>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program". I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California doing the remote interviews, during this pandemic we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners and here to feature the most Innovative Connect Deployment. We have Accenture of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada known as ESDC. Guys, congratulations Joel Marchildon, Accenture Canada, managing director and Benoit Long, ESDC of Canada chief transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on, and congratulations on the award. >> Thank you. >> Thank you and nice to be here >> So obviously, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing you got a business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this Connect has been interesting. Its been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the Public Sector Summit with Teresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution that is starving and deserving of the award? >> Maybe I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that was stood up fairly quickly, over the course of about four days and really in support of benefit that the Government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end, its a fully functioning featured contact center solution. Includes an IVR. And, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents. So that's the the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to how it came about so quickly. >> Yeah, we're happy to actually, we were obviously like every other government facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need. The jobs are being lost, our current systems were in trouble because of their age and their archaic nature. And so the challenge was quickly how do we actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called the Canada emergency response benefit that we had to support clients directly and so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a firestorm, to say, well, what could you do? And how could you help. And so we had an established relationship with a number of our system integrators, including Accenture. And we were able to run a competition very rapidly, and Accenture won. And then we deployed in, as Joel said, in a matter of four days, what for us was an exceptional and high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in a pandemic of all things, but with the uncertainty that comes with loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody a real; a human being, as well as to be able to efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, was pretty fundamental for us. So the the people in the groups that we're talking through here we're speaking to millions of people, who were literally being asked to accept the payment rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and of high quality personally as a technology solution, it would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >> And well, that's a great point. One of the things that you see with the pandemic, its a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right. So like other things, you can kind of plan for things, hypothetical, you got scenarios. But this is truly a case where every day counts, every minute counts, because humans are involved. There's no ROI calculation. Its not like, well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think. This is real results, fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud, can I stand up something quick, and you did it with a partner, okay. This is like not, like normal. Its like, its like unheard of, right. Four days, with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room. As you guys knew this was here. Take us through through what happened. >> So I think I can start. As you can imagine the set of executives that were overseeing the payment process was an exceptional, it was like a bunker, frankly, for about two weeks. We had to suspend the normal operations of the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody has seen before the level of simplicity was maximized in order to deliver the funds quickly. So you can imagine its a Warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around timing. Timing is fundamental. People are literally losing their jobs, there is no support, there is no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So, and the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there. And there is straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment, if you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed is unheard of on all fronts. When it came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support in a service context, the clients that were desperate to reach us, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of calls a day. We're not talking a few thousand here, ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in overtaken by volumes, call centers, because we had our regular ones still operating. Over a million calls were coming in the day. With the capacity to answer 10s of thousands and so the reality is that the Call Centers that we put up here, very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular call centers. And that speaks to the the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it. And I have to say maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate the conditions to lead to this are rare. But I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often. Why can't we operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances, now realizing the new normal will never be the same. That these types of solutions and technology and their scalability, their agility, their speed of deployment, is frankly something we want we want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do them during normal timeline conditions, but even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us a while I can actually tell you because I was the lead technologist to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it, and five years to install it. That's the last experience we have of call center, enterprise scale capabilities. And in this case we went from years, to literally days. >> Well, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say, why didn't we do this before? The waterfall meetings getting everyone arguing kind of gets in the way and the old software model, I want to come back to the transformation Benoit a minute, Because I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel, because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently, this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is, "We're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that, a consulting firm, taking our times trying to get a pound of flesh from the client." This is an example of my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this is not new to Accenture. So take us through how you guys reacted, because one, you got to sync up and get the cadence of what Benoit was trying to do sync up and execute take us through what happened on your side. >> Yeah, I mean, so its an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly. And, we've had to look at, to get this specific solution out the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that we had to get pretty agile ourselves internally on, how we go through approvals, etc, to make sure that we were there to support Benoit and his team and I think that we saw this as a broader opportunity to really respond to it. To help Canada in a time of need. So I think we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization would have taken, could have taken weeks, right, and we were down to hours and a lot of instances. So it forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean to Benoit's point I think this is really going to hopefully change the way... It illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how quickly we can look at problems and we reduce deployment timeframes from years to months and months to weeks, etc. For solutions like this. And I think the AWS platform specifically in this case, Benoit touched on a lot of things beat the market scalability, but just as the benefit itself has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is, its simple to use technologically. I mean, we trained, as I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend. And they're not normal agents. These were people who were furloughed from other jobs potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents, by training, but they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours. And I think, from that perspective, that was important as well to have something that people could use to answer those calls that we know that we knew were going to come. >> Benoit this is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know its under circumstances of the pandemic and you guys did solve a big problem really fast and saved lives and then help people get on with their day. But transformation is about having people closest to the problem, execute. And also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This is kind of the playbook. Amazon came in and said, "Hey, you want to stand something up?" You wired it together the solution quickly, you have close to it. Looking back now its almost like, hey, why aren't we doing this before, as you said, and then you had to bring people in, who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This is the playbook to share your thoughts on this because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time, and it actually is playing out in real time. >> Well, I would definitely endorse the idea that its a playbook. Its I would say its an ideal and dream playbook to bid like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically. It is exactly that. So a lot of things had to happen quickly but also correctly, because you can't pull all these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly I think, as Canadians we were very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this but also literally putting themselves into these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond and quickly do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change, I was shocked into existence. I mean, I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some higher level of energy was thrown in quickly, mobilize everybody all at once. Nobody was said he is sitting around saying, I wonder if we have changed management covered off, this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental, if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly, then the best pay your plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of spontaneous driving change, exception, acceptance, and adoption, is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now will be continuing that kind of progression going forward. And we now found the way and we certainly use the way to work with the private sector in an innovative capacity and innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and scalable, to be able to pull all of the organization all at once very rapidly and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning, we had 10 year plans for our big transformations, because some of our programs are the most important in the country in many ways. We support people about 8 million Canadians a month, depending on the benefits payments that we deliver. And they're the most marginal needing and requires our support from seniors, to the unemployed, to job seekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself, and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have its just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us a way that we had never forecast, and I have to say I had to throw up my 10 year plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 to nine to eight year plans going forward. And so its exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then, obviously as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible. So the benefits of all these solutions can make a difference in people's lives. >> What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable, but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time to leverage the people and the resources you have. And take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that's needs to be refreshed, you can always be on that bleeding edge. And this just brings up the DevOps kind of mindset, agility, the lean startup, the lean company, this is a team effort between Amazon Accenture and ESDC. Its, pass, shoot, score really fast. So this is the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, new pass, shoot, score combination because you got speed, you got agility, you're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary in solving problems? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we were able to show in what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate, getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens, that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly, is what's becoming more important, obviously, security and privacy, those things are of the utmost importance as well. But its ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, test it again, and just always be iterating on the solution. Like I can say what we put out on April 6, within four days, is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added an integrated workforce management solution from NICE, and we added some other ISVs to do outbound dialing from Acquia and things like that. So the solution has grown from that MVP. And I think that's one other thing that's going to be a big takeaway. If you're not going to do anything till you got the final end product out there, then its going to be late. So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >> Benoit, talk about that dynamic because that's about building blocks, on foundational things and then services. Its the cloud model. >> Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwartz, which I believe you are quite familiar with. And, I spent an hour and a half with him. We were talking and he was so exciting and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him and I used to be the chief technology officer for the Government of Canada, right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting. And I'm sure its possible in some other places, and maybe in some other countries where they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon. I'll have to apologize for not believing him enough. I think the building blocks of Agile the building blocks sprints and MVPs. I mean, they're enough fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest Harriers and scariest problems technologically. And then from a business perspective, service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult. Arduous you make change over years, not months, not days, for sure. And so I think that new method is not only a different way of working, its a completely revamped way of assembling solutions. And I think that the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are going to be assembled. We know in working, I'm saying this in front of Joel, he doesn't know that yet. (all laughing) (indistinct) partners. We're going to be assembling MVP maps of an entire long program and its going to be iterative, it is going to be designed built, it will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, as much as we can govern it because the government is... We may have changed a lot, but the government is not necessarily caught on to most of these approaches. But the reality is that, that's where we're heading. And I will say, I'll close perhaps on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization, speed and solutioning, and being engaged rapidly, you just can't take that away from an organization once they've tasted that. If you let them down, well, they'll remember and frankly, they do remember now because they want more of this. And its going to be hard. But its a better hard, better challenge, than the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterate quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the the other comment I would add is most of this was driven by a client need. And that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to a common focus. If it had been just about, well, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better as providers. Yeah, would it work perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilization that comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus, and then we drive everyone to that solution. >> Shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new wave, you're oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of this just look could feel its success and performance. So as people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice synergy. This is a key! Joe, take us home here on the Accenture. The award winner, you guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have had the opportunity to help. And it was a it was a complete team effort and continues to be. Its not a bunch of eccentric technologists in the background doing this. The commitment from everyone to get this in place and to continue to improve it from Benoit team and from other folks across the government has been paramount to the success. So its been a fantastic if world win like experience and look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been well said, I think one thing that's done is its created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Benoit team. >> Well, congratulations for the most innovative Connect Deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the Hockey-Reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. Its pass, shoot, score every time and its contagious. (Benoit laughs) Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and congratulations for winning the election. Take care! >> Thanks. >> Take care. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's Coverage "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards" show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Everyone welcome back from the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Aus re Mars. It's one of the re shows, as we know, reinvent is the big show. Now they have focus, shows reinforces coming up that security Remar is here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, director of machine learning thought leadership with AWS. Great to see you again. Yeah. Give alumni welcome back here. Back every time we got deep racer, always to talk >>About, Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >>So I want to get into the deep racer in context here, but first re Mars is a show. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press. Um, not a lot of news, cuz it's not a newsy show. It's more of a builder kind of a convergence show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a, a moment in time that I think's gonna be one of those timeless moments where we're gonna look back and saying that year at re Mars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping machine learning, scaling robotics is hot. It's now transforming fast. Just like the back office data center did years ago. Yeah. And so like a surge is coming. >>Yeah. >>What, what's your take of this show? >>Yeah. And all of these three or four components are all coming together. Right. And they're intersecting rather than just being in silos. Right. So we're seeing machine learning, enabled perception sort of on robots, um, applied to space and sort of these, uh, extra sort of application initiatives. Um, and that's, what's really exciting about this show is seeing all these things come together and all the industry-wide examples, um, of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So, >>So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them? This show? What, what, what they're gonna be what's in it for me, what's all this show. What does it mean? >>Yeah. It's just a glimpse into where things are headed. Right. And it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. It's sort of the beginning of the wave of, um, you know, these sort of advanced capabilities that we're gonna see imbued in applications, um, across all different industries. >>Awesome. Well, great to have you in the cube. Every time we have an event we wanna bring you on because deep racers become a, the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following. It's become massive following. Um, and which started out as an IOT, I think raspberry pie first time was like a, like >>A, we did a little camera initially camera >>And it was just a kind of a fun, little clever, I won't say hack, but just having a project that just took on a life OFS own, where are we? What's the update with racer you're here with the track. Yeah, >>Possibly >>You got the track and competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there. Boston dynamics. >>Well we'll, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah. So deep razor, you know, is the fastest way to get hands on with machine learning. You know, we designed it as, uh, a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using, uh, a simulation, uh, to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So deep racer includes a 3d racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car. So you can take, uh, the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this one 18th scale, um, kind of RC car. That's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra, uh, Intel, X, 86 processor inside here. Um, and this thing will drive itself, autonomously around the track. And of course what's a track and uh, some cars driving around it without a little competition. So we've got the deep racer league that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's >>It's, it's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models cuz they go off the track and I see people and it's oh my, then they gotta reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch and every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list that reinvent, it's almost like a, a super score gets you up. Yeah. Take, take us through the reinvents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our, our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at re Mars and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical, uh, races. Um, and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. Yeah. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. Um, so we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical and they, the top ones of them come together at reinvent every year in November, December. Um, and we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where these guys get the field gets narrowed to 10 racers and then those 10 racers, uh, race to hold up the championship cup and, um, earn, earn, uh, you know, a whole set of prizes, either cash or, or, you know, scholarships or, you know, tuition funds, whatever the, uh, the developer is most interested >>In. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on the cube because I I'm smiling. That's, it's so much fun. I mean, if I had not been with the cube anyway, I'd love to do this. Um, would you ever imagine when you first started this, that it would be such so popular and at the rise of eSports? So, you know, discord is booming. Yeah. The QB has a discord channel now. Sure, sure. Not that good on it yet, but we'll get there, but just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who wanna compete. You never thought that would be this big. We, >>We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched deep racer, you know, we envisioned this as a way for, you know, developers who had already graduated from school. They were in a company they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies. And they're saying, this is really fun. Like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and national Australia bank all adopting deep racer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. Um, the second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use deep racer because you needed an AWS account. You had to have a credit card. You might, you might get billed. There was a free tier involved. Um, so what we did this past year was we launched the deep racer student league, um, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college, uh, deep Razer student includes 10 hours a month of free training, um, so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win, win prizes. >>So they don't have to go onto the dark web hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a deep Razer that's right. They can now come in on their own. >>That's right. That's right. They can log into that virtual the virtual environment, um, and get access. And, and one of the other things that we realized, um, and, and that's a common kind of, uh, realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning. But also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners? Um, and this applies to the, the, the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, Hey, you know, um, the world's gonna see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with, um, you know, underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of deep Bracer student. So now students, um, can register and opt into the scholarship program and we're gonna give out, uh, Udacity scholarships to 2000 students, um, at the end of this year who compete in AWS deep racer student racers, and also go through all of the learning modules online. >>Okay. Hold on, lets back up. Cuz it sounds, this sounds pretty cool. All right. So we kind went fast on that a little bit slow today at the end of the day. So if they sign up for the student account, which is lowered the batteries for, and they Intel and a desk, this is a courseware for the machine learning that's right. So in order to participate, you gotta take some courseware, check the boxes and, and, and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with the scholarship after the fact. >>So Intel's a partner of ours in, in putting this on. So it's both, um, helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who, um, get qualified for the scholarship and, and win one of those 2000 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships, uh, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel, um, professionals will help mentor these students, uh, give them career advice, give them technical advice. C >>They'll they're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just gonna get to data here. So is it money or credits for the, for the training? >>That's the scholarship or both? Yes. So, so the, the student training is free for students. Yep. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just, you log in and you get your account. Um, then the 2000, uh, Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to, to the winners of the student, um, scholarship program. It's a four month long, uh, class on Python programming for >>AI so's real education. Yeah. It's like real, real, so ones here's 10 hours. Here's check the box. Here's here's the manual. Yep. >>Everybody gets access to that. That's >>Free. >>Yep. >>To the student over 16. Yes. Free. So that probably gonna increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now? Yeah. In terms of scope to scale here for me. Yeah. Scope it >>Out. What's the numbers we've, we've been, uh, pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the deep racer student program and of those over 30,000 have opted into that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest, um, from across the globe in, in this virtual students, um, opportunity, you know, and students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun, deep racer kind of hands on racing. Um, and obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity >>Or how many people are in the AWS deep racer, um, group. Now, because now someone's gotta work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, >>You know, we're pretty efficient with what we, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of, um, what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience in viewing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements. You know, one of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a discord channel, so not only can the students get hands on, but they also have this built in community of other students now to help support them bounce ideas off of and, you know, improve their learning. >>Awesome. So what's next, take us through after this event and what's going on for you more competitions. >>Yeah. So we're gonna be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico city, you know, uh, this week we were in Milan, um, you know, we've got some AWS public sector, um, activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in, um, Ottawa in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in, um, Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events, both for students as well as for the professionals who wanna compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at reinvent. So we'll be back here in Vegas, um, at the beginning of December where our champions will, uh, compete to ho to come. >>So you guys are going to all the summits, absolutely. Most of the summits or >>All of them, anytime there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to >>The track is always open. >>Absolutely. All >>Right. Well, thanks for coming on the cube with the update. Appreciate it, >>Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be >>Here. Pleasure to know you appreciate it. Love that program. All right. Cube coverage here. Deep race are always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events, more exciting than the cube. Some say, but uh, almost great to have you on Mike. Uh, great success. Check it out free to students. The barrier's been lower to get in every robotics club. Every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. Uh, it's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. There's one to learn that. All right. Cube coverage. Coming back after this short break.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante the pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital but also highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication collaboration and chaotic responses by virtually every major company in the planet the solar winds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect moreover the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cyber criminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are now met with counterattacks designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities the only upshot is the cyber security market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll provide our quarterly update of the security industry and share new survey data from etr and thecube community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare we'll also share our thoughts on the game of 3d chest that octa ceo todd mckinnon is playing against the market now we all know this market is complicated fragmented and fast moving and this next chart says it all it's an interactive graphic from optiv a denver colorado based si that's focused on cyber security they've done some really excellent research and put together this awesome taxonomy and mapped vendor names therein and this helps users navigate the complex security landscape and there are over a dozen major sectors high-level sectors within the security taxonomy in nearly 60 sub-sectors from monitoring vulnerability assessment identity asset management firewalls automation cloud data center sim threat detection and intelligent endpoint network and so on and so on and so on but this is a terrific resource and can help you understand where players fit and help you connect the dots in the space now let's talk about what's going on in the market the dynamics in this crazy mess of a landscape are really confusing sometimes now since the beginning of cyber time we've talked about the increasing sophistication of the adversary and the back and forth escalation between good and evil and unfortunately this trend is unlikely to stop here's some data from carbon black's annual modern bank heist report this is the fourth and of course now vmware's brand highlights the carbon black study since the acquisition and it catalyzed the creation of vmware's cloud security division destructive malware attacks according to the recent study are up 118 percent from last year now one major takeaway from the report is that hackers aren't just conducting wire fraud they are 57 of the bank surveyed saw an increase in wire fraud but the cyber criminals are also targeting non-public information such as future trading strategies this allows the bad guys to front run large block trades and profit it's become very lucrative practice now the prevalence of so-called island hopping is up 38 from already elevated levels this is where a virus enters a company's supply chain via a partner and then often connects with other stealthy malware downstream these techniques are more common where the malware will actually self-form with other infected parts of the supply chain and create actions with different signatures designed to identify and exfiltrate valuable information it's a really complex problem of major concern is that 63 of banking respondents in the study reported that responses to incidents were then met with retaliation designed to intimidate or initiate ransomware attacks to extract a final pound of flesh from the victim notably the study found that 75 percent of csos reported to the cio which many feel is not the right regime the study called for a rethinking of the right cyber regime where the cso has increased responsibility in a direct reporting line to the ceo or perhaps the co with greater exposure to boards of directors so many thanks to vmware and tom kellerman specifically for sharing this information with us this past week great work by your team now some of the themes that we've been talking about for several quarters are shown in the lower half of the chart cloud of course is the big driver thanks to work from home and the pandemic to pandemic and the interesting corollary of course is we see a rapid rethinking of endpoint and identity access management and the concept of zero trust in a recent esg survey two-thirds of respondents said that their use of cloud computing necessitated a change in how they approach identity access management now as shown in the chart from optiv the market remains highly fragmented and m a is of course way up now based on our research it looks like transaction volume has increased more than 40 percent just in the last five months so let's dig into the m a the merger and acquisition trends for just a moment we took a five month snapshot and we were able to count about 80 deals that were completed in that time frame those transactions represented more than 20 billion dollars in value some of the larger ones are highlighted here the biggest of course being the toma bravo taking proof point private for a 12 plus billion dollar price tag the stock went from the low 130s and is trading in the low 170s based on 176 dollar per share offer so there's your arbitrage folks go for it perhaps the more interesting acquisition was auth 0 by octa for 6.5 billion which we're going to talk about more in a moment there's more private equity action we saw as insight bought armis and iot security play and cisco shelled out 730 million dollars for imi mobile which is more of an adjacency to cyber but it's going to go under cisco's security and applications business run by g2 patel but these are just the tip of the iceberg some of the themes that we see connecting the dots of these acquisitions are first sis like accenture atos and wipro are making moves in cyber to go local they're buying secops expertise as i say locally in places like france germany netherlands canada and australia that last mile that belly-to-belly intimate service israel israeli-based startups chalked up five acquired companies in the space over the last five months also financial services firms are getting into the act with goldman and mastercard making moves to own its own part of the stack themselves to combat things like fraud and identity theft and then finally numerous moves to expand markets octa with zero crowdstrike buying a log management company palo alto picking up devops expertise rapid seven shoring up its kubernetes chops tenable expanding beyond insights and going after identity interesting fortinet filling gaps in a multi-cloud offering sale point extending to governance risk and compliance grc zscaler picked up an israeli firm to fill gaps in access control and then vmware buying mesh 7 to secure modern app development and distribution services so tons and tons of activity here okay so let's look at some of the etr data to put the cyber market in context etr uses the concept of market share it's one of the key metrics which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set so for each sector it calculates the number of respondents for that sector divided by the total to get a sense for how prominent the sector is within the cio and i.t buyer communities okay this chart shows the full etr sector taxonomy with security highlighted across three survey periods april last year january this year in april this year now you wouldn't expect big moves in market share over time so it's relatively stable by sector but the big takeaway comes from observing which sectors are most prominent so you see that red line that dotted line imposed at the sixty percent level you can see there are only six sectors above that line and cyber security is one of them okay so we know that security is important in a large market but this puts it in the context of the other sectors however we know from previous breaking analysis episodes that despite the importance of cyber and the urgency catalyzed by the pandemic budgets unfortunately are not unlimited and spending is bounded it's not an open checkbook for csos as shown in this chart this is a two-dimensional graphic showing market share in the horizontal axis or pervasiveness and net score in the vertical axis net score is etr's measurement of spending velocity and we've superimposed a red line at 40 percent because anything over 40 percent we consider extremely elevated we've filtered and limited the number of sectors to simplify the graphic and you can see in the sectors that we've highlighted only the big four four are above that forty percent line ai containers rpa and cloud they exceed that sort of forty percent magic water line information security you can see that is highlighted and it's respectable but it competes for budget with other important sectors so this of course creates challenges for organization because not only are they strapped for talent as we've reported they like everyone else in it face ongoing budget pressures research firm cybersecurity ventures estimates that in 2021 6 trillion dollars worldwide will be lost on cyber crime conversely research firm canalis pegs security spending somewhere around 60 billion dollars annually idc has it higher around 100 billion so either way we're talking about spending between one to one point six percent annually of how much the bad guys are taking out that's peanuts really when you consider the consequences so let's double click into the cyber landscape a bit and further look at some of the companies here's that same x y graphic with the company's etr captures from respondents in the cyber security sector that's what's shown on the chart here now the usefulness of the red lines is 20 percent on the horizontal indicates the largest presence in the survey and the magic 40 percent line that we talked about earlier shows those firms with the most elevated momentum only microsoft and palo alto exceed both high water marks of course splunk and cisco are prominent horizontally and there are numerous companies to the left of the 20 percent line and many above that 40 percent high water mark on the vertical axis now in the bottom left quadrant that includes many of the legacy names that have been around for a long time and there are dozens of companies that show spending momentum on their platforms i.e above single digits so that picture is like the first one we showed you very very crowded space but so let's filter it a bit and only include companies in the etr survey that had at least a hundred responses so an n of a hundred or greater so it's a little easy to read but still it's kind of crowded when you think about it okay so same graphic and we've superimposed the data that determined the plot position over in the bottom right there so it's net score and shared n including only companies with more than 100 n so what does this data tell us about the market well microsoft is dominant as always it seems in all dimensions but let's focus on that red line for a moment some of the names that we've highlighted over the past two years show very well here first i want to talk about palo alto networks pre-covet as you might recall we highlighted the valuation divergence between palo alto and fortinet and we said fortinet was executing better on its cloud strategy and palo alto was at the time struggling with the transition especially with its go to market and its sales force compensation and really refreshing its portfolio but we told you that we were bullish on palo alto networks at the time because of its track record and the fact that cios consistently told us that they saw palo alto as a thought leader in the space that they wanted to work with they said that palo alto was the gold standard the best especially larger company cisos so that gave us confidence that palo alto a very well-run company was going to get its act together and perform better and palo alto has just done just that as we expected they've done very well and they've been rapidly moving customers to the next generation of platforms and we're very impressed by the company's execution and the stock has generally reflected that now some other names that hit our radar and the etr data a couple of years ago continue to perform well crowdstrike z-scaler sales sail point and cloudflare a cloudflare just reported and beat earnings but was off the stock fell on headwinds for tech overall the big rotation but the company is doing very well and they're growing rapidly and they have momentum as you can see from the etr data and we put that double star around proof point to highlight that it was worthy of fetching 12 and a half billion dollars from private equity firm so nice exit there supporting the continued control consolidation trend that we've predicted in cyber security now let's turn our attention to octa and auth zero this is where it gets interesting and is a clever play for octa we think and we want to drill into it a bit octa is acquiring auth zero for big money why well we think todd mckinnon octa ceo wants to run the table on identity and then continue to expand his tam he has to do that to justify his lofty valuation so octa's ascendancy around identity and single sign sign-on is notable the fragmented pictures that we've shown you they scream out for simplification and trust and that's what octa brings but it competes with some major players most notably microsoft with active directory so look of course microsoft is going to dominate in its massive customer base but the rest of the market that's like jump ball it's wide open and we think mckinnon saw the opportunity to go dominate that sector now octa comes at this from an enterprise perspective bringing top-down trust to the equation and throwing a big blanket over all the discrete sas platforms and unifying employee access octa's timing was perfect it was founded in 2009 just as the massive sasification trend was happening around crm and hr and service management and cloud etc but the one thing that octa didn't have that auth 0 does is serious developer chops while octa was crushing it with its enterprise sales strategy auth 0 was laser focused on developers and building a bottoms up approach to identity by acquiring auth0 octa can dominate both sides of the barbell and then capture the fat middle so yes it's a pricey acquisition but in our view it's a great move by mckinnon now i don't know mckinnon personally but last week i spoke to arun shrestha who's the ceo of security specialist beyond id they're a platinum services partner of octa and there a zero trust expert he worked for octa for a number of years and shared with me a bit about mckinnon's style and think big approach arun said something that caught my attention he said firewalls used to be the perimeter now people are and while that's self-serving to octa and probably beyond id it's true people apps and data are the new perimeter and they're not in one location and that's the point now unfortunately i had lined up an interview with dia jolly who was the chief product officer at octa in a cube alum for this past week knowing that we were running this segment in this episode but she unfortunately fell ill the day of our interview and had to cancel but i want to follow up with her and understand how she's thinking about connecting the dots with auth 0 with devs and enterprises and really test our thesis there this is a really interesting chess match that's going on let's look a little deeper into that identity space this chart here shows some of the major identity players it has some of the leaders in the identity market and there's a breakdown of etr's net score now net score comprises five elements the lime green is we're adding the platform new the forest green is we're spending six percent or more relative to last year the gray is flat send plus or minus flat spend plus or minus five percent the pinkish is spending less and the bright red is where exiting the platform retiring now you subtract the red from the green and that gets you the result for net score which you can see superimposed on the right hand chart at the bottom that first column there the far column is shared in which informs and indicates the number of responses and is a proxy for presence in the market oh look at the top two players in terms of spending momentum now sales sale point is right there but auth 0 combined with octa's distribution channel will extend octa's lead significantly in our view and then there's microsoft now just a caveat this includes all of microsoft's security offerings not just identity but it's there for context and cyber arc as well includes its acquisition of adaptive but also other parts of cyberarks portfolio so you can see some of the other names that are there many of which you'll find in the gartner magic quadrant for identity and as we said we really like this move by octa it combines positive market forces with lead offerings from very well-run companies that have winning dna and passionate people now to further emphasize emphasize what what's happening here take a look at this this chart shows etr data for octa within sale point and cyber arc accounts out of the 230 cyber and sale point customers in the data set there are 81 octa accounts that's a 35 overlap and the good news for octa is that within that base of sale point in cyber arc accounts octa is shown by the net score line that green line has a very elevated spending and momentum and the kicker is if you read the fine print in the right hand column etr correctly points out that while sailpoint and cyberarc have long been partners with octa at the recent octane 21 event octa's big customer event the company announced that it was expanding into privileged access management pam and identity governance hello and welcome to coopetition in the 2020s now our current thinking is that this bodes very well for octa and cyberark and sailpoint well they're going to have to make some counter moves to fend off the onslaught that is coming now let's wrap up with what has become a tradition in our quarterly security updates looking at those two dimensions of net score and market share we're going to see which companies crack the top 10 for both measures within the etr data set we do this every quarter so here on the left we have the top 20 sorted by net score or spending momentum and on the right we sort by shared n so again top 20 which informs shared end and forms the market share metric or presence in the data set that red horizontal lines those two lines on each separate the top 10 from the remaining 10 within those top 20. in our method what we do is we assign four stars to those companies that crack the top ten for both metrics so again you see microsoft palo alto networks octa crowdstrike and fortinet fortinet by the way didn't make it last quarter they've kind of been in and out and on the bubble but you know this company is very strong and doing quite well only the other four did last quarter there was same four last quarter and we give two stars to those companies that make it in both categories within the top 20 but didn't make the top 10. so cisco splunk which has been steadily decelerating from a spending momentum standpoint and z-scaler which is just on the cusp you know we really like z-scaler and the company has great momentum but that's the methodology it is what it is now you can see we kept carbon black on the rightmost chart it's like kind of cut off it's number 21 only because they're just outside looking in on netscore you see them there they're just below on on netscore number 11. and vmware's presence in the market we think that carbon black is really worth paying attention to okay so we're going to close with some summary and final thoughts last quarter we did a deeper dive on the solar winds hack and we think the ramifications are significant it has set the stage for a new era of escalation and adversary sophistication now major change we see is a heightened awareness that when you find intruders you'd better think very carefully about your next moves when someone breaks into your house if the dog barks or if you come down with a baseball bat or other weapon you might think the intruder is going to flee but if the criminal badly wants what you have in your house and it's valuable enough you might find yourself in a bloody knife fight or worse what's happening is intruders come to your company via island hopping or inside or subterfuge or whatever method and they'll live off the land stealthily using your own tools against you so they can you can't find them so easily so instead of injecting new tools in that send off an alert they just use what you already have there that's what's called living off the land they'll steal sensitive data for example positive covid test results when that was really really sensitive obviously still is or other medical data and when you retaliate they will double extort you they'll encrypt your data and hold it for ransom and at the same time threaten to release the sensitive information to crushing your brand in the process so your response must be as stealthy as their intrusion as you marshal your resources and devise an attack plan you face serious headwinds not only is this a complicated situation there's your ongoing and acute talent shortage that you tell us about all the time many companies are mired in technical debt that's an additional challenge and then you've got to balance the running of the business while actually affecting a digital transformation that's very very difficult and it's risky because the more digital you become the more exposed you are so this idea of zero trust people used to call it a buzzword it's now a mandate along with automation because you just can't throw labor at the problem this is all good news for investors as cyber remains a market that's ripe for valuation increases and m a activity especially if you know where to look hopefully we've helped you squint through the maze a little bit okay that's it for now thanks to the community for your comments and insights remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search breaking analysis podcast put in the headphones listen when you're in your car out for your walk or run and you can always connect on twitter at divalante or email me at david.valante at siliconangle.com i appreciate the comments on linkedin and in clubhouse please follow me so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics and others and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante >> The pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital but it also highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication, collaboration, and chaotic responses by virtually every major company in the planet. The SolarWinds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect. Moreover, the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cybercriminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are now met with counter attacks, designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities. The only upshot is the cybersecurity market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we'll provide our quarterly update of the security industry, and share new survey data from ETR and the Cube community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare. We'll also share our thoughts on the game of 3D chess that Okta CEO, Todd McKinnon, is playing against the market. Now, we all know this market is complicated, fragmented and fast moving. And this next chart says it all. It's an interactive graphic from Optiv, a Denver, Colorado-based SI that's focused on cybersecurity. They've done some really excellent research and put together this awesome taxonomy, and it mapped vendor names therein. And this helps users navigate the complex security landscape. And there are over a dozen major sectors, high-level sectors within the security taxonomy and nearly 60 subsectors. From monitoring, vulnerability assessment, identity, asset management, firewalls, automation, cloud, data center, sim, threat detection and intelligent endpoint network, and so on and so on and so on. But this is a terrific resource, and going to help you understand where players fit and help you connect the dots in the space. Now let's talk about what's going on in the market. The dynamics in this crazy mess of a landscape are really confusing sometimes. Now, since the beginning of cyber time, we've talked about the increasing sophistication of the adversary, and the back and forth escalation between good and evil. And unfortunately, this trend is unlikely to stop. Here's some data from Carbon Black's annual modern bank heist report. This is the fourth, and of course now, VMware's brand, highlights the Carbon Black study since the acquisition, and to catalyze the creation of VMware's cloud security division. Destructive malware attacks, according to the recent study are up 118% from last year. Now, one major takeaway from the report is that hackers aren't just conducting wire fraud, they are. 57% of the banks surveyed, saw an increase in wire fraud, but the cybercriminals are also targeting non-public information such as future trading strategies. This allows the bad guys to front-run large block trades and profit. It's become a very lucrative practice. Now the prevalence of so-called island hopping is up 38% from already elevated levels. This is where a virus enters a company supply chain via a partner, and then often connects with other stealthy malware downstream. These techniques are more common where the malware will actually self-form with other infected parts of the supply chain and create actions with different signatures, designed to identify and exfiltrate valuable information. It's a really complex problem. Of major concern is that 63% of banking respondents in the study reported that responses to incidents were then met with retaliation designed to intimidate, or initiate ransomware tax to extract a final pound of flesh from the victim. Notably, the study found that 75% of CISOs reported to the CIO, which many feel is not the right regime. The study called for a rethinking of the right cyber regime where the CISO has increased responsibility and a direct reporting line to the CEO, or perhaps the COO, with greater exposure to boards of directors. So, many thanks to VMware and Tom Kellerman specifically for sharing this information with us this past week. Great work by your team. Now, some of the themes that we've been talking about for several quarters are shown in the lower half of the chart. Cloud, of course is the big driver thanks to work-from-home and to the pandemic. And the interesting corollary of course, is we see a rapid rethinking of end point and identity access management, and the concept of zero trust. In a recent ESG survey, two thirds of respondents said that their use of cloud computing necessitated a change in how they approach identity access management. Now, as shown in the chart from Optiv, the market remains highly fragmented, and M&A is of course, way up. Now, based on our research, it looks like transaction volume has increased more than 40% just in the last five months. So let's dig into the M&A, the merger and acquisition trends for just a moment. We took a five-month snapshot and we were able to count about 80 deals that were completed in that timeframe. Those transactions represented more than $20 billion in value. Some of the larger ones are highlighted here. The biggest of course, being the Thoma Bravo, taking Proofpoint private for a $12 plus billion price tag. The stock went from the low 130s and is trading in the low 170s based on the $176 per share offer. So there's your arbitrage, folks. Go for it. Perhaps the more interesting acquisition was Auth0 by Optiv for 6.5 billion, which we're going to talk about more in a moment. There was more private equity action we saw as Insight bought Armis, an IOT security play, and Cisco shelled out $730 million for IMImobile, which is more of an adjacency to cyber, but it's going to go under Cisco security and applications business run by Jeetu Patel. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the themes that we see connecting the dots of these acquisitions are first, SIs like Accenture, Atos and Wipro are making moves in cyber to go local. They're buying SecOps expertise, as I say, locally in places like France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia, that last mile, that belly to belly intimate service. Israeli-based startups chocked up five acquired companies in the space over the last five months. Also financial services firms are getting into the act with Goldman and MasterCard making moves to own its own part of the stack themselves to combat things like fraud and identity theft. And then finally, numerous moves to expand markets. Okta with Auth0, CrowdStrike buying a log management company, Palo Alto, picking up dev ops expertise, Rapid7 shoring up it's Coobernetti's chops, Tenable expanding beyond Insights and going after identity, interesting. Fortinet filling gaps in a multi-cloud offering. SailPoint extending to governance risk and compliance, GRC. Zscaler picked up an Israeli firm to fill gaps in access control. And then VMware buying Mesh7 to secure modern app development and distribution service. So tons and tons of activity here. Okay, so let's look at some of the ETR data to put the cyber market in context. ETR uses the concept of market share, it's one of the key metrics which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. So for each sector, it calculates the number of respondents for that sector divided by the total to get a sense for how prominent the sector is within the CIO and IT buyer communities. Okay, this chart shows the full ETR sector taxonomy with security highlighted across three survey periods; April last year, January this year, and April this year. Now you wouldn't expect big moves in market share over time. So it's relatively stable by sector, but the big takeaway comes from observing which sectors are most prominent. So you see that red line, that dotted line imposed at the 60% level? You can see there are only six sectors above that line and cyber security is one of them. Okay, so we know that security is important in a large market. But this puts it in the context of the other sectors. However, we know from previous breaking analysis episodes that despite the importance of cyber, and the urgency catalyzed by the pandemic, budgets unfortunately are not unlimited, and spending is bounded. It's not an open checkbook for CSOs as shown in this chart. This is a two-dimensional graphic showing market share in the horizontal axis, or pervasiveness in net score in the vertical axis. Net score is ETR's measurement of spending velocity. And we've superimposed a red line at 40% because anything over 40%, we consider extremely elevated. We've filtered and limited the number of sectors to simplify the graphic. And you can see, in the sectors that we've highlighted, only the big four are above that 40% line; AI, containers, RPA, and cloud. They exceed that sort of 40% magic waterline. Information security, you can see that as highlighted and it's respectable, but it competes for budget with other important sectors. So this is of course creates challenges for organization, because not only are they strapped for talent as we've reported, they like everyone else in IT face ongoing budget pressures. Research firm, Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that in 2021, $6 trillion worldwide will be lost on cyber crime. Conversely, research firm, Cannolis peg security spending somewhere around $60 billion annually. IDC has at higher, around $100 billion. So either way, we're talking about spending between 1 to 1.6% annually of how much the bad guys are taking out. That's peanuts really when you consider the consequences. So let's double-click into the cyber landscape a bit and further look at some of the companies. Here's that same X/Y graphic with the companies ETR captures from respondents in the cybersecurity sector. That's what's shown on the chart here. Now, the usefulness of the red lines is 20% on the horizontal indicates the largest presence in the survey, and the magic 40% line that we talked about earlier shows those firms with the most elevated momentum. Only Microsoft and Palo Alto exceed both high watermarks. Of course, Splunk and Cisco are prominent horizontally. And there are numerous companies to the left of the 20% line and many above that 40% high watermark on the vertical axis. Now in the bottom left quadrant, that includes many of the legacy names that have been around for a long time. And there are dozens of companies that show spending momentum on their platforms, i.e above single digits. So that picture is like the first one we showed you, very, very crowded space. But so let's filter it a bit and only include companies in the ETR survey that had at least 100 responses. So an N of 100 or greater. So it was a little easier to read but still it's kind of crowded when you think about it. Okay, so same graphic, and we've superimposed the data that determined the plot position over in the bottom right there. So there's net score and shared in, including only companies with more than 100 N. So what does this data tell us about the market? Well, Microsoft is dominant as always, it seems in all dimensions but let's focus on that red line for a moment. Some of the names that we've highlighted over the past two years show very well here. First, I want to talk about Palo Alto Networks. Pre-COVID as you might recall, we highlighted the valuation divergence between Palo Alto and Fortinet. And we said Fortinet was executing better on its cloud strategy, and Palo Alto was at the time struggling with the transition especially with its go-to-market and its Salesforce compensation, and really refreshing its portfolio. But we told you that we were bullish on Palo Alto Networks at the time because of its track record, and the fact that CIOs consistently told us that they saw Palo Alto as a thought leader in the space that they wanted to work with. They said that Palo Alto was the gold standard, the best, especially larger company CISOs. So that gave us confidence that Palo Alto, a very well-run company was going to get its act together and perform better. And Palo Alto has just done just that. As we expected, they've done very well and rapidly moving customers to the next generation of platforms. And we're very impressed by the company's execution. And the stock has generally reflected that. Now, some other names that hit our radar in the ETR data a couple of years ago, continue to perform well. CrowdStrike, Zscaler, SailPoint, and CloudFlare. Now, CloudFlare just reported and beat earnings but was off, the stock fell on headwinds for tech overall, the big rotation. But the company is doing very well and they're growing rapidly and they have momentum as you can see from the ETR data. Now, we put that double star around Proofpoint to highlight that it was worthy of fetching $12.5 billion from private equity firm. So nice exit there, supporting the continued consolidation trend that we've predicted in cybersecurity. Now let's turn our attention to Okta and Auth0. This is where it gets interesting, and is a clever play for Okta we think, and we want to drill into it a bit. Okta is acquiring Auth0 for big money. Why? Well, we think Todd McKinnon, Okta CEO, wants to run the table on identity and then continue to expand as TAM has to do that, to justify his lofty valuation. So Okta's ascendancy around identity and single sign-on is notable. The fragmented pictures that we've shown you, they scream out for simplification and trust, and that's what Okta brings. But it competes with some major players, most notably Microsoft with active directory. So look, of course, Microsoft is going to dominate in its massive customer base, but the rest of the market, that's like (indistinct) wide open. And we think McKinnon saw the opportunity to go dominate that sector. Now Okta comes at this from an enterprise perspective bringing top-down trust to the equation, and throwing a big blanket over all the discreet SaaS platforms and unifying employee access. Okta's timing was perfect. It was founded in 2009, just as the massive SaaSifiation trend was happening around CRM and HR, and service management and cloud, et cetera. But the one thing that Okta didn't have that Auth0 does is serious developer chops. While Okta was crushing it with its enterprise sales strategy, Auth0 was laser-focused on developers and building a bottoms up approach to identity. By acquiring Auth0, Okta can dominate both sides of the barbell and then capture the fat middle. So yes, it's a pricey acquisition, but in our view, it's a great move by McKinnon. Now, I don't know McKinnon personally, but last week I spoke to Arun Shrestha, who's the CEO of security specialist, BeyondID, they're a platinum services partner of Okta. And they're a zero trust expert. He worked for Okta for a number of years and shared with me a bit about McKinnon's style, and think big approach. Arun said something that caught my attention. He said, firewalls used to be the perimeter, now people are. And while that's self-serving to Okta and probably BeyondID, it's true. People, apps and data are the new perimeter, and they're not in one location. And that's the point. Now, unfortunately, I had lined up an interview with Diya Jolly, who was the chief product officer at Okta and a Cube alum for this past week, knowing that we were running this segment in this episode but she unfortunately fell ill the day of our interview and had to cancel. But I want to follow up with her, and understand how she's thinking about connecting the dots with Auth0 with devs and enterprises and really test our thesis there. This is a really interesting chess match that's going on. Let's look a little deeper into that identity space. This chart here shows some of the major identity players. It has some of the leaders in the identity market, and is a breakdown at ETR's net score. Now net score comprises five elements. The lime green is, we're adding the platform new. The forest green is we're spending 6% or more relative to last year. The gray is flat send plus or minus flat spend, plus or minus 5%. The pinkish is spending less. And the bright red is we're exiting the platform, retiring. Now you subtract the red from the green, and that gets you the result for net score which you can see super-imposed on the right hand chart at the bottom, that first column there. The far column is shared in which informs and indicates the number of responses and is a proxy for presence in the market. Oh, look at the top two players in terms of spending momentum. Now SailPoint is right there, but Auth0 combined with Okta's distribution channel will extend Okta's lead significantly in our view. And then there's Microsoft. Now just a caveat, this includes all of Microsoft's security offerings, not just identity, but it's there for context. And CyberArk as well includes this acquisition of adaptive, but also other parts of CyberArk's portfolio. So you can see some of the other names that are there, many of which you'll find in the Gartner magic quadrant for identity. And as we said, we really like this move by Okta. It combines positive market forces with lead offerings from very well-run companies that have winning DNA and passionate people. Now, to further emphasize what's happening here, take a look at this. This chart shows ETR data for Okta within SailPoint and CyberArk accounts. Out of the 230 CyberArk and SailPoint customers in the dataset, there are 81 Okta accounts. That's a 35% overlap. And the good news for Okta is that within that base of SailPoint and CyberArk accounts, Okta is shown by the net score line, that green line has a very elevated spending in momentum. And the kicker is, if you read the fine print in the right hand column, ETR correctly points out that while SailPoint and CyberArk have long been partners with Okta, at the recent Octane21 event, Okta's big customer event, The company announced that it was expanding into privileged access management, PAM, and identity governance. Hello, and welcome to co-opetition in the 2020s. Now, our current thinking is that this bodes very well for Okta and CyberArk and SailPoint. Well, they're going to have to make some counter moves to fend off the onslaught that is coming. Now, let's wrap up with what has become a tradition in our quarterly security updates. Looking at those two dimensions of net score and market share, we're going to see which companies crack the top 10 for both measures within the ETR dataset. We do this every quarter. So here in the left, we have the top 20, sorted by net score spending momentum and on the right, we sort by shared N. So it's again, top 20, which informs, shared N informs the market share metric or presence in the dataset. That red horizontal lines, those two lines on each separate the top 10 from the remaining 10 within those top 20. And our method, what we do is we assign four stars to those companies that crack the top 10 for both metrics. So again, you see Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, CrowdStrike, and Fortinet. Fortinet by the way, didn't make it last quarter. They've kind of been in and out and on the bubble, but company is very strong, and doing quite well. Only the other four did last quarter. They were the same for last quarter. And we give two stars to those companies that make it in both categories within the top 20 but didn't make the top 10. So Cisco, Splunk, which has been steadily decelerating from a spending momentum standpoint, and Zscaler, which is just on the cusp. We really like Zscaler and the company has great momentum, but that's the methodology. That is what it is. Now you can see, we kept Carbon Black on the right most chart, it's like kind of cut off, it's number 21. Only because they're just outside looking in on net score. You see them there, they're just below on net score, number 11. And VMware's presence in the market we think, that Carbon Black is right really worth paying attention to. Okay, so we're going to close with some summary and final thoughts. Last quarter, we did a deeper dive on the SolarWinds hack, and we think the ramifications are significant. It has set the stage for a new era of escalation and adversary sophistication. Now, major change we see is a heightened awareness that when you find intruders, you'd better think very carefully about your next moves. When someone breaks into your house, if the dog barks, or if you come down with a baseball bat or other weapon, you might think the intruder is going to flee. But if the criminal badly wants what you have in your house and it's valuable enough, you might find yourself in a bloody knife fight or worse. Well, what's happening is intruders come to your company via island hopping or insider subterfuge or whatever method. And they'll live off the land stealthily using your own tools against you so that you can't find them so easily. So instead of injecting new tools in that send off an alert, they just use what you already have there. That's what's called living off the land. They'll steal sensitive data, for example, positive COVID test results when that was really, really sensitive, obviously still is, or other medical data. And when you retaliate, they will double-extort you. They'll encrypt your data and hold it for ransom, and at the same time threaten to release the sensitive information, crushing your brand in the process. So your response must be as stealthy as their intrusion, as you marshal your resources and devise an attack plan. And you face serious headwinds. Not only is this a complicated situation, there's your ongoing and acute talent shortage that you tell us about all the time. Many companies are mired in technical debt, that's an additional challenge. And then you've got to balance the running of the business while actually effecting a digital transformation. That's very, very difficult, and it's risky because the more digital you become, the more exposed you are. So this idea of zero trust, people used to call it a buzzword, it's now a mandate along with automation. Because you just can't throw labor at the problem. This is all good news for investors as cyber remains a market that's ripe for valuation increases and M&A activity, especially if you know where to look. Hopefully we've helped you squint through the maze a little bit. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks to the community for your comments and insights. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes, they're all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts, put in the headphones, listen when you're in your car, or out for your walk or run, and you can always connect on Twitter @DVellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and in Clubhouse, please follow me, so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics and others. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (light instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the public sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon. Connect a spiritual contact center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an ai VR and, uh, you know, we stood it up for 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, I'd be happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age in the arcade cake Nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed in, as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in that endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then, in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers, but we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today. Uh, with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead. Ah, technologist, to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it. Two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old, the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months, And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example, in my opinion of a partner working with the problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what? Ben? What I was trying to do, sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah. I mean, so it's It's Ah, It's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally, even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how, How quickly we can look at problems and and we reduce deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours that I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that you know that when you're gonna come So, >>Ben, what this is This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation. People process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know, Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook to build like showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also correctly because you know you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly, do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change. I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would ain't for. And so our challenge Now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found a way. And we certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity and in innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior studio, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with their systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes. But then, obviously, as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff in there, quickly, test it, change it tested again and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government. Can't right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of agile, the building blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean, they're not fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest various and scariest problems technologically and then from a business perspective. Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely revamped way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. Um, and I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches. But the reality is that that's where we're headed. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they don't remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think The other company, I would add, is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. It could have been just about well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better. It is his providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus. And then we drive. Everyone's with that, >>you know, shared success and and successes contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary numbers just look and feel. It's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the West. Thanks. Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with though leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back all ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios we're still getting through the COVID crisis. I think we're in week 12. I don't know, I can't even keep track anymore. But again, as part of this process, we're reaching out to our community, going out to the leaders of the community to really get some best practices, get some insight, and I hear from people that are out in the community and helping other companies as well as their own company, kind of get through these crazy times. So we're really excited to have in a brand new role, never been on the key before, Saleem Janmohamed. He is the senior managing director and market unit lead of the U.S West he just took over from John Del Santo, who we met when you guys opened the new salesforce location. So Saleem, great to meet you. >> Hi, Jeff, great to meet you. Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. >> Glad to be here. Excited for being in this new role. >> So, it's a new role for you, but you've been at a center for, I think for 30 some odd years so, give us a little bit of history. How did, where did you get started? And obviously you must like the culture. You must like the opportunity to stick with it this long. >> Yeah, I am, 30 years in one company is definitely an anomaly here in the Bay area. I started actually in Toronto in financial services, I have an undergraduate degree in business and computer science and then an MBA. I was attracted to Accenture or Anderson Consulting at the time because it was a combination of business and technology. And frankly, the ability to travel the world, just from a personal perspective, I was born in Kenya of Indian parents. I grew up in the UK, I went to school in Canada and now I'm a U.S citizen. So, when someone asks me, where are you from? My usual answer is, how much time do you have? (laughs) But I've got the opportunity through Accenture to work all around the world with some amazing clients, doing incredible things. So, I'm excited about this opportunity to work with some of the leading clients in the world. >> Right? And for people that are familiar with this Accenture, you guys are kind of a matrix organization. So, in terms of the vertical specialty, you've been in the called the CMT, the Communications Media and Technology. So what's been kind of your focus from that point of view? >> Absolutely, so I spent about, as I said, 30 years with Accenture, about 20 of those years were with a wireline wireless and satellite communications companies where I was helping to essentially build out the network infrastructure, the billing and customer care infrastructure. For both large existing telcos, as well as emerging telcos or next-gen telcos, for example, in the wireless space. In markets like India and the middle East, which were emerging markets for us, and for the wireless business. The last 10 years I've spent in the software and platforms part of our business. which is really serving our high-tech client base, as well as our internet and social plant based mostly here on the West Coast. And so it's been, CMT is one of our five industry verticals. The others are products, resources, health and public sector, and financial services. So, we have gone to market traditionally, as those industry led PNS just in the last few months, we actually, right before the Pandemic, I shifted to a new operating model, which is very geography focused. We still preserved our core industry argument. But we're now concentrating in specific markets with a real focus to get all of our services, deployed into those markets and focused on the unique needs of each market. So, it's nothing like moving to a new operating model and having to deal with a pandemic, two weeks into it. It certainly tests your leadership argument as well as your leadership team. >> Right, well, at least you're not in it by yourself. And, it's interesting from your mobile background, you got to see some significant transformation driven by the mobile, especially as you said in more rural markets that were underserved by traditional wire, telephones, but wireless completely changed the game. COVID is this new kind of digital transformation opportunity. We've talked about it a lot over the last several weeks, and it was kind of this light switch moment. You didn't really have a lot of time to plan or, any plans you had were probably laid out very organized, Gantt chart way over a long, long period of time. Then suddenly it was like, boom, you can't go to work. Everybody needs to work from home. So, I'm just curious to get your perspective as you look at, say, the telco transformation and some of these other transformations that didn't have the, either the benefit or the liability, I guess, depending on how you want to define it, of kind of this forcing function that's ready, set go now, you don't really get to think about it or have a choice anymore. >> No, absolutely, look, I'll tell you the COVID crisis, never been a time in  human history, when 2 billion people virtually overnight had to change their behavior And I think that's what we've seen here from an enterprise perspective. The transformation required or the capability required to actually work, have tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of employees working from home is an arduous task. If you think about Accenture, I mean, we've been a virtual organization throughout our history, We don't really have a headquarters. Our leadership team is distributed all over the world, and a lot of our workforce is actually mobile. So, early on we invested in remote infrastructure, Cloud technologies, really allowing our people to work on client sites at home, in our offices around the world, and to be able to collaborate and communicate, in that fashion. But for those organizations that haven't invested in that kind of infrastructure, COVID has really actually created a greater separation of between the leaders and the laggards. The top 10% of digital transformers have actually expanded that gap and they've created lasting value for their shareholders through that infrastructure investment that they've made. And I think about sort of today's clients that we have here, whether it's on the West Coast or around the world, at this point we've seen more digital transformation happened in the last three months, than we have seen in the last 10 years. It is on the agenda for our key clients and their boards with respect to how they create resiliency, both in their infrastructure and their business operations. So we're particularly focused on helping clients through that transformation, and closing that gap between the leaders and laggards. >> That's terrific, and I'm wondering what you could share, cause we always talk about kind of the three headed monster, right? It's it's technology, which is certainly part of it, but it's also people and process. And clearly to be able to efficiently manage a workforce of 500,000+ people I think are at essentially these days distributed all over the world, many languages, many times zones, many kind of expertises, what are some of those things along those three paths that you share in terms of best practices between the technology and the people and the process? >> Absolutely, so from it, I think, technology is the underlying foundation at this point, if you don't have the remote working infrastructure and the Cloud capability, your data and your systems accessible, to a remote workforce you're already behind. So, step one is getting the basic foundation of the fundamentals in place through that remote infrastructure as well as Cloud technologies. From a process standpoint, what we're seeing clients do today is actually rethink all their processes. If COVID has taught us one thing. I mean, three months ago, if you had asked most of the executives that we talked to, can you actually run your company remotely, most would have answered no. (Jeff laughs) Today, what we've proven over the last three months is in fact that's possible. But you really now need to create lasting change in the process, to be able to sort of sustain the value. We're finding that people are more efficient, quality's better, engagement is better, with remote working, but in order to be able to create enduring change, you're going to need to actually change and rationalize processes across the organization from selling to customer care, to marketing and to operations, and even some cases manufacturing. And that requires a cultural change as well. For organizations that haven't, aren't used to sort of virtual working, it requires an engagement model change, and really sort of bringing together a hybrid between, physical interaction and digital interaction. One of the things we're doing actually along those lines, our team is Zurich cause that pioneered this technology we're calling synapse, which allows you to go from sort of, this kind of interaction to actually augmented reality and virtual reality environments where you connect collaborate with each other in an entirely virtual world that actually replicates the real world. So, we've taken our San Francisco Hub and various other Hub locations around the world, replicated them instead of 3D space, and how people do interact with each other, in a more human way in a virtual space. So, I think what you're going to see is more of those kinds of technologies, creeping into the way people actually interact with each other as the new normal. >> Right, so, for the people that weren't prepared, right? That hadn't already kind of moved down the road in terms of SaaS applications and distributed workforce and security and all those things to bake in, did they just have to go now or are they still stuck, kind of holding their head in the sand, waiting for this thing to end. I mean, is there a way for someone to, how do they quickly make that transformation with no planning? It's one thing if you're already kind of on your way, and you just, you give it a little bit more gas, but for the people that really weren't thinking that way, do they even have a chance or it's like, sorry, you better, (laughs) you're late to the party. >> I think today, even with a standing start today, if you look at the technologies available from Microsoft, from Google, from Amazon, a lot of the big public Cloud providers, you can really get up to speed very quickly. For example, we took the National Health Service in the UK, using teams we put them online almost within a week to get them activated in a virtual environment, interacting and operating their service without having interest invested in that technology in the past so, even as an organization that hasn't done, that you can move quickly leveraging the investments in infrastructure that service providers have made over the years. >> Jeff: Right. >> I think that it requires though a leadership change. The c-suite and the board of our clients really need to see that strategic imperative of making that change in order to be able to facilitate the change through the organization. And I can tell you that, our clients are absolutely committed to that journey at this point, and are actively looking for opportunities to implement digital technology throughout every function in their organization, so that they can actually, handle these kinds of extraneous shocks to their business. >> Right. >> And if you think about sort of the three areas of focus these days, it's about, getting people to work or getting back to the office wherever possible, and doing that with a focus on keeping their people safe, and within sort of the regulatory environment that they operate. But secondly, it's about putting in place these kinds of digital technologies that allow sort of ongoing hybrid digital and physical workspaces, and also creating a different type of customer experience from selling to operations for their customer base. And then the last is actually thinking about a dramatic change in cost infrastructure through outsourcing that also creates the ability to variabilize your cost in the event of further extraneous shocks, because we don't know how long this is going to last. We don't know what the next wave might look like. So you really need to think about putting in place the infrastructure and the changes that allows you to endure both from a cost as well as a process and technology perspective, these changes in the future. >> Yeah, I want to dig into a little bit about kind of what comes next because we're into this for a while. I think it's going to keep going for a while. There's indications that we might be hitting into a second wave and in my mind, short of a vaccine we're going to be an in kind of an uncomfortable state for awhile. But I'm just curious as to how you're hearing people thinking about what going back means. Cause I, you know, I have a hard time thinking that if people have been working from home for months, right, and behaviors become habits and, people learn how to be productive and, they like to be able to eat dinner with the family. I just don't know, or what do you think in terms of kind of rushing back to jumping on the 101 every day at 7:00 to sit in traffic for two hours. I just, it seems like hopefully we're past that in a need to have knowledge workers be at an office all together at the same time every day, especially now that they've learned to be productive, kind of outside of that routine. What are some of the things that people are thinking about? How should they be thinking about it? And of course there's the whole liability issue where, you invite people back somebody gets sick. I mean, we've barely kind of begun to hear the whole lawyer piece of the story, which we don't necessarily >> No. >> need to get into. >> I mean, I think the first thing is absolutely making sure that people are safe. And I think most organizations are thinking through, how to put in place the controls and the processes to ensure that their people are safe and most are thinking about this in a very phased way. You're hearing a lot of our Bay area clients announcing that they're not returning back to work this year. And, several are saying, perhaps even never. And so I think that, there is a fundamental change happening here with respect to going back to the office. Our sense is that there's going to be a much more hybrid environment where, it's going to be perfectly fine for folks to be working from home two or three days a week, and then going to the office where it's necessary to collaborate in a physical way. And also a human way, I think that, we do need as humans that interaction, a physical interaction. And so I think, we may be physically apart, but we need to be socially interactive. And I think organizations are trying to figure out sort of the right blend there. But I don't think we go back to a normal, if you will the old normal, which was five days a week in the office, I do think that we're going to be in a much more virtual environment. And frankly, there are some benefits of that in that, if you look at our organization because we're so global, we're able to tap into talent all around the world that can help our clients here in the Bay area, because they're more comfortable now, with the use of virtual technology. So I do think that the new normal will be a hybrid environment, much more so than it has in the past. >> Yeah, we talked to, I don't know if you know, Darren Murph, GitLab, they're really interesting company. They've been 100% remote from forever. So they've got a lot of really defined practices and processes in place in terms of like, which communication channel is for what types of communication and Darren's point was because they are mobile and they are in different time zones, you have to be much more defined and thoughtful in the way that you organize your communications so that people can be more self serve. And that those things will also work great in a physical world you just didn't have to have in the physical world. And his point is, we can just throw people in a room and hope that they get together, that doesn't necessarily always happen. And so by using some of these remote management techniques and processes you're actually going to be much more effective whether you're together in a room and can go out to lunch together, or you're still distributed team. And really kind of, as we've seen this transition from kind of do we want to put it in Cloud, to why don't we want to put it in the Cloud, to kind of a Cloud first and then on kind of a mobile, where your history is, should it be a mobile app, or should it be mobile first? It almost feels like now it's going to be remote first. And then if there's a reason to come to the office, it's an important meeting we need to get together. People are coming from out of town, but it almost feels like it's going to shift that remote's going to be the primary form. And then the physical getting together really be secondary. I don't know if you are hearing anything along those lines. >> No, absloutely, we've seen that in our own environment. I think the level of engagement between our leadership teams here in the West and all around the world and in the market units is actually significantly greater. It's not that you run into someone in the hallway with especially in a very large organization like ours, you are now actually connecting face to face with people. The days of the conference call are gone, and you're actually interacting and you're peering into the lives and the homes of the colleagues that you've worked with for many years. I think that's actually a pretty fundamental social change, and actually creates a level of proximity that perhaps you didn't even see when you were together in an office somewhere, and you're appearing into the lives, if you will, of your counterparts. I think that's a pretty fundamental change. And, if I look at the forms of engagement, I mean, we have, most of our population is under 30 around the world. And so they're used to a digital channels of communication, both on the mobile handset, as well as on their laptops and desktops, through online channels. And so, we're actually leveraging that to be much more connected, even in this virtual world than we were in our physical world. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think most organizations see that as an avenue to really get a pulse on what's happening with their workforce and in their business, especially in a global setting. >> Right, and I wonder if you could share some best practices on kind of from a leadership perspective, cause you're part of Julie's executive team. I'm sure you guys are distributed all over the world and I assume your direct reports, maybe a little bit less distributed now that you're running the U.S. West but, one thing we keep hearing is that the frequency and the variety of the communications has got to go up a lot both in terms of, what you're talking about and how often you're talking to. And as you said, kind of getting into this, kind of human side, because you are getting invited into people's homes. What can you share that you guys have been doing best practices at a center forever because you've been managing distributed teams, since the very beginning? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you look at just this week, I spent eight hours with Julie and the entire Global Management Committee, the top 40 people, or so within Accenture. Every morning through video conferences, we interacted with Julie, highly interactive sessions, where we went through our strategy or financial results, some of the key initiatives we're trying to drive, and instead of what we would have done historically is fly 40 people to some part of the world, and how's them in a hotel room for two or three days to have the same session, we were incredibly more productive. We had three blocked hours per day over the last three days, again using digital media to engage with each other converse share our rich media content much more productive use of technology and frankly, a lot less wear and tear on people flying around the world, and as substantially lower cost. So, I think that that's something that is here to stay. I can't see us going back to the model where we, fly people around for internal meetings, certainly. From a West perspective, I meet with my management team, we scheduled calls now three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically, we get together for an hour. We conduct sort of what's going on with the business, where are the issues, what do we need to solve? And we do that entirely virtually, if you think about it, I'm getting, an hour or three hours a week with my entire leadership team, connected and collaborating around the same issues, in a much more kind of organized and concentrated way than if I ran into them at the coffee machine or at the water cooler. I am actually getting more engagement, more organization and more focus through my leadership team, in this new world than perhaps I would have had, in new. >> Right. >> So, I think that there's a lot of benefit, to this model. I still think that there's an opportunity to get, when we have large meetings and we need to sort of convey a particular message. It is nice to be able to get together with people physically. But I think that that's going to be less often now than in the past. >> Right, I just think people it's just different, right? It's not better or worse, it's just different. We had an interview earlier today. I think we had somebody on from Singapore, somebody on, from India, somebody on from Germany, our host was in Boston and the production was here in Palo Alto. You couldn't do that to get all those people together in a physical space is a lot bigger investment and a lot more difficult. So, it's just, it's different. It's not the same as being together. We can't go out and get a beer after this is over, but at the same time, it's a lot easier to grab an hour and get together with people. So, I think there is, it's different, it's not a substitute is different. >> Yeah, I mean, to that point, if you think about our clients they are global, their executives are global. The ability to actually connect with clients have a conversation regardles of where they are on the globe You know, it's, we are actually much more able to do that now because it doesn't require flying. It doesn't require sort of scheduling months ahead to make sure everyone can be in a particular location. You can literally just schedule a meeting and have it the next day. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that makes us much more responsive to our client's needs and much more accessible as they have questions for us. So I think there's definite advantages to this mode of working. >> Right. So Saleem, before I let you go, it's a great conversation and we could go all day, but we'll let you (laughs) get back to work. But I've just, especially since you come from a communications background and a 30 year veteran in this space I mean for as bad as this pandemic has been and it's bad, right? A lot of people are dead, a lot of businesses like restaurants and airlines, speaking of airlines and hotels, couldn't go digital right away. Right, we're fortunate to be in the knowledge business that we could. But what I really want to get your perspective is the fact that we have so many of these tools in place today that actually enabled it to happen kind of easily, right? We've got fast internet and we've got a high power mobile devices. And we have a huge suite of mobile applications from Salesforce to Slack, to Acuity. That's the software we use for scheduling. I mean, there's so many tools that, you look at had this happened 10 years ago, of five years ago, 15 years ago, a really different level of pain. And I'm sure, as you look back to the old days, put again application of that service providers and laying all this fiber and a lot of that stuff in 2000 looked like it wasn't necessarily going to pay off. And in fact, a lot of that infrastructure that was put in in those early days has really, kind of shined in this moment where it had to. And it's, I just love to get kind of your perspective with a little bit of a history of how these systems have developed and are in place and really enabled, kind of this work from anywhere, communicate from anywhere, almost do anything as long as you've got access to some type of a device and an internet connection. >> Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you that the broadband infrastructure investments that our telco clients have made over the last, two decades or so have really come into their own through this crisis. I think if you look at the level of investment, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have made in Cloud infrastructure has enabled, our organization, as well as many others, to be able to turn on a dime with respect to this crisis. I actually think that emerging economies that are implementing for example, 5G technologies, and adopting those technologies sometimes faster than their Western counterparts are actually, will leap frog, with respect to using those technologies, and allow if you will, their economies, their businesses, to sustain these kinds of impacts in a much more ready way in the future than perhaps in the past. And I think that, digital and digital transformation is sort of a element to the  business in the future and frankly, to sustaining, economies. So, I think mobile technology, Cloud technology, and the ability to sort of digitize your business and your economy are critical success factors for the future. >> Yeah, if not, you're in trouble because everybody else is doing it. >> Exactly. (Jeff laughs) >> All right, Saleem. Well, thank you for spending a few minutes, sharing your insight, really appreciate it. And congratulations on the new position. I'll look forward to seeing you in that beautiful, innovation Hub, one of these days, as soon as we can get back outside. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Jeff, I look forward to having you at the San Francisco Hub and showing you the virtual implementation of that Hub on our CMS platform. >> Awesome, look forward to it, thanks a lot. >> All right, you take care. >> All right, he's Saleem, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment. We have Brian Bohan, he is the Director of the Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group Global Lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, Managing Director Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group. Oh my word (all laugh) how big are your business cards? >> Exactly >> Well welcome for both of you Thanks for coming on the show. So the relationship between AWS and Accenture is now in its 13th year. I want to hear from both of you, what's new what's exciting about the relationship and I'm going to start with you Chris. >> Yeah, so it's been 13 great years. Four years since we used the AABG, we use the acronym to make it easier to say >> Rebecca: Okay, thank you, and now you tell me. >> The Accenture AWS Business Group. So the partnership continues to get stronger, continues to grow, we've doubled down on the partnership this last year, really increasing our investment and our focus. We've done in the last year really a lot of focus around industries. So we continue to build our teams we continue to grow on the number of certified resources we have. And our clients are just eatin' that stuff up. So it just gives us more opportunity to grow. >> Ryan? >> Yeah, I mean I think you can see, it's consistent with what you see here at the event and also with Andy's keynote. The emphasis on enterprise and as we see large enterprises really accelerating to AWS, I think that's what we're seeing as well. At any given time we have hundreds of projects going on around the world, but when we formed the business group in 2015 it was really around driving really large transformations with customers and what we're seeing now is customers at the place of maturity and willing to take, embark on those journeys and I think we're really well set up to make that happen together as a partnership. >> So as you kind of enter into this new phase now of kind of working with companies, are you seeing any kind of increasing specialization in the types of companies you're working with? >> Yeah, no absolutely. So I think that's why the answer's really exciting. So I think if you look across this is fairly typical. We started out in a lot of horizontal capability areas and they're still incredibly important to us around data and SAP, mass migrations and these are areas we continue to invest in and we tend to get even more specialized as we do so, but we're also seeing this last year is getting more industry focused. So as we move up the stack and we start talking about cloud native development, we start talking about machine learning and analytics, customer care has become a really interesting thing. So you see a lot of companies, whether it be tire companies, CPG companies, moving from products companies extending into services, it completely changes how they think about customer care and how they need to understand their data and understand their customers. So necessarily as you move up that stack, you have to have that deep domain expertise and so what's fantastic is we have great technology, we're building out some teams with domain expertise, but Accenture has got thousands of people with this expertise. So it's again this kind of combining of strengths that we're able to bring to the table for our customers. >> Yeah we saw when we started the group, we knew Accenture's strong position in industries, right. Our deep industry knowledge, knowing those industries really well we knew they would come together at some point, the technology and industry. And we've seen that over the last 12 months really start to take effect. Companies are now specifically thinking about how they leverage Amazon for their specifically industry solutions and capabilities, and we're just going after that. >> So Andy Jassy in his fireside chat this morning talked about innovation at AWS and he said, we're a big company but we need to think of ourselves as a big startup. So here are two big companies, how do you innovate together what is your relationship like? I mean you said it's 13 great years, but what's your creative process? >> So I'll take a stab. So first of all, I'll say that in recognition of that we actually on our team, and this year into some light of and Chris mentioned a doubling down the partnership, we're growing the team we have on the AWS side to support the partnership. And with some of the things we're doing in addition to adding industry folks, is I've added a full time team to focus on innovation. And it's innovation with customers but it's also all the mechanisms we use. So if you think about with AWS, a lot of customers come to us and want to understand how does Amazon innovate, what is our culture of innovation? So at Amazon we have a program that we've rolled out around that. Accenture also has many mechanisms around innovation. Small teams driving very agile projects, and it's our job, that team's job and my team to go around and pull the best of breed across the world and make sure that we're delivering that to clients every single day. And so more and more clients want to see not just the outputs, but they want us to imbed in their teams and also show them by doing. So yes, give us the deliverable but we want to build the muscle around what Accenture and AWS can do together around innovation. So that's more and more what we see. >> Yeah and we follow the Amazon principles, right. The principles that Andy talks about that are core to innovation there, we follow them. From the beginning when we started this partnership we started working backwards, what we wanted it to be in five, ten years and we follow those. So our teams act that way, they work that way, they follow those day to day out and it makes us, it allows us to integrate well into AWS into the AWS people around the world. For Accenture it gives us, our people a insight into how AWS does it, and then we can share that with our customers as well. >> Interesting, so Chris you've been doing this a long time. Right, okay and so, and you guys have been collaborating for a long time, when Amazon first started there was a whole new breed of companies they were coming out, we'd call kind of born in the cloud. Companies that were agile and fast moving, taking advantage of a lot of the technology stack to do things that a lot of legacy companies couldn't do. Now we're starting to see what has been termed kind of companies being reborn in the cloud, right. Older, leg--, you know older companies now that are transforming moving their workloads to the cloud and then getting new types of capabilities. I'm wondering in your work, are you seeing some examples of companies that are kind of undergoing that kind of transformation? >> Yeah absolutely. I think we see what we would call an epic disruption of these companies right. It's happening, it's been happening for awhile. I think they've gotten, they've looked at Amazon now more as not just a cloud, and not just infrastructure, going up the stack and doing that. So they're going through these transformations and we see them balancing between moving their workloads to AWS versus innovating. And also changing, they've realized they have to change the organization to go along with that. It's just not moving and acting in the same old way so we're seeing agile and cloud come together to drive that transformation. So I would say almost every customer we're seeing today is going through that transformation in some form or fashion >> Yeah, I would say that's also a really interesting change Again, years ago we were, if you were focused on a mass migration today, the conversation is if you're a pharmaceutical company how do you get your pipeline of therapeutics out to market faster, right? How do you start thinking about patients differently or patient services, the data you have on those patients how do you integrate further into the value chain and to providers and payers and get that information. So, and what happens, what you find is to be able to deliver say precision medicine and pharmaceutical you need to rethink about your data, then you have to look at your application portfolio and say, okay what does that need to look like to support this completely new paradigm serving our patients? And that's what ends up pulling the workloads through to support these new business initiatives. So I think that's a bit of a difference that we've been seeing as well in the last couple years. >> One of the messages we're hearing is that journeys of the cloud really represents the fourth industrial revolution. I'm wondering, in terms of the pace of innovation are there any new technologies that maybe even just from a couple of years ago that are just table stakes today? >> Yeah no, I think the table stakes, AI and ML are quickly becoming table stakes, right. And that's what I love about AWS, they make the stuff easy to consume. Right, SageMaker and that stuff. Last year I was able to go in through DeepRacer and going through that I was able to do a model in 30 minutes. I don't do a lot of coding anymore these days, but on a plane I was able to create my first model. And so that stuff is becoming table stakes. They're making it very easy, so there is no excuse to not do ML or AI in your application. I don't need a separate set of data scientists sitting off to the side. So that to me, and data in the cloud, right. So the data being there so I can consume it in AI and ML that's table stakes, there is no more hey, I'm just only going to put what I don't care about, or what I want to low cost data store, it's table stakes to have that data there, accessible to your people 24-7. >> And what does that mean for your workforce? Because as you said, these are now basics. You need to know how to use these tools and be willing to experiment with these technologies. How do you make sure your workforce has the right skills and the right mentality and approach? >> So one of the things I talked a little bit about DeepRacer last year when DeepRacer came out, I was sitting there kind of scratching my head and saying, what is this, right? It's a glorified RC car. And one of my team members was texting me and saying, we've got to do this. And what that, we've run a private league, and what that's done is it's taken well over 1400 people who never knew what machine learning, R-reinforcement learning was and got them engaged in doing it. So now they've got that experience, they're now hungry for more knowledge through a fun activity, a competition. You know we're all very competitive people at Accenture, so that was just, it caught on amazing, it was amazing just around the world at how these people took onto it and why our employees took onto it. >> Yeah, the person who won that league, so it was across 30 different innovation centers at Accenture, plus hundreds of people virtually building cars, and the guy who won it out of Kronsberg, Germany had never touched AWS the day before. And I dunno if this is true, the story's great, he supposedly wrote his model on the train to the innovation center that day, he ran the model and came up like four one hundredths of a second off the world record. So great example, yeah, of somebody who wasn't in the AWS kind ecosystem at Accenture, got turned on my this new technology, this new capability, dove in and now he's enabled, right. And we talk about innovation, so innovation is also like I said, not just what you're delivering for the client but how you're doing it. So that same team actually who started the DeepRacer league down in Australia, they've been creating what they call a hackathon as a service. So working with customers, not just doing slideware and going through courseware, but getting folks in a room like this and you've seen it here at the event, have a business problem that you want to solve, get a bunch of people in a room, business people, technology people, and hack away. In a low risk environment that's collaborative where you can share and you're learning by doing. So we're seeing a lot of that, and so you've got to really, like think of new ways that you're going to enable the workforce especially if you hope to scale this. >> So one of the things obviously that Accenture brings to the table, AWS got a global platform but you're a consulting firm with global reach. And everybody wants to use data in new ways but how you use data in different regions and different localities can vary. So how are you working with customers to be able to kind of enable that? >> Yeah, so obviously a lot of different regulations, country by country, and they're changing very rapidly so we have to stay on top of it. One of the things we've done is through our we formed a state of business group last year. We've completely focused on data. Includes AABG folks, Amazon folks, but they're very regionally based. So we stood up a lighthouse here in North America, in New Jersey, and the experts sitting in that are very well versed in what North America or the US is doing around data privacy and security and things like that. So they're taking what they learned, the same thing, we opened it in London last, a few weeks ago in Canada, other places. So we're definitely taking a regional focus but we're making sure through the partnership that the techniques, the tooling, the capabilities are being pushed down into those groups. So they're taking all that experience and that knowledge but putting a local slant to it and making sure it's locally compatible. >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting too is you talk about, I mean data we're seeing this take off in every industry and it's so critical, but two of the areas that the data business group is seeing the most traction actually are financial services and life sciences pharmaceutical health care. So you would think, those are two of the most regulated industries in the world, extremely sensitive data, you wouldn't think those would be the ones out in front but they are, and because there's so much value to be had. So even in Europe, working with pharmaceutical companies there together, and their R and D process around patient services and being able to use native data lakes on AWS, use machine learning to gain new insights in terms of how therapeutics are working on patient populations, right. And so this is again, very sensitive information but hugely valuable, and Accenture through this business group has all the capabilities so that we can have the best of both worlds, right. And have it accessible, analyze it in AWS but have it secure as well. >> And a lot of research show, actually the constraints can power innovation. The fact that it, because it is so sensitive and there are these regulatory concerns around it that that in fact enables people to be more, they're forced to be more creative. >> Yeah, and it's the old, you know cars didn't go fast until they put brakes on them, kind of a thing, right. And we see that, absolutely. And I think that sort to thing is, big enterprise customers, they want to move fast but they're public companies, they have to ensure that they're mitigating risk. So again we're investing a lot in moving fast but doing it in a way that controls risk and is able to kind of give them the assurances that they need. >> And definitely the platformed has helped, right. Amazon investing in that platform, bringing the tools like you saw on Andy's keynote, some things around the S3 bucket, you know those type of things. Those are enabling, and those regulations, us to deal with those regulations much faster and less work on our side to build the things that are need to meet those regulations. So definitely the platform growing and expanding is definitely helping us go faster. >> That's a great point, right. I mean because also if you have, you know whether your data, your applications in your on-premises environment chances are you don't have the granular visibility that you would like into that environment, whereas you move it into AWS, you have all these tools to really get as granular as you want and really understand your environment and make sure that you have control over it. So it really creates a new paradigm for that. >> One of the things that really struck me during Andy's keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy's keynote, was the fact when we was announcing all these, this dizzying number of new products and services >> Brian: I'm not sure how he does that (all laugh) >> I know, just how many of them rely on the technology ecosystem to be successful. So can you just riff on that a little bit about how really the landscape for technology has changed so dramatically in the sense that all these companies need to cooperate and collaborate, and here we are. You two, you're a living and breathing example. >> Absolutely, you know I think you'll hear Andy say it, is the right tool for the right job. AWS, we're very much about giving customers choice. So there's a lot of options and you know we went through all the different database options that we have. So they're very specific to specific use cases. Now that also implies that you have to know which tools to use for the right job and you have to have very skilled craftsmen. So that's where we rely on partners like Accenture who have those skilled craftsmen, in addition to our own to really extend that. And then you look at the ISV ecosystem, right and some of those ISVs and our technology partners who've done an amazing job of taking our capabilities but then extending them further into whatever domain that they're very expert in, and there's a very specific IP delivers extra value to their customers. And so that's what, we want to give all this choice, whether it's a customer, or a technology partner, a consultancy like Accenture can really thrive. >> And I think if you walk through the show floor you see what these companies are doing. And they're not afraid to innovate and they're not afraid to take on some of the bigger challenges out there because they don't have to invest in the platform underneath. They're able to start with something that's solid, known, recognized by the market, right. No one is going to get in trouble for building something on AWS. So they're taking that and taking the next level and you're right, the partnerships between 'em we see if you just walk down there, you see them talking, you see them collaborating and saying, oh well I'm doing this, if we integrate this, can we do this differently? So you know I think we're only going to see more of that. And we're going to see it more industry focused, coming back to what we were talking about earlier. We're going to see more things stand up in the industries. We've seen this with FinServ, we've seen this you know but I think across all the industries we're going to see more of this collaboration. >> Yeah, I agree, in fact I have someone on my team now that's new this year to focus exclusively on we'll call the power of three. So it's AWS, Accenture, and plus a technology partner. And so if you go in the Executive Summit, Salesforce being a really obviously example, right. Accenture's got very large successful Salesforce practice very important partner of AWS's, how can we come together and drive more value for our customers by figuring out solutions. You know we announced at Dreamforce, the connect integration with Salesforce that's a perfect example, right. So the end-to-end customer care I talked about earlier, even more powerful, we can bring that power of three together. >> So going into the 13th year, lucky 13 (laughs) what are some of the things we're going to be talking about at next year's Executive Summit? What are some of the things you're most looking forward to in the coming year? >> I have to say machine learning and AI. And I have to say Outposts is probably the third of my, I think I live the quantum computing stuff, and Accenture has been doing a lot of research and a lot of work in quantum computing. We were super excited to see what was announced, I guess Monday, and so we're super excited about that but I think that's a little farther out. I think the ML, the AI, the new things in SageMaker are super exciting and I think are only going to make that stuff go faster. So I think that's all we're going to be talking about next year I think we're going to be talking about all the new models that have been created, all the new problems that have been solved, and just a new paradigm in computing off of that stuff 'cause it's getting simpler to use, faster to use, and cheaper to use so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's just, these announcements yesterday just continue to remove barriers, and so you think about the announcement with Verizon around 5G, so now the possibilities that opens up in terms of the applications and the analysis and the machine learning that can get pushed down to the edge is really amazing. And I think what's going to be fun is, we work with customers to figure out what these services should look like, but even at launch we're not sure how they're going to be used. So now it's going to be really exciting turning all these developers, all the Accenture developers, loose on this and just let's see what we create together. >> In 2020 all the developers are loose, I love it. (all laugh) Brian, Chris thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again. That was a really great conversation. >> Well, thanks for having us >> Thanks for having us >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering AWS reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. It was two cubes. Live coverage in Boston, Massachusetts, for Amazon Web services reinforces A W s, his first inaugural conference around security, cloud security and all the benefits of security vendors of bringing. We're here with a man who runs the marketplace and more. Dave McCann Cube, alumni vice president of migration, marketplace and control surfaces. That's a new tail you were that you have here since the last time we talked. Lots changed. Give us the update. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great to be back, ma'am. Believe it's seven months of every event. >> Feels like this. Seven years. You know, you've got a lot new things happening. >> We do >> explain. You have new responsibility. You got the marketplace, which we talked about a great product solutions. What else do you have? >> So we've obviously been expanding our service portfolio, right? So either us is launching. New service is all the time. We have a set of service is a road in the migration of software. So I run. No, the immigration Service's team and interesting. We were sitting in Boston, and that's actually headquartered 800 yards down the road. So there's a set of surfaces around the tools to help you as a CEO. Move your applications onto the clothes. Marketplace is obviously where we want you to find short where you need to buy. And then once you get into the topic of governance, we had one product called Service Catalog and reinvent. We announced a new product. That was a preview called Control. Yesterday we went to G A full availability off control, Terror and Control term service catalog together are in the government space, but we're calling them control service is because it's around controlling the access off teams to particular resources. So that's control service. >> What people moving into the cloud and give us a sense of the the workload. I know you see everything but any patterns that you can see a >> lot of patterns and merging and migration, and they are very industry specific. But there are some common patterns, so you know we're doing migrations and frozen companies were weighed and professional service is run by. Todd Weatherby is engaged in hundreds of those migrations. But we also have no over 70 partners that we've certified of migration partners. Migration partners are doing three times as many migrations as our old professional service is. Team are doing so in collection. There's a lot going on there, one of the common patterns. First of all, everybody is moved a Web development other websites have done. They're all running on the AWS know what they're doing is they're modernizing new applications. So the building in Europe or bring enough over moving onto containers. So it was a lie that ran on a sever server on. As they move into the clothes, they're gonna reshape the throw away. Some of the court brief the court up into micro service is on. Deploy out, Let's see on E. C s, which is continuing. There's a lot of application organization, and then on the migration side, we're seeing applications clearly were migrating a lost a lot of ASAP. So the big partners like Deloitte and Accenture are doing a C P migrations, and we've done a lot of ASAP migrations. And then there are other business applications are being moved with particular software vendors. You know there's a company here in Boston called Pegasystems. They do a world leading workflow platform. We've worked with Pagan, and we have migrated loss of paga warped floors in dozens of paying customers up on the float. >> You innovated on the marketplace, which is where people buy so they can contract with software. So now you got moving to the cloud, buying on the cloud, consuming the cloud and then governing it and managing that aspect all under one cohesive unit. That's you. Is that good? >> Yeah, it's a good way to think about it. It's a san of engineering teams with Coleman purpose for the customer. So you know, one of the things we do AWS is we innovate a lot, and then we organize the engineering teams around a common customer needs. So we said, above all of the computer stories service is on. We pay attention to the application layer. We described the application, So if you think of a migration service is says, I've actually got a service called Discovery, I crawl over your servers and I find what you have way. Then what we do is we have a tool that says, Are you gonna bring and move the till. So you have to build a business case. We just bought a company in Canada called TSA Logic. They had a Super Two for building a business case that said, what would this absolutely running with either of us. >> So is the need of the business case. What's the courtney that you guys have focused on? What was that? >> So, interestingly, we run more Windows Server and the clothes when Microsoft. So you actually have to business keys here. So many windows servers are running on print. What does it look like when a run on either the U. S. And T s so logic? Really good, too. And we find our customers using it. That says, Here's your own prim Windows server configuration with an app on run the mortal What would it look like when it runs on AWS? >> But why would you just do that with a spreadsheet? What? What is the T s so logic do that you couldn't do especially >> well? First of all, you want to make a simple too Somebody has to go run a spreadsheet. They've turned it into a tool that a business years Ercan used a sales person you could use on. They've built on top of a database. So it's got a rich set of choices. You are richer than you put in. A special with a U IE is intuitive, and you're gonna learn it in 20 minutes. I'm not gonna have you made up >> this date in their best practice things like that that you can draw a library >> of what's going down, and it keeps the data store of all the ones we've done. So we're turning that into two. Were giving Old Toller solution architect. >> Well, you got a good thing going on with the marketplace. Good to see you wrapping around those needs there. I gotta ask for the marketplace. Just give us the latest stats. How many subscriptions air in the marketplace these days? What's the overall number in the marketplace? It's >> pretty exciting. Way decided just at San Francisco to announce that we now have over 1,000,000 active subscriptions in the marketplace, which is a main boggling number on its own 1,000,000 subscriptions. Ice of Scrape. Within those subscriptions, we've got over 240 foes and active accounts, you know, and the audience doors you could be an enterprise with 100 cases and in an enterprise. What we typically see is that there are seven or eight teams that are buying or using software, so we'll have seven or eight accounts that have the right to subscribe. So you could be a one team and you're in another team you're buying B I tools. You're buying security tools. So those accounts on what? We're announcing the show for the first time ever. Its security is we have over 100,000 security subscriptions. That's a while. That's a big number. Some companies only have 100 customers, and the market, please. Our customers are switched on 100,000 security. So >> many product listings is that roughly it's just security security. At 300 >> there's over 100 listings. Thing is a product with a price okay on a vendor could be Let's see Paolo off networks or crowdstrike or trains or semantic or McAfee or a brand new company like Twist located of Israel. These companies might have one offer or 20 offers, so we have over 800 offers from over 300. Vendors were having new vendors every week. >> That's the next question. How many security app developers are eyes? Do you have over 300? 300? Okay. About 100. Anyway, I heard >> this morning from Gartner that they believe that are over 1000 security vendors. So I'm only 30% done. I got a little work >> tonight. How >> do you >> govern all this stuff? I was a customer. Sort of Make sure that they're in compliance. >> Great question. Steven Smith yesterday was talking about governance once she moved things on the clothes. It's very elastic. You could be running it today, not running a tomato, running it in I d running in Sydney. So it's easy to fire up running everywhere. So how did the governance team of a company nor watch running where you know, you get into tagging, everything has to be tagged. Everything has to have a cord attached to it. And then you do want to control who gets to use what I may have bought about a cuter appliance. But I don't know that I gave you rates to use it, right, so we could have border on behalf of the company. But I need to grant you access. So we launched a couple of years ago. Service catalog is our first governance to and yesterday we went into full release over new to call the control tower. >> Right. What you announced way reinvents >> preview. And yesterday we went to Jenny. What control does is it Natural Owes me to set up a set of accounts. So if you think of it, your development team, you've got David Kay and tested and the product ain't your brand new to the company. I'm a little worried. What, you're going to get up. You >> don't want to give him the keys to the kingdom, >> so I'm actually going to grant you access to a set of resources, and then I'm gonna apply some rules, or what we call God reels is your brand. You you haven't read my manual, you're in the company. So I'm gonna put a set of God reels on you to make sure that you follow our guide length >> Just training. And so is pressing the wrong button, that kind of thing. So I gotta ask you I mean, on the buying side consumption. I heard you say in a talk upstairs on Monday. You have a buyer, buyer, lead, engineering teams and cellar Let engineering, which tells me that you got a lot of innovation going on the marketplace. So the results are obviously they mention the listings. But one of the trends that's here security conference and it was proper is ecosystems importance in monetization. So back in the old days, Channel partners were a big part of the old computer industry. You're essentially going direct with service listings, which is great. How does that help the channel? Is there sinking around channel as a buyer opportunity? How do you How does that work with the market? Is what your thinking around the relationship between the scale of a simplicity and efficiency, the marketplace with the relationships the channel partners may have with their customers? And how do you bridge that together? What's the thinking >> you've overstayed? Been around a long time? >> Uh, so you have 90 Sydney? Well, the channels have been modernizes the nineties. You think about a >> long time. It's really interesting when we conceived Market please candidly. Way didn't put the channel in marketplace, and in retrospect, that was a miss. Our customers are big customers or small customers. Trust some of the resellers. Some resellers operates surely on price. Some resellers bring a lot of knowledge, even the biggest of the global 2000 Fortune 100. They have a prepared advisor. Let's take a company record. You often got 700 security engineers that are blue chip companies in America trusts or they buy the software the adoptive recommends. So mark it, please really didn't accommodate for Let's Pick another One in Europe, it would be computer center. So in the last two years we've dedicated the data separate engineering team were actually opened up. A team in a different city on their sole customer is a reseller. And so we launch this thing called Consulting Partner Private offer. And so now you're Palo. Also, for your trained, you can authorize active or serious or s h I to be the re sailor at this corporation, and they can actually negotiate the price, which is what a role resellers do. They negotiate price in terms, so we've actually true reseller >> write software for fulfillment through the marketplace. Four partners which are now customers to you now so that they could wrap service is because that's something we talk to. People in the Channel number one conversation is we love the cloud. But how do I make money and that is Service is right. They all want to wrap Service's around, So okay, you guys are delivering this. Is that my getting that right? You guys are riding a direct link in tow marketplace for partners, and they could wrap service is around there, >> will you? Seeing two things? First of all, yes. We're lowering the resale of to sell the software for absolutely. So you re sailor, you can quote software you build rebuild for you so that I become the billing partner for a serious or a billing partner for active on active can use marketplace to fulfill clothes software for their customers. Dan Burns to see you about pretty happy. You crossed the line into a second scenario, which is condone burns attached. Service is on. Clearly, that's a use case we hear usually would we hear use cases way end up through feeling that a little, little not a use case I have enabled, but we've done >> what you're working on It. We've had what the customer. How does the reseller get into the marketplace? What kind of requirements are there. Is it? Is it different than some of your other partners, or is it sort of a similar framework? >> They have to become an approved resale or so First of all, they have to be in a peon partner. I mean, we work tightly with a p N e p M screens partners for AWS. So Josh Hoffman's team Terry Wise, his team, whole part of team screen. The reseller we would only work with resellers are screened and approved by the PM Wants the AP en approved way have no set up a dedicated program team. They work with a reseller with trained them what's involved. Ultimately, however, the relationship is between Splunk in a tree sailor, a five and a three sailor named after a tree sailor or Paulo trend or Croat straight. So it's up to the I S V to tail us that hey, computer centers my reseller. I don't control that relationship. A fulfillment agent you crow strike to save resellers, and I simply have to meet that work so that I get the end customer happy. >> So your enabler in that instance, that's really no, I'm >> really an engine, even team for everybody engineer for the Iast way, engineer for the buyer. And they have to engineer for the re. So >> you have your hands in a lot of the action because you're in the middle of all this marketplace and you must do a lot of planning. I gotta ask you the question and this comes up. That kind of put on my learning all the Amazon lingo covering reinvent for eight years and covering all the different events. So you gotta raise the bar, which is an internal. You keep innovating. Andy Jassy always sucks about removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. So what is the undifferentiated heavy lifting that you're working toe automate for your customers? >> Great questions. Right now there's probably three. We'll see what the buyer friction is, and then we'll talk about what the sale of friction is. The buyer frustration that is, undifferentiated. Heavy lifting is the interestingly, it's the team process around choosing software. So a couple of customers were on stage yesterday right on those big institutions talked about security software. But in order for an institution to buy that software, there are five groups involved. Security director is choosing the vendor, but procurement has to be involved. Andre. No procurement. We can't be left out the bit. So yesterday we did. The integration to Cooper is a procurement system. So that friction is by subscribing marketplace tied round. Match it with appeal because the p O is what goes on the ledgers with the company. A purchase order. So that has to be a match in purchase order for the marketplace subscription. And then engineers don't Tidwell engineers to always remember you didn't tag it. Hi, this finance nowhere being spent. So we're doing work on working service catalog to do more tagging. And so the buyer wants good tagging procurement integrated. So we're working on a walk slow between marketplace service catalog for procurement. >> Tiring. So you've kind of eliminated procurement or are eliminating procurement as a potential blocker, they use another. Actually, we won't be >> apart for leading procurement. VPs want their V piece of engineering to be happy. >> This is legal. Next. Actually, Greek question. We actually tackled >> legal. First, we did something called Enterprise Code tracked and our customer advisory board Two years ago, one of our buyers, one of our customers, said we're gonna be 100 vendors to deploy it. We're not doing 100 tracks. We've only got one lawyer, You know, 6000 engineers and one lawyer. Well, lawyers, good cord is quickly. So we've created a standard contract. It take stain to persuade legal cause at risk. So we've got a whole bunch of corporations adopting enterprise contract, and we're up to over 75 companies adopting enterprise contract. But legal is apartment >> so modernizing the procurement, a key goal >> procurement, legal, security, engineering. And then the next one is I t finance. So if you think of our budgets on their course teams on AWS, everything needs to be can become visible in either of US budgets. And everything has become visible in course exporter. So we have to call the rate tags. >> I heard a stat that 6,000,000 After moving to the cloud in the next 6,000,000 3 to 5 years, security as a focus reinforces not a summit. It's branded as a W s reinforce, just like reinvents. Same kind of five year for security. What's your impression of the show so far? No, you've been highly active speaking, doing briefing started a customer's burn, the midnight oil with partners and customers What's that? What's your vibe of the show? What's your takeaway? What's the most important thing happening here? What's your what's your summary? >> So I always think you get the truth in the booth. Cut to the chase. I made a customer last night from a major media company who we all know who's in Los Angeles. His comment was weeks, either. These expectations wasn't she wanted to come because he goes to reinvent. Why am I coming to Boston in June? Because I'm gonna go to reinvent November on this. The rates of security for a major media company last night basically said, I love the love. The subject matter, right? It's so security centric. He actually ended up bringing a bunch of people from his team on, and he loves the topics in the stations. The other thing he loved was everybody. Here is insecurity, reinvent. There's lots of people from what's the functions, But everybody here is a security professional. So that was the director of security for a media company. He was at an event talking to one of the suppliers, the marketplace. I asked this president of a very well known security vendor and I said. So what's your reaction to reinforce? And he said, Frankly, when you guys told me it was coming, we didn't really want the bother. It's the end of the quarter. It's a busy time of year. It's another event, he said. I am sure glad we came on. He was standing talking to these VP of marketing, saying, We want to bring more people, make sure, So he's overjoyed. His His comment was, when I go to Rio event 50,000 people but only 5% of their own security. I can't reinforce everybody's insecurity >> in Houston in 2020. Any inside US tow? Why Houston? I have no clue what I actually think >> is really smart about the Vineyard, and this is what a customer said Last night. I met a customer from Connecticut who isn't a load to travel far. They don't get to go to reinvent in Vegas. I think what we did when we came to Boston way tapped into all the states that could drive. So there are people here who don't get to go to reinvent. I think when we go to Houston, we're going to get a whole bunch of takes its customers. Yeah, you don't get a flight to Vegas. So I think it's really good for the customer that people who don't get budget to travel >> makes sense on dry kind of a geographic beograd. The world >> if we're expanding the customers that can learn. So from an education point of view, we're just increase the audience that we're teaching. Great, >> Dave. Great to have you on. Thanks for the insights and congratulations on the new responsibility as you get more coz and around marketplace been very successful. 1,000,000 subscriptions. That's good stuff again. They were >> you reinvented and >> a couple of months, Seven days? What? We're excited. I love covering the growth of the clouds. Certainly cloud security of his own conference. Dave McCann, Vice president Marketplace Migration and Control Service is controlled cattle up. How they how you how you move contract and governed applications in the future. All gonna be happening online. Cloud Mr. Q coverage from Boston. They just reinforced. We right back with more after this short break

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by Extension Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for adobe summat. Twenty nineteen. I'm John for With my Coast. Jeffrey for Yu here for two days. The wall, the wall coverage We're on day to our next guest. Marc Andre Sinclair, director of digital marketing Platform Content Strategy Export Development Canada E D. C. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So love your channel. Digital marketing platform content strategy. That's kind of in the center of all the action. So, you know, you've been doing some transformation. Tell us your story. What do you guys do? What was what was that? What's the story? >> So I joined E. C. Exported moment Cata two years ago, really helping them out on the overall digital transformation. So I've been fortunate, joined the organization as the moment that they're our position. We wanted to change like we weren't a mandate to gain back some relevance in the market. CDC exists how occasion businesses go beyond the borders, go international. So they really wanted to be relevant to the market because we're not competing with the markets were really just like a compliment in a market. So we've been on that journey distrust, transformation For the last two years, we've are now competing the first phase of a transformation and just about two years, which normally takes four years in the industry. And we're now add midway to our overall digital transformation. We want a critical the number of customers that we have in four years, but it's a very aggressive target what we call normal, like a stretch goal that are serious put. So that's what we've been up to in the last two years. >> And what >> was the catalyst? Why the change? Because, well, what was going on kind of behind the scenes t make such an aggressive, so aggressive move. If you look at >> the interest you overall, there's a major shift in what is export. So exporting means merchandising guys ing good for most of the people. When when you look at the shipping industry to software and services, these folks are not perceiving themselves as being on exporter like really, you build a software, you sell it. You don't think about your software getting beyond the borders. So the industry, the overall market size, are the number of companies that we could help in. The country has grown, but our number of customer remained flat. So we wanted to catch back at that market reach. And there was a theater in Perth. Is that forced us to change? But basically it started. What? Our CEO Putting forward a strong paper cultured like really forced people to think differently and change. >> What's the progress Like how you happy with the progress so far? Absolutely. What are what are some of the things you've knocked down already? What was the pick us through the steps? They could screw up the plan. What was the What is the plan? What is completed were how much how much is left. >> OK, so it started for us as a strong investments and over all the marketing tech stocks which started obviously where I will be summit. So we started in the vestments with the Adobe expense manager and it was about us changing the technology that we had in terms of delivering a customer experience. So your approach we took wass people processing technology. But at the middle, we really put the customer experience at the forefront of everything at the art of every decisions. Makings. So for us were Margaret, we're finishing the migration as we speak right now. That's the first phase. And now with the partner that we have X censure. We're looking in terms ofthe archaic. How can we build capabilities back in the business? Because we've outsourced are full function to our partner. And now it's about how do we get the right level of cost tower scalability for the future so we can deliver premium customer experience. So a lot of activities have happened. We went into natural transformation at the same time, the organization has embraced our job overall and now we're really thinking about was the future data customer experience. So these are the biggest shift that their condition is looking at As we stand right now, we've done the migration and we can now start to think about personalization experimentations. These are all the cool things that we have ahead of us. >> What was the heavy lifting hard part of getting this off the ground? What, some learning or any experiences where you, you know, failed miserably and rebooted or reset means you learned through it oration. We see these successful projects. What's the key learnings? Have you had any moments like that? >> Definitely So So, First of all, I would like to talk a bit about the fail approach because this is something that wasn't obviously part of the organization. And that is something fundamental to a change in organizations. So to quote my boss fail stance or first attempt and learning, So you got to get out and you got to try things and we gotta experiment. Otherwise, you're not really pushing the boundaries. Eso I'm proud of her failure and actually won an award about failure last year at our, um, organizations. So they have a corporate awards that recognise people that do fails but move on and fell fast, like that's a spirit. So for us as, say, at the beginning, the biggest part of a project was to get the what I call the M V P. Zero. So we have to change from a nun premise toe called architectures. And when you start to do these things at an organization that has never done cloud, you uncover a lot of stuff a lot of security protocols, firewalls kicking in. So our first BP zero just to set the infrastructure has been quite a challenge. I think we went three times out, and the third time was the right one. But this is the critical one where you start to build credibility. And even though for us we're working and agile every two weeks without ever cradle to grave, everything full blown experience, this one was really a longer one. And we were really made sure that the requisition understood that this is complicated When you do the foundation. This >> is company goes cousins to say its foundational. So I'm going to take your time. You've got to get that right. Can't have any cracks in the foundation because you're building on top of it. Exactly. So that three attempts you. You said you went out for forbid, or how did three attempts of building it was >> so the throughout That's R about us deploying the full Levi's serology in the clouds. So first time we went uncover a few things. Second time, not anything pop up weren't aware. And then the third time we went out. Third time's a charm to say we went >> out. It was good >> way. Nailed it on that >> time. It's the >> price I didn't invite you on stage. I don't know if you caught that in the Kino. Towards the end of his keynote, he said, We need to have an award for people that disproved their own hypothesis. Exactly so. But you said it's interesting. He said. The people part was hard in the process, and yet it was a top down initiative from the CEO. So was it not bought in a kind of the mid tier management level? The senior management? Why, if the COC and we need to do this, was it hard to move those different party organization? Well, >> I'd say the people part was more about having the right talent on the right mind sets. So one to CEO put forward the culture paper, the stretch goals. Really the organization started to organize themselves on. Are we going to make that thing happened now? Like we need to work differently. And this is not about just more cash, more at counts. We need to re engineer a bit the way we were working, so I wouldn't say that there was an issue with with the way or the people of today was just like you start through higher scrums, you start the heart coach to start our appeal. These are skills says that you've never had. Like at the beginning of the project, we had new marketing talent. We had new partner for the ritual that every we have a new partner for agile and we also have new technology. So you start with a lot of new stuff at the same time. So I'd say these are natural things that you have to do. Is it easy? No, not necessarily. But we had a lot of support from the sea level standpoint. >> It sounds like you guys have a very Dev ops oriented culture because talking about failing fast is a cultural cloud concept. I mean agile iterating scrums. This's a dev ops mindset, infrastructure. It's code. Did you guys have that built in Or you said you started three years ago. Was that was that the core cultural mindset? >> So I wouldn't say that we're a dev ups type of culture of mentality, I would say, actually, it's probably the part that we still need to invest hard because now we build a fully whole machine that scaring and pushing the machine you start uncover that once you go that full cycle, few things are popping up, so you know, and and the in the nineties are beginning of this of two thousands. Like when you were thinking about nal ticks, people were always like, Okay, let's let's do this on our techs use case. Our position at the end. Let's do your documentation at the end. It tends to be the same thing with Dev up. Sometimes like we have a strong architectural when in terms of regression, automation and all these things, we truly need to invest a bit more so we can have a because we're playing every single two weeks that we wanted or not. So that's a lot of pressure on all the people that do, que way you waited to make sure everything >> you want to get it right first, then kind of bolted on after as more of an operational models >> way had a very strong foundation, and now we're spinning everything. >> It's all I got to ask you about the export piece of it because, obviously, um, international global competitiveness is a big force. Right now, people have to be global and data privacy. You mentioned. We talk about genie pr before we came on camera you an opinion on this. Do you have anything? You? Could you please share your view on TV? I really Well, I thought it's valuable. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what I didn't mention when we chatted about that before is Wei thought a lot about you. We need to comply to GDP. Are because this is ah, European regulation. And we headed up that Yes, a CZ. Because we have prisons internationally and erupts. Not everyone that has that opinion that they need to comply. But what we've uncovered was one, one or two weeks before the D days on May twenty fits that We needed to be compliant. So what has happened is in two weeks, we stop everything. We worked twenty four hours for two weeks to restructure the platform to make sure that we were, like, compliant to do CPR. And then after that, we fought a lot. Next few months, we'LL look into it. Are we going to make that thing right? Because people are scared of gpr, but that you want it or not? This is just a beginning way. See it with the California Act Canada as a castle. I'm pretty sure they're going to be very aggressive, so you need to make sure that you really invest in. There are privacy management and all these things. At the end of the day, if it's well done, your customers will love it. The issue is people are being a bit sneaky without the use data. But if you're being transparent and you're being honest with the way you use the data and you're being fully disclosing what you're doing, it's not an issue you need to embrace it. Actually, I think that's a commis it embrace it because it's going to be part of our journey that we >> want to do the tough work up front for you. He was forced to because you are building something new. And then, well, the deadlines here, so is the struggles. Hard works. He had to grind it out. So you and then once you get over that, prepare for it, invested it, nurture the strategy for that. What's the advice to give someone sets there has to do the GPR and might not be into the time pressure, but it's starting out and saying Okay, I got to get my arms around this. What's the core issues well, getting started, not colour, but like what's playbook? >> So the playbook and say like if you think about G p r. This is basically for the European. You If they're not giving you the right tio leverage cookies and tracking and all these things, you should not be doing it. So it's simply thinking in your implementation of a piece of software that goes at the beginning that says, Do you want to have full functional thief, full personalization or not? And don't look at GDP R. But look at the customer experience. If you put the customer once again at the forefront and you really think about what does it make sense? You know if if you and I get on the Web sites and we see that thing that is fronting A, I know what you've done last summer like it's kind of creepy. You don't want to have these things. And so you just build that customer experience around their privacy management, and then everything will fall together. >> So build it into the product. >> Yeah, platform, yeah, and do it the right way and compliance will follow. Don't do it to be compliant. Don't >> exactly do it through a customer experience, >> right? Right. So how's this success band in terms of getting into some of these new markets for you in terms of software and services and some of the other export markets? So, so >> interesting question, because two years ago a DC was focused on to court things, financial products and insurance products. So right now we've expended our product line, and we're now having this what we call knowledge business. So if you think about occasion, business or any business that wants to go beyond the borders, this's quite scary to go in the international game. So now we're capable of offering them a lot of insights on international market out the exports virus key questions that haven't her journey. So we're not helping them to our journey and also as were wet and better than the international supply chains. We're helping them with connecting with big, big companies that are leveraging or looking for some capabilities that we have in the country. So we've really skilled up the product line that we have. We're really shifting the model. We're working a lot with the banks and the way we're supporting the Cajun businesses so like it's days and nights, the type of products that have a solution, the experience that were providing, uh, from two years ago. Do we still have work? Absolutely. Like digital transformation is never such a thing that is completed. The key essence here. The key message is, it's never done, and the customer experience has to be at the forefront if you think about the customer experience. It just happened that most of the experiences digital these days so test our mission is never handing. >> I think I think it's a great mind set. I think that's so smart. It's not just about mobile first or cloud for just customer center. From the beginning, I'm gonna ask you the question. What's it like working with a century Iraq? That what role that they play with a easy to work with the good? What's the story? >> Absolutely. I'm very pleased with the team that we had. We have strong people from Accenture were fully leveraging the network that they have because they're distributed in the global business. Axe Central, for us, is doing all the delivery stuff, the the very difficult stuff behind the scene that is normally like your function that you haven't an organization. So we've been extremely pleased on DH. Actually, I think that the fighter fact that were capable of delivering every single two weeks and agile were pure, agile. You will hear in the industry that some people think they're our job, but they're actually hybrid Elijah. So we're full blown, agile the organization. And they've been strong partner with us on that journey. >> That's awesome. Well, I love the story looking for to keep it in touch. Keep us posted on When you get this transformation. I look forward to chatting. And thanks for sharing your story. And inside here in the Cube, my pleasure. Mark Andreessen, Claire customer here inside the cute telling about the journey and the struggles and GDP are get on it and make it an advantage. Great. Great line there. And digital is the future. I'm Jeffery Jeffery. More day to coverage with the Cube after the short break

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in downtown San Francisco, the Hotel Nikko, it's International Women's Day, March 8th, stuff happening all around the world If you haven't seen it, jump on social. I think there's more hashtags than I even know what to do with. Thankfully we have 240 characters now. (Lisa laughs) But we're excited to be here at the Accenture event, it's Getting To Equal. Accenture's made a commitment to get to 50% gender equality by 2025, and this is a terrific event, 400 people, a lot of panels, a lot of real-world conversations. So we're excited to be here and our next guests are joining us, it's Lisa Bridgett, she's the COO of The Modist. Welcome. >> Thank you so much. >> And Amy Fuller, chief marketing and communications officer from Accenture. Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So for folks that aren't familiar with The Modist, give us a little overview. >> Hi everyone, we are a year old today. >> A year today? >> A year old on International Women's Day. >> Happy birthday. >> Thank you so much. And we are a luxury ecommerce platform between Dubai and London, that has an assortment and a curation of luxury fashion, 150 brands, but all with the sensibility around modesty, so we think about hemlines, we think about opacity, we think about loose fits, all with luxury fashion on top of it, but making sure that we cater for our customers' needs in mind. >> How could this not have existed before, 366 days ago. >> This is the age old question, and our founder Ghizlan Guenez has been asked that time and time again. We have numerous places where you can go and find anything that will reveal, but there wasn't a one-stop place that really had curation and styling thought through from a modest perspective. And the customer base spans women who think about modesty from a religious perspective, businesswomen, curvier women, older women, high fashionistas that love a layered look, really, it's a niche, but it's massive. It's a massive global niche. >> Again, we're here, Macy's is right across the street, we're right downtown San Francisco, Nordstrom's, this is the big retail hub of San Francisco, one of the bigger retail hubs in the United States. And we know, we were talking before we turned on the cameras, I have teenage girls, and you go to the store, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, "is there nothing else that you can buy, "besides what's on there?" Why is this so underserved, or was underserved? >> I mean, I think that the fashion industry is going through a massive overhaul now, as one thinks about whether you're designing for aspiration, or whether you're designing and selling for really the reality of what the consumer segment is out there. And that goes for a Western woman, and when you think about the global fashion industry, are we thinking about fashion that resonates in India, or the Middle East, or in Asia, or are you sticking to a more conformed, idealized persona of what the customer is. And so this is very much on top of minds of all retail at the moment, and you will have seen shifts into larger sizes, very well-known fashion designers thinking about how do I design and cater for women that don't subscribe to an idealized format, it's quite a reflective thing that the fashion industry's going through at the moment. >> It's interesting Amy, a lot of conversations about communications, and objectives, not necessarily about what's comfortable and what I want to wear. As you look at this world and how it evolves, what's your take? Because, designing for an aspiration, that's a really interesting way, versus just designing practical clothes, we haven't seen the practical side. >> Well I think that what Lisa and her company are doing has potential to be quite transformational, and, I'll just plug a piece of research that we're publishing in honor of International Women's Day, which looked at, how do we get to equality in the workplace. Massive research, analytics, surveyed 22,000 working adults, men and women, in 34 countries, and what we were trying to get at, and did get at, are things about the culture. So what are the cultural factors that actually make a difference? So this is a very long way of getting to the point, but one of the questions we asked was, have you ever been asked to change clothing, hair, tattoos, et cetera, things about personal appearance to fit and conform in the workplace. A lot of people had been asked, sadly. And this was across 34 countries. But what we further found was, if you had not been asked to conform to the workplace, in other words, if you are allowed to dress as you wish to dress, that that was a factor that drove equality in the workplace. So, the idea that a woman with fabulous taste, who wishes to dress modestly, and Lisa described, there are a lot of people out there with that point of view, have a place to go to get absolutely stunning stuff, and dress as they wish to dress, and therefore, be the persona they want to be in the workplace is really powerful. And there were a lot of other factors, but that was the one that I found really, really, really interesting, and we found out before we had even invited Lisa to talk to us today, so it was a coming together of things that do matter. >> It's interesting because dress in the workplace, in the context of the workplace, is an interesting topic, if you go to Wall Street, everybody's got to buy the super nice suits, and then we got this kind of Casual Friday thing a few years ago, and people were very confused, how casual do I get on Casual Friday, and then, you've kind of got the whole joke about the baristas, with tats, and ripped up t-shirts-- >> There you go. >> And the getting that blended into traditional corporate cultures, little bit of a shocker. >> Well, there are a lot of questions that come into play, and I was having a long chat with one of my male colleagues, last night about how things have changed, and how much trickier it is to navigate, and he described that early on, cut to a couple of decades ago, men had to wear white shirts and ties at Accenture, and there was a young man who came to work in a blue Oxford, tie, suit, perfectly appropriate-- >> But blue, not white. >> On a Monday, yes, taken to task, and drawn aside, and said, "Blue shirts are for Fridays." >> Wow. >> So, from there, we go, and one of the things we really love about Accenture is that, you can wear what you want to wear, and it really has such a profound impact on how you feel in the workplace. And, if I can pull in a little AI stuff as well, when we look at AI, and the impact it will have on the workforce, what really, really matters is the things that humans are uniquely able to do. And what AI is uniquely able to deliver, that's the big win for all of us, for business, and when you think about the uniquely human characteristics, creativity, comfort that leads to creativity, and being able to freely think, is one of the most valuable qualities we have as humans. And, oddly, or not oddly, what you wear allows you to feel comfortable, or not. So coming back to what the Modist really provides women with great taste-- >> Great taste. >> To something that they feel comfortable with, and they can be more productive, and more successful. >> Yeah, I'll halo just a couple of those points. The first one is about choice. So, we were saying earlier on, we're in a luxurious environment where we are able to say, "You can choose," because it has not been that way and still continues not to be that way for many people. And that's why we really are for a mission and a purpose, because here we provide you with this element of choice, and you don't need to be ashamed of it, and you'd need to be proud of it. The second part was that modesty didn't need to equate to frumpiness, why can't I dress elegantly and magnificently beautifully, and there is something about dress, and fashion, that really provides a sense of identity, that's an age old desire for society, and for women, a lot, and this is a place where you can be modest, but luxuriously, and beautifully dressed up. And be proud of that, and not necessarily conformed into a box of frumpiness, or less stylish wear. >> The other big interchange, I think, which drove a lot of the traditional norms around clothing, was when you interface with a customer. It was how do you represent the customer, I'm sure that was a lot of what the story that you said, or in the investment bankers, where, we want you to have a certain look, because you're representing the company, it's that company's look that you are personifying when you go out and talk to your customer. Well today, a lot of customer interactions, let's take banking for one, is done on a mobile app. People don't go to the bank, I don't expect the guy to come out from the back with the beautiful pinstripe suit, who knows me anymore. I wonder, do you think that's had a part of the impact on this? Or just more of our acceptance in general of people that don't necessarily look like me? Whether that be in skin color, dress, the way they speak, et cetera. >> Yeah, those are great-- >> You go, and I've got a-- >> Well, I think it's both, and I love both of those points, more virtual interaction clearly takes clothing out of the equation, as well as a lot of other things, and that can be liberating, though I think we have a thirst for the in real life, and the person-to-person which isn't going away. But, I grew up in the advertising business, and, at ad agencies, they were pretty loose. But you always dressed for your client, so that certainly was a dynamic. But of course, now, dressing for your client doesn't imply a suit. And it makes it slightly more work, in fact, 'cause you have to do some anthropological study of what is the client environment like, and that how would you be most comfortable, and appropriate in that environment, so, certainly both of those factors come into play. >> And I feel the hyperdigitalization of the way we interact actually allows for more authenticity. Because you don't have to dress up in the suit that's the conform, you know. Your digital interaction and the work effect is happening, and so people behind that wanting to know who are you really? And authenticity is a way in which you get your own identifical message through, and dressing is one of the elements that comprises that. >> Alright, so before we wrap, Lisa, I want to get your take, so, you've been in business for a year-- >> Yes. >> Again, happy birthday. >> Thank you. >> If we get together, a year from now, you've, say, got over the hurdle, you're up, you're running, you're shipping, what are some of your objectives for the next year? >> Well, we have an amazing strategic roadmap ahead, we have got a very secret launch around product that will be coming out shortly, and that's something that we've been deep in. We are really developing the personalization and the AI component of our shopping experience, so we're really targeting what works best for this consumer, how and where, and that goes all the way from her marketing, through to her experience inside, and through to the retention side. And, just increasly, continually growing globally. We ship to 120 countries, our first market is UAE, our second is America, third is UK, fourth Saudi Arabia, fifth Canada, sixth Hong Kong. So we're global at the get-go, and it's just continuing to grow our customer base in this magnificently beautiful parts of the world that love modest fashion. >> Well, congratulations-- >> Thank you so much. >> And what a great story, we'll continue to watch it. >> Thank you so much. >> So Lisa, thank you, Amy, thanks for spending some time with us. >> Thanks so much! >> Alright, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, We're at the Accenture International Women's Day event, in San Francisco, California. Thanks for watching. (mellow electronic music)

(bubbly electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE, covering Polycon 18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in the Bahamas. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the token economics world cryptocurrency blockchain, the new innovation that's changing the world. And of course, word on the ground floor, day two of coverage our next guest Amir Kaltak, CEO and founder of L-exit, L-exit, Lexit, called legalized exit, legit exit. He's automating the M&A process in a decentralized way. This is exactly the kind of value we see with cloud computing, and when you see automation and efficiencies, that's disruptive. Amir, congratulations on your awesome venture. Love your model. Let's get into details, because I think-- >> Thank you. >> You're demonstrating, in my opinion, where value is being created and then ultimately captured faster, more efficiently, because you're automating the M&A process. For people to get exit in a highly volatile, value creation, value capture world. Take a minute to explain your company. This is fantastic. Thank you for this kind intro. Hello, world. Lexit, in a nutshell, is M&A on blockchain, and I hope you guys will love it. What we do is we give you access to the world of M&A, which is currently a big boys club, and we want you guys to be all participating in it, from the small entrepreneur who just started out, who crashed his startup but created a great tac. He can sell it on it. The whole world's going to see it. Or to the seasoned entrepreneur, to the big entity, to the big enterprise, you can sell it on there too. You will be seen by all acquirers in the world, and at a penny of the cost, at multitudes of speed, you will be able to liquidize and asset your business. >> So we, Dave and I, predict that there's going to be a lot of liquidity going on at many levels, obviously. Token economics drives that, but in the startup world, you either make it or you sell it, or you put it out of business. In this world, as people start developing technology, the difference between a company and a feature might not be the same. So I might build the best app for social entrepreneurship, for solving world hunger or tracking the water supply through blockchain. And someone says, "Damn, I love that. I'm going to buy that." Now I got to go to a banker, I got to get legal fees. My choices are-- >> Yes, limited. >> Limited, hassle, costs cash. >> As a guy who just crashed a startup, let's take this example, because the majority does fail: over 90%, as matter of fact 96%. Now, you just failed, but you have this great technology you created, right? What are you going to do? You check your address book. Who might buy it? But it's limited too, because you just started out. You don't know nobody, so what you do is you go to a consultancy: M&A consultancy, the lawyers who are connected to this sphere. >> John: The gatekeepers. >> Yes, the gatekeepers. Big boys. >> John: And they take a big cut of it. >> They will tell you, it's an amazing technology. We'll help you sell it, but you make a down payment of $10,000 right now, and we'll look into it. But you don't have $10,000 right now, for instance. So what are you going to do? And even if you pay them, the likeability of them getting back to you is not that high, so what you do is on Lexit is, you get to Lexit, you open up your account, get KYC'd. We're very strict on that. It's fully legit platform, and you list it. You get assessed by our professional M&A network, given a value to it. It's not the value it will be sold for, but it's a value the professional assessor thinks you're worth, and why. He's going to say these reasons. Now, the buyers are going to see it, make the bids, and there you are. Access. >> So you guys automate that entire end-to-end process. >> Absolutely. So, Lexit is, from the listing, down to the final due diligence and drafting of agreements. Everything is in it. The final signature and the transfer of ownership. It's a full solution. >> Yes. The future of work, obviously, is about automation. I mentioned cloud computing, because we look at that market heavily. On the tech side, automation drives it, but managing processes, automating processes away is threatening to a lot of people. You're basically putting people out of business, potentially. >> Yes, I keep doing that. >> If you're successful, a cadre of ecosystem partners, service providers, traditionally go out of business, so I like that. >> Potentially. >> Well, they're going to have to adapt or change. I see this in global service integrators, like Accenture. These guys are getting eaten up by machine learning automated coding, because they can do it faster and better. >> You know my business better than I do! (both laugh) >> What we do at theCUBE, we know our stuff. So, this is disruptive, and at the end of the day, the other thing I want to get your reaction to is open-source. A lot of people in the ethos of the mission based open-source world is, I wrote coding as an open-source. If my company fails, and my VC's make it proprietary, it's like an owned asset in bankruptcy, or whatever, dying, you can't put it back, but with open-source code, there's always going to be value there, to some level. It might not be great. So, I might say "Hey, you had a failed venture, I'll buy your code." >> Exactly. >> Transfer your GitHub over. Done. >> That's how it works. >> So this is kind of like the dynamic that... Do you see that? >> This is the direction that we're heading to. We want to connect the dots, because we started Lexit out of a community approach. We figured out two years ago, when we started it... So we're two years into that right now, that this is direly needed. We don't have access, but if I got this problem right now as a startupper, so do many. And out of this thinking, we claim ourselves to be the startups for startups and empower the community. I believe that in terms of leadership, for instance, you're only a good leader if you empower everyone around you to become a good leader, based on respect and mutual purpose. >> So I got to ask you a question. >> Please. >> Cause everyone's going to ask this question of all startups. You got to know where you are. Are you a startup? Are you a growing company? Where's the product? How far along are you? When is it going to be released? Talk about the momentum of the offering that you have. Is it available in Beta? What's the status of the product itself? Because I'm sure it'll be used a lot. >> As I said, we started two years ago. The first year we didn't even write a single line of code. It was just like how do you put this huge M&A process into a usable yet powerful but simple to use platform. How do you do that? Just scalable from the small, small asset you want to sell, a line of code, an algorithm up to a large enterprise. The first year was finding out a process. What is necessary? How do we cover all aspects on different jurisdictions, and all this stuff, right? How to make it work on the legal side too. And we figured it out, and then we started doing it. And right now I can tell you guys we are scheduling the launch of Lexit, this year, in June. So we'll not just-- >> The product will be ready for production, shipping product. >> Absolutely. Available worldwide, completely worldwide ready to operate. Ready to make your deals, to put your listings, to make your bids, to get the best technology out there, but not just technology. Letters M&A, it means any kind of of business from a pizza chain, to a high tech company, to a biotech company, to food, supplies you can sell. >> Usually when I do legal documents, you see an exhibits in there, and say oh, exhibit A is all the IP, or whatever the seller's selling and the buyer's buying. When you deal with decentralized asset creation and capture, use that blockchain involved, how much is the tech involved in your process? Obviously, the legal stuff, I can really see automating away. That's like check one. But when you start dealing with assets that are either code or something durable, like property, that's maybe stored in blockchain, how do you guys look at that? Is that part of the automation? Is that a factor? Where does that impact? Is that an exhibit? Do I just say "Here's my key"? How do you deal with that? >> Alright, let's put it this way. We do want to connect existing M&A space to Lexit. The exits, they're huge structures. We do want to disrupt them, that's true, but to do that you can't just create entirely everything new. You have to kind of find a way for the big boys old club, the big banks, and all those folks around there to participate, right? To give them a familiar way to work. What we did is the token model economics in a way that people get rewarded, people pay for stuff inside of it, and such, right? Everything is triggered with smart contracts, obviously, to know did you do the down payment, did the signature happen. The smart contracts are automating the whole thing down to the final transaction. When the final transaction happens we get our commissions paid out from the Astro we have. The Lexit Crypto Astro. Everything is transferred and secure. Everybody involved into a deal knows exactly what's happening. >> John: And they have a shared incentive too. >> Absolutely >> They're tokenizing the process so there's a reward element. Right? >> Yes. >> Am I getting this right? >> Yes, the access. There are three parties in Lexit. Buyer, seller, obviously and the assessors. Professional M&A guys. They get rewarded in tokens, and that greatly. Pretty much in the magnitude of what they do in billables at the Big Four, PWC and so on. There's a high incentive there to do this in this assessment, and they get rewarded from the community pool which gets feed with all those listing fees, unlocking futures and everything that's happening within Lexit itself. The kicker is that we at Lexit believe that much in token that the commission you have to pay us is between 8 and 2%. 2% of about 35 million dollars in volume, and it gets a bit higher down to the lower ones. We take this commission only in our own token. I don't want dollars, not even Bitcoin. >> So you have your own token? >> Yes. >> Utility token or security token? >> It's a utility token strictly, and it's called LXT. >> LXT. Great. And is it available now, or are you going to launch it in June? >> Right now we are in the private pre-sale. I'll put through, and it looks like we'll keep it in the presale. It looks like the page was selling out LXT right now to the private backers. It's that high that we think in two weeks from now on, speaking mid-March, it's sold out >> What's the numbers? Hard cap, soft cap? Do you have the numbers? >> I told my team "Listen, everybody tells me: 'you're doing M&A on blockchain, you can raise hundreds of millions,'" and everybody will say "That's okay." I said "We don't need that money." I just want to raise what we do need to finalize the last mile of the dev and launch it this year. The hard cap is 10,000 ETH. 10K ETH only, roughly $9 million right now, and that's it. >> And you're going to reserve the other tokens for the community to do the work and be part of this new future of work equation? >> 50% of the total supply, which is 18 million, it's zero, goes to sale, to the market. Just 10% to us founders. You don't need more. >> So you're not greedy? >> No. >> You guys are playing it right to create-- >> I want the community to be empowered, this whole-- >> You need the community. You need the community. >> I need the community. >> So that is a different dynamic... Well, not different. That is the dynamic that everyone is agreeing on in the community in the ecosystem here, is that if you have bogarting or hoarding coins, or people taking down allocations, you miss the dynamic of the human capital, which is what the future of work is doing. You are an example-- >> Free promotion, you know what I mean? >> You're engaging. The future of work requires human capital. So if one institutional buyer buys the token out, there's no people. >> I interrupted you. You said "We are an example for what"? >> The future of work. >> I love that. >> You are executing, potentially, disruptive M&A, but you're not going after the banks directly. They can play, too. >> Right. >> So you guys are a service. You're like an Amazon.com website cloud service for... >> You could say that. >> M&A. Well, not like, but automated. Automating away things is the way to go. Do you see other examples that are like you guys, that are emerging in use cases? Obviously you're taking a known process, M&A, automating it away, making it tokenized. What other things do you see out there that's ripe for disruption? >> I do think that if somebody out there... Lexit, what we do, let's put it aside for a moment. I think supply, the supply chains of the world are ripe for disruption. I think they're inefficient. I think even food production, down to the basic needs of a human being, this is ripe for disruption. >> When I got my MBA back in the 90s, after I got my Computer Science degree in the 80s, I remember the word that always stick in my head from the books that they teach you is the "Value Chain." >> Value Chain. >> The Value Chain is a concept of anything, of value creation. This notion of chaining, blockchain, you see it... Anything that has value creation process. >> Let's take food production for a moment. Rice, okay? Rice. So now there is this farmer, somewhere in Asia, or in elsewhere, and he's producing, and he's selling it to somebody, who's picking it up, and he sells to the next distributor. He sells to an international distributor. He sold it for probably... I don't know, maybe 20 cents a pound tops? Probably just five. I don't know the prices. What happens if we could chain that supply chain, that we have a decentralized nature of how all these people can directly feed into the system and just jump those middlemen entirely. So this is what I'm speaking about. It's going to disrupt everything. Somebody's going to figure out that one. >> So you guys have a good formula, just to recap. You're automating the M&A process, you're creating a huge supply of tokens available to the community, that will help you change the game on M&A, which is also part of the process of your value chain, now tokenized, and you're taking a small cut that's a tiered commission, if you will, on the M&A transaction. >> It's like six times cheaper. >> Higher for the lower numbers and as you go higher, which you want more deals, you take a smaller cut, so it's not greedy, you're not taking a grotesque-- >> Nope. We go even beyond. Around Lexit we created a partner program. This partner program is fueling directly deals onto Lexit, and we give them 50% off the commission. People tell me "You're crazy." No I'm not. You need to incentify. So if you get thousands of these partners one day... Think of that. 50% is still a lot. I believe in sharing everything except my girlfriend. Everything is fine, so we share. You can have my beer, that's fine. (both laugh) Speaking of that, I believe in this-- >> Well, the Network Effect, too. Sharing is an ethos of distribution, so distribution is sharing. Sharing is also a social thing, but social gamification really is about distribution. You're essentially creating a network effect, and this is the fundamental pattern in token economics, is the networks. >> Totally true. >> You see that? >> That's how it happens. >> What's your situation now? You've got a deal going on. Are you with Polymath? >> That's amazing, I-- >> Talk about that. You're announcing it on stage in about an hour. >> It's true, yeah. The stage is about to come. Trevor and his team do a great job. Boarding startups with the tokens to become a security token. I believe there is a huge business for them in the future. And now we want to work with them together, so we partner up, and what we do is... One of the models is that we will help their clients to liquidize these tokens, then, over Lexit. So this is one of the thoughts we have. We're just figuring out a few things, but we're very excited. >> John: And it's all API-based, I'm assuming, right? >> All API-based. It's been highly automated, of course. Automation. It's all about automation. You have to lower the cost to make it efficient, to make it cheap for everybody involved, so you have to automate everything you can, and smart contracts are, per se, an automation tool. >> Well, Amir, good luck with your venture, Lexit. I love the idea, I love what you're doing. I think this is what we look for in theCUBE, this kind of innovation. We think it's awesome. Good luck on your team. Product's almost pre-launch. >> And the pre-sale is almost through, so if you guys want in before ETH (mumbles), let me just drop that one in two weeks. It's closing and we distro in between four to six weeks, we're going to distro the token. So it's everything happening right now, and soon after that the exchanges are waiting, and you'll be surprised. They're going to be the good ones. >> This is innovations theCUBE are covering: the blockchain, the cryptocurrency. We're at Polycon 18. Polymath is the folks putting on the event with Grit Capital, a Canadian contingency, but they know their cryptography. If you know Canada, you know what the deal is there. It's theCUBE covering it live. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Thank you. (reverb-heavy electronic music) (moody ambient electronic) (moody ambient electronic) >> Hi, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE. I've been in the tech business since I was 19, first programming on minicomputers in a large enterprise, and then worked at IBM and Hewlett Packard, a total of nine years in the enterprise. Various jobs from programming, training, consulting and, ultimately as an executive salesperson, and then started my first company, it was in 1997, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1999. I've been here ever since. I've always loved technology, and I love covering emerging technology. I was trained as a software developer, and loved business. I loved the impact of software technology to business. To me, creating technology that starts a company and creates value and jobs is probably one of the most rewarding things I've ever been involved in. And I bring that energy to theCUBE because theCUBE is where all the ideas are and where the experts are, where the people are and I think what's most exciting about theCUBE is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen. Entrepreneurs, CEO of companies, Venture Capitalists. People who are really, on a day in and day out basis, building great companies. In the technology business, there's just not a lot of real-time live TV coverage, and theCUBE is a non-linear TV operation. We do everything that the TV guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews. We ask tougher questions. We ask sometimes some light questions. We talk about the person and what they feel about. It's not prompted and scripted. It's a conversation. It's authentic. And for shows that have theCUBE coverage, it makes the show buzz, it creates excitement, and more importantly, it creates great content, great digital assets that can be shared instantaneously to the world. Over 31 million people have viewed theCUBE and that is the result of great content, great conversations, and I'm so proud to be part of theCUBE, a great team. Hi, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (emotive electronic music) >> Narrator: Robert Herjavec!