one's the same, but what's just anecdotally you see, as that baseline, how fast we will get there, is there a certain minimum viable configuration or architecture? Just take us through your thoughts on that. >>Yeah. Great question. It definitely depends on organizational complexity and, you know, can depend on applicational application complexity as well. But I would say most importantly is, um, you know, the, the array of cost centers, departments, you know, complexity across the org as opposed to, you know, technological. Um, so I would say for, you know, less complex organizations, we've seen it happen in, you know, hours or, you know, a day less, et cetera. Um, because that's, you know, one or two or a smaller engineering games, they can share that visibility really quickly. And, um, you know, they may be familiar with Kubernetes and they just get it right away. Um, for larger organizations, we've seen it take kind of up 90 days where it's really about infusing this kind of into their DNA. When again, there may not have been a visibility or transparency here before. Um, again, I think the, the, the bulk of the time there is really about kind of the cultural element, um, and kind of awareness building, um, and just buy in throughout the organization. >>Awesome. Well, guys got a great product. Congratulations, final question for both of you, it's early days in Kubernetes, even though the tide is rising, keeps rising, more boats are coming in. Harbor is getting bigger, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's really going great. You guys are seeing customer adoption. We're seeing cloud native. I was told that my friends at dock or the container side is going crazy as well. Everything's going great in cloud native. What's the vision on the innovation? How do you guys continue to push the envelope on value in open source and in the commercial area? What's the vision? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's many areas here and I know Alex will have more to add here. Um, but you know, one area that I know is relevant to his world is just more, really interesting integrations, right? So he mentioned coop costs, insights, powering decisions, and say Spinnaker, right? I think more and more of this tool chain really coming together and really seeing the benefits of all this interoperability. Right. Um, so that I think combined with, uh, just more and more intelligence and automation being deployed again, that's only after the fact that teams are really comfortable with his decisions and the information and the decisions that are being made. Um, but I think that increasingly we see the community again, being ready to leverage this information and really powerful ways. Um, just because, you know, as teams scale, there's just a lot to manage. And so a team, you know, leveraging automation can, you know, supercharge them and in really impactful ways. >>Awesome, great integration integrations, Alex, expand on that. A whole different kind of set of business development integrations. When you have lots of tool chains, lots of platforms and tools kind of coming together, sharing data, working together, automating together. >>Well. Yeah, we, so I think it's going to be super important to keep a pulse on the new tools. Right. Make sure that we're on the forefront of what customers are using and just continuing to meet them where they are. And a lot of that honestly, is working with AWS too, right? Like they have great services and EKS and managed Prometheus's. Um, so we want to make sure that we continue to work with that team and support their services as that launched as well. >>Great stuff. I got a couple of minutes left. I felt I'll throw one more question in there since I got two great experts here. Um, just, you know, a little bit change of pace, more of an industry question. That's really no wrong answer, but I'd love to get your reaction to, um, the SAS conversation cloud has changed what used to be SAS. SAS was, oh yeah. Software as a service. Now that you have all these kinds of new kinds of you have automation, horizontally, scalable cloud and edge, you now have vertical machine learning. Data-driven insights. A lot of things in the stack are changing. So the question is what's the new SAS look like it's the same as the old SAS? Or is it a new kind of refactoring of what SAS is? What's your take on this? >>Yeah. Um, there's a web, please jump in here wherever. But in, in my view, um, it's a spectrum, right? There's there's customers that are on both ends of this. Some customers just want a fully hosted, fully managed product that wouldn't benefit from the luxury of not having to do any, any sort of infrastructure management or patching or anything like that. And they just want to consume a great product. Um, on the other hand, there's other customers that have more highly regulated industries or security requirements, and they're going to need things to deploy in their environment. Um, right now QP cost is, is self hosted. But I think in the future, we want to make sure that, you know, we, we have versions of our product available for customers across that entire spectrum. Um, so that, you know, if somebody wants the benefit of just not having to manage anything, they can use a fully self hosted sat or a fully multitenant managed SAS, or, you know, other customers can use a self hosted product. And then there's going to be customers that are in the middle, right, where there's certain components that are okay to be a SAS or hosted elsewhere. But then there's going to be components that are really important to keep in their own environment. So I think, uh, it's really across the board and it's going to depend on customer and customer, but it's important to make sure we have options for all of them. >>Great guys, we have SAS, same as the old SAS. What's the SAS playbook. Now >>I think it is such a deep and interesting question and one that, um, it's going to touch so many aspects of software and on our lives, I predict that we'll continue to see this, um, you know, tension or real trade-off across on the one hand convenience. And now on the other hand, security, privacy and control. Um, and I think, you know, like Alex mentioned, you know, different organizations are going to make different decisions here based on kind of their relative trade-offs. Um, I think it's going to be of epic proportions. I think, you know, we'll look back on this period and just say that, you know, this was one of the foundational questions of how to get this right. We ultimately view it as like, again, we want to offer choice, um, and make, uh, make every choice be great, but let our users, uh, pick the right one, given their profile on those, on those streets. >>I think, I think it's a great comment choice. And also you got now dimensions of implementations, right? Multitenant, custom regulated, secure. I want have all these controls. Um, it's great. No one, no one SaaS rules the world, so to speak. So it's again, great, great dynamic. But ultimately, if you want to leverage the data, is it horizontally addressable? MultiTech and again, this is a whole nother ball game we're watching this closely and you guys are in the middle of it with cube costs, as you guys are creating that baseline for customers. Uh, congratulations. Uh, great to see you where thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us again. Okay. Great. Conservation aiders startup showcase open cloud innovators here. Open source is driving a lot of value as it goes. Commercial, going to the next generation. This is season two episode, one of the AWS startup series with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is part of the AWS startup showcase season two. I'm very happy to have with me Webb brown CEO of Qube cost web. Welcome to the program. How are you? I'm doing >>Great. It's great to be here, Dave. Thank you so much for having me really excited for the discussion. >>Good to see you. I guess we saw each other last down in Los Angeles for, for coop con, >>Right? Exactly. Right. Still feeling the energy from that event. Hoping we can be back together in person. Not, not too long from now. >>Yeah. Well I'll second that, well, let, let's get straight to it. Tell us, tell us about Q cost. What do you guys do? And I think just central to that question is what gives you guys the right to exist? What problem are you solving? >>Yeah, I love the question. So first and foremost coupe costs, we provide cost monitoring and cost management solutions for teams running Kubernetes or cloud native workloads. Everything we do is, is built on open source. Our founding team was working on infrastructure monitoring solutions at Google before this. And, and what we saw was as we had several teammates join the Kubernetes effort very early days at Google, we saw teams really struggling even just to, to monitor and understand Kubernetes costs, right? There's lots of complexity with the Kubernetes scheduler and being able to answer the question of what is the cost of an application or what is the cost of, you know, a team department, et cetera. And the workloads that they're deploying was really hard for most teams. If you look at CNCF study from late last year, still today, about two thirds of teams, can't answer where they are spending money. And what we saw when digging in there is that when you can't answer that question, it's really hard to be efficient. And by be efficient, we, we mean get the right balance between cost and performance and reliability. So we help teams in, in these areas and more where, you know, now have thousands of teams using our product. You know, we feel where we're just getting started on our mission as well. >>So when people hear it, when people think of coop costs, they w they naturally associate that with Kubernetes. And they think, well, Kubernetes is open-source wait, isn't that free? So what, so what costs are you tracking? Exactly. >>Yeah. Great question. We would track costs in any environment where you can run Kubernetes. So if that's on-prem, you can bring a custom pricing sheet to monitor, say the cost of your underlying CPU course, you know, GPU's memory, et cetera. If you're running in a cloud environment, we have integrations with Azure, GCP and AWS, where we would be able to reflect all the complexity of, you know, whatever deployment you have, whether you're using a spot and multiple regions where you have complex enterprise discounts are eyes savings plans, you name it, we'd be reflecting it. So it's really about, you know, not just generic prices, it's about getting the right price for your organization. >>So the infrastructure that goes into this calculation can be on premises or off premises in the form of cloud. I heard that, right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So all of those environments, we'd give you a visibility into all the resources that your Kubernetes clusters are consuming. Again, that's, you know, nodes, load balancers, every resource that it's directly touching also have the ability for you to pull in external costs, right? So if you have Kubernetes tenants that are using S3 or cloud sequel, or, you know, another external cloud service, we would make that connection for you. And then lastly, if you have shared costs, sometimes even like the cost of a dev ops team, we'd give you the ability to kind of allocate that back to your core infrastructure, which may be used for showback or even charged back across your, your, >>So who are the folks in an organization that are tapping into this, are these, you know, our, our, our, our developers being encouraged to be cognizant of these costs throughout the process, or is this just sort of a CFO on down visibility tool? >>Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. And what we see is a major transformation here where, you know, kind of shift left from a cost perspective where more and more engineering teams are interested in just being aware or having transparency. So they can build a culture of accountability with costs, right, with the amazing ability to rapidly push to production and iterate, you know, with microservices and Kubernetes, it's hard to have this kind of, you know, just wait for say the finance team to review this at the end of the month or the end of the quarter. We see this increasingly be being viewed in real time by infrastructure teams, by engineering teams. Now finance is still a very important stakeholder and, you know, absolutely has a very important like seat at the table in these conversations. But increasingly these are, again, real time or near real time engineering decisions that are really moving the needle on cost and cost efficiency, overtime and performance as well. >>Now, can you use this to model what costs might be, or is this, or is this, you know, you, you mentioned monitoring in real time, is this only for pulling information as it exists, or could you do, could you use some of the aspects of, of, of your toolset to make a decision, whether something makes more sense to run on your existing infrastructure on premises versus moving into, you know, working in a cloud? Is that something that is designed for or not? >>Great question. So we do have the ability to predict cost cost going forward, based on everything we've learned about your environment, whether you're in multi-cloud hybrid cloud, et cetera. So some really interesting functionality there and a lot more coming later this year, because we do see more and more teams wanting to model the state of the future, right? As you deploy really complex technologies, like say the cluster auto scale or, or HPA in different environments, it can really challenging to do an apples to apples comparison, and we help teams do exactly that. And again, gonna have a lot more interesting announcements here later this year. >>So later that later this year, meaning not in the next few minutes while we're together, >>Nothing new to announce on that front today, but I would say, you know, expect later this quarter for us to have more. >>Okay, that sounds good. Now, now you touched on this a little bit, but I want to hone in on why this is particularly relevant now and moving into the future. You know, we've always tracking costs has always been important, you know, even before the Dawn of cloud, but why is it increasingly important? And, and, you know, there are, there are alternatives for cost tracking legacy alternatives that are out there. So talk about why it's particularly relevant now and tell us what your super power is. You know, what's the, all right. All right. >>Secrets, >>Secret sauce is something you can't share super power. You can talk about >>Absolutely >>NDA. So yes, >>Your superpower. Yeah. Great questions. So for support, just to, to, to touch on, what's fundamentally changing to make a company like ours, you know, impactful or relevant. There's really three things here first and foremost is the new abstractions or complexities that come with Kubernetes, right. Super powerful, but from a cost standpoint, make it considerably harder to accurately track costs. And the big transformation here is, you know, with Kubernetes, you can, at any given moment have 50 applications running on a single node or a single VM, you can fast forward five minutes and there could be 50 entirely new applications, right? So just assigning that VM or, you know, tagging that VM back to an application or team or department really is not relevant in those places. So just the new complexity related to costs makes this problem harder for teams. Second is what we touch on. >>Just again, the power of Cooney. Kubernetes is the ability to allow distributed engineering teams to work on many microservices concurrently. So you're no longer in a lot of ways managing this problem where they centralized kind of single point of decision-making. Oftentimes these decisions are distributed across not only your infrastructure team, but your engineering team. So just the way these decisions and, you know, innovation is happening is changing how you manage these. And lastly, it's just scale, right? The, the cloud and, you know, Kubernetes continue to be incredibly successful. You know, where as goop costs now managing billions of dollars as these numbers get bigger and bigger just becomes more of a business focus and business critical issue. So those are the, you know, the three kind of underlying themes that are changing. When I talk about what we do, that makes us special. It's really this like foundational layer of visibility that we build. >>And what we can do is in real time with a very high degree of accuracy at the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world, give you visibility at any dimension. And so from there, you can do things like have real-time monitoring. You can have real-time insights, you can allow automation to make decisions on these, you know, inputs or data feeds. You can set alerts, you can set recurring reports. All of these things are made possible because of, you know, the, the, I would say really hard work that we've done to, again, give this real-time visibility with a high degree of accuracy at, at crazy scale. >>So if we were to play little make-believe for a moment, pretend like I'm a skeptical sitting on the fence. Not sure if I want to go down this path kind of person. And I say, you know what, web, I think I have a really good handle on all of my costs so far. What would you hit me with as, as, as an example of something that people really didn't expect until they, until they were running coup costs and they had actually had that visibility, what are some of the things that people are surprised by? >>Yeah. Great question. There'd be a number, number one. I'd have, you know, one data point I want to get from you, which is, you know, for your organization or for all of your clusters, what is your cost efficiency? Can you answer that with a high degree of accuracy and by cost efficiency? >>And the answer is now. So tell me, tell me, tell me how to sign up for coupons. >>Yeah. And so the answer, the answer there is you can go get our community version, you know, you can be up and running in minutes, you don't have to share any data, right? Like it is, you know, simply a helmet install, but cost efficiency is this notion of, of every dollar that you are spending on provision resources. What percentage of those dollars are you actually utilizing? And we have, you know, we, we now have, you know, thousands of teams using our product and we've worked with, you know, hundreds of them really closely, you know, this is, you know, that's not the entire market, but in our large sample sizes, we regularly see teams start in the low 20% cost efficiency, meaning that approximately 80% is quote waste time and time. Again, we see teams just be shocked by this number. And again, most of it is not because they were measuring it and accurately or anything like that. Most teams again today still just don't have that visibility until they start working with this. >>So is that, is that sort of the, I in my house household, certain members seem to only believe that there is one position for a light switch, and that would be the on position. Is there, is this a bit of a parallel where, where folks are, are spinning up resources and then just out of sight, out of mind, maybe not spinning them down when not needed. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's, that's definitely one class of the challenges I would say, you know, so today, if you look at our product, we have 14 different insights across like different dimensions of your infrastructure one, or, or I would say several of those relate to exactly what you just described, which is you spin up a VM, you spend a bit load balancer, you spin up an external IP address. You're using it. You're not paying for it. Another class is this notion of, again, I don't have an understanding of what my resources cost. I also don't have a great sense for how much my microservice or application will need. So I'm just going to turn on all the lights, which is, or I'm going to drastically over provision again, I don't know the cost, so I'm just going to kind of set it and forget it. And if my application is performing, you know, then you know, we're doing well here. Again, with this visibility, you can get much more specific, much more accurate, much more actionable with making that trade off, you know, again, down to the individual pod workload, you know, deployment, et cetera. >>So we've, we've touched on this a bit peripherally, but give me an example. You know, you, you run into someone who happens to be a happy user of coop cost. What's the dream story that you love to hear from them about what life was before was before coop costs and what life was like after? >>Yeah, there's a lot, a lot of different dimensions there. You know, one, one is, you know, working with an infrastructure team that, that used to get asked these questions a lot about, you know, why does this cost so much, or why are we spending this and Kubernetes or, or wire expenses growing the rate that they are, you know, like when this, when this works, you know, engineering teams or infrastructure teams, aren't getting asked those questions, right? The tool could cost itself is getting asked that and answering that. So I think one is infrastructure teams, not fielding those types of questions as much. Secondly, is just, you know, more and more teams rolling this out throughout their organization. And ultimately just getting, building a culture of awareness, like ownership, accountability. And then, you know, we just increasingly are seeing teams, you know, find this right balance between cost and performance again. So, you know, in certain cases, improving performance, when are resource bottlenecks in places and other places, you know, reducing costs, you know, by 10 plus million dollars, ultimately at the end of the day, we like to see just teams being more comfortable running their workloads in Kubernetes, right? That is the ultimate sign of success is just an organization, feels comfortable with how they're deploying, how they're managing, how they're spending in Kubernetes. Again, whether that be, you know, on-prem or transitioning from on-prem to a cloud in multiple clouds, et cetera. >>So we're talking to you today as part of the second season of the AWS startup showcase. What's, what's the relationship there with, with AWS? >>So it is the, the largest platform for coop costs being run today. So I believe, you know, at this point, at least a thousand different organizations running our product on AWS hosted clusters, whether they're, you know, ETS or, or self-managed, but you know, a growing number of those on, on EKS. And, you know, we've just, you know, absolutely loved working with the team across, I think at this point, you know, six or seven different groups from marketplace to their containers team, you know, obviously, you know, ETS and others, and just very much see them continuing to push the boundaries on what's possible from a scale and, you know, ease of use and, you know, just breadth of, of offering to this market. >>Well, we really look forward to having you back and hearing about some of these announcements, things that are, that are coming down the line. So we'll definitely have to touch base in the future, but just one, one final, more general question for you, where do you see Kubernetes in general going in 2022? Is it sort of a linear growth? Is there some, is there an inflection point that we see, you know, a good percentage of software that's running enterprises right now is already in that open source category, but what are your thoughts on Kubernetes in 2022? >>Yeah, I think, you know, the one word is everywhere is where I see Kubernetes in 2022, like very deep in the like large and really complex enterprises. Right. So I think you'll see just, you know, major bets there. And I think you'll continue to see more engineers adopted. And I think you'll also continue to see, you know, more and more flavors of it, right? So, you know, some teams find that running Kubernetes anymore serverless fashion is, is right for them. Others find that, you know, having full control, you know, at every part of the stack, including running their own autoscaler for example is really powerful. So I think just, you know, you'll see more and more options. And again, I think teams increasingly adopting the right, you know, abstraction level on top of Kubernetes that works for their workloads and their organizations >>Sounds good. We'll we'll, we'll come back in 2023 and we'll check and see how that, how that all panned out. Well, it's been great talking to you today as part of the startup showcase. Really appreciate it. Great to see you again. It's right about the time where I can still tell you happy new year, because we're still, we're still in January here. Hope you have a great 2022 with that from me, Dave Nicholson, part of the cube part of AWS startup showcase season two, I'd like to thank everyone for joining and stay with us for the best in hybrid tech coverage.

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 21 live form Los Angeles. Lisa Martin, with Dave Nicholson. And we've got a CUBE alum back with us. Webb Brown is back. The co-founder and CEO of Kubecost. Welcome back! >> Thank you so much. It's great to be back. It's been right at two years, a lot's happening in our community and ecosystem as well as with our open source project and company. So awesome with that. >> Give the audience an overview in case they're not familiar with Kubecost. And then talk to us about this explosive growth that you've seen since we last saw you in person. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Kubecost provides cost management solutions purpose-built for teams throwing in Kubernetes and Cloud Native. Right? So everything we do is built on open source. All of our products can be installed in minutes. We give teams visibility into spend, then help them optimize it and govern it over time. So it's been a busy two years since we last talked, we have grown the team about, you know, 5 x, so like right around 20 people today. We now have thousands of mostly medium and large sized enterprises using the product. You know, that's north of a 10 x growth since we launched just before, you know, KubeCon San Diego, now managing billions of dollars of spin and, you know, I feel like, we're just getting started. So it's an incredibly exciting time for us as a company and also just great to be back in person with our friends in the community. >> This community is such a strong community. And it's great to see people back here. I agree. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So Kubecost, obviously you talk about cost optimization, but it's, you really, you're an insight engine in the sense that if you're looking at costs, you have to measure that against what you're getting for that cost. >> Absolutely. So what are some of the insights that your platform or that your tool set offers. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, you know, we think about our product is first and foremost, like visibility and monitoring and then insights and optimization and then governance. You know, if you talk to most teams today, they're still kind of getting that visibility, but once you do it quickly leads in how do we optimize? And then we're going to give you insights at every part of the stack, right? So like at the infrastructure layer, thinking about things like Spot and RIS and savings plans, et cetera. At the Kubernetes orchestration layer, thinking about things like auto scaling and, you know, setting requests and limits, et cetera, all the way up to like the application layer with all of that being purpose-built for, you know, Cloud Native Kubernetes. So the way we work as you deploy our product in your environment, anywhere you're running Kubernetes, 1.11 or above we'll run. And we're going to start dynamically generating these insights in minutes and they're real time. And again, they scaled to the largest Kubernetes clusters in the world. >> And you said, you've had a thousand or so customers in the medium to large enterprise. These are large organizations, probably brand names, I imagine we are familiar with that are leaning on Kubecost to help get that visibility that before they did not have the ability to get. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So definitely our users of our thousands of users, skews heavily towards, you know, medium and large side enterprise. Working with some amazing companies like Adobe, who, you know, just have such high scale and like complex and sophisticated infrastructure. So, you know, I think this is very natural in what we expect, which is like, as you start spending more resources, you know, missing visibility, having unoptimized infrastructure starts to be more costly. >> Absolutely. >> And we typically see as once that gets into like the multiple head count, right? And it starts to, you know, spend some, may make sense to spend some time optimizing and monitoring and, you know, putting the learning in place. So you can manage it more effectively as time goes on. >> Do you have any metrics or any X factor ranges of the costs that you've actually saved customers? >> Yeah. I mean, we've saved multiple customers in them, like many of millions of dollars at this point, >> So we're talking big. >> Really big. So yeah, we're now managing more than $2 billion of spin. So like some really big savings on a per customer base, but it's really common where we're saving, you know, north of 30%, sometimes up to 70% on your Kubernetes and related spin. And so we're giving you insights into your Kubernetes cluster and again, the full stack there, but also giving you visibility and insights into external things like external disk or cloud storage buckets or, you know, cloud sequel that, that sort of stuff, external cloud services. >> Taking those blinders off >> Exactly. And giving you that unified, you know, real time picture again, that accurately reflects everything that's going on in your system. >> So when these insights are produced or revealed, are the responses automated? or are they then manually applied? >> Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. We support both and we support both in different ways By default, when you deploy Kubecost, and again it's, today it's Helm Install. It can be running in your cluster in, you know, minutes or less, it's deployed in read only mode. And by the way, you don't share any data externally, it's all in your local environment. So we started generating these insights, you know, right when you install in your environment. >> Let me ask you about, I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say you're generating an insight, are you just giving an answer and guidance? or you're providing the reader background on what leads to that insight? >> Yeah. You know, is that a philosophical question of, do you need to provide the user rationale for the insight? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're doing this today and we'll do more, but one example is, you know, if you just look at this notion of setting requests and limits for your applications in Kubernetes, you know, if you, in simple forms, if you set a request too high, you're potentially wasting money because the Kubernetes scheduler is presenting that resource for you. If you set it too low, you're at risk of being CPU throttled, right? So communicating that symbiotic relationship and the risk on either side really helps the team understand why do I need to strike this balance, right? It's not just cost it's performance and reliability as well. So absolutely given that background and again, out of the box we're read only, but we also have automation in our product with our cluster controller. So you can dynamically do things like right-size your infrastructure, or, you know, move workloads to Spot, et cetera. But we also have integrations with a bunch of tooling in this ecosystem. So like Prometheus native, you know, Alert Manager native, just launched an integration with Spinnaker and Armory where you can like dynamically at the time of deployment, you know, right size and have insights. So you can expect to see more from us there. But we very much think about automation is twofold. One, you know, building trust in Kubecost and our insights and adopting them over time. But then two is meeting you where you are with your existing tooling, whether it's your CICB pipeline, observability or, you know, existing kind of workflow automation system. >> Meeting customers where they are is, is critical these days. >> Absolutely. I think, especially in this market, right? where we have the potential to have so much interoperability and all these things working in harmony and also, you know, there's, there's a lot of booths back here, right? So we, you know, we have complex tech stacks and, you know, in certain cases we feel like when we bring you to our UI or API's or, you know, automation or COI's, we can do things more effective. But oftentimes when we bring that data to you, we can be more effective again, that's, you know, coming, bringing your data to Chronosphere or Prometheus or Grafana, you know, all of the tooling that you're already using on a daily, regular basis. >> Bringing that data into the tool is just another example of the value in data that the organizations can actually harness that value and unlock it. >> Webb: Yeah. >> There's so much potential there for them to be more competitive, for them to be able to develop products and services faster. >> Absolutely. Yeah, I think you're just seeing the coming of age with, you know, cost metrics into that equation. We now live in a world with Kubernetes as this amazing innovation platform where as an engineer, I can go spin up some pretty costly resources, really fast, and that's a great thing for innovation, right? But it also kind of pushes some of the accountability or awareness down to the individual >> Webb: IC who needs to be aware, you know, what, you know, things generally cost at a minimum in like a directional way, so they can make informed decisions again, when they think about this cost performance, reliability, trade-off. >> Lisa: Where are your customer conversations? Are your target users, DevOps folks? I was just wondering where finance might be in this whole game. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Given the fact that we are kind of open source first and started with open source, we, you know, 95% of the time when we start working with an infrastructure engineering team or dev ops team. They've already installed our product. They're already familiar with what we're doing, but then increasingly and increasingly fast, you know, finance is being brought into the equation and, you know, management is being brought into the equation. And I think it's a function of what we were talking about where, you know, 70% of teams grew their Kubernetes spend over the last year, you know, 20% of them more than doubled. So, you know, these are starting to be real, you know, expense items where finance is increasingly aware of what's going on. So yeah, they're coming into the picture, but it's simply thought that you starting with, and, and working with the infrastructure team, that's actually kind of putting some of these insights into action or hooking us into their pipelines or something. >> When you think of developers going out and grabbing resources, and you think of a, an insight tool that looks at controlling cost, that could seem like an inhibitor. But really if you're talking about how to efficiently use whatever resources you have to be able to have access to in terms of dollars, you could sell this to the developers on that basis. It's like, look, you have these 10 things that you want to be able to do. If you don't optimize using a tool like this, you're only going to be able to do 4 of them. >> Without a doubt. Yeah. And you know, us as our founding team, all engineers, you know, we were the ones getting those questions of, you know, how have we already spent, you know, our budget on just this project? We have these three others we want to do, right? Or why are costs going up as quickly as they are? You know, what are we spending on this application, instead of that kind of being a manual lift, like, let me go do a bunch of analysis or come back with answers. It's tools to where not only can management answer those questions themselves, but like engineering teams can make informed opportunity costs and optimizations decisions itself, whether it's tooling and automation doing it for them or them applying things, you know, directly. >> Lisa: So a lot of growth. You talked about the growth on employees, the growth in revenue, what lies ahead for Kubecost? What are some of the things that are coming on the horizon that you're really excited about? >> Yeah, we very much feel like we're just getting started you know, just like we feel this ecosystem and community is, right? Like there's been tons of progress all around, but like, wow, it's still early days. So, you know, we, we did raise, you know, five and a half million dollars from, you know, First Round who is an amazing group to work with at the end of last year. So by growing the engineering team were able to do a lot more. We got a bunch of really big things coming across all parts of our product. You can think about one thing we're really excited that's in limit availability right now is our first hosted solution. It's our first SaaS solution. And this is critically important to us in that we want to give teams the option to, if you want to own and control your data and never egress anything outside of your cluster, you can do that with our deploy product. You can do that with our open source. You can truly lock down namespace to egress and never send a byte out. Or if you'd like the convenience of us to manage it for you and be kind of stewards of your data, we're going to offer, you know, a great offering there too. So that's unlimited availability day. We're going to have a lot more announcements coming there, but we see those being at feature parity, you know, between like our enterprise offerings and our hosted solution and just, you know, a lot more coming with, you know, visibility, some more like GPU insights, you know, metrics coming quickly, a lot more with automation coming and then more integrations for governance. Again, kind of talked about Spinnaker and things like that. A lot more really interesting ones coming. >> So five and a half million raised in the last round of funding. Where are you going to be applying that? What are some of the growth engines that you want to tune with that money? >> Yeah, so, you know, first and foremost, it was really growing the engineering team, right? So we've, you know, like 4 x the engineering team in the last year, and just have an amazing group of engineers. We want to continue to do that. >> Webb: We're kind of super early on the like, you know, marketing and sales side. We're going to start thinking about that more and more, you know, our approach first off was like, we want to solve a really valuable problem and doing it in a way that is super compelling. And we think that when you do that, you know, good things happen. I think that's some of our Google background, which is like, you build a great search engine and like, you know, good things generally happen. So we're just super focused on, again, working with great users, you know, building great products that meet them where they are and solve problems that are really important to them. >> Lisa: Awesome. Well, congratulations on all the trajectory of success since we last saw you in person. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you back on the show, looking forward to, so folks can go to www.kubecost.com to learn more and see some of those announcements coming down the pike. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Don't you make it two years before you come back. >> Webb: I would love to be back. I hope we're back bigger than ever, you know, next year, but it has been such a pleasure, you know, last time and this time, thank you so much for having me, you know, I love being part of the show and the community at large. >> It's a great community and we appreciate you sharing all your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Los Angeles. This is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 21. We back with our next guest shortly. We'll see you there.

>>Live from San Diego, California at the cube, covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back to the cube bumps to men. And my cohost is John Troyer and we're in San Diego for coupon cloud native con 2019. Our fourth year of covering this show over 12,000 in attendance, such growth in the ecosystem. Lots of different projects to talk about, not just Kubernetes, but joining us first time on the program. Longtime watcher Webb Brown, who's the cofounder of cube costs, yet another project here in, in the uh, ecosystem. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. All right. So, uh, as a, you know, every time we get a founder on his, you know, tell us a little bit about your background and give us that why of what led to the creation of QT. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, our founding team all worked in infrastructure monitoring at Google for a long time and, you know, working in container orchestration environments, uh, we saw this challenge where teams that were moving and Coopernetti's, uh, were finding themselves, uh, kind of easy to let costs kind of get away from them. Um, there are a lot of moving parts that weren't there before. There's a lot of dynamic aspects that are hard to just really get your, your arms around it. Um, and we found ourselves just really pulled towards helping teams, you know, solve those problems. Um, so yeah, that was a little over a year ago today when we made the plunge and, and here we are. >>Yeah. You know, we remember the days when, you know, public cloud was supposed to be simple and inexpensive and we found out that maybe it's neither of those things necessarily. Um, you know, let's click it a little bit as to, you know, containers, Kubernetes, what's different about this then? Everything else we've been doing in public cloud, uh, for the last, you know, 10. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, so we believe in like, it's ideal state. It still has the ability to be exactly those things, right? Simple and much more affordable. Uh, but we think that there's like tools and elements of this that create risk to the contrary. Um, and we think kind of, you know, there's three things that are different here. Uh, first is that you now have access to these incredibly powerful abstractions that are available at global scale that give you access to these really expensive resources, right? And mistakes can be costly there. Uh, two is you're seeing this like move towards decentralized deployments where you're now having individual product or application engineering teams managing their own applications, even provisioning their own infrastructure and it's a lot higher velocity, a lot higher, like dynamic environments. And then three is just, uh, it's much harder, harder to have visibility when you're in these multitenant environments. Right? You know, you can now have many teams, many even departments shipping on a single VM or a, a S a small set of EMS. >>All right, if you could just give us kind of bumper sticker or sticker on the project itself. How long has it been around? Uh, it fell ball and get hub. I see. And how many people are using it, >>growth, things like that. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we started the project about a year ago. Um, the, the get hub project specifically is for doing cross cloud cost allocation. Um, there's a lot of challenges for like measuring the cost of say, CPU, Ram, storage, et cetera. When you talk about having, you know, spot instances and U S central on AWS versus, you know, committed use in, you know, us central on TCP. So this project helps develop a uniform standard and library to measure costs across all these different environments. Um, hundreds of teams are using it today. Uh, we have integrations with Azure, GCP, AWS, and we also support on-prem Kubernetes clusters. What kind of a minor detail web, but I mean, those costs change week over week as, uh, announcements happen as instances go up and down. I mean, how, how does the project and the community come together to, to even track all that? >>Yeah, no, we know it well. I mean, we're living and breathing and seeing exactly that. Um, and that speaks to, you know, really the complexity here. Um, and the project is designed to support exactly that. So constantly refreshing billing data, uh, dynamically looking at wind pods or jobs are coming up and going down and in real time look at the cost of the nodes that they're actually running on. Um, that is both the beauty and the challenge that we face is things can change so quickly and oftentimes that's for the better. But it's also a challenge to just stay on top of all the changes happening. What does, does the community help assemble that data? Are there AP? I mean, does that, I don't think there's cost API APIs for every cloud or maybe I'm wrong. So we have, we do have a billing API integrations for these three cloud providers. So like I mentioned, AWS, Azure, GCP, uh, the community has been instrumental in finding all these edge cases, right? So like, you know, GPU in this environment versus, you know, storage in this environment. And that's, it's really this long tail of complexity that's really hard for getting this right. And the ecosystem has been absolutely key to finding all those like nooks and crannies to get this just right. Okay. >>Just finishing that thought on, on the billing, you've got billing API in the public cloud, but on the, on premises environment, uh, your mileage may vary, I'm assuming. How does that fit in? >>Yeah, you can, you can think about is kind of bring your own pricing sheet, right? So like we want to support your environment and that could be you care about, you know, just the price of CPU, memory, storage, GPS, etc. But it could also be, you know, you have some centralized ops teams that you want to allocate or like amortize the costs of across all of your tenants in that cluster. So we want to meet you where you are and give you full custom, you know, like inputs to tailor this to your environment. Okay. >>We've talked about the project. There's also a company, a associated with us, help us understand the relationship, the size of the team, uh, kind of the business strategy there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So we have an open core model where our commercial product is built on top of this open source library. You can think about it providing a lot of the, the UI and enterprise management functionality, things like, you know, multi-cloud view, uh, longterm durable storage, SAML integrations, that sort of stuff. Um, you know, we're a small team of engineers right now. Um, you know, all engineers. So we're living and breathing the like actual, you know, writing go, you know, writing code every day. Well, w we're a lot of, we live in a world. Uh, we're maybe, I dunno for post dev ops yet, but there's a lot of dev ops here at this show. You, we've got many flavors of dev ops, dev, sec ops. I mean, is this, who is, and I'm, where I'm going is, is there a dev cost ops developers now have to be worrying about the cost of what they're doing, who, who is paying attention to the, to the, uh, the, the, the cash register. >>The at the top of the coop cross. Yeah. Stack. >> Yeah. I think it's very similar to what you just said is all of this is in flux, right? And there's so many different models, uh, that are, that are working and are constantly evolving. Um, what we typically see is it's uh, someone from the finance org and someone from the dev ops org that is jointly caring about this, this picture. Um, so you know, we have opinions on how this can work really well, but we also love to just let the industry and you know, in different enterprises guide us and kind of meet them where they are. Um, but, but we think that this is going to be continuing to evolve and change for the years to come just cause so much. >>It's such a big challenge. I've talked to some large enterprises that they assign engineering resources to do the financial engineering thing and it seems that number one is the cloud providers should be able to put, put some, you know, pieces in place. Secondly, you know, automation intelligence of, you know, that this entire ecosystem should be able to help. There. Is that, is that really where your, your, your team and your project is focusing to, you know, to take that, I don't want that, you know, you should be building new apps and helping my business not sitting there watching the meters and saying, Oh wait, I need >>yeah. Turn some knobs. Yeah. So I think the first part of what you mentioned is very relevant and, and was kind of the kicker that really pushed us over the edge to start this project start this company is we saw teams that were building their own internal solutions are doing all this ad hoc analysis and Oh by the way, pretty much every team we talked to is doing it differently. So that was what our real inspiration to say, okay, we have to do this. Um, we absolutely see an evolution to just more and more automation and intelligence. But you have to think about cost is not an isolated variable. Cost is very closely linked to reliability and performance, stability, all of these things. So you want to be really thoughtful and really careful when you start handing this stuff over to an algorithm. Right? Because it can mean, you know, performance regressions, it can mean, so we, you know, we absolutely see the industry evolving there. >>Um, we see a lot of teams that then in our view are like, uh, rightfully cautious before kind of handing over the keys, uh, to, to an algorithm or set of algorithms that are going to really dial the lever for them on, you know, the right amount of say, memory, compute, et cetera. I imagine there's also tradeoffs between, uh, engineering resources and cost. Right. I could do it the, the, the S the fast way with one engineer and it, and it might have one cost application. I might, uh, sure I could get my cloud costs down, but it might've taken me, you know, 10 engineer months to do. So. There's all, it's interesting. Is there a conversation in the, like, let's use the community in the broader sense about how to do this kind of capacity management and trade offs. Is there an emerging, you know, it's hard in the OSS world if there's not a project around that you can gather around. >>How do you have a conversation around, you know, costs and engineering trade offs? Yeah, I think we're still really early here and I think there's still huge opportunity. Um, and we just feel that it's incredibly challenging if you just look at the engineering side, you know, there's so much uncertainty to go in and say what's it going to take to move us from, you know, on demand a spot or move us from one reason to the other or one provider to the other. Um, that it's really hard to really put an expected costs on that and do an appropriate ROI. Um, what we've seen that, uh, a lot of teams are able to really easily identify the low hanging fruit where there's a very clear ROI, but these like, you know, marginal decisions, absolutely think there's, uh, more frameworks and more tools that can help teams make those decisions. Well, all right, so >>love to get your personal viewpoint as you're working for a startup. You're here in this massive ecosystem to tell us about that kind of environment, how it is in this cloud native ecosystem. And, uh, you know, any specific things around, you know, the event itself, >>they are welcomed. Yeah. Um, so, you know, we're coming from Google and a lot of our exposure to bigger conferences was, you know, things, things like Google IO and Google specific events. Um, and, and those are amazing to have their own, you know, ecosystem and kind of atmosphere. But, but I've never felt energy like this. I've never seen so many things that are new. So many things are changing all at once. Um, that it just, it's impossible to not get here and be excited by this stuff, right. Of like, um, you know, a lot of us have ideas how things were of all, but I definitely can't claim to like, you know, have really any real conviction around how this broader ecosystem or law that, and that just adds to the excitement of so many things are improving and evolving all at the same time. >>Yeah. Do you feel a small company like yourself can get attention with everything that's going on here? >>Yeah. I mean, what we want to do is we want to be the very best at costs. And capacity and, and, and while that touches on many things, that's really small area. So, you know, our approach is we're not going to be everything. And, and while that can be hard at times, um, we think that's right for a small team. And that's my general advice to anybody that comes to this eco is, is finding a real problem, uh, and be comfortable not being everything for everybody, but go and solve that for a set of users and do it the best. All right. If you could just give you the final word here, what should we be looking for for from Q cost, uh, kind of over the next year? Yeah, I think just, uh, you know, really getting, going deeper and broader in costs and capacity management. >>That's bringing our tools to more platforms, more users, uh, more intelligence and, and automation over time, but just continue to approve a visibility to make this easier and easier for teams to make these appropriate tradeoffs where they invest engineering resource and how they optimize costs. All right, well what, Brian, thanks so much for joining us. We are welcome to welcome. We're glad to welcome cube cost to the cube alumni. Thank you so much, John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman and check out the cube.net for all the coverage. Uh, we've been for years at this event, uh, in the U S we've also done the European shows and so much more come in three days, wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching the cube.

>> live from Mountain View, California. It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back to the cave. Lisa Martin with John Barrier on our first day of two days of coverage of Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. John Eyre. Please welcome to iniquitous and directors solutions, architecture and Devil Box from Liberty Technology. Tony, Welcome. >> How are you? >> Good, thanks for Thanks for having us tell our audience a little bit about liberty technology before we get into the community. What you doing your breakout session? >> Not a problem. The re technology is a company. Where? MSP company down in Griffin, Georgia. And so we handle a lot of a lot of clients are either public sector cities, all different types of all the different verticals. So well. And so do you have a client? A customer out there that needs needs an extra arm into it. We're there for them. >> So your basement of Georgia, Which means that how warm it is in here today Outside should be nothing for you right >> now. Tell me about >> well outside >> now, since there is no humanity I like it back home in few minutes, >> Californians were babies. >> Yeah, Joni, Public Sector. We've done a lot of interviews of public sector folks with their towns and cities, air, ground rules, municipalities, cities, their I t light. And then they don't have the Dev ops expertise, but clouds a perfect fit for them. But they have a lot of certain characters. Whether it's email is very ephemeral. People come and go, So getting people collaborating in these distinct user groups that have different roles and responsibilities is a challenge. How are you guys solving that? Because there's something I know you guys have worked on. There's a challenge that's only Republicans for enterprises do. How do you bring people that are distinct user populations that have an application or roll or use case into a collaborative, horizontally scaleable >> system? We show Be honest way. Go in there and we go in there and we discover as to what they're doing now, what are their pain points? What do they want? Change where they want to go and then we show them the collaboration started. We shone like what makes team's way? Show him all of the, uh, meetings room devices, things like that. And then not just on the collaboration side, but also if there helping with three, six, five their security than Rocky. That's how we bring. That's how we bring collaboration intothe public >> about the Cisco dynamic we've been covering definite create since it started. Definite. Now it's just go live couple years, seeing kind of a new vibe and new mojo going on with that within the Cisco ecosystem of actually coding stuff up, whether it's slinging AP eyes together or creating new ones. New capabilities. How is it changed the delivery in performance of the customers? Because this is not just your old school Cisco networking company. Yeah, they got APS. Things are connected. Date is moving from Point A to point B. All right, but he's kind of integration challenges. Kind of seamless program ability is the core theme here. What's your reaction? Thoughts on all this? >> No. >> Well, first off, this is my first definite create. I've been to other Siskel lives have not been too. Don't think great yet so so far, I'm enjoying this a lot. It's I like the tight niche, the community style of this of this event I'm sorry. Go back, >> Tio. Go live a little creations that are going on here. Very community already. Kind of be open source projects. Yeah, people talking to each other, a lot of hallway conversations. But it's a kind of a new kind of collaborative model that customers are now getting exposed to write. This is something >> new. I mean, it is. It's new, and I'm finding a lot times where a lot of customers and clients they've heard about it, but they don't know yet. So it's our job to actually get them to adopt to it and and also adapt to it as well. So it's almost like how we have our own like community here. For definite. It's almost how can we take that structure and show it to our clients >> and translation involved Kind of kind of taper down the excitement, maybe, or keeping up questions for you people watching that aren't here. A definite what's that? What's the vibe here? Like, what's some of the cools? Things you've seen and heard are something Well, the keynote was >> great either. Was amazing Kino how they actually showed how, especially with the Iraqi had when Mandy went while I was out there talking about from the small campus to the festival and to an actual >> there's a radio >> that was a great use of incredible, especially with like big Stadium and how John McDonough came out and showed about how there was a fight on the field with you. Yet no one saw it, but yet then, when they went through the actual demonstrate, the actual video were like, Oh, yeah, this's amazing how it's almost like it was like the minority report way. You're already >> exactly Dan. Yes, the data out there, >> all that data and they just machine learning A I just watching people, seeing what they're doing, kind of almost like predicting what they're going to do >> and every little bit, actually, a little bit. I agree with you. I thought they did a great job with that, Especially coming off the heels of Coachella and showing how they can enable Cisco enable developers for social folks to set up secure networks of different sizes and also be able to use in real time machine learning a eye to evaluate what's going on the offensive. And that was a very cool, real world example of what they showed. Leveraging machine learning, identifying. There's there's an issue here. There's an altercation. They surprised at a sports event, right? And deploying those. It has a lot security, many sports events, though I thought it was all that the security was just casually walking up to fight. That's another thing >> that you would slow >> down. But you don't know what >> you're right. >> And it is so many more etiquette rules now at events, whether it's, you know, hate crimes or just, you know, just violent language fights. Also, everyone sees those that write that events. But this actual now, surveillance tech out there. You know, you could tell the guys that how many beers he's had kicks in, You know, >> we're gonna have something where they can actually check out someone like Heat signature. They can't tell how >> much he's going to explode. Is the Red Sox going to blow the lead again? A. Having a good year? Well, you know, they wanted last year Yankee fans, so you would be off the charts now. Philly fans, a whole other story. I don't. Okay. My digress. You've >> got a breakout session. Sorry, John. A lightning session that's tomorrow Any time tomorrow. Tell us the title and what you're going to be talking about. >> Keisha, my title is orchestrate forty five percent. So >> we'LL just read the forty five percent correct Alright, Digging >> again tonight a little >> bit. I have a sly where we was actually Suzy. We actually did a presentation awhile back where she put up a slider, says where she talked about how fifty five percent of partners are creating APS and developing their own naps. So, way of liberty we saw that we were like, OK, what about the other forty five percent? So that's where that the idea came out too. Okay, let's I'll do a talk about how we orchestrate forty, forty five, forty five percent. So entails What I'm doing with that is that we actually have a platform called Consulate. Where there were that platform has the ability to integrate with multiple business processes. So we're connecting. We're integrating with connect allies with Iraqi doing eight about and so that I have it where that there'll be a trigger or Web hook from one my rocky cameras like emotion which will trigger which will create a ticket and connect allies so they can help out some help tasks service desk and then that which will also they get thrown into teams and click on the ticket and then also run commands and grab a snapshot from the camera. The right of the team's six teams >> fell by the Iraqi for a minute because we get a lot of hearing a lot of buzz about Muraki. It's not just wireless. It's not just what you might think it is, it seems to be connected tissue you meant. There's a great demo that added to she's showing around. They are with looking at network configuration. We're obviously to be connecting all of this together. What's your view on this? What's that? >> I for one, I love muraki. I run Rocky at home, so five the viol. Although the wireless is switching cameras and just that, it's it's one. Really. They have, like their own room platform that connects has all their devices connecting into the dashboard, and you could do so much with it that they're actually they're open up Now. The eyes, the web hooks this so much things that you can actually integrate with it. It's it's great, and it's the analytics that you get from it. >> And this is what you're talking about really about bringing these teams together through Webb Hooks for AP, eyes in through Morocco, the connected to direct and then allow the APS to be valuable, cross different groups >> very valuable, but then so that then you don't have it on. Engineer doesn't have have to touch different applications or devices. They get it all from one and from that one application, click and go to where you need to get got. >> So we're only on halfway through Day one of your first up that crate. But it sounds like you've already been exposed to so many things that I could see the wheels turning us without anticipating that you're going to be able to bring back to liberty. And that will really help drive. What you guys doing driving forward toward that customer engagement only, eh? Educate >> well, since it is, you know, it's like half day already on day one. There's still so much to see here. There's so much to see about Coyote. There's a bunch of workshops here about form Iraqi and the AP ice, which I want to join in and see what I can take out of that and bring it back. Um, you know, there's a bunch of stuff get on. So I want to gather all that and just be a sponge and then bring it back to liberty and say, Hey, this is what we can do. How can they fit into our business model? >> Awesome. Well, Tony, thank you so much for stopping by and talking with Jonah me on the program this afternoon. We appreciate it. Best of luck in your lightning session tomorrow as well. >> Thank you so much >> for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on the Cube. Live from Cisco. Definite great. Twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> No.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge18. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. We're coming at you from The Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I have with me Paul Webb; he is the ServiceNow Practice Lead for EY. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Paul. >> Thanks for having me, Rebecca. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how, what EY's focus is, and it's not traditional IT, you're really focused on bringing ServiceNow into the business; can you talk a little bit about this? >> Yeah, that's right. >> Paul: So, traditionally ServiceNow's been seen inside the IT organization, transforming the way in which the service desk is run. But what we're finding is more and more of customers see the power of the platform and how it can be taken out into HR, customer service, and automate a lot of business process that have traditionally been manual or used by a bunch of disparate systems. So, that's been our focus and it's been very compelling to our customers and it's been very good to us. >> So, give me some examples of how, of what you're doing. What are some innovative solutions? >> Yeah, so we've got a couple of really cool ones. One is fleet car management, so we've taken a device that we've put in vehicles that then transmits back to a ServiceNow hub to give us the vehicle telemetry. So then when the vehicle comes back in from being used, someone like Hertz or Avis, anyone like that, they can then use a device to see whether the car needs a repair or a service, new tires, and then automatically trigger a work order to get that taken care of. So that's a really different use case than a traditional IT. >> Right, right, and so... How are clients, are they ready for this? Are they, you feel at this conference that there's been this pent-up exhaustion with the workplace and the way it's been structured because our consumer lives are so easy and intuitive. >> We're seeing this need for disruption sort of kicking in this year. It's like last year it was a lot of ideas, a lot of thought around the art of the possible, but now we're starting to see companies ready to embrace it, and so that change, that transformation is happening right now in 2018. >> And how are you helping them, because it's not easy, this stuff is hard, change management. >> Yeah, it's kind of great that we're such a diverse and broad company, so the fact that I can bring our customer service teams, our supply chain teams, our human resources teams, all of that consulting breadth that we have, and deep subject matter experience. We can bring that to the ServiceNow platform and then take it to a client to really transform the way in which they think about a problem. >> And what would you say are some of the best practices that have emerged, because as we've said, this is a really disruptive time for so many companies. You just talked about car industry. What would you say are the insights you've gleaned in working with clients? >> It's time to value, I think more than anything else it's getting something in the hands of the customer or the user very, very quickly. So, our typical cycle is 12 weeks from an ideation, an idea of what they want to achieve, to something they can actually touch and feel and experience. >> Rebecca: 12 weeks! >> 12 weeks, yeah. And we typically work in these 12-week delivery cycles, so that you don't end up with fatigue and design fatigue. You just get your hands on something you can touch, you can feel, you can experience, and then you can mature it from there. >> So, walk us through the process. I mean, at 12 weeks, that is stupendous. >> Yeah, first of all it's containing the scope, it's not trying to do too much all at once. We then really help the client to whiteboard what problem they want to solve, we may do something as simple as a proof of concept, or we call them hackathons, it's common here. Do that to get the ideas into an environment that they can touch, then we come up with a series of requirements that need to be in the first release, and then once we've done that, it's send it to our developers, get them to turn the crank, turn it into something that we can get in the hands, even if it's not in production, if it's not production-ready it's got to be close enough where they can say, "Yeah, we need x changed, we need y changed, we need something different." Or this is good to go, let's now evolve. >> When you're in this design process, which is messy and complicated, how are you sparking good ideas and creativity and innovation on your team? >> We find the client brings that themselves. We've got smart people, they do good things, they're young, they're innovative. But we find when we start to produce some ideas to the conversation, it rapidly sparks the same back from the client. So this collaborative approach works really well to bring everybody up to a whole new level of thinking. >> So, the tag line, the new branding for ServiceNow is making the world of work work better for people, and that is where you're focusing EY's business, too. So, what would you say should be next? What are the next employee pain points that you want to focus on with the ServiceNow platform? >> It's interesting that, it's a little less exciting, but it's this concept of the system of protection. One of the guys that works with me, Lawrence, came up with the concept of using ServiceNow as this system of protection, where we can look at things like compliance and security and risk, and use ServiceNow to help manage that, facilitate that risk. The second side is obviously the more creative, improve productivity, improve efficiency, drive more of this disruptive digital agenda into the equation. And so those two ends of the spectrum, protect the business and then innovate the business, are two prime agenda items right now. >> Finally, why would a client choose EY? What do you bring to the table? >> I think it's the breadth and depth. You know, we are a very large global company. We have a lot of really bright minds, I think 70 percent of our business is now millennials, so we've got a lot of brilliant minds that are really trying to bring new ideas, new disruptive thinking, and yet we still have that maturity and that experience across that spectrum. So, bring all that to bear on a problem for a client enables us to do some really unique things. >> Rebecca: Great, well thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Paul. >> Thanks very much for having me, Rebecca. >> We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 and theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Male Narrator: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now here are your hosts Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> And welcome back inside the San Jose Convention Center here at the Cube, along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls, appreciate you joining us here as we continue our coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016, live here on SiliconANGLE TV. This is the flagship broadcast where we extract the signal from the noise. And Jeff, we're on the home stretch here through the second day, I could stay here for a few more days. Great guests, great lineups, great keynotes, and a lot of energy here on the floor I like. >> Lot of energy, I love these kinds of shows because it's really about helping people be successful and we're talking about real things, and again we keep coming back to products and solutions in technology but for most small businesses it's about cash. It's about cash flow. >> Being successful, Rania Succar, is now joining us, she's a QuickBooks Financing and Director there at QuickBooks, and we appreciate your time here, Rania. >> Great. >> So tell us about just the overarching mission, right, cause as Jeff said, helping people, giving them access to capital, badly needed, small businesses, it's a critical need, and what QuickBooks does on that, with that, on the financing platform. >> Well you guys have seen it here for the last few days. The QuickBooks team is absolutely focused on helping small businesses survive and thrive. Everyone here's trying to crack that, and you just said it, cash is one of the biggest pain points that small businesses face. Whenever we talk to small businesses, the first thing they tell us is the thing that keeps them up at night is cash flow, and we also know one of the biggest reasons that small businesses fail is they can't get access to cash flow, and to cash, and so the team a couple years back said we've got to crack this in order to help more small businesses survive past the five year mark and be able to put their dreams into action. So with that in mind, we took a look at financing and for small businesses, it's a fairly broken process, so we're working to reinvent small business lending. It's broken for a couple of reasons, one is, if you have ten businesses that go into a bank to apply for a loan, only three get approved, and it takes over 30 hours of work for a small business to do that application to a bank, so it's right for innovating and improving the experience for small businesses, so what we do, is we're hyper focused on making the experience better in three ways, first, we're trying to drive up the approval rate, and we do that with the incredible clarity and we do that with the incredible clarity with which we can understand the small business based on the data that we have. We understand the small business ecosystem better than anyone, and we understand the full picture of a small business' credit worthiness, and financial health better than everyone, anyone. We can give them access to-- we can help them get credit for all the future invoices that they have coming in, we understand the strength of their customer base, you put that together, we can drive approval rates up. The other thing we're focused on is the time it takes to apply. You need to put together tax returns, and interim financial reports if it's the middle of the year, and bank statements, it's very frustrating. We have most of that information in the Intuit space, and our vision is rather than even applying it's just available for you in QuickBooks when you need it, and the third thing, so approval rates, the time it takes, the third thing we're very focused on is the guidance. Small businesses need advice, most of them didn't get into running their own small business because they knew anything about finances, they had a dream and they wanted to put it into place, and so we're very focused on taking the insights we have about a small business to help them get lending that's right for them with confidence that they're getting the right financing for their business. So we can help them predict when they're going to need financing, and we can connect them to an accountant because we know over a million of our small businesses are connected to accountants. So that's what we do, and this week as you heard, we just announced we crossed the half a billion dollar mark in financing in small businesses. >> Now, say that again. >> Half a billion dollars. >> Half a billion dollars of financing. >> Congratulations. >> We're incredibly proud, we're incredibly proud. >> Let me ask you a couple details, so my kids are going, they're applying for college right now, so the CommonApp-- >> So, Jeff will need somewhere shy of half a million of that money. (Rania laughs) >> Do you have like a CommonApp inside QuickBooks which is a defined kind of definition that then gets shared with the lenders that want to participate in the market, or do you have like a defined QuickBooks FICO score, if you will, based on these other parameters that you have that then get shared with the lenders, how do you kind of, you've got all this data, it's my data, but I'm allowing you to use in such a way to help me get this loan in this market place. How does the actual mechanics work. >> I love that, we're a platform, almost like an Amazon in a sense, where you go to Amazon, you have one thing that you want to get and you get access to multiple different providers, so we're a platform. Right now, the way that it works, there is a CommonApp, but the amazing thing is you don't have to fill it out because we have all the information inside QuickBooks so we pre-fill it for you and ask you just for a couple of things but we do all the work and then we figure out which of our lending partners based on what you need, we've got about a dozen, are best suited for your needs, and then we send the information to the lenders with your permission and then you get all your offers right there, and the really neat thing about what we do is we compare the offers apples to apples, this is pretty incredible, we're super focused on transparency, this is a big part of our value proposition, we always disclose the APR of the loan, we always show the loan cost apples to apples so that you know exactly what you're getting, we show you things like what are the fees, what are the pre-payment penalties, so it's super clear, super transparent, and you know what you're getting. >> It's like the comparison shopping table. >> Exactly. >> You lay it all out and I can make my decisions. >> Exactly. >> And then how long does it usually take on a relatively smooth process given the fact you're already pre-populating the data, it goes out, what does it usually take? >> A lot of our lenders fund within the same day. >> Jeff: Within the same day? >> So you literally with a lot of our lenders, if everything goes right, you can apply within minutes and get funding in your bank account the same business day. >> The money goes through the same system as well. (Jeff chuckles) >> There are lenders, and we have a portfolio of offerings, so we'll work with, we have an SBA lender, we've got work in capital lenders, if you're going through the SBA process it's a lot faster through our process than it would be if you applied through a traditional bank, but it still could take a couple of months in that case, so we make that very clear, when you choose the offering that you want, if you're in need for financing right away, it can happen very quickly, if you're willing to wait a couple more months, in the worst case, in the case of an SBA loan, on average, it's less than a week. >> Well it seems like you have so many pieces in place to make it much more convenient and much more reliable and I guess much more predictable for a small business, what about approval rates then, what, you said three out of ten? >> That's the current. >> On average, is that the current, is that your average? >> Ours is better than that, it's not quite there, you know, we have a really high aspiration on that, where we'd like to be able to get, you know, we'd like to get it closer to 60 or 70 percent over time, the approval rate, so we're still moving in that direction, we've got a great team, we've got tons of innovation and R&D happening right now back in Mountain View, we've got a ton of data scientists that are combing through this data and improving the approval rates all the time, so that's an area where we're innovating and really pushing for our small businesses. >> And so, nice announcement this week, well better than nice, great announcement this week, but you're always looking, as you said, for the next best thing. >> Rania: Yep. >> And so what have you heard from your client base that says okay, we've addressed this, now this is where we need to pivot, this is where we need to go, like what's the next big hurdle or next big challenge that you think you need to handle? >> It's innovating on those three areas I told you, and on each of those three we've made quite a lot of work and quite a lot of headway in the last few years, but there's so much more room, and so like I've said we have this team of phenomenal data scientists working to find those areas of advantage for small businesses where we can help them get approved more often. We've got the team that's trying to really make it to a point where you're in QuickBooks and you can see your financing offer before you even apply. We want to get rid of the application altogether and just service the best offer for you, and then all the prediction for when you're going to need financing and that cash flow prediction, looping in the accountant so the accountant can immediately see all the options you were given and they can talk through them with you. >> And your clients can find out right away, the customers, if they did not get approved. >> Right. >> Where's the trouble area, where did the red light come on? >> That's right. >> Because of the figures you're able to consult with them and help them maybe shore up their bottom line? >> We don't do enough of that today, it's absolutely in our road map, so that's a huge opportunity because we have a relationship with small businesses, it's not like a transaction where you go to a website and you apply for a loan, we're in it for the long term to help small businesses grow and so you can imagine, and this is where we're headed, when you start, you know, you get your first financing, it could be a credit card, and then a year or two later we see that you're financials have improved and we consult you on the next offering and all the way you get better terms because you've been with us for a while and we can help make sure you're getting better financing deals over time. >> It's a really interesting situation, because, you know, hopefully over time, really it becomes, we always talk about kind of looking back, and then predictive and then prescriptive, so in theory, as you're moving down your path, as you're growing your business, it should actually flag you, right, hey, by the way you've got a big event, seasonalities coming up, oh we just noticed you just locked in a big purchase order, somebody's late to pay et cetera, it might be a good time to get actually ahead of the curve before you even know that this event is coming to go ahead and make even up to in making the offer. >> Absolutely, you know, you're getting ready to, you know, for the holidays and have you thought about making sure you've got enough financing to buy as much inventory as you want this year so you can take advantage of the seasonal trends we're seeing. Or we're seeing a lot of retailers, you know, really heavying up on inventory, have you thought about doing that as apart of your strategy, it looks like it could be a good year, so there's so much opportunity there, we can pair every small business owner with a line of credit so that they can manage payroll at any given time and never have to worry about the cash flow ups and downs that come. >> Right, and then I would imagine too, within like those different offers, not only apples to apples across the same type of loan, but maybe you should consider, you know, a factoring on your receivables, versus a capital loan that's capitalized against some equipment or something, cause there's also options within the types of financing that you may want to do. >> So on that we've done quite bit of work. We have lenders in our portfolio that do invoice financing. We've got lenders in our portfolio, Amex working capital terms, that do vendor bill payment through, you know, paying all of your bills that are coming up, we've got as I said SBA loans that will help with long term expansion, we've got that, and we're just continuing to innovate on that too. >> And from the lender point of you, you said you have about a dozen, you're bringing in more, you know, for the opportunity, cause a lot of them probably already have existing relationships with many of these clients, how do they see kind of the opportunity to interface for those clients in this different way through QuickBooks as an intermediary? >> Oh, they love it, because it's very hard for these lenders to go out and acquire new customers, often times they don't have a relationship with these existing customers and they have to go out and do the hard work to acquire customers whereas they're in the QuickBooks ecosystem and, you know, customers really love the opportunity to work with these lenders because we can provide the right advice to them paired with the loan offering, so it works out very well. >> It should be cheaper for them to actually provide those too, cause again you're taking a lot of the headache out. So, before we went live, you talked about some of the numbers, I just want to go through some of the numbers, so you shared the big number 500 million. >> Yep. >> But in terms of kind of an average loan size that you see, in a lifetime value of the loans to some of the customers, I was wondering if you could share some of those statistics. >> Sure, so we see two very different needs for financing from our customer base, there's the work and capital loans, and there's the expansion capital loans, and our customers typically are split between the need for both and at any given time, a business is actually looking for both. They need to smooth over the work and capital and then the expansion capital as well, but our average loan size is about 35,000 dollars today, and it ranges from as little as 2,500 dollars to just smooth a very small cashflow bump that you have, all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the all the way up to 250-500 thousand dollars to do some of the bigger expansions that small businesses are looking to do, and it's really wonderful to be able to help small businesses on both sides of the spectrum because if you're a small business owner, seasonality is really a major pain point. Often times, they'll have most of their business concentrated in the summer months, or potentially the summer months and the winter months, but not the spring and the fall, and so you need, you still have tons of bills, you have employees you need to cover in those off months, and having access to financing where you can get it fairly quickly cause you don't know when those bumps are going to hit, is incredibly valuable. On the flip side, the expansion side, every business owners dream is to expand and it's been amazing to be here over the past few days and hear these stories, you know, Alli Webb on stage yesterday, the founder of Drybar, talking about how she went from one location to 66 in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch in 5 years, and so it's very hard to go into a bank branch and convince them of your grand idea to expand. >> Jeff: Especially if they don't have hair. >> Especially if they don't have hair, she had a hard time... (everyone laughs) >> Her husband and her brother are business partners and they're both bald. >> Yeah, they're sitting with them, they don't have hair either, so. >> So for that reason, it's hard to convince people, and so it's wonderful to be able to help the expansion side of things too. >> Hopefully this has been, if nothing else, a great opportunity for Frick Inc. to find out about the small business college fund. >> Jeff: It's already gone through. >> That quick. >> John: Right, so we'll find out in less than 24 hours. The kids are going to Stanford. >> Alright. >> Or you're going to work at the community college for a bit. Rania we appreciate the time. >> Sure, it was great. >> Very much, thank you for being here. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations on the Amex announcement, and so many other great things you have in the pipeline now to make small business dreams come true. >> Wonderful, thank you very much, it was great to chat with you. >> Thank you very much Rania. Back with more here on the Cube from San Jose in just a moment. (hip tech music)

>> It's the Cube covering IBM cheap Data Officer Strategy Summit brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts Day villain day and still minimum. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We here at the Chief Data Officers Summit that IBM is hosting in Boston. I'm joined by Courtney Abercrombie. According your your title's too long. I'm just gonna call you a cognitive rockstar on >> Alec Crane is >> here from Yusa. System by President, Vice President at that firm. Welcome to the Cube. Great to see you guys. Thank you. So this event I love it. I mean, we first met at the, uh, the mighty chief data officer conference. You were all over that networking with the CEO's helping him out and just really, I think identified early on the importance of this constituency. Why? How did you sort of realize and where have you taken it? >> It's more important than it's ever been. And we're so grateful every time that we see a new chief data officer coming in because you just can't govern and do data by committee. Um, if you really hope to be transformational in your company. All these huge, different technologies that are out there, All this amazing, rich data like weather data and the ability to leverage, you know, social media information, bringing that all together and really establishing an innovation platform for your company. You can't do that by committee. You really have to have a leader in charge of it. and that’s what chief data officers are here to do. And so every time we see one, we're so grateful >> that just so >> that we just heard from Inderpal Bhandari on his recommendation for how you get started. It was pretty precise and prescriptive. But I wonder, Alan. So tell us about the chief data officer role at USAA. Hasn't been around for a while. Of course, it's a regulated business. So probably Maur, data oriented are cognizant than most businesses. But tell us about your journey. >> We started probably about 4 or 5 years ago, and it was a combination of trying to consolidate data and analytics operations and then decentralized them, and we found that there was advantages and pros and cons of doing both. You'd get the efficiencies, but once you got the efficiencies, you'd lose the business expertise, and then we'd have to tow decentralize. So we ended up landing a couple of years ago. What we call a hub and spoke system where we have centralized governance and management of key data assets, uh, data modelling data science type work. And then we still allow the, uh, various lines of business to have their own data offices. And the one I run for USAA is our distribution channels office for all of the data and analytics. And we take about 100,000,000 phone calls a year. About 2,000,000,000 webb interactions. Mobile interactions. We take about 18,000 hours. That's really roughly two years of phone conversation data in per day. Uh, we take about 50,000,000 lines of, uh, Web analytic traffic per day as well. So trying to make sense of that to nurture remember, relationships, reinforce trust and remove obstacles >> for your supporting the agent systems. Is that right? >> I support the agent systems as well as the, um, digital >> systems. Okay. And so the objective is obviously toe to grow the business, keep it running, keep the customers happy. Very operate, agent Just efficient. Okay. Um and so when you that's really interesting. This sort of hub and spoke of decentralization gets you speed and closer to the business. Centralization get you that that efficiency. Do you feel like you found that right balance? I mean, if you think so. I >> think you know, early on, we it was mme or we had more cerebral alignment, you know, meaning that it seemed logical to us. But actually, once the last couple of years, we've had some growing pains with roles, responsibilities, overlaps, some redundancy, those types of things. But I think we've landed in a good place. And that's that's what I'm pretty proud of because we've been able to balance the agility with the governance necessary toe, have good governance and put in place, but then also be able to move at the speed the businessmen. >> So Courtney, one of things we heard one of the themes this morning within IBM it's of the role of the chief Data officer's office is to really empower the lines of business with data so that you can empower your customers is what Bob Tatiana was telling us, right? With data. So how are you doing? That is you have new services. You have processes or how is that all working >> right? We dio We have a lot of things, actually, because we've been working so much with people like Allen's group who have been leaders at, quite frankly, in establishing best practices on even how to set up these husbands votes. A lot of people are, you know, want to talk, Teo, um, the CDO and they've spun off even a lot of CEOs into other organizations, in fact, but I mean, they're really a leader in this area. So one of the things that we've noticed is you know, the thing that gives everybody the biggest grief is trying to figure out how to work with unstructured data. Um, and all this volume of data, it's just insane. And just like I was saying in the panel earlier, only about 5% of your actual internal data is enough to actually create a context around your customers. You really have to be able to go with all this exogenous data to understand what were the bigger ramifications that were going on in any customer event, whether it's a call in or whether it's, uh, you know, I'm not happy today with something that you tried to sell me or something that you didn't respond too fast enough, which I'm sure Alan could, you know, equate to. But so we have this new data as a service that we've put together based on the way the weather data has, the weather company has put their platform together. We're using a lot of the same kind of like micro services that you saw Bob put on the screen. You know, everything from, I mean, open source. As much open sources we can get, get it. And it's all cloud based. So and it's it's ways to digest and mix up both that internal data with all of that big, voluminous external data. >> So I'm interested in. So you get the organizational part down. Least you've settled on approach. What are some of the other big challenges that you face in terms of analytics and cognitive projects? Your organization? How are you dealing with those? >> Well, uh, >> to take a step back, use a We're, uh, financial services company that supports the military and their families. We now have 12 million members, and we're known for our service. And most of the time, those moments of truth, if you will, where our service really shines has been when someone talks to you, us on the phone when those member service reps are giving that incredible service that they're known for on the reason being is that the MSR is the aggregator of all that data. When you call in, it's all about you. There's two screens full of your information and the MSR is not interested in anything else but just serving you, our digital experiences more transactional in orientation. And it was It's more utilitarian, and we're trying to make it more personal, trying to make it more How do we know about you? And so one of the cues that were that were taking from the MSR community through cognitive learning is we like to say the only way to get into the call is to get into the call, and that is to truly get into the speech to text, Then do the text mining on that to see what are the other topics that are coming out that could surface that we're not actually capturing. And then how do we use those topics at a member level two then help inform the digital experience to make it more personal. How do I detect life events? Our MSR's are actually trained to listen for things like words like fiance, marriage moving, maybe even a baby crying in the background. How do we take that knowledge and turn that into something that machine learning can give us insights that can feedback into our digital transact actions. So >> this's what our group. >> It's a big task. So So how are >> you doing that? I mean, it's obviously we always talk about people processing technology. Yeah, break that down for us. I mean, how are you approaching that massive opportunity? >> Part of it is is, uh, you know, I look at it. It is like a set of those, you know, Russian nesting dolls. You know, every time you solve one problem, there's another problem inside of it. The first problem is getting access to the data. You know, where and where do you store? We're taking in two years of data per day of phone call data into a system where you put all that right and then you're where you put a week's worth a month's worth a quarter's worth of data like that. Then once you solve that problem, how do you read Act all that personal information So that that private information that you really don't need that data exhaust that would actually create a liability for you in our in our world so that you can really stay focused on what of the key themes that the member needs? And then the third thing is now had. Now that you've got access to the data, it's transcribed for you. It's been redacted from its P I I type work well, now you need the horse power and of analysts on, we're exploring partnerships with IBM, both locally and in in the States as well as internationally to look at data science as a service and try to understand How can we tap into this huge volume of data that we've got to explore those types of themes that are coming up The biggest challenges in typical transaction logging systems. You have to know what your logging You have to know what you're looking for before you know what to put the date, where to put the data. And so it's almost like you kind of have to already know that it's there to know how much you're acquiring for it and what we need to do more as we pivot more towards machine learning is that we need the data to tell us what's important to look at. And that's really the vat on the value of working with these folks. >> So obviously, date is increasingly on structure we heard this morning and whatever, 80 90% is structured. So here you're no whatever. You're putting it into whatever data fake swamp, ocean, everything center everywhere, and you're using sort of machine learning toe both find signal, but also protected yourself from risk. Right. So you've got a T said you gotta redact private information. So much of that information could be and not not no schema? Absolutely. Okay, So you're where are you in terms of solving that problem in the first inning or you deeper than that, >> we're probably would say beyond the first inning, but we so we've kind of figured out what that process is to get the data and all the piece parts working together. We've made some incredible insights already. Things that people, you know, I had no idea that was there. Um, but, uh, I'd say we still have a long way to go. Is particularly terms of scaling scaling the process, scaling the thie analytics, scaling the partnerships, figuring out how do we get the most throughput? I would say it's It's one of those things. We're measuring it on, maybe having a couple of good wins this year. A couple of really good projects that have come across. We want to kind of take that tube out 10 projects next year in this space. And that's how we're kind of measuring the velocity and the success >> data divas. I walked away and >> there was one of them Was breakfast this morning. Data divas. You hold this every year. >> D'oh! It's growing. Now we got data, >> dudes. So I was one of the few data dudes way walked in >> one of the women chief date officers. I got no problem with people calling me a P. >> I No. Yeah, I just sell. Sit down. Really? Bath s o. But also, >> what's the intent of that? What learning is that you take out of those? >> I think it's >> more. It's You know, you could honestly say this isn't just a data Debo problem. This is also, you know, anybody who feels like they're not being heard. Um, it's really easy to get drowned out in a lot of voices when it comes to data and analytics. Um, everybody has an opinion. I think. Remember, Ursula is always saying, Ah, all's fair in love, war and data. Um and it feels like, you know, sometimes you go, I'll come to the table and whoever has the loudest voice and whoever bangs their test the loudest, um, kind of wins the game. But I think in this case, you know, a lot of women are taking these roles. In fact, we saw, you know, a while back from Gardner that number about 25% of chief data officers are actually women because the role is evolving out of the business lines as opposed Thio more lines. And so I mean, it makes sense that, you know, were natural collaborators. I mean, like the biggest struggle and data governance isn't setting up frameworks. It's getting people to actually cooperate and bring data to the table and talk about their business processes that support that. And that's something that women do really well. But we've got to find our voice and our strength and our resolve. And we've got to support each other in trying to bring more diverse thinking to the table, you know? So it's it's all those kinds of issues and how do you balance family? I mean, >> we're seeing >> more and more. You know, I don't know if you know this, but there's actual statistics around millennials and that males are actually starting to take on more more role of being the the caregiver in the family. So I mean as we see that it's an interesting turnabout because now all the sudden, it's no longer, you know, women having that traditional role of, you know, I gotta always be home. Now we're actually starting to see a flip of that, which is which is, >> You know, I think it's kind of welcome. My husband's definitely >> I say he's a better parent than me. >> Friday. It's >> honest he'll watch this and he >> can thank me later that it was >> a great discussion this morning. Alan, I want to get your feedback on this event and also you participate in a couple of sessions yesterday. Maybe you could share with our audience Some of the key takeaways in the event of general and specific ones that you worked on yesterday. >> Well, I've been fortunate to come to the event for a couple of years now. And when we were just what 50 or so of us that were showing up? So, you know, I see that the evolution just in a couple of years time conversations have really changed. First meeting that we had people were saying, Where do you report in the organization? Um, how many people do you have? What do you do for your job? They were very different answers to any of that everywhere. From I'm an independent contributor that's a data evangelist to I run legions of data analysts and reporting shops, you know, and so forth and everything in between. And so what I see what it's offers in first year was really kind of a coalescing of what it really means to be a data officer in the company that actually happened pretty quickly in my mind, Um, when by seeing it through through the lens of my peers here, the other thing was when you when you think about the topics the topics are getting a lot more pointed. They're getting more pointed around the monetization of data communicating data through visualization, storytelling, key insights that you, you know, using different technologies. And we talked a lot yesterday about storytelling and storytelling is not through visual days in storytelling is not just about like who has the most, you know, colors on on a slide or or ah you know, animation of your bubble charts and things like that. But sometimes the best stories are told with the most simple charts because they resonate with your customers. And so what I think is it's almost like kind of getting a back to the basics when it comes to taking data and making it meaningful. We're only going to grow our organizations and data and data scientists and analysts. If we can communicate to the rest of the organization, our value and the key to creating that value is they can see themselves in our data. >> Yeah, the visit is we like to call it sometimes is critical to that to that storytelling. Sometimes I worry and we go onto these conferences and you go into a booth and look what we can do with machine learning, and we would just be looking at just this data. So what do I do? What >> I do with all this? Yeah. >> I don't know how it would make sense of it. So So is there a special storyteller role within your organization or you all storytellers? Do you cross train on that? Or >> it's funny you'd ask that one of the gentlemen of my team. He actually came to me about six months ago, and he says I'm really good at at the analysis part, but I really have a passion for things like Photoshopped things like, uh uh, uh the various, uh, video and video editing type software. He says I want to be your storyteller. I want to be creating a team of data and analytics storytellers for the rest of the organization. So we pitched the idea to our central hub and spoke leadership group. They loved it. They loved the idea. And he is now, um, oversubscribed. You would say in terms of demand for how do you tell the data? How do you tell the data story and how it's moving the business forward? And that takes the form kind of everything from infographics tell you also about how do you make it personal when, when? Now 7,000 m s. Ours have access to their own data. You know, really telling that at a at a very personal level, almost like a vignette of animus are who's now able to manage themselves using the data that they were not able able tto have before we're in the past, only managers had access to their performance results. This video, actually, you know, pulls on the heartstrings. But it it not only does that, but it really tells the story of how doing these types of things and creating these different data assets for the rest of your organization can actually have a very meaningful benefit to how they view work and how they view autonomy and how they view their own personal growth. >> That's critical, especially in a decentralized organization. Leased a quasi decentralized organization, getting everybody on the same page and understand You know what the vision is and what the direction is. It s so often if you don't have that storytelling capability, you have thousands of stories, and a lot of times there's dissonance. I mean, I'm not saying there's not in your in your organization, but have you seen the organization because of that storytelling capability become Mohr? Yeah, Joe. At least Mohr sort of effective and efficient, moving forward to the objectives. Well, >> you know, as a as a data person, I'm always biased thatyou know data, you know, can win an argument if presented the right way. It's the The challenge is when you're trying to overcome or go into a direction. And in this case, it was. We wanted to give more autonomy. Toothy MSR community. Well, the management of that call center were 94 year old company. And so the management of that of that call center has been doing things a certain way for many, many, many, many years. And the manager's having access to the data. The reps not That was how we did things, you know. And so when you make a change like that, there's a lot of hesitation of what is this going to do to us? How is this going to change? And what we're able to show with data and with through these visualizations is you really don't have anything to worry about? You're only gonna have upside, you know, in this conversation because at the end of the day, what's going to empower people this having access and power of >> their own destiny? Yeah, access is really the key isn't because we've all been in the meetings where somebody stands up and they've got some data point in there pounding the table, >> right? Oftentimes it's a man, all right. It >> is a powerful pl leader on jamming data down your throats, and you don't necessarily know the poor sap that he's, you know, beating up. Doesn't think Target doesn't have access to the data. This concept of citizen data scientists begins to a level that playing field doesn't want you seeing that >> it does. And I want to actually >> come back to what you're saying because there's a larger thought there, which is that we don't often address, and that's this change banishment concept. I mean, we we look at all these. I mean, everybody looks at all these technologies and all this information, and how much data can you possibly get your >> hands on? But at the end of >> the day, it's all about trying to create an outcome. A some joint outcome for the business and it could be threatening. It could be threatening to the C suite people who are actually deploying the use of these data driven tools because >> it may go >> against their gut. And, you >> know, oftentimes the poor messenger of that, >> When when you have to be the one that stands up and go against that, that senior vice presidents got it, the one who's pounding and saying No, but I know better >> That could be a >> tough position to be in without having some sort of change management philosophy going on with the introduction of data and analytics and with the introduction of tools, because there's a whole reframing that, Hey, my gut instinct that got me here all the way to the top doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to continue to scale in this new world with all of all of our competitors and all these, you know, massive changes going on in the market place right now. My guts not going to get me there anymore. So it's hard, it's hard, and I think a lot of executives don't really know to invest in that change management, if you know that goes with it that you need to change philosophies and mindsets and slowly introduced visualizations and things that get people slowly onboard, as opposed to just throwing it at him and saying here, believe it. >> Think I mean, it wasn't that >> long ago. Certainly this this millennium, where you know, publications like Harvard Business Review had, uh, cover stories on why gut feel, you know, beats, you know, analysis by paralysis. >> That seems to be changing. And >> the data purists would say the data doesn't lie. It was long as you could interpret it correctly. Let the data tell us what to do, as opposed to trying to push an agenda. But they're still politics. >> There's just things out >> there that you can't even perceive of that air coming your way. I mean, like, Blockbuster Netflix, Alibaba versus standard retailers. I mean, >> there's just things out >> there that without the use of things like machine learning and being comfortable with the use, the things like mission learning a lot of people think of that kind of stuff is >> Well, don't get your >> hoodoo voodoo into my business. You know, I don't know what that algorithm stuff does. It's >> going Yeah, I mean, e. I mean to say, What the hell is this? And now, yeah, it's coming and >> you need to get ready. >> There's an >> important role, though I think instinct, you know, you don't want to dismiss a 20 year leader in a particular operations because they've they've they've getting themselves where they're at because in large part, maybe they didn't have all the data. But they learned through a lot of those things, and I think it's when you marry those things up. And if you kenbrell in a kind of humble way to that kind of leader and win them over and show how it may be validating some of their, um uh yeah, that some of their points Or maybe how it explains it in a different way. Maybe it's not exactly what they want to see, but it's helping to inform their business, and you come into him as a partner, as opposed to gotcha, you know. Then then you know you can really change the business that way. And >> what is it? Was Linda Limbic brain is it just doesn't feel right. Is that the part of the brain that informs you that? And so It's hard to sometimes put, but you're right. Uh, there there is a component of this which is gut feel instinct and probably relates to to experience. So it's It's like, uh, when, when, uh, Deep blue beat Garry Kasparov. We talk about this all the time. It turns out that the best chess player in the world isn't a machine. It's a It's a human in the machine. >> That's right. That's exactly right. It's always the training that people training these things, that's where it gets its information. So at the end of the day, you're right. It's always still instinct to some >> level. I could We gotta go. All right. Last word on the event. You know what's next? >> Don't love my team. Data officer. Miss, you guys. It is good >> to be here. We appreciate it. All right, We'll leave it there. Thank you, guys. Thank you. All right, keep right. Everybody, this is Cuba. Live from IBM Chief Data Officer, Summit in Boston Right back. My name is Dave Volante.