>>Hey, everyone. Welcome back to accelerating analytics, maturity. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, Alan Jacobson joins me next. The chief data and analytics officer at Altrix Ellen. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks Lisa. >>So Ellen, as we know, everyone knows that being data driven is very important. It's a household term these days, but 93% of organizations are not utilizing the analytics skills of their employees, which is creating a widening analytics gap. What's your advice, your recommendations for organizations who are just starting out with analytics >>And you're spot on many organizations really aren't leveraging the, the full capability of their knowledge workers. And really the first step is probably assessing where you are on the journey, whether that's you personally, or your organization as a whole, we just launched an assessment tool on our website that we built with the international Institute of analytics, that in a very short period of time, in about 15 minutes, you can go on and answer some questions and understand where you sit versus your peer set versus competitors and kind of where you are on the journey. >>So when people talk about data analytics, they often think, ah, this is for data science experts like people like you. So why should people in the lines of business like the finance folks, the marketing folks, why should they learn analytics? >>So domain experts are really in the best position. They, they know where the gold is buried in their companies. They know where the inefficiencies are, and it is so much easier and faster to teach a domain expert a bit about how to automate a process or how to use analytics than it is to take a data scientist and try to teach them to have the knowledge of a 20 year accounting professional or a, or a logistics expert of your company. It much harder to do that. And really, if you think about it, the world has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. If, if you were a marketing professional 30 years ago, you likely didn't need to know anything about the internet, but today, do you know what you would call that marketing professional? If they didn't know anything about the internet, probably unemployed or retired. And so knowledge workers are having to learn more and more skills to really keep up with their professions. And analytics is really no exception. Pretty much in every profession, people are needing to learn analytics, to stay current and, and be capable for their companies. And companies need people who can do that. >>Absolutely. It seems like it's table stakes. These days, let's look at different industries. Now, are there differences in how you see analytics in automation being employed in different industries? I know Altrix is being used across a lot of different types of organizations from government to retail. I also see you're now with some of the leading sports teams, any differences in industries. >>Yeah. There's an incredible actually commonality between domains industry to industry. So if you look at what an HR professional is doing, maybe attrition analysis, it's probably quite similar, whether they're in oil and gas or in a high tech software company. And so really the similarities are, are much larger than you might think. And even on the, on, on the, on the sports front, we see many of the analytics that sports teams perform are very similar. So McLaren is one of the great partners that we work with and they use TRICS across many areas of their business from finance to production, extreme sports, logistics, wind tunnel engineering, the marketing team analyzes social media data, all using Altrics. And if I take as an example, the finance team, the finance team is trying to optimize the budget to make sure that they can hit the very stringent targets that F1 sports has. And I don't see a ton of difference between the optimization that they're doing to hit their budget numbers and what I see fortune 500 finance departments doing to optimize their budget. And so really the, the commonality is very high. Even across industries. >>I bet every F fortune 500 or even every company would love to be compared to the same department within McLaren F1, just to know that wow, what they're doing is so in incre incredibly important as is what we are doing. Absolutely. So talk about lessons learned, what lessons can business leaders take from those organizations like McLaren, who are the most analytically mature >>Probably first and foremost, is that the ROI with analytics and automation is incredibly high. Companies are having a ton of success. It's becoming an existential threat to some degree, if, if your company isn't going on this journey and your competition is it, it can be a, a huge problem. IDC just did a recent study about how companies are unlocking the ROI using analytics. And the data was really clear organizations that have a higher percentage of their workforce using analytics are enjoying a much higher return from their analytic investment. And so it's not about hiring two double PhD statisticians from Oxford. It really is how widely you can bring your workforce on this journey. Can they all get 10% more capable? And that's having incredible results at businesses all over the world. An another key finding that they had is that the majority of them said that when they had many folks using analytics, they were going on the journey faster than companies they didn't. And so picking technologies, that'll help everyone do this and, and do this fast and do it easily. Having an approachable piece of software that everyone can use is really a key, >>So faster able to move faster, higher ROI. I also imagine analytics across the organization is a big competitive advantage for organizations in any industry. >>Absolutely the IDC or not. The IDC, the international Institute of analytics showed huge correlation between companies that were more analytically mature versus ones that were not. They showed correlation to growth of the company. They showed correlation to revenue and they showed correlation to shareholder values. So across really all of the, the, the key measures of business, the more analytically mature companies simply outperformed their competition. >>And that's key these days is to be able to outperform your competition. You know, one of the things that we hear so often, Alan, is people talking about democratizing data and analytics. You talked about the line of business workers, but I gotta ask you, is it really that easy for the line of business workers who aren't trained in data science, to be able to jump in, look at data, uncover and extract business insights to make decisions. >>So in, in many ways, it really is that easy. I have a 14 and 16 year old kid. Both of them have learned Altrics they're, Altrics certified. And, and it was quite easy. It took 'em about 20 hours and they were, they, they were off to the races, but there can be some hard parts. The hard parts have more to do with change management. I mean, if you're an accountant, that's been doing the best accounting work in your company for the last 20 years. And all you happen to know is a spreadsheet for those 20 years. Are you ready to learn some new skills? And, and I would suggest you probably need to, if you want, keep up with your profession. The, the big four accounting firms have trained over a hundred thousand people in Altrix just one firm has trained over a hundred thousand. >>You, you can't be an accountant or an auditor at some of these places with, without knowing Altrix. And so the hard part, really in the end, isn't the technology and learning analytics and data science. The harder part is this change management change is hard. I should probably eat better and exercise more, but it's, it's hard to always do that. And so companies are finding that that's the hard part. They need to help people go on the journey, help people with the change management to, to help them become the digitally enabled accountant of the future. The, the logistics professional that is E enabled that that's the challenge. >>That's a huge challenge. Cultural, cultural shift is a challenge. As you said, change management. How, how do you advise customers? If you might be talking with someone who might be early in their analytics journey, but really need to get up to speed and mature to be competitive, how do you guide them or give them recommendations on being able to facilitate that change management? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, so people entering into the workforce today, many of them are starting to have these skills Altrics is used in over 800 universities around the globe to teach finance and to teach marketing and to teach logistics. And so some of this is happening naturally as new workers are entering the workforce, but for all of those who are already in the workforce have already started their careers, learning in place becomes really important. And so we work with companies to put on programmatic approaches to help their workers do this. And so it's, again, not simply putting a box of tools in the corner and saying free, take one. We put on hackathons and analytic days, and it can, it can be great fun. We, we have a great time with, with many of the customers that we work with helping them, you know, do this, helping them go on the journey and the ROI, as I said, you know, is fantastic. And not only does it sometimes affect the bottom line, it can really make societal changes. We've seen companies have breakthroughs that really make great impact to society as a whole. >>Isn't that so fantastic to see the, the difference that that can make. It sounds like you're, you guys are doing a great job of democratizing access to alter X to everybody. We talked about the line of business folks and the incredible importance of enabling them and the, the ROI, the speed, the competitive advantage. Can you share some specific examples that you think of Alter's customers that really show data breakthroughs by the lines of business using the technology? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so many to choose from I'll I'll, I'll give you two examples. Quickly. One is armor express. They manufacture life saving equipment, defensive equipments, like armor plated vests, and they were needing to optimize their supply chain, like many companies through the pandemic. We, we see how important the supply chain is. And so adjusting supply to, to match demand is, is really vital. And so they've used all tricks to model some of their supply and demand signals and built a predictive model to optimize the supply chain. And it certainly helped out from a, a dollar standpoint, they cut over a half a million dollars of inventory in the first year, but more importantly, by matching that demand and supply signal, you're able to better meet customer customer demand. And so when people have orders and are, are looking to pick up a vest, they don't wanna wait. >>And, and it becomes really important to, to get that right. Another great example is British telecom. They're, they're a company that services the public sector. They have very strict reporting regulations that they have to meet and they had, and, and this is crazy to think about over 140 legacy spreadsheet models that they had to run to comply with these regulatory processes and, and report, and obviously running 140 legacy models that had to be done in a certain order and linked incredibly challenging. It took them over four weeks, each time that they had to go through that process. And so to, to save time and have more efficiency in doing that, they trained 50 employees over just a two week period to start using Altrix and, and, and learn Altrix. And they implemented an all new reporting process that saw a 75% reduction in the number of man hours. >>It took to run in a 60% runtime performance. And so, again, a huge improvement. I can imagine it probably had better quality as well, because now that it was automated, you don't have people copying and past data into a spreadsheet. And that was just one project that this group of, of folks were able to accomplish that had huge ROI, but now those people are moving on and automating other processes and performing analytics in, in other areas, you can imagine the impact by the end of the year that they will have on their business, you know, potentially millions upon millions of dollars. This is what we see again. And again, company after company government agency, after government agency is how analytics are really transforming the way work is being done. >>That was the word that came to mind when you were describing the all three customer examples, the transformation, this is transformative. The ability to leverage alters to, to truly democratize data and analytics, give access to the lines of business is transformative for every organization. And, and also the business outcomes. You mentioned, those are substantial metrics based business outcomes. So the ROI and leveraging a technology like alri seems to be right there, sitting in front of you. >>That's right. And, and to be honest, it's not only important for these businesses. It's important for, for the knowledge workers themselves. I mean, we, we hear it from people that they discover Alrich, they automate a process. They finally get to get home for dinner with their families, which is fantastic, but, but it leads to new career paths. And so, you know, knowledge workers that have these added skills have so much larger opportunity. And I think it's great when the needs of businesses to become more analytics and analytic and automate processes actually matches the needs of the employees. And, you know, they too wanna learn these skills and become more advanced in their capabilities, >>Huge value there for the business, for the employees themselves to expand their skillset, to, to really open up so many opportunities for not only the business to meet the demands of the demanding customer, but the employees to be able to really have that breadth and depth in their field of service. Great opportunities there. Alan, is there anywhere that you wanna point the audience to go, to learn more about how they can get started? >>Yeah. So one of the things that we're really excited about is how fast and easy it is to learn these tools. So any of the listeners who wanna experience Altrix, they can go to the website, there's a free download on the website. You can take our analytic maturity assessment, as we talked about at the beginning and, and see where you are on the journey and just reach out. You know, we'd love to work with you and your organization to see how we can help you accelerate your journey on, on analytics and automation, >>Alan, it was a pleasure talking to you about democratizing data and analytics, the power in it for organizations across every industry. We appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you so much >>In a moment, Paula Hanson, who is the president and chief revenue officer of ultras and Jackie Vander lay graying. Who's the global head of tax technology at eBay will join me. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Terrance Wampler joins me next, General Manager at Workday Financial Management at Workday. Terrance, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thank you for having me. It's great to be here, I appreciate it. >> Nice that we can still do these events virtually even though we were quite socially distance. So the last year has brought lots of changes, one of them being IBM Think and theCUBE being virtual, but I'm curious to get your perspectives and your observations. We've seen many finance organizations have to rapidly pivot and accelerate their digital transformation making it a priority. What are some of the key priorities that you've seen that the C-suite, the CFO are dealing with? >> Yeah, well, I think what's happening is what we've seen are new ways to work and using remote access, having to do mobile technologies. What's happening is that's actually driving more risk for companies. And so as companies get more risk that's driving the needs to have more scrutiny on those business processes and that's forcing them to want to accelerate what they're doing in terms of a digital transformation, other stuff like that. It's also forcing them to think more about the data they have and the information they have looking forward and how they're doing planning and how they can do planning in terms of bringing people back to work, in terms of new business models, in terms of what may be next, in terms of opportunity for them or even doing catastrophe planning as they work through this stuff. And as they start to look at that, they're really thinking about how to make their business profit and much more agile. And so it's kind of a complicated thread that you start to pull as people start to change how things work. >> Yeah, that risk is a big factor and that pivot was so quick for so many businesses where suddenly so many of us, and so many of us are still remote. I'm curious what some of the things are though that you're hearing with respect to organizations looking to start opening things back up and bringing some of their folks back on campus. >> Yeah, it's a very interesting dilemma because what's happening is people have learned how to work remotely now. And so they're trying to figure out how they're going to bring people back to be more collaborative. But at the end of the day the first and most important thing they've learned is that especially for a finance function, they no longer want to be transaction operators. What they want to start doing is pushing that work to more automated tools, to have that be done for them and try to promote themselves to be more like analysts or even advisors to the business or even a partner to the business. And as they go through that evolution what they're really trying to do is unlock all of the potential of the people they have, of the processes they have and of the data they have. So it has really made companies do, is look at everything in its entirety and want to change all of it, but they have to go at different paces. >> Definitely, talk to me about what Workday and IBM are doing together to help customers tackle these challenges, adjust their priorities and accelerate that transformation. >> Yeah, certainly. So one of the things that we've done is gotten together and created this go to market strategy called Enterprise Finance. And what enterprise finance does is it really tries to meet the customer wherever they are. So while all of these customers are looking to accelerate their digital transformation they come from very different places, right? And their journey to that transformation is going to be very different. And that means that some of them are going to want to be able to do a full transformation right away and do it globally and make a big change because they've just been hit very hard by this and they see it as an opportunity to grow. And others are going to come from a very complex environment and that complex environment could include complicated manufacturing components in their solution. And they need to look at something like just a corporate finance layer that has kind of an integrated planning solution and consolidation, close capabilities for them to be able to run their business and be a little bit more agile at the top line. >> So a spectrum of you said meeting them where they are. There's a lot of customers in different places. I'm curious what some of the things are that you've observed over the last year, that really are kind of unique ways that finance leaders are approaching this new way of working. >> Yeah, so there's probably two examples I can give you. One is a generic example where we have customers that have participated in merger or acquisition activity over the past year, as it happens to be or customers that have even spun up new divisions with new business models, trying to introduce new services or think about things that they can take advantage of or even shifting away from old this months that have been impacted by what's happening. And as they do that, they will look to do a transformation around finance in that function only or for that subsidiary or for that division. And so that's probably the first example. The second example that I'll give you is companies having to do something they never thought they would do before. I'll give you a simple example. We have a large number of insurance companies here in the United States as customers. And we all probably got our rebate check from the insurance company for our automobiles, right? So what happened is most of the large insurance companies identified that, hey, we actually don't have much risk because people aren't driving and they're paying us these big premiums. And so the insurance regulatory bodies put pressure on those insurance companies. So they had to figure out it business process model and a mechanism by which to go out, forecast what the premium reduction should be, what the business should look like, what that risk should be, do all of that planning and then think about it for their future actually and all the old stuff and then figure out a process by which to get those rebates delivered out to customers. So there's interesting things like that happening in process. And if somebody wasn't running a remote system that didn't have good agility, they wouldn't be able to make that quick pivot and get us all those rebate checks that we were so happy to have. >> Yes, very happy to have that. It sounds like that was done in a pretty fast turnaround time. So I imagine you're also dealing with customers who have sort of a TBD time schedule where there's still so much dynamics going on in the market today. >> Well, that's exactly right. I mean, because you're looking at different business models in different industries, I picked insurance there, but you can pick other extremes like how are retailers reopening? What are they thinking? You can look at hospitality places, how are they going to reopen? How are they going to generate revenue? How are they going to do planning? How are they going to account for things, right? So it's a range. So what's happened is everybody's looked at this as it's now an opportunity to not think in terms of years or even longer range plans. It's really an opportunity to be much more agile and think about being able to dynamically move in quarters or half year kind of increments. >> Yeah, we've been having a lot of conversations about how that time table has shifted and it's getting smaller and smaller because there's been so much flux and so much change that these organizations are really figuring out how do we actually shift and not just organizationally, but culturally as well to be able to adapt to these changes, that can be pretty sudden and pretty significant. I am curious too, Workday has historically focused its financial management solutions on really very much people intensive industries but you do have customers that are outside of that in the services. You talked about insurance getting value from Workday. Talk to me about some of those other expansion of opportunities there are in the more services oriented industries. >> No, that makes a lot of sense. And so I'll call it product based industries but you can think about it as manufacturing your other components, but is people that have systems around product. And while they might have complex supply chains that Workday isn't able to support for them right now they are looking at doing either that corporate transformation layer or they're looking at a solution we have around the Accounting Center. What Accounting Center allows them to do is bring in high volume of data from those source transaction systems and then generate accounting from it. But it gives them the ability to mix that operational data with that accounting data to do exactly what you're describing, be able to pivot more quickly and do more planning because they have a better foundation from their data accuracy and the consistency of that data. So they may be running multiple ERP systems and as they're running those they can bring that data together through Accounting Center kind of in a federated way and get better insight into what they need to do to plan more rapidly to roll things out. So they can kind of keep that execution system of record system, and then they can basically promote this to more of a operational, planning and analysis type function. >> Have you noticed in your conversations with customers the financial management changing in terms of being elevated up to the C-suite or a board level conversation with businesses now suddenly being very laser focused on understanding that reducing risk. Did any of that change and shift in terms of visibility in the last year? >> Yes it did. And the primary reason is because finance has always been the stewards of that information, and they curate the data, they do all of that work and then other people take it and do analysis. The finance department has taken more control of not only being the curator of that information but also being the team that does more of the analysis and has engaged more with corporate strategy or the chief revenue officers and trying to bring forward the ability to do analysis and have a voice in terms of what are the business models we should be doing, what are the strategic growth initiatives we should be doing? How should we be looking at running the business? Not just doing a finance function but really doing that advisory role. And it really has become because the data is so important to make those decisions, everyone wants these data driven decisions. And they are the curator of that data or the steward of that data. So they've kind of helped promote themselves to do that. >> What are some of the things that if you look out into your crystal ball for the rest of 2021, what are some of the things that you think we're going to see in some of the key industries that are working hard to return retail, manufacturing, the supply chain. We just had that big traffic jam in the Suez Canal, and a lot of challenges there. What are some of the things that you think are opportunities that we're going to see unfolding this year? >> Yeah, so I think it's going to be first, around getting back to work. So it's back to office stuff, which we'll start on the HR side, but it's going to lead to facility costs. It's going to lead to worker safety stuff and reporting, and it's going to lead to how you manage a healthcare or other tracking of things, is going to lead to how you engage with customers remotely. It's going to be a number of factors that are related to how do we transition back into real life? Because what we've started to see is in different parts of the country or the world even, parts of retail open up but we haven't seen mass return to lots of offices like here in the United States. And I think that will drive a lot of different processes in terms of about how people do working shifts, how they do meetings, how they do analysis, and there will be a desire then to have those business processes automated, right? The results of the transaction that comes from that, et cetera. >> That's a good point that you bring up that there's so many things that I hadn't really considered in terms of what it's going to take for businesses to return and have folks come back to campus. The extrovert in me just wants to go back but you bring up a great point and there's so many other facets that they had to deal with rapidly last year that have to be reconsidered. And so it makes sense that automation is something that they're looking at as coming in and really helping to automate certain processes to help reduce risk, reduce costs. Last question for you, Terrance, where can customers go if they are looking to get back on the track? How could they engage IBM and Workday together to help transform? >> Yeah, so the best and easiest way is we have some joint blogs that we've worked together, but first there's this CUBE. And then there is the joint blogs that we've worked together to talk about Enterprise Finance and how we're going to market. And then Enterprise Finance talks about the spectrum of a full finance transformation to a division to a corporate layer. >> Excellent, and I did see your blog. It sounds like you've been very busy in the last year which is excellent. But thanks so much Terrance for coming by and sharing with us all the dynamics that are going on in financial management and beyond, and the acceleration of elements of transformation that organizations have to look at now. It's very interesting. We appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thank you for having me. >> For Terrance Wampler, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (bright ambient music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two, we're sort of wrapping up the Chief Data Officer event. It's MIT CDOIQ, it started as an information quality event and with the ascendancy of big data the CDO emerged and really took center stage here. And it's interesting to know that it's kind of come full circle back to information quality. People are realizing all this data we have, you know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. So the information quality worlds and this chief data officer world have really come colliding together. Robert Abate is here, he's the Vice President and CDO of Global IDS and also the co-chair of next year's, the 14th annual MIT CDOIQ. Robert, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, well thank you. >> Now you're a CDO by background, give us a little history of your career. >> Sure, sure. Well I started out with an Electrical Engineering degree and went into applications development. By 2000, I was leading the Ralph Lauren's IT, and I realized when Ralph Lauren hired me, he was getting ready to go public. And his problem was he had hired eight different accounting firms to do eight different divisions. And each of those eight divisions were reporting a number, but the big number didn't add up, so he couldn't go public. So he searched the industry to find somebody who could figure out the problem. Now I was, at the time, working in applications and had built this system called Service Oriented Architectures, a way of integrating applications. And I said, "Well I don't know if I could solve the problem, "but I'll give it a shot." And what I did was, just by taking each silo as it's own problem, which was what EID Accounting Firm had done, I was able to figure out that one of Ralph Lauren's policies was if you buy a garment, you can return it anytime, anywhere, forever, however long you own it. And he didn't think about that, but what that meant is somebody could go to a Bloomingdale's, buy a garment and then go to his outlet store and return it. Well, the cross channels were different systems. So the outlet stores were his own business, retail was a different business, there was a completely different, each one had their own AS/400, their own data. So what I quickly learned was, the problem wasn't the systems, the problem was the data. And it took me about two months to figure it out and he offered me a job, he said well, I was a consultant at the time, he says, "I'm offering you a job, you're going to run my IT." >> Great user experience but hard to count. >> (laughs) Hard to count. So that's when I, probably 1999 was when that happened. I went into data and started researching-- >> Sorry, so how long did it take you to figure that out? You said a couple of months? >> A couple of months, I think it was about two months. >> 'Cause jeez, it took Oracle what, 10 years to build Fusion with SOA? That's pretty good. (laughs) >> This was a little bit of luck. When we started integrating the applications we learned that the messages that we were sending back and forth didn't match, and we said, "Well that's impossible, it can't not match." But what didn't match was it was coming from one channel and being returned in another channel, and the returns showed here didn't balance with the returns on this side. So it was a data problem. >> So a forensics showdown. So what did you do after? >> After that I went into ICICI Bank which was a large bank in India who was trying to integrate their systems, and again, this was a data problem. But they heard me giving a talk at a conference on how SOA had solved the data challenge, and they said, "We're a bank with a wholesale, a retail, "and other divisions, "and we can't integrate the systems, can you?" I said, "Well yeah, I'd build a website "and make them web services and now what'll happen is "each of those'll kind of communicate." And I was at ICICI Bank for about six months in Mumbai, and finished that which was a success, came back and started consulting because now a lot of companies were really interested in this concept of Service Oriented Architectures. Back then when we first published on it, myself, Peter Aiken, and a gentleman named Joseph Burke published on it in 1996. The publisher didn't accept the book, it was a really interesting thing. We wrote the book called, "Services Based Architectures: A Way to Integrate Systems." And the way Wiley & Sons, or most publishers work is, they'll have three industry experts read your book and if they don't think what you're saying has any value, they, forget about it. So one guy said this is brilliant, one guy says, "These guys don't know what they're talking about," and the third guy says, "I don't even think what they're talking about is feasible." So they decided not to publish. Four years later it came back and said, "We want to publish the book," and Peter said, "You know what, they lost their chance." We were ahead of them by four years, they didn't understand the technology. So that was kind of cool. So from there I went into consulting, eventually took a position as the Head of Enterprise and Director of Enterprise Information Architecture with Walmart. And Walmart, as you know, is a huge entity, almost the size of the federal government. So to build an architecture that integrates Walmart would've been a challenge, a behemoth challenge, and I took it on with a phenomenal team. >> And when was this, like what timeframe? >> This was 2010, and by the end of 2010 we had presented an architecture to the CIO and the rest of the organization, and they came back to me about a week later and said, "Look, everybody agrees what you did was brilliant, "but nobody knows how to implement it. "So we're taking you away, "you're no longer Director of Information Architecture, "you're now Director of Enterprise Information Management. "Build it. "Prove that what you say you could do, you could do." So we built something called the Data CAFE, and CAFE was an acronym, it stood for: Collaborative Analytics Facility for the Enterprise. What we did was we took data from one of the divisions, because you didn't want to take on the whole beast, boil the ocean. We picked Sam's Club and we worked with their CFO, and because we had information about customers we were able to build a room with seven 80 inch monitors that surrounded anyone in the room. And in the center was the Cisco telecommunications so you could be a part of a meeting. >> The TelePresence. >> TelePresence. And we built one room in one facility, and one room in another facility, and we labeled the monitors, one red, one blue, one green, and we said, "There's got to be a way where we can build "data science so it's interactive, so somebody, "an executive could walk into the room, "touch the screen, and drill into features. "And in another room "the features would be changing simultaneously." And that's what we built. The room was brought up on Black Friday of 2013, and we were able to see the trends of sales on the East Coast that we quickly, the executives in the room, and these are the CEO of Walmart and the heads of Sam's Club and the like, they were able to change the distribution in the Mountain Time Zone and west time zones because of the sales on the East Coast gave them the idea, well these things are going to sell, and these things aren't. And they saw a tremendous increase in productivity. We received the 2014, my team received the 2014 Walmart Innovation Project of the Year. >> And that's no slouch. Walmart has always been heavily data-oriented. I don't know if it's urban legend or not, but the famous story in the '80s of the beer and the diapers, right? Walmart would position beer next to diapers, why would they do that? Well the father goes in to buy the diapers for the baby, picks up a six pack while he's on the way, so they just move those proximate to each other. (laughs) >> In terms of data, Walmart really learned that there's an advantage to understanding how to place items in places that, a path that you might take in a store, and knowing that path, they actually have a term for it, I believe it's called, I'm sorry, I forgot the name but it's-- >> Selling more stuff. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's selling more stuff. It's the way you position items on a shelf. And Walmart had the brilliance, or at least I thought it was brilliant, that they would make their vendors the data champion. So the vendor, let's say Procter & Gamble's a vendor, and they sell this one product the most. They would then be the champion for that aisle. Oh, it's called planogramming. So the planogramming, the way the shelves were organized, would be set up by Procter & Gamble for that entire area, working with all their other vendors. And so Walmart would give the data to them and say, "You do it." And what I was purporting was, well, we shouldn't just be giving the data away, we should be using that data. And that was the advent of that. From there I moved to Kimberly-Clark, I became Global Director of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics. Their challenge was they had different teams, there were four different instances of SAP around the globe. One for Latin America, one for North America called the Enterprise Edition, one for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one for Asia-Pacific. Well when you have four different instances of SAP, that means your master data doesn't exist because the same thing that happens in this facility is different here. And every company faces this challenge. If they implement more than one of a system the specialty fields get used by different companies in different ways. >> The gold standard, the gold version. >> The golden version. So I built a team by bringing together all the different international teams, and created one team that was able to integrate best practices and standards around data governance, data quality. Built BI teams for each of the regions, and then a data science and advanced analytics team. >> Wow, so okay, so that makes you uniquely qualified to coach here at the conference. >> Oh, I don't know about that. (laughs) There are some real, there are some geniuses here. >> No but, I say that because these are your peeps. >> Yes, they are, they are. >> And so, you're a practitioner, this conference is all about practitioners talking to practitioners, it's content-heavy, There's not a lot of fluff. Lunches aren't sponsored, there's no lanyard sponsor and it's not like, you know, there's very subtle sponsor desks, you have to have sponsors 'cause otherwise the conference's not enabled, and you've got costs associated with it. But it's a very intimate event and I think you guys want to keep it that way. >> And I really believe you're dead-on. When you go to most industry conferences, the industry conferences, the sponsors, you know, change the format or are heavily into the format. Here you have industry thought leaders from all over the globe. CDOs of major Fortune 500 companies who are working with their peers and exchanging ideas. I've had conversations with a number of CDOs and the thought leadership at this conference, I've never seen this type of thought leadership in any conference. >> Yeah, I mean the percentage of presentations by practitioners, even when there's a vendor name, they have a practitioner, you know, internal practitioner presenting so it's 99.9% which is why people attend. We're moving venues next year, I understand. Just did a little tour of the new venue, so, going to be able to accommodate more attendees, so that's great. >> Yeah it is. >> So what are your objectives in thinking ahead a year from now? >> Well, you know, I'm taking over from my current peer, Dr. Arka Mukherjee, who just did a phenomenal job of finding speakers. People who are in the industry, who are presenting challenges, and allowing others to interact. So I hope could do a similar thing which is, find with my peers people who have real world challenges, bring them to the forum so they can be debated. On top of that, there are some amazing, you know, technology change is just so fast. One of the areas like big data I remember only five years ago the chart of big data vendors maybe had 50 people on it, now you would need the table to put all the vendors. >> Who's not a data vendor, you know? >> Who's not a data vendor? (laughs) So I would think the best thing we could do is, is find, just get all the CDOs and CDO-types into a room, and let us debate and talk about these points and issues. I've seen just some tremendous interactions, great questions, people giving advice to others. I've learned a lot here. >> And how about long term, where do you see this going? How many CDOs are there in the world, do you know? Is that a number that's known? >> That's a really interesting point because, you know, only five years ago there weren't that many CDOs to be called. And then Gartner four years ago or so put out an article saying, "Every company really should have a CDO." Not just for the purpose of advancing your data, and to Doug Laney's point that data is being monetized, there's a need to have someone responsible for information 'cause we're in the Information Age. And a CIO really is focused on infrastructure, making sure I've got my PCs, making sure I've got a LAN, I've got websites. The focus on data has really, because of the Information Age, has turned data into an asset. So organizations realize, if you utilize that asset, let me reverse this, if you don't use data as an asset, you will be out of business. I heard a quote, I don't know if it's true, "Only 10 years ago, 250 of the Fortune 10 no longer exists." >> Yeah, something like that, the turnover's amazing. >> Many of those companies were companies that decided not to make the change to be data-enabled, to make data decision processing. Companies still use data warehouses, they're always going to use them, and a warehouse is a rear-view mirror, it tells you what happened last week, last month, last year. But today's businesses work forward-looking. And just like driving a car, it'd be really hard to drive your car through a rear-view mirror. So what companies are doing today are saying, "Okay, let's start looking at this as forward-looking, "a prescriptive and predictive analytics, "rather than just what happened in the past." I'll give you an example. In a major company that is a supplier of consumer products, they were leading in the industry and their sales started to drop, and they didn't know why. Well, with a data science team, we were able to determine by pulling in data from the CDC, now these are sources that only 20 years ago nobody ever used to bring in data in the enterprise, now 60% of your data is external. So we brought in data from the CDC, we brought in data on maternal births from the national government, we brought in data from the Census Bureau, we brought in data from sources of advertising and targeted marketing towards mothers. Pulled all that data together and said, "Why are diaper sales down?" Well they were targeting the large regions of the country and putting ads in TV stations in New York and California, big population centers. Birth rates in population centers have declined. Birth rates in certain other regions, like the south, and the Bible Belt, if I can call it that, have increased. So by changing the marketing, their product sales went up. >> Advertising to Texas. >> Well, you know, and that brings to one of the points, I heard a lecture today about ethics. We made it a point at Walmart that if you ran a query that reduced a result to less than five people, we wouldn't allow you to see the result. Because, think about it, I could say, "What is my neighbor buying? "What are you buying?" So there's an ethical component to this as well. But that, you know, data is not political. Data is not chauvinistic. It doesn't discriminate, it just gives you facts. It's the interpretation of that that is hard CDOs, because we have to say to someone, "Look, this is the fact, and your 25 years "of experience in the business, "granted, is tremendous and it's needed, "but the facts are saying this, "and that would mean that the business "would have to change its direction." And it's hard for people to do, so it requires that. >> So whether it's called the chief data officer, whatever the data czar rubric is, the head of analytics, there's obviously the data quality component there whatever that is, this is the conference for, as I called them, your peeps, for that role in the organization. People often ask, "Will that role be around?" I think it's clear, it's solidifying. Yes, you see the chief digital officer emerging and there's a lot of tailwinds there, but the information quality component, the data architecture component, it's here to stay. And this is the premiere conference, the premiere event, that I know of anyway. There are a couple of others, perhaps, but it's great to see all the success. When I first came here in 2013 there were probably about 130 folks here. Today, I think there were 500 people registered almost. Next year, I think 600 is kind of the target, and I think it's very reasonable with the new space. So congratulations on all the success, and thank you for stepping up to the co-chair role, I really appreciate it. >> Well, let me tell you I thank you guys. You provide a voice at these IT conferences that we really need, and that is the ability to get the message out. That people do think and care, the industry is not thoughtless and heartless. With all the data breaches and everything going on there's a lot of fear, fear, loathing, and anticipation. But having your voice, kind of like ESPN and a sports show, gives the technology community, which is getting larger and larger by the day, a voice and we need that so, thank you. >> Well thank you, Robert. We appreciate that, it was great to have you on. Appreciate the time. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll be right back with out next guest as we wrap up day two of MIT CDOIQ. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit, here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment, we have George Gagne, he is the Chief Information Officer at Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, George. And we have Christopher McDermott, who is the CDO of the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, Chris. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So, I want to start with you George, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. >> Sure, so the mission has been around for decades actually. In 2015, Secretary of Defense, Hagel, looked at the accounting community as a whole and for efficiency gains made decision to consolidate some of the accounting community into a single organization. And they took the former JPAC, which was a direct reporting unit to PACOM out of Hawaii, which was the operational arm of the accounting community, responsible for research, investigation, recovery and identification. They took that organization, they looked at the policy portion of the organization, which is here in Crystal City, DPMO and then they took another part of the organization, our Life Sciences Support Equipment laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, and consolidated that to make the defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Under the Office of Secretary Defense for Policy. So that was step one. Our mission is the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel to their families and to our nation. That's our mission, we have approximately 82,000 Americans missing from our past conflicts, our service members from World War II, Korea War, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. When you look at the demographics of that, we have approximately 1,600 still missing from the Vietnam conflict. We have just over a 100 still missing from the Cold War conflict. We have approximately 7,700 still missing from the Korean War and the remainder of are from World War II. So, you know, one of the challenges when our organization was first formed, was we had three different organizations all had different reporting chains, they had their own cultures, disparate cultures, disparate systems, disparate processes, and step one of that was to get everybody on the same backbone and the same network. Step two to that, was to look at all those on-prem legacy systems that we had across our environment and look at the consolidation of that. And because our organization is so geographically dispersed, I just mentioned three, we also have a laboratory in Offutt, Nebraska. We have detachments in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and we have a detachment in Germany. And we're highly mobile. We conduct about, this year we're planned to do 84 missions around the world, 34 countries. And those missions last 30 to 45 day increments. So highly mobile, very globally diverse organization. So when we looked at that environment obviously we knew the first step after we got everybody on one network was to look to cloud architectures and models in order to be able to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, so we developed a case management system that consist of a business intelligence software along with some enterprise content software coupled with some forensics software for our laboratory staff that make up what we call our case management system that cloud hosted. >> So business challenges, the consolidation, the reset or set-up for the mission, but then the data types, it's a different kind of data problem to work, to achieve the outcomes you're looking for. Christopher, talk about that dynamic because, >> Sure. >> You know, there are historical different types of data. >> That's right. And a lot of our data started as IBM punchcards or it started from, you know, paper files. When I started the work, we were still looking things up on microfiche and microfilm, so we've been working on an aggressive program to get all that kind of data digitized, but then we have to make it accessible. And we had, you know as George was saying, multiple different organizations doing similar work. So you had a lot of duplication of the same information, but kept in different structures, searchable in different pathways. So we have to bring all of that together and make and make it accessible, so that the government can all be on the same page. Because again, as George said, there's a large number of cases that we potentially can work on, but we have to be able to triage that down to the ones that have the best opportunity for us to use our current methods to solve. So rather than look for all 82,000 at once, we want to be able to navigate through that data and find the cases that have the most likelihood of success. >> So where do you even begin? What's the data that you're looking at? What have you seen has had the best indicators for success, of finding those people who are prisoners of war or missing in action? >> Well, you know, for some degrees as George was saying, our missions has been going on for decades. So, you know, a lot of the files that we're working from today were created at the time of the incidents. For the Vietnam cases, we have a lot of continuity. So we're still working on the leads that the strongest out of that set. And we still send multiple teams a year into Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia. And that's where, you know, you try to build upon the previous investigations, but that's also where if those investigations were done in the '70s or the '80s we have to then surface what's actionable out of that information, which pathways have we trod that didn't pay off. So a lot of it is, What can we reanalyze today? What new techniques can we bring? Can we bring in, you know, remote sensing data? Can we bring GIS applications to analyze where's the best scenario for resolving these cases after all this time? >> I mean, it's interesting one of the things we hear from the Amazon, we've done so many interviews with Amazon executives, we've kind of know their messaging. So here's one of them, "Eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting." You hear that a lot right. So there might be a lot of that here and then Teresa had a slide up today talking about COBOL and mainframe, talk about punch cards >> Absolutely. >> So you have a lot of data that's different types older data. So it's a true digitization project that you got to enable as well as other complexity. >> Absolutely, when the agency was formed in 2015 we really begin the process of an information modernization effort across the organization. Because like I said, these were legacy on-prem systems that were their systems' of record that had specific ways and didn't really have the ability to share the data, collaborate, coordinate, and communicate. So, it was a heavy lift across the board getting everyone on one backbone. But then going through an agency information modernization evolution, if you will, that we're still working our way through, because we're so mobilely diversified as well, our field communications capability and reach back and into the cloud and being able to access that data from geographical locations around the world, whether it's in the Himalayas, whether it's in Vietnam, whether it's in Papua New Guinea, wherever we may be. Not just our fixed locations. >> George and Christopher, if you each could comment for our audience, I would love to get this on record as you guys are really doing a great modernization project. Talk about, if you each could talk about key learnings and it could be from scar tissue. It could be from pain and suffering to an epiphany or some breakthrough. What was some of the key learnings as you when through the modernization? Could you share some from a CIO perspective and from a CDO perspective? >> Well, I'll give you a couple takeaways of what I thought I think we did well and some areas I thought that we could have done better. And for us as we looked at building our case management system, I think step one of defining our problem statement, it was years in planning before we actually took steps to actually start building out our infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud, or our applications. But building and defining that problem statement, we took some time to really take a look at that, because of the different in cultures from the disparate organizations and our processes and so on and so forth. Defining that problem statement was critical to our success and moving forward. I'd say one of the areas that I say that we could have done better is probably associated with communication and stakeholder buy-in. Because we are so geographically dispersed and highly mobile, getting the word out to everybody and all those geographically locations and all those time zones with our workforce that's out in the field a lot at 30 to 45 days at a time, three or four missions a year, sometimes more. It certainly made it difficult to get part of that get that messaging out with some of that stakeholder buy-in. And I think probably moving forward and we still deal regarding challenges is data hygiene. And that's for us, something else we did really well was we established this CDO role within our organization, because it's no longer about the systems that are used to process and store the data. It's really about the data. And who better to know the data but our data owners, not custodians and our chief data officer and our data governance council that was established. >> Christopher you're learnings, takeaways? >> What we're trying to build upon is, you define your problem statement, but the pathway there is you have to get results in front of the end users. You have get them to the people who are doing the work, so you can keep guiding it toward the solution actually meets all the needs, as well as build something that can innovate continuously over time. Because the technology space is changing so quickly and dynamically that the more we can surface our problem set, the more help we can to help find ways to navigate through that. >> So one of the things you said is that you're using data to look at the past. Whereas, so many of the guests we're talking today and so many of the people here at this summit are talking about using data to predict the future. Are you able to look your data sets from the past and then also sort of say, And then this is how we can prevent more POW. Are you using, are you thinking at all, are you looking at the future at all with you data? >> I mean, certainly especially from our laboratory science perspective, we have have probably the most advanced human identification capability in the world. >> Right. >> And recovery. And so all of those lessons really go a long ways to what what information needs to be accessible and actionable for us to be able to, recover individuals in those circumstances and make those identifications as quickly as possible. At the same time the cases that we're working on are the hardest ones. >> Right. >> The ones that are still left. But each success that we have teaches us something that can then be applied going forward. >> What is the human side of your job? Because here you are, these two wonky data number crunchers and yet, you are these are people who died fighting for their country. How do you manage those two, really two important parts of your job and how do you think about that? >> Yeah, I will say that it does amp up the emotional quotient of our agency and everybody really feels passionately about all the work that they do. About 10 times a year our agency meets with family members of the missing at different locations around the country. And those are really powerful reminders of why we're doing this. And you do get a lot of gratitude, but at the same time each case that's waiting still that's the one that matters to them. And you see that in the passion our agency brings to the data questions and quickly they want us to progress. It's never fast enough. There's always another case to pursue. So that definitely adds a lot to it, but it is very meaningful when we can help tell that story. And even for a case where we may never have the answers, being able to say, "This is what the government knows about your case and these are efforts that have been undertaken to this point." >> The fact there's an effort going on is really a wonderful thing for everybody involved. Good outcomes coming out from that. But interesting angle as a techy, IT, former IT techy back in the day in the '80s, '90s, I can't help but marvel at your perspective on your project because you're historians in a way too. You've got type punch cards, you know you got, I never used punch cards. >> Put them in a museum. >> I was the first generation post punch cards, but you have a historical view of IT state of the art at the time of the data you're working with. You have to make that data actionable in an outcome scenario workload work-stream for today. >> Yeah, another example we have is we're reclaiming chest X-rays that they did for induction when guys were which would screen for tuberculosis when they came into service. We're able to use those X-rays now for comparison with the remains that are recovered from the field. >> So you guys are really digging into history of IT. >> Yeah. >> So I'd love to get your perspective. To me, I marvel and I've always been critical of Washington's slowness with respect to cloud, but seeing you catch up now with the tailwinds here with cloud and Amazon and now Microsoft coming in with AI. You kind of see the visibility that leads to value. As you look back at the industry of federal, state, and local governments in public over the years, what's your view of the current state of union of modernization, because it seems to be a renaissance? >> Yeah, I would say the analogy I would give you it's same as that of the industrial revolutions went through in the early 20th century, but it's more about the technology revolution that we're going through now. That's how I'd probably characterize it. If I were to look back and tell my children's children about, hey, the advent of technology and that progression of where we're at. Cloud architecture certainly take down geographical barriers that before were problems for us. Now we're able to overcome those. We can't overcome the timezone barriers, but certainly the geographical barriers of separation of an organization with cloud computing has certainly changed. >> Do you see your peers within the government sector, other agencies, kind of catching wind of this going, Wow, I could really change the game. And will it be a step function into your kind of mind as you kind of have to project kind of forward where we are. Is it going to a small improvement, a step function? What do you guys see? What's the sentiment around town? >> I'm from Hawaii, so Chris probably has a better perspective of that with some of our sister organizations here in town. But, I would say there's more and more organizations that are adopting cloud architectures. It's my understanding very few organizations now are co-located in one facility and one location, right. Take a look at telework today, cost of doing business, remote accessibility regardless of where you're at. So, I'd say it's a force multiplier by far for any line of business, whether it's public sector, federal government or whatever. It's certainly enhanced our capabilities and it's a force multiplier for us. >> And I think that's where the expectation increasingly is that the data should be available and I should be able to act on it wherever I am whenever the the opportunity arises. And that's where the more we can democratize our ability to get that data out to our partners to our teams in the field, the faster those answers can come through. And the faster we can make decisions based upon the information we have, not just the process that we follow. >> And it feeds the creativity and the work product of the actors involved. Getting the data out there versus hoarding it, wall guarding it, asylumming it. >> Right, yeah. You know, becoming the lone expert on this sack of paper in the filing cabinet, doesn't have as much power as getting that data accessible to a much broader squad and everyone can contribute. >> We're doing our part. >> That's right, it's open sourcing it right here. >> To your point, death by PowerPoint. I'm sure you've heard that before. Well business intelligence software now by the click of a button reduces the level of effort for man-power and resources to put together slide decks. Where in business intelligence software can reach out to those structured data platforms and pull out the data that you want at the click of a button and build those presentations for you on the fly. Think about, I mean, if that's our force multiplier in advances in technology of. I think the biggest thing is we understand as humans how to exploit and leverage the technologies and the capabilities. Because I still don't think we fully grasp the potential of technology and how it can be leveraged to empower us. >> That's great insight and really respect what you guys do. Love your mission. Thanks for sharing. >> Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Ferrer. We will have much more coming up tomorrow on the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, DC. (upbeat music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome everybody to this cube conversation my name is Dave Volante and we're here in our Palo Alto studios Medusa doc R is here he's an investor and entrepreneur and a friend we're do great to see you again thanks so much for coming in thank you it's a head too long it is you and I sat down and had a conversation on the cube so it's been well yeah yeah well you've been on the cube a bunch and you've a I've seen some great conversations that you had with with with Peter and John so thanks for making the time and coming back in thank you so I want to start with when I go around and talk to executives every CEO is trying to get digital right you know whatever that means you know they know it's important and they're trying to figure it out they know it relates to data they know they have to leverage data they know this buzzword of digital transformation what are you seeing when you talk to executives and companies how real is this digital transformation is it a fad or is it a substantive good question to look from my view point of view digital transformation is the word people use but at the end of the day CIOs have to disrupt their businesses every CEO has to figure out am i cutting the cost I'm a helping companies grow in revenue from a look at from a board perspective and what people are looking at the investor perspective most CEOs are CEOs are looking at somehow looking running their operations on a day-to-day basis to that point I think most CEOs are expecting see I was to do the new innovative things at you probably hearing that people are adding CDO as a title yeah so it's up to see I were to see will it be the innovate to CIO it's like you have two kids like in your case your four kids you have two how do you make sure that all four kids are given the equal responsibility so Ciara has to decide look I have budget X X by two goes to my existing business X by two goes to the new business that decision making is not happening with the see I was today and that's what the distal transformation has to be is going on in a what I call not in a disruptive manner but the CEOs who have figure out how to disrupt it I really taking the next stage the next thing that people are interested there is where do I start right you have all should I start with my CRM supply chain should I start with my IT you got to figure out what all the but start someplace you pick one the area but that has to be disruptive in the sense we are living in the age of where I call it autonomous everything right there's a data there is cloud and there's AI our mission like what are you these three are such a large disruption in our industry see us how to figure out and say what can I do in terms of cost saving in terms of revenue growth but that can't be incremental it has to be revolutionary so I often say we've decades we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law in this industry that's where innovation came from no longer it's as you said it's data now for the last 10 years and you were involved in this we were collecting all this data we lowered the cost of collecting data and and and in running data warehouses with Hadoop but now data's plentiful insights aren't so you have data you have to apply machine intelligence to that data and then cloud gives you scale so that's like the new innovation cocktail so you agree that digital I agree digital transformation is real and the other dynamic mudo is you see companies are because it's data are able to traverse industries used to be you're in an industry if you're in financial services that's it if you're in healthcare that's it now you see Amazon's and content apples into financial services so people are afraid of getting disrupted you've got this new innovation cocktail so your point was really get started so you've got a shift resources you don't have unlimited budget right so how do people do that how are they taking cost out of the business and how are they reapportioning that cost for innovation really good so I'll give you two examples from Megan again thinking of where I see it one is for CIOs has something called IT operations IT operation is a very big piece that people need to figure out how to get the cost out of it the IT operations cannot be developed we've been running IT for last 30 years I mean what are the word they used I know Gartner uses the word called AAA Hobbs I don't care what the word is but the key is you have to run your 18 autonomous manner we are living in the age of your trading is autonomous your my your four on game by four on K is being traded through hedge funds your add technologies autonomous with Facebook Google and Amazon with all data when I saw with with Casper and Splunk we made cybersecurity autonomous to whatever extent threat detection but when it came to IT operations and IT customer support today manual if I may see over right now I'll invest on customer service and support to start as a point of what can I do to make my service agents better or what can I do to make the end users or the users experience better without going to a human can I eliminate the human in the equation here the mileage may vary it's like the driverless consequence you have level 1 to level 5 they may like to have autopilot some people may have a fully autonomous car depending on the organization you got to have a right amount of autonomous City in your organization both for IT operations and IT Service Management that hasn't happened and that will be happen in the next 4 5 years so let's talk about that you were at ServiceNow for a period of time they've obviously disrupted the old-line helpdesk and you know they really did a job on BMC and hewlett-packard etc are they in a position to take that next step in when you go to service now analogy here folks talk about AI and infusing AI obviously there's a lot of data being collected is that the right model I mean if they've automated forms but you think you're talking about something more I help us understand that sure looks abused know is in a great position they'll continue to do well it's a great company right I think what's going to happen next is how can companies like ServiceNow take her to the next stage right either become a partner with ServiceNow or service now itself we'll do it a little bit new companies will be for me one angle is forces enterprises is this game going to be for enterprises same playbook as a playbook for the cloud so imagine an apps that are born on the cloud their IT operations data their ticketing data where will that go to that means we think through enterprise data which is enterprise apps and so as they need to figure out so if I am a company today if I'm daring I need to decide what will I do for my enterprise applications and services what do I do it for my cloud Orion services so that is addition you have to make it at the top once it goes down the next level then able to decide is it for IT support customer support or IT operations what can I do in terms of augmenting there if I do is just to make my agents better you can take the cost out of the equation the cost should be is can I automate to the point I can eliminate 50% of my DevOps 50% of my SR ease my role of the come is in the next four five years this 70 80 % of devops I tell you when I study jobs will be gone that should be automated it should be a driverless IT autonomous IT people should have him that's not even a moonshot goal we all in America let's make great our great again this is our time it's IT if we don't do it some other country will do it Chile is going to eat us for lunch so he basically putting forth the scenario a DevOps was essentially a stepping stone and you see that largely going away it has to be it has been automated I'm not going to hide hundreds of tunas I called Manuel tuners right yes I'll need some DevOps people I need some IT admin things that system cannot do it algorithmically should go to humans at some point but there are enough things like if you want to install something in your laptop why should I talk to somebody else if I want to upgrade to Microsoft Office if I want to buy a CRM license if I want to get a zoom provisioning why do I need to talk to a human being in this equation can I oughta mater complete autonomous can I get to a level five autonomous in IT right that's what I'm looking towards robotic process automation play a role here can our PA we've done some some events with automation anywhere new iPad you're seeing huge valuations uipath as supposedly as another six billion dollar evaluation I mean you know amazing unicorn plus plus plus can those technologies be applied to solve this problem yes or no I think it depends on what the HRP are under star doing IP is a great topic right not be resolved very successful what I'm talking about is our IT operations and IT support and customer support automation can our PA guys take their technology their substrate a platter sure they can try it but these are all have to be grown organically doing this in nit going for customer service and support doing it for the cloud has its own its own skin its own platform like you and me were talking earlier if I'm doing this thing on Amazon why wait and launch a VM I won't even do it like if a new ticket comes in I should be doing through kinases I should be doing through my lambda functions I shouldn't be my cost of goods with so much that I want it should not cost me anything until the point Dave generates a ticket to me first all why should Dave generate a ticket right look at the very much extreme model of the test laws just like our today tells me when should I service my car why should you do the same thing like I should be coming and telling your SharePoint is going to go down they have today your Kube application you cannot do an interview with me too unless you fix it that is what the world wants to go so back to service management for minutes so in the old days our service manager was too cumbersome we really didn't have a single CMDB it just really didn't work that well it didn't change anything a lot of tickets that's what it did service now obviously solved that that that problem but what I'm inferring from what you're saying is it's still too expensive the entire infrastructure it needs to be more streamlined and automation is the answer absolutely so I think if you take it'll add layers and layers the first is in the support starting women from CMDB most organizers say my CMD that I still all are stale that's never accurate how can I get a dynamic view of Dave's ink right I should know when and that has to be done at the level of services and apps and at kubernetes level 2 container level once I have a blueprint of what my organization is then I need to know how do I handle the tickets against it then I can I do a health monitoring for all my CIS right I should be telling the outage put it at the another what business carries is my business running correctly you do have a downtime what is going to happen even though if I am false positives few times people are expecting saying that tell me proactively what services will impact and who will be impacted so I can take a corrective action and that will happen starting from CMDB automation I actually call it cloud CMDB our dynamic CMDB in the world of cloud and dynamic let's make a good cmdbs dynamic and accurate then take it to the ultimate outage prediction right if I can give your business up time and outage prediction that would be Nirvana are you telling me that IT cannot solve it you and me are saying in Palo Alto a driverless cars are going around we are going to see it in our lifetime IT can be so complex that the car can be autonomous but IT cannot be I don't buy them well I mean you hear about all the systems are down or my systems are slow today that's that's a form of outage that costs Fortune 2000 companies and money I mean it's you know 50 60 thousand dollars a minute in this in some cases so the and I think sometimes people aren't aware as to how much how much revenue is lost to downtime or lost productivity so there's huge huge gains to be made there and it seems that the cloud is the platform on which you're going to you're gonna build these these these natural choice it has to be yeah and it has we want a cloud to you can't say we are in the eight if you are a noose new cloud you're building it I tell people bill it is a multi cloud your same code should work on GCP Amazon and Azure right and on VMware if you want to be a private cloud but should be same the same codebase should be able to compile and run on all multiple processor kubernetes micro services that's really the enabler there right right at once run it anywhere interesting conversation multi-cloud you're hearing a lot of discussion you know certainly in DC the Jedi case Oracle is contesting that when you read the rulings from the General Accounting Office that basically the the DoD determined that multi-cloud is is less secure more expensive more complex now that's the DoD everybody's gonna have multi cloud because multi-cloud is multi vendor sure but it's interesting you don't hear Amazon talking about multi cloud other than you don't want to do it because it's too expensive but everybody else is talking about multi cloud is kubernetes somewhat of a threat to that Amazon posture I don't think I think if you look at Amazon is saying they call it hybrid cloud the word may be different multi cloud or hybrid cloud yeah say they've already partnered like the best public cloud partner with the best pressure of your house is awesome announcement right so vehement software ever talk to Pat gal singer and his team and look they got VMware working with AWS vice-versa so that's it great I mean maybe even call it a two ecosystem but they got that whole thing working there yeah anything with agile is going to do with their public cloud on Azure with as you understand I'll just tack on prom yeah right everybody has 70 mgcp will figure out so then after a while if you and me as a customer I should be able to move things many times it happen is I'm not going to move things dynamically for a nibble but if I want I don't want to vendor lock it I want a code such that if tomorrow something happens I should be able to have an option to move my code base to a different cloud and that's what multi-cloud will happen as a requirement as you build it how much you exercise are not people will design software going for a formal techno so a whole new vector of conversation I would love to get your opinion on that multi-cloud opportunity obviously Cisco's going after VMware's in the strong position there certainly Microsoft is is vying for that you have a ton of startups looking at this IBM with the Red Hat acquisition now is in a in a pretty strong position you know given its open source chops how do you see that whole multi-cloud you know vendor landscape shaking out I think I got really good I have a TD for this at the end when the dust settles you won't have 100 aircraft carriers you will have only four or five yeah so it's like what happened in 90s compact went away Dec went away so same thing is going to happen here there will be four or five vendors will survive there will be Amazon's as yours maybe GCPs VMware's maybe it's Cisco and IBM talks about a I mean there's like maybe alley cloud in China you won't have hundreds of cloud so the number is already decreasing it will let be 10 will it be 5 will it before that still you will see the tall rise but it's already been the whole council isn't happening so if I'm a customer if I'm a vendor if I'm a startup or a public company I'm going to build it only for a few these multi cloud vendors I'm not going to across hundred yeah because the marginal economics of those those hyper clouds we've been saying this for years if there's just so much more compelling and at the end of the day if the economics are 10x less expensive and more attractive that they're gonna win you know and and I think even though you have thousands and thousands of service providers who call themselves cloud we're talking about a different kind of cloud it's got one of those you know it when you see it types of things and I'm going to add something so if you take this back to your earlier question about where the disruption is happening we talked about all the customer service support an IT service management industry but imagine if an app is born on the cloud call it cloud native applications you have millions of new apps that are there on this cloud platforms what is that going to do where is the data going there they want another customer service and support applicant on their platform it currently it's like I'm in your house I'm drinking your wine but when it comes to managing my customers of an operation I will take your log data your even data or take indeed and put in somebody else's house even though John is your partner when you put it there it doesn't make sense it should run it inside yours so all these vendors would want a native application that is running on their platform solving their customer data which hasn't happened yet well this is interesting so obviously Oracle has its own cloud but you're seeing well see work day Salesforce service now all these SAS companies just used to build their own clouds they're building their own data centers Chuck Chuck Philips oven forces I don't friends don't let friends build data centers so maybe he's prescient maybe the trend is that these apps are going to largely predominantly run in the public cloud the Oracle IBM notwithstanding they've got the resources to maybe you know tough it out is that the scenario that you see I have take the consumer companies whether you take V work Airbnb uber all these guys you are already seeing them on to some opinion maybe they have their own datacenter but there are vastly learning and public clouds right and you have already seen that's even the big SAS vendors whether it's Adobe yeah it'll be solid partner with Microsoft Azure workday is partnering with Amazon you saw em Salesforce partnering with Google cloud and AW so you're only seeing these vendors the large SAS when there's already saying in order for me for economics wise it doesn't make sense whether it's for my marketing cloud my service cloud my ecommerce cloud I want this to run on this cloud platform to get scale cost of economics and also I need my services that are built there with a new substrate like we talked about that's lambda functions to kinases I'm not going to do it on my platform but and that trend is going on it's just accelerating so how are you spending your time these days you've had a very successful entrepreneur investor you've been CEO of multiple companies what do you do in these days I'm look I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now so I spend a lot of time with this company called I set up that's right I'm even we talked about it it's a startup company in Palo Alto their vision is to apply like what we got AI ops applying AI for digital transformation for AI customer service I trps oh I like the region look I want to spend time with companies which are taking a big bet right it's like in our IT industry nobody talks about moonshot goals let's take a bigger bet let's take a much vision of for five year ten years what can we disrupt right and I look at those companies I invest with those companies and spending time with them I'm learning a lot in the process I'm contributing back to the those companies well you know sitter I was on Twitter yesterday with with a little group we're having an interesting discussion about you know how things are changing the dynamics of where innovation comes over so we started this conversation with that sort of new innovation cocktail and there just seems to be a whole new fabric of services not only it's not just remote cloud services anymore it's these embedded services that are can think they can act they can sense and it's ubiquitous now even the edge autonomous vehicles we're entering a whole new era it's very exciting right and again one thing that we didn't talk to see Mike and son and my it again it's society has to have regulations and will come if you look at the what's happened in this whole call center customer service industry if autonomous city will happen of any level from level even if I automate 30 percent of your customer service and you don't touch a human being when you are at home for your Comcast to your nest imagine all those services inside your home from field service to if they get automated what's going to happen first of all if Sally's gonna improve your costs are going to reduce if I'm a business I can take that money and invest somewhere else but more importantly those most of those things it's it's a big disruption happening in the outsourced industry right these are your jobs in China India Philippines Vietnam my concern is dart saying that there will be a certain is going to happen people are not paying attention to that and this this strain has already left the station yeah it's going to come to a platform again some next platform but next for five years you'll see a tremendous disruption in this area of digital transformation well I remember a couple decades ago there was a lot of talk about well you people spending a lot of money on IT but that you don't see it in the productivity numbers and all of a sudden because of the PC revolution the productivity went through the roof you're hearing similar sort of discussions now we feel like productivity is about to explode because of what you're saying here absolutely and again the per back to the RP has already shown the value our peers no longer in each category it's what we talked about success renders from you iPad automation anywhere blue prism that just on the back end of the supply chain and RPF cell taking the two front office applying that to customer service facing to your crm facing that your IT hasn't happened yet can I automatically can I ought Americans right from an employee experience to customer experience that productivity if you employ it you'll get more customers doing that yeah it scares people but but it's the future so you better embrace it and lean in voodoo thanks so much oh let's go always measure to see you alright thanks for watching everybody this is David day from our studios in Palo Alto and we'll see you next time thank you [Music]

[Music] Andre one of the things that have come up is your relation with Russia as we talked about so I have to ask you a direct question do you to work with sanctioned Russian entities or Russian companies shown we and c5 we do not work with any company that's sanctioned from any country including Russia and the same applies to me we take sanctions very very seriously the one thing you don't mess with is US sanctions which has application worldwide and so you always have to stay absolutely on the right side of the law when it comes to sanctions so nothing nothing that's something that's connection nets are trying to make they're also the other connection is a guy named Victor Vail Selberg Viktor Vekselberg Vekselberg to go with the Russian names as people know what is your relationship with Viktor Vekselberg so victim Viktor Vekselberg is a is a very well known Russian businessman he's perhaps one of the best known Russian businessman in the West because he also lived in the US for a period of time it's a very well-known personality in in in Europe he's a donor for example to the Clinton Foundation and he has aggregated the largest collection of Faberge eggs in the world as part of national Russian treasure so he's a very well known business personality and of course during the course of my career which has focused heavily on also doing investigations on Russian related issues I have come across Viktor Vekselberg and I've had the opportunity to meet with him and so I know him as a as a business leader but c5 has no relationship with Viktor Vekselberg and we've never accepted any investment from him we've never asked him for an investment and our firm a venture capital firm has no ties to Viktor Vekselberg so you've worked had a relationship at some point in your career but no I wouldn't on a daily basis you don't have a deep relationship can you explain how deep that relationship is what were the interactions you had with him so clarify that point so so I know Viktor Vekselberg and I've met him on more than one occasion in different settings and as I shared with you I served on the board of a South African mining company which is black owned for a period of a year and which Renova had a minority investment alongside an Australian company called South 32 and that's the extent of the contact and exposure I've had to so casual business run-ins and interactions not like again that's correct deep joint ventures are very kind of okay let's get back to c5 for a minute cause I want to ask you it but just do just a circle just one last issue and Viktor Vekselberg Viktor Vekselberg is the chairman of scope over the Russian technology innovation park that we discussed and he became the chairman under the presidency of President Dmitry Medvedev during the time when Hillary Clinton was doing a reset on Russian relations and during that time so vekselberg have built up very effective relationships with all of the or many of the leading big US technology companies and today you can find the roster of those partners the list of those partners on the scope of our website and those nuclear drove that yes Victor drove that Victor drove that during during in the Clinton Secretary of this started the scope of our project started during the the Medvedev presidency and in the period 2010-2011 you'll find many photographs of mr. vekselberg signing partnership agreements with very well known technology companies for Skolkovo and most of those companies still in one way or another remain involved in the Skolkovo project this has been the feature the article so there are I think and I've read all the other places where they wanted to make this decision Valley of Russia correct there's a lot of Russian programmers who work for American companies I know a few of them that do so there's technology they get great programmers in Russia but certainly they have technology so oracles they're ibm's they're cisco say we talked about earlier there is US presence there are you do you have a presence there and does Amazon Web service have a presence on do you see five it and that's knowing I was alright it's well it's a warning in the wrong oh sorry about that what's the Skog Obama's called spoke over so Andres Kokomo's this has been well report it's the Silicon Valley of Russia and so a lot of American companies they're IBM Oracle Cisco you mentioned earlier I can imagine it makes sense they a lot of recruiting little labs going on we see people hire Russian engineers all the time you know c5 have a presence there and does AWS have a presence there and do you work together in a TBS in that area explain that relationship certainly c5 Amazon individually or you can't speak for Amazon but let's see if I've have there and do you work with Amazon in any way there c-5m there's no work in Russia and neither does any of our portfolio companies c5 has no relationship with the Skolkovo Technology Park and as I said the parties for this spoke of a Technology Park is a matter of record is only website anyone can take a look at it and our name is not amongst those partners and I think this was this is an issue which I which I fault the BBC report on because if the BBC report was fair and accurate they would have disclosed the fact that there's a long list of partners with a scope of our project very well known companies many of them competitors in the Jedi process but that was not the case the BBC programme in a very misleading and deceptive way created the impression that for some reason somehow c5 was involved in Skolkovo without disclosing the fact that many other companies are involved they and of course we are not involved and your only relationship with Declan Berg Viktor Vekselberg was through the c5 raiser bid three c5 no no Viktor Vekselberg was never involved in c5 raiser Petco we had Vladimir Kuznetsov as a man not as a minority investor day and when we diligence him one of our key findings was that he was acting in independent capacity and he was investing his own money as a you national aniseh Swiss resident so you if you've had no business dealings with Viktor Vekselberg other than casual working c-5 has had no business dealings with with Viktor Vekselberg in a in a personal capacity earlier before the onset of sanctions I served on the board of a black-owned South African mining company and which Renault bombs the Vekselberg company as a minority investment alongside an Australian company called South 32 and my motivation for doing so was to support African entrepreneurship because this was one of the first black owned mining companies in the country was established with a British investment in which I was involved in and I was very supportive of the work that this company does to develop manganese mining in the Kalahari Desert and your role there was advisory formal what was the role there it was an advisory role so no ownership no ownership no equity no engagement you call them to help out on a project I was asked to support the company at the crucial time when they had a dispute on royalties when they were looking at the future of the Kalahari basin and the future of the manganese reserve say and also to help the company through a transition of the black leadership the black executive leadership of the cut year is that roughly 2017 so recently okay let on the ownership of c5 can you explain who owns c5 I mean you're described as the owner if it's a venture capital firm you probably of investors so your managing director you probably have some carry of some sort and then talk about the relationship between c5 razor bidco the Russian special purpose vehicle that was created is that owning what does it fit is it a subordinate role so see my capital so Jones to start with c5 razor boot code was was never a Russian special purpose vehicle this was a British special purpose vehicle which we established for our own investment into a European enterprise software company vladimir kuznetsov later invested as an angel investor into the same company and we required him to do it through our structure because it was transparent and subject to FCA regulation there's no ties back to c5 he's been not an owner in any way of c5 no not on c5 so C fibers owned by five families who helped to establish the business and grow the business and partner in the business these are blue chip very well known European and American families it's a small transatlantic community or family investors who believe that it's important to use private capital for the greater good right history dealing with Russians can you talk about your career you mentioned your career in South Africa earlier talk about your career deal in Russia when did you start working with Russian people I was the international stage Russian Russia's that time in 90s and 2000 and now certainly has changed a lot let's talk about your history and deal with the Russians so percent of the Soviet Union I think there was a significant window for Western investment into Russia and Western investment during this time also grew very significantly during my career as an investigator I often dealt with Russian organized crime cases and in fact I established my consulting business with a former head of the Central European division of the CIA who was an expert on Russia and probably one of the world's leading experts on Russia so to get his name William Lofgren so during the course of of building this business we helped many Western investors with problems and issues related to their investments in Russia so you were working for the West I was waiting for the West so you are the good side and but when you were absolutely and when and when you do work of this kind of course you get to know a lot of people in Russia and you make Russian contacts and like in any other country as as Alexander Solzhenitsyn the great Russian dissident wrote the line that separates good and evil doesn't run between countries it runs through the hearts of people and so in this context there are there are people in Russia who crossed my path and across my professional career who were good people who were working in a constructive way for Russia's freedom and for Russia's independence and that I continue to hold in high regard and you find there's no technical security risk the United States of America with your relationship with c5 and Russia well my my investigative work that related to Russia cases are all in the past this was all done in the past as you said I was acting in the interest of Western corporations and Western governments in their relations with Russia that's documented and you'd be prepared to be transparent about that absolutely that's all those many of those cases are well documented to corporations for which my consulting firm acted are very well known very well known businesses and it's pretty much all on the on the Podesta gaiting corruption we were we were we were helping Western corporations invest into Russia in a way that that that meant that they did not get in meshed in corruption that meant they didn't get blackmailed by Russia organized crime groups which meant that their investments were sustainable and compliant with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other bribery regulation at war for everyone who I know that lives in Europe that's my age said when the EU was established there's a flight of Eastern Europeans and Russians into Western Europe and they don't have the same business practices so I'd imagine you'd run into some pretty seedy scenarios in this course of business well in drug-dealing under I mean a lot of underground stuff was going on they're different they're different government they're different economy I mean it wasn't like a structure so you probably were exposed to a lot many many post-conflict countries suffer from predatory predatory organized crime groups and I think what changed and of course of my invested investigative career was that many of these groups became digital and a lot of organized crime that was purely based in the physical world went into the into the digital world which was one of the other major reasons which led me to focus on cyber security and to invest in cyber security well gets that in a minute well that's great I may only imagine some of the things you're investigated it's easy to connect people with things when yeah things are orbiting around them so appreciate the candid response there I wanna move on to the other area I see in the stories national security risk conflict of interest in some of the stories you seeing this well is there conflict of interest this is an IT playbook I've seen over the years federal deals well you're gonna create some Fahd fear uncertainty and doubt there's always kind of accusations you know there's accusations around well are they self dealing and you know these companies or I've seen this before so I gotta ask you they're involved with you bought a company called s DB advisors it was one of the transactions that they're in I see connecting to in my research with the DoD Sally Donnelly who is Sally Donnelly why did you buy her business so I didn't buy Sonny Donnelly's business again so Sally Tony let's start with Sally darling so Sally Donny was introduced to me by Apple Mike Mullen as a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Sally served as his special advisor when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Apple Mullen was one of the first operating parties which we had in c5 and he continues to serve Admiral Mullen the four start yes sir okay and he continues to serve as one of operating partners to this day salad only and that will Mike worked very closely with the Duke of Westminster on one of his charitable projects which we supported and which is close to my heart which is established a new veteran rehabilitation center for Britain upgrading our facility which dates back to the Second World War which is called Headley court to a brand-new state-of-the-art facility which was a half a billion dollar public-private partnership which Duke led and in this context that Ron Mullen and Sally helped the Duke and it's team to meet some of the best experts in the US on veteran rehabilitation on veteran care and on providing for veterans at the end of the service and this was a this was a great service which it did to the to this new center which is called the defense and national rehabilitation center which opened up last summer in Britain and is a terrific asset not only for Britain but also for allies and and so the acquisition she went on to work with secretary Manus in the Department of Defense yes in February Feb 9 you through the transaction yes in February 2017 Sally decided to do public service and support of safety matters when he joined the current administration when she left her firm she sold it free and clear to a group of local Washington entrepreneurs and she had to do that very quickly because the appointment of secretary mattis wasn't expected he wasn't involved in any political campaigns he was called back to come and serve his country in the nation's interest very unexpectedly and Sally and a colleague of us Tony de Martino because of their loyalty to him and the law did to the mission followed him into public service and my understanding is it's an EAJA to sell a business in a matter of a day or two to be able to be free and clear of title and to have no compliance issues while she was in government her consulting business didn't do any work for the government it was really focused on advising corporations on working with the government and on defense and national security issues I didn't buy Sonny's business one of c-5 portfolio companies a year later acquired SPD advisors from the owner supported with a view to establishing and expanding one of our cyber advising businesses into the US market and this is part of a broader bind bolt project which is called Haven ITC secure and this was just one of several acquisitions that this platform made so just for the record c5 didn't buy her company she repeat relieved herself of any kind of conflict of interest going into the public service your portfolio company acquired the company in short order because they knew the synergies because it would be were close to it so I know it's arm's length but as a venture capitalist you have no real influence other than having an investment or board seat on these companies right so they act independent in your structure absolutely make sure I get that's exactly right John but but not much more importantly only had no influence over the Jedi contract she acted as secretary mitosis chief of staff for a period of a year and have functions as described by the Government Accounting Office was really of a ministerial nature so she was much more focused on the Secretary's diary than she was focused on any contracting issues as you know government contracting is very complex it's very technical sally has as many wonderful talents and attributes but she's never claimed to be a cloud computing expert and of equal importance was when sally joined the government in february 17 jeddah wasn't even on the radar it wasn't even conceived as a possibility why did yet I cannot just for just for the record the Jedi contract my understanding is that and I'm not an expert on one government contracting but my understanding is that the RFP the request for proposals for the July contract came out in quarter three of this year for the first time earlier this year there was a publication of an intention to put out an RFP I think that happened in at the end of quarter one five yep classic yeah and then the RFP came out and called a three bits had to go in in November and I understand a decision will be made sometime next year what's your relationship well where's she now what she still was so sunny left finished the public service and and I think February March of this year and she's since gone on to do a fellowship with a think-tank she's also reestablished her own business in her own right and although we remain to be good friends I'm in no way involved in a business or a business deal I have a lot of friends in DC I'm not a really policy wonk of any kind we have a lot of friends who are it's it's common when it administrations turnover people you know or either appointed or parked a work force they leave and they go could they go to consultancy until the next yeah until the next and frustration comes along yeah and that's pretty common that's pretty cool this is what goes on yeah and I think this whole issue of potential conflicts of interest that salad only or Tony the Martino might have had has been addressed by the Government Accounting Office in its ruling which is on the public record where the GAO very clearly state that neither of these two individuals were anywhere near the team that was writing the terms for the general contract and that their functions were really as described by the GAO as ministerial so XI salient Antonia was such a long way away from this contact there's just no way that they could have influenced it in in in any respect and their relation to c5 is advisory do they and do they both are they have relations with you now what's the current relationship since since Sally and Tony went to do public service we've had no contact with them we have no reason of course to have contact with them in any way they were doing public service they were serving the country and serving the nation and since they've come out of public service we've we've not reestablished any commercial relationship so we talked earlier about the relation with AWS there's only if have a field support two incubators its accelerator does c5 have any portfolio companies that are actually bidding or working on the Jedi contract none what Santa John not zero zero so outside of c5 having relation with Amazon and no portfolios working with a Jedi contract there's no link to c5 other than a portfolio company buying Sally Donnelly who's kind of connected to general mattis up here yeah Selleck has six degrees of separation yes I think this is a constant theme in this conspiracy theory Jonas is six degrees of separation it's it's taking relationships that that that developed in a small community in Washington and trying to draw nefarious and sinister conclusions from them instead of focusing on competing on performance competing on innovation and competing on price and perhaps that's not taking place because the companies that are trying to do this do not have the capability to do so Andre I really appreciate you coming on and answering these tough questions I want to talk about what's going on with c5 now but I got to say you know I want to ask you one more time because I think this is critical you've worked for big-time company Kroll with terminus international market very crazy time time transformation wise you've worked with the CIA in Quantico the FBI nuclei in Quantico on a collaboration you were to know you've done work for the good guys you have see if I've got multiple years operating why why are you being put as a bad guy here I mean you're gonna you know being you being put out there with if you search your name on Google it says you're a spy all these evil all these things are connecting and we're kind of digging through them they kind of don't Joan I've had the privilege of a tremendous career I've had the privilege of working with with great leaders and having had great mentors if you do anything of significance if you do anything that's helping to make a difference or to make a change you should first expect scrutiny but also expect criticism when that scrutiny and criticism are fact-based that's helpful and that's good for society and for the health of society when on the other hand it is fake news or it is the construct of elaborate conspiracy theories that's not good for the health of society it's not good for the national interest is not good for for doing good business you've been very after you're doing business for the for the credibility people questioning your credibility what do you want to tell people that are watching this about your credibility that's in question again with this stuff you've done and you're continuing to do what's the one share something to the folks that might mean something to them you can sway them or you want to say something directly what would you say the measure of a person it is his or her conduct in c-five we are continuing to build our business we continue to invest in great companies we continue to put cravat private capital to work to help drive innovation including in the US market we will continue to surround ourselves with good people and we will continue to set the highest standards for the way in which we invest and build our businesses it's common I guess I would say that I'm getting out as deep as you are in the in term over the years with looking at these patterns but the pattern that I see is very simple when bad guys get found out they leave the jurisdiction they flee they go do something else and they reinvent themselves and scam someone else you've been doing this for many many years got a great back record c5 now is still doing business continuing not skipping a beat the story comes out hopefully kind of derail this or something else will think we're gonna dig into it so than angle for sure but you still have investments you're deploying globally talk about what c5 is doing today tomorrow next few months the next year you have deals going down you're still doing business you have business out there our business has not slowed down for a moment we have the support of tremendous investors we have the support of tremendous partners in our portfolio companies we have the support of a great group of operating partners and most important of all we have a highly dedicated highly focused group of investment teams of very experienced and skilled professionals who are making profitable investments and so we are continuing to build our business we have a very full deal pipeline we will be completing more investment transactions next week and we are continue to scalar assets under management next year we will have half a billion dollars of assets under management and we continue to focus on our mission which is to use private capital to help innovate and drive a change for good after again thank you we have the story in the BBC kicked all this off the 12th no one's else picked it up I think other journals have you mentioned earlier you think this there's actually people putting this out you you call out let's got John wheeler we're going to look into him do you think there's an organized campaign right now organized to go after you go after Amazon are you just collateral damage you mentioned that earlier is there a funded effort here well Bloomberg has reported on the fact that that one of the competitors for this bit of trying to bring together a group of companies behind a concerted effort specifically to block Amazon Web Services and so we hear these reports we see this press speculation if that was the case of course that would not be good for a fair and open and competitive bidding process which is I think is the Department of Defense's intention and what is in the interests of the country at a time when national security innovation will determine not only the fate of future Wars but also the fate of a sons and daughters who are war fighters and to be fair to process having something undermine it like a paid-for dossier which I have multiple sources confirming that's happened it's kind of infiltrating the journalists and so that's kind of where I'm looking at right now is that okay the BBC story just didn't feel right to me credible outlet you work for them you did investigations for them back in the day have you talked to them yes no we are we are we are in correspondence with the BBC I think in particular we want them to address the fact that they've conflated facts in this story playing this parlor game of six degrees of separation we want them to address the important principle of the independence of the in editorial integrity at the fact that they did not disclose that they expert on this program actually has significant conflicts of interests of his own and finally we want them to disclose the fact that it's not c5 and Amazon Web Services who have had a relationship with the scope of our technology park the scope of our technology park actually has a very broad set of Western partners still highly engaged there and even in recent weeks of hosted major cloud contracts and conferences there and and all of this should have been part of the story in on the record well we're certainly going to dig into it I appreciate your answer the tough questions we're gonna certainly look into this dossier if this is true this is bad and if there's people behind it acting behind it then certainly we're gonna report on that and I know these were tough questions thanks for taking the time Andre to to answer them with us Joan thanks for doing a deep dive on us okay this is the Q exclusive conversation here in Palo Alto authority narc who's the founder of c-5 capital venture capital firm in the center of a controversy around this BBC story which we're going to dig into more this has been exclusive conversation I'm John Tory thanks for watching [Music] you

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by vmware, and its ecosystem partner. (electronic music) >> And we're back, this is SiliconANGLE Media's production of the Cube. I'm here with Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Keith, I don't know about you, but one of the things that really excites me when I get to come to events like this is talking to the users, talking about the practitioners, what they're using, how they're using it. And so I'm really happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest Brett Ruth who's the server, storage, and virtualization supervisor at BKD. Brett, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so BKD. I know you're big in your field, but there might be some people out there that aren't familiar with your organization. Maybe just give us the thumbnail of the company, how long you been there, and your role there. >> Sure, BKD is the number 12 accounting firm in the United States, 36 offices, net revenue 564 million. Tax audit, corporate finance, wealth advisors, technology services, that's BKD in a nutshell. >> Alright, and your role in the organization? >> My role is kind of the server supervisor. I have a team of seven assist admins who report to me. We take care of anything on the Windows server to Lennox server, to our Nutanix environment, our Vmware environment, our IceLAN storage environment, and all the applications that live on those. >> Alright, so Brett, one of the things I'm sure you'll find, your stuff doesn't change, you don't acquisitions to integrate, you don't have new technology being thrown at you all the time. If sure every year they just say how much more budget and how many more people do you want. >> Exactly >> So bring us in the reality. What's your world like? What are some of the big challenges? I'd say first if you can from just kind of the industry standpoint, and how does that impact what you're doing? >> Sure, so BKD is a growth firm so we look at business acquisitions when we can. We look at those, we actually completed one not that long ago in Chicago. We expanded there. So each one's always different, you know different technology. Some of those acquisitions are a couple servers, some of them are completely cloud-based, some of them are mixed in between. So having a platform where we settle on with Nutanix has kind of helped be able to make those integrations a little bit easier. But no, every year budget cycle comes around, and what's the initiative the firm wants to do. And every year it's different. It's fun, you know it's challenging to have different and new things we have to tackle every year. >> So when choosing these platforms, one, quick question around the organization, a bunch of knowledge workers. How many, what's the head count? >> Brett: Around 26,000. >> 26,000. So you guys and your IT organization, you work for the bean counters of bean counters. (laughing) So they understand ROI, TCO. When it comes to selecting these technologies, how much pressure are you under to do less for more, and prove that you're doing, I'm sorry, do more with less, and prove that you're doing more or less? >> Sure, and that comes up during the budget cycles. I mean there is a large amount of time that is spent of what's next year's initiatives? What does that server landscape look like? You know, does there a new product that comes out that requires a head count increase or not? Or is it a new application we need to stand up? And every year that comes around, and the questions come. Well, maybe the firm didn't have a good year, maybe the firm had a better year. So we, you know, the budget gets adjusted based on that. But more times than not, the firm recognizes that putting money into IT does nothing but help the business grow. So as long as we spend it wisely, we usually can, we can get accomplished. >> Alright Brett, I want you to take us inside, you know I hate to do it, but the budgeting thing. Cause one of the promises of, you said you're using Nutanix, used to be okay this year, oh it's time for the server refresh, next year, wait, no, you don't have any server budget, you know, we're doing some storage ad ons, or things like that. You might get some budget here or there if you need it, or if there's an emergency, but you got to justify that. The promise of a pool of resources should be, well I'm consolidating a number of pools, and therefore, I should be able to be more agile, more flexible, I'm buying in smaller chunks, rather than bigger chunks. What's your experience been on kind of that purchasing from that relationship with the finance side of the business? >> Sure, so when I started BKD, I've been there about five years, it was a traditional three-tier architecture when we rolled into it. And the firm was growing at such a rate that we were running into those physical limitations of the hardware. And it's never a fun game to go ask the CIO an unbudgeted SAN purchase you know. Do that a couple of years in a row, and it gets harder and harder to ask those questions. So we finally came to a point as a company of we need to do something different. And, you know, through research and product I had, and my team all had to do to accomplish it, we landed on Nutanix, and we landed on a hybrid converge infrastructure. And what we can do is we build those quote unquote lego blocks, so now there's not a big, giant purchase of a SAN or a new set of UCS Chassis or whatever the product might be. It's a, I know this quarter I need this amount of nodes, or I know for this project I'm going to need this, and I can just build and add on when I need to. So it makes the budgeting and those unbudgeted purchases a lot more easier to take. >> So much of the messaging from day one, day two is aimed kind of at you. You're on the ground, you have to deal with not only the engineers that implement the technology, but also the executives that approve the purchases. So a lot of the messaging here has been for you. How have you received it, and what's your impression of Vmware's messaging around, take your favorite topic? >> Right, you know a lot of cloud talk's been happening here and a lot of DevOps has been talked about here, and a way to improve that. BKD has an internal IT development team, so a lot of those things I can take away here, and try and see if I can help our Dev team however I can. A lot of the messaging is just seeing where the industry is going, not just Vmware, but everyone on the solutions floor. I mean that's a lot of my time here is research and seeing what products that I know we have to complete in the next fiscal year or two, and then what products are out there that I can just buy. >> Alright, can you bring us into your application portfolio? What sits on the Nutanix platform, what doesn't? I hear you said you got a scale-out NAS platform also. You talked about some developers there. I'd love to understand how you figure out what goes where, where you are in building that out. How many nodes you have if you can share? >> The IceLAN is six nodes in each data center, the Nutanix is 26 nodes in each data center. We're probably 99.9% virtualized. The only thing I think we don't have virtualized is we still have a physical domain controller outside of both just from shear, if everything is off, I have one point I can get back into, right. But exchange, sharepoint, our sequel is all virtualized. The IceLAN is really kind of the unstructured file pool that we can put map drives, we can put blob storage from our sharepoint environment lands onto it. Flat files from our sequel land onto it. And, yeah, everything runs on our Nutanix. >> So going into that developer relationship, you know Nutanix, I've talked to these guys before about their ideal of being a cloud company. So developers, when they hear the term cloud, what's the impact of you, on your role, when you have Nutanix, a cloud company, and your developers asking for cloud? >> It's a interesting question because we try and phrase it as BKD, we now have an internal cloud, we have an enterprise cloud, you know the term private cloud. And we can provide those instant resources to DevOps when they need it depending on if they have a new set of QA boxes that need to be stood up. But you know there is some projects that we're looking at of is it AWS or is it Azure or is it Google's cloud. Are there things that make sense to go out there versus keeping 'em in house? And those come up as an as-need basis. >> So DevOps, so (laughing) When we talk about DevOps, what are the pain points that you guys, cause that's a big topic. Do I go all the way as far as Netflix and DevOps all the things that we say, or what have you guys targeted to say, okay, here's where the value add is in the enterprise? >> I think we're still, that's still of of those things that our development team's looking at. I think it really depends on the application and what the business is looking for. I mean there's been some products internally that the team's released that makes sense to stay on Prim. The next project I find out a month from now might be something that's perfect for the cloud. I think they just take that on a kind of case-by-case basis. >> Alright, Brett, you've got a portfolio of partners that you're working with here. What's on your list of to-do's for them? What are you looking for from the ecosystem to make your life easier and help? >> Always looking for more stable code releases. I think any engineer would love stable code releases. You know for the most part everybody gets that. We're always going to have issues. >> Anybody you want to call out for not giving you stable code releases? (laughing) >> I can say everybody because, I mean everyone will do that. No, I think it's continuing to improve the product, continuing to make it. It's that do more with less right? I can't have two or three dedicated people working on the virtualization environment. They have to be multi-skilled you know. My team that I have, my seven assist admins are all great, probably some of the best guys I've worked with. We all have to wear multiple hats, even sometimes maybe we don't want to. So having those products come into the environment that make it easier for them, and then just seeing how those code releases come out, that would just make our lives even better. >> Just real quick, can you say whose hardware your Nutanix is on? >> It's Supermicro, it's from Nutanix. >> It's the basic things. This morning the keynote got a big laugh talking about some of the coope-tition that goes on just between Dell, EMC, Vmware in some of their partnerships. Some of your partners get along better than others. Is that something that impacts you, something you think about at all? >> It's definitely, being a Nutanix guy coming into VM World this year has definitely been an interesting experience. It's that cohabitation that happens between the two. But at the end of the day, I still have severs to run, I have an environment to maintain for BKD, and you know, if I need something done, I know I can go to them, and they'll help work with me on it. >> So the show floor this year, Vmware just as massive as it's been all-- >> Yeah. >> Vmware is all about the ecosystem. How important is this large ecosystem to your everyday operations of you environment? >> I mean it's the never knowing what the next project that comes out, or the next scene the business wants to do, or the next acquisition comes up. Maybe there's a product that I don't have in house that needs to take care of it. And then having this many vendors that I can go and talk with over these couple days has been great because I can now go back to the team and go, man I didn't think about this, and this product would help solve that. Or two months from now something comes around, I go oh yeah I talked to these guys, and go flip through the business cards and the paper stuff we take home and call 'em up. >> I love that even as a Nutanix customer, the Vmware, the coope-tition, that you still find value in the overall-- >> Brett: Oh yeah absolutely. >> Brett, any either announcements or kind of new things coming out in the market, anything catch in your eye? You said you were bringing that back to the office. >> Forgive me but I can't remember the name. The malware kind of virus scanner that Pat was talking about yesterday. That kind of really was a, being able to use that AI to figure out at a base level what milicent code is and isn't was, it would be an awesome game changer if it works out how it looks to be. >> Absolutely, no shortage of new things to look into. Brett Ruth, BKD, really appreciate you sharing your viewpoint everything going on inside. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you guys. >> Hope to catch up with you sometime in the future. For Keith Townsend, and I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VM World 2017. You're watching the Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's the Cube. On the ground with Accenture Labs 30th Anniversary Celebration. >> Hello and welcome back to our special on the ground coverage of Accenture Labs 30 year celebration. Here's to the next 30 years is their slogan and I'm John Ferry with the Cube and I'm here with Marc Carrel-Billiard who's the Senior Manger that runs R&D Global for Accenture Labs. Welcome to the Cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> Marc: Thanks, John. >> So, I got to ask you, Accenture 30 years, they weren't called Accenture back then, it was called Arthur Anderson or Anderson Consulting and then it became Accenture, now you got Accenture Lab. But you have had labs all throughout. >> You're right. I mean, it's pretty amazing. And I think this is absolutely right. So we had this organization for 30 years, believe it or not. And that organization is doing applied research. So what we do is we leverage new technology innovations and everything to really solve business challenges or societal pacts and social changes and everything. >> State of the art back then, if I remember correctly my history was converting an S&A gateway to a technet to a TCP/IP network. >> Yeah we just improved a little bit. We went to quantum computing, to Blockchain, to different type of things like that. >> What a magical time it is right now >> It is magic. >> Share some color on today's culture, the convergence of all this awesomeness happening. Open source, booming. Cloud, unlimited compute. You have now more developers than ever, Enterprise is looking more and more like consumers. So a lot of action. What's the excitement? Share the cutting edge lab's activity. I think you said something absolutely right. I mean, I think there's a combinatorial effect of two different technology working very well together, and is a compression on time, all those technology waves that are maturing very fast. So one thing that we been doing is a great example for that, is quantum computing. You heard about quantum computing, you know? >> Of course. >> That's the new Paradigm of computing power. Leveraging like, quantum mechanics, you know? I mean it's really amazing stuff. And believe it or not, we've been working with D-Wave, they have a quantum computer in Vancouver, and a companies called 1QBit, it's a software company, and we've built, on top of that, an algorithm that has molecule comparison. And we worked with Biogen, a pharmaceutical company, to work on this. Now, the really staggering thing about it, is that we talked about it like six months ago, we build the pilot in two months time. Done. And then now, I mean, it's already made. >> Well, this is amazing. This is what highlights to me what's exciting. What you just described is a time frame that's really short. >> That's right! >> Back in the old days, it was these projects were months and months, and potentially years. >> Absolutely. >> What is the catalyst for that? Is it the technology leverage? Is it the people? Is it the process? All three? What's the take? >> I think it's all three. I would say that definitely the technology, as I said, get combined faster. You said very right, there's a lot of capability in term of high performance computing we can get through the Cloud, the storage as well. The data that we're going to be accessing, and then I think the beauty is that, putting all the people together for the quantum work. We had mathematicians, we have from Biogen, we have our own labs, and all people together, they make the magic happen. >> 30 years ago, just a little history 'cause I'm old enough to actually talk about 30 years ago, the Big Six Accounting Firms, accounting firms, ran all the big software projects. How ironic is that, that today Blockchain disrupts the even need for an accounting firm, because with Smart Contracts, Blockchain is turning out to be a very, very disruptive operation in technology, because you don't need an accounting firm to clear out contracts. Blockchain is very disruptive. What are you guys doing on Blockchain? >> You're absolutely right, John. And you know, the first thing. So, we have seven labs in Accenture Labs. And we have one lab didn't get it on Blockchain, and it's Sophia Antipolis inside of France, where I'm from, by the way. We're doing a lot of things with Blockchain. A lot of people are thinking about Blockchain as a system that's going to regulate, basically, transfer a transaction, financial transaction. We want to take Blockchain to the next level. And one thing we're doing, for example, We're using Blockchain for Angels. How we're track, basically, donation you're going to do. We going to use Blockchain for-- >> Well that's because people want to know their money's actually going to good. >> That's right! That's right! >> Not to scams that have been out there. >> You got it. >> We going to use Blockchain as a DRM system, Digital Rights Management system. We're going to use that in manufacturing industry, in many industry, and it goes on and on and on. >> What is the big buzz right now with Cryptocurrency? You're seeing a lot of these ICOs out there. Are those legit? In your mind, is it just a bubble? Is it just a normalization's going to come, what's your take on Initial Coin Offerings? >> I think, to be honest with you, I think this is a progress with thing. I mean, we discuss about Blockchain and everything. We see some trains going there. I think it's accelerating as well, because it's got a lot of take up and everything. We see, also, the world changing, and I think we need to look at the geo-political context of the world and what could happen. So I think those kind of new regulation, the way it's going to work. I mean, it's coming on time, people's going to leverage it, so I think it's not some fad stuff. This is something that's going to stay. >> It's just a Wild West. >> But it was, exactly. Right now, we need to work on the right standard, we need to figure out how it's going to work and everything. >> What is the exciting things that you see out there right now? I mean, Blockchain just kind of gets us excited 'cause you can imagine different new things happening. But the clients that I talk to, customers, your clients, or CIOs, they have to reimagine the future. >> That's right. >> With preexisting conditions called legacy infrastructure. >> Exactly >> Legacy software. How do they get the best of the magic and manage the preexisting conditions? >> So, there's a lot of innovation in term of software development. You take energy in everything that we have, basically, to connect to your legacy, and leverage it as much as you can. You know, there's a big progress in artificial intelligence today. I mean, I've live a lot of winters of artificial intelligence. I think finally, maybe there's going to be some spring. Why? Because of what we talk about. The iPad from one's computing the data available, and then also, some new type of algorithm like deep learning and everything. That data that is somewhere into this company called the Dark Data, people is going to be able to leverage it, and then make those artificial intelligence systems even more intelligence, smarter, and everything. So, legacy's here, but we're going to leverage it, and we're going to give a second life to those legacy environment. So those technology like artificial intelligence, new analytics and all those different things. >> So I got to ask you a kind of politically hot question, which is the digital transformation. >> Yes. >> So there's doubt we're in a digital transformation. No brainer. Yet, I go to conferences over and over again, and I see Gartner Magic Quadrant. I'm number one on the Magic Quadrant, and everybody's number one in the Magic Quadrant. So, the question is, what's the scoreboard of the new environment? Because, if you use the old scoreboard, and the world's horizontally scalable, you're going to have a blending of Magic Quadrants. So there's going to be a disruption, and that's causing confusion to the CIOs and CXOs because you got Chief Data Officer, Chief Security Officer, you got no perimeter for security, you have quantum computing, you have Cloud. So, people are trying to squint through all the nonsense and saying, how do you measure success? >> Yeah. >> Certainly customers is a good one. >> I think this is the typical question. I mean, this whole digital transformation, I understand that is important, and we need to understand. I mean, Accenture, and especially the lab, it's all about result. And you know what? The mission of the lab is new, it's applied, is now. New technology applied for real challenges, and I want to deliver it now, and I want to work for six months. So my word is that our research is outcome driven, and that's exactly what we're seeing. So, I told you about the quantum computing, and I have other example where we are really laser-focused on making an outcome. I think that's where-- >> So, to your point, people shouldn't buy promises. >> No. >> They should buy results. >> That's right. >> So, Peter Barris, who runs our research, said to me, and I asked him the question, he goes, ah, that's just a bunch of BS. The ultimate metric is how many customers you have. So, someone should be touting their customers. >> Sorry? >> They should be touting their customers, not some survey. >> No, absolutely. And I'm really for that. >> I want to tell you something, that I'm a very pragmatic person. I'm coming from the field, where I was serving 400 clients doing, every day, project delivery, you know? >> John: God bless you. >> And I've always been doing innovation at the same time, but my view was that innovation needs to be scalable, it needs to be tangible, it needs to be outcome driven. So again, this is really the matter of the lab, and if you look at how the lab works with the rest of the organization of Accenture, this is exactly what we're doing. We connect with our studio, where we can do prototyping front of the eyes of our client. We connect with Open Innovation, where we connect with the best start ups in the world. I think, you remember when I told you combinatorial effect. There's a combinatorial effect with technology that is a combinatorial effect with people. If you put the people from start up, the best guys from the lab, the best guys from the studios and everything, that's where the magic happens. >> So this is a new configuration? >> We collect the innovation architecture. >> So this is a scalable model for being agile, and the results are what? Faster performance? >> Faster performance, innovative performance, and tangible outcome. >> Okay Marc, you're an excitable guy, I like talkin' with you, what are you most excited about right now in this world that you're living in? So, I told you about the technology, and there's one thing that the lab is doing, and we'll be launching that this year, and we'll continue expanding. It's what we call Tech For Good. Tech For Good is how we're going to apply technology to change society. What we're going to do for fighting hunger in India. How we're going to give situational awareness to blind people using augmented reality immersion learning. That keeps me awake at night, because this is technology for best usage, it allows for our people to sleep well at night. My kids are proud of me, and I think we can-- >> Change the world! >> That's right! We can attract great people. >> Alright, final question. Here at the celebration, at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, what's the big scene here? Share with the folks who are watching, who aren't here, what's happening. >> I think, first of all, the venue is amazing. Computer Historic Museum is probably one of my favorite museum here in Silicon Valley. I mean, you need to understand that, 15 years old I started to work on a IBM 360 of my uncle, so the machine over there, I know it. I worked on it. And when I see the completed progress where we are today, when we see the Cray, when we see the quantum and everything, I feel so lucky that we're celebrating 30 years. Now I'd to go for the next 30 years of the lab. That's what I want to do. >> Let's get that on our next interview. Marc, thanks for sharing, here's to the next 30 years. This is the Cube coverage of Accenture Lab's 30 year celebration. The Computer History Museum, I'm John Ferry. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for theCube's exclusive three days of coverage of HPE Discover 2017. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, and my cohost, Dave Vellante. Partner in crime here. Our next guest is Ana Pinczuk, Senior Vice President, General Manager, HPE Pointnext, the new organization >> Ana: That's correct. Yeah. >> John: Anyways, welcome to theCube. Good to see you again. >> Thank you. Really nice to see you as well. Yeah, excited to be here with you guys. >> Cube alumni also. Part of the Grace Hopper Community as well with women in tech. Great work there. Just want to give you props. >> Ana: Thank you, yeah. >> Shout out there. Okay, so you're in the new job here. You're a seasoned veteran. >> Ana: Yes. >> You know the industry. Your thoughts? I mean, you're coming in fresh. >> Ana: Yeah, I'm coming in fresh. So, first of all, three whole months here, you know. So, it's been kind of a whirlwind since we came onboard. We announced the new brand. So HP Pointnext is the new brand for really our future-facing services organization, right. And we've got this great opportunity, you know? We've got customers that are really undergoing tremendous digital transformation, right, and they need help, and we're the arm of HP that can really help them through that journey. All the way from sort of advice and transform services, professional services, like design and implementation services, and then when we go to operational support services as well, so. >> John: One of the things that Meg Whitman was talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction to, is, she said it's a cleaner positioning with HPE now. Because the partner relationships have always been center. We had the Chief Channel Officer on earlier, Denzel. 70 percent of the revenues comes from partners. >> Ana: That's right. >> And so, having Pointnext the way it's structured makes it cleanier. What is she-- Cleaner, for everyone to understand what's happening. What does she mean by that? And give us your perspective. >> Ana: Yeah. Well, I'll give you, you know. Look, before, we had a huge outsourcing business, right. And with the DXC business moving off, we've got the opportunity to really partner with the Accentures, the DeLoyds, the WhitPros, the Tatas of the world, right? We provide mostly technology services, so, to the extent that they go and they help customers with applications and really figuring out their business processes, then we come together with them and then figure out how to translate that business architecture to the technology architecture and then how to do that technology road map for them, right. So, um, it's really positioned us much closer to different kinds of SI's, both sort of the traditional SI's as well as other ecosystem partners. And today, I mean, if you think about mostly every vertical is transforming, right, so. Whether you're in retail or transportation, et cetera. And frankly with DXC, you know, really going off focusing on outsourcing, we're still a huge partner of theirs, you know. They're a customer of ours. But at the same time, it opens up huge opportunities to go after other verticals and other solutions as well. >> Dave: Yeah, it's kind of a strange TAM expansion for the core of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Ana: Yeah, it is. >> You sort of concede the outsourcing business. Okay, we're out of that business. >> Ana: That's right. >> But now you've got so many other partners that really could boost your core business. >> Ana: Yeah. And, you know, um, I mean. Nobody owns advise and transform, right? I mean, nobody owns the whole digital transformation journey. The opportunity there greatly, sort of, outweighs the constraints that we have in that space, right. And so, you know, it's really important for us to go with the Accentures or the Deloyds, other partners, and be able to come with them and provide those solutions to customers. >> John: Ana, I'd like to get your thoughts on the trend and the particular question if it's going to be around the cloud transformation, which is the driver. You got big data, you've got IOTs, you have, obviously you have your hybrid IT solutions here, but, you know, cloud computing in general and big data point to a new set of applications. Dave and I always comment on theCube as we go to all these different events that we're old enough to remember the 80's and 90's. >> Ana: You're not that old. >> The 80's and 90's, the ERP generation. The mini computer was a massive opportunity for service providers. >> Ana: That's right. >> You know you had the big six accounting firms back in the day. Now you have thousands of partners. That was a big movement. That was a big wave. >> Ana: It is. >> This wave is almost bigger than that, but different. >> Ana: It is. >> What's different now as the new apps come out? >> Ana: Yeah. >> John: And we've seen this movie before in a way. >> Ana: Yes. >> John: With the ERPs of the world and CRMs. >> Ana: Yeah. >> John: What's different now with cloud that makes this bigger, and what's your thoughts on this opportunity? >> Ana: Well, I think, two things for me. One is-- In fact, over the last couple of days, we've been talking to a lot of customers about not what I would consider traditional, but even S, you know, SAP HANA, right? And those migrations. Those are like, a little bit like, still the old wave, you know. With new, sort of a new flavor to it as people go more into big data and analytics as well. But the biggest thing is that, you know, think about the world of the future. Everything's going to communicate with everything else. Everything is going to compute, right? And so, you know, the patterns of communications are really shifting, you know, as well. It used to be very data center, centric, and those traditional models, or the old IBM models of the 80's, right. >> John: Big iron, all the-- >> Ana: Big iron, everything in the servers and the data center. But think about, you know, your toaster talking to you, you know. Think about smart meters out there. Think about your car being really a roaming, you know, office and entertainment center, right. >> John: Yeah. >> So I think that's what's really shifting. It's just the magnitude of data that's going to be, you know, computable, in a sense, at the edge, and that's really helping us think about whole new different applications that we didn't have, you know, back then. >> Dave: So cloud is obviously this huge megatrend, and everybody, I think Hewlett-Packard Enterprises included, is trying to substantially mimic the cloud experience on-prim, create hybrid. And it seems like you're having a great deal of success there, at least early, some early wins. The other component of that is the business model side of things. >> Ana: Yes. >> The whole as a service piece of it. >> Ana: Yes. >> And as you transition into that, you know, cloud-like world, what happens on the business model side? I mean, we've heard a lot about flex capacity and things of that nature, but it feels like the services business can transform dramatically into that model. I wonder if you can comment on that. >> No, it's true. I mean, just think about it. In the more traditional world, we've been mostly a product company with sort of services attached. You know, you sell a hardware box and you attach support to it and some installation services. We're completely shifting the model, right? So we're really services led and hardware attached, right, of the model going forward. And, so that's one thing that's shifting. And then the business models are really outcome based. You know, so, I'll give you an example. You know, I was talking to a customer, in fact, earlier this morning, about providing retail store as a service. That's a very different model, right. That means that we're looking at the whole architecture for them. We're looking at what value constitutes in a retail store. You know, how do they make money. What that outcome should be, right. Then how do you deliver that as a solution on a per, you know, something basis. Per outcome basis. So completely shifts the way that we think about delivering services. >> Dave: And so has it become services as a service? I mean do you go to-- >> Ana: I call it-- Yeah, I mean, I've been calling it, you know, experience as a service, and it is service as a service or outcome as a service. I mean, in a sense what the customer cares about is the value that they get out of that thing that you delivered to them, right. And so-- >> John: It's important to them. >> It's important to them. >> John: It's their business. >> I think, that's their business. That's what they care about. You know, I'll give you an example. Data is so important. Backing up your data is really important. But what the customer cares about is not whether they have back up, but it's whether the back up actually worked, you know. >> Dave: And can I recover. >> Ana: And can I recover from it, restore it, right. And so, when you think about that, you know, experience as a service. The experience is, gees, you know, that I get my data backed up and can I restore or recover from it. And then that becomes the outcome that they want. >> John: Which is the digital transformation. I mean, digital transformation has been around for awhile. It's been that buzzword. Certainly center stage here. But you're talking about business transformation. You're talking about really changing how companies are doing business. >> Ana: That's correct. >> John: Chop line revenue driven by digital services or digital apps or-- >> That's right, that's right. >> John: Interfaces, experiences. Whether it's feeling good or actually delivering something. >> Ana: That's right. And, you know, what's happening. I mean, think about the retail store of the future, right. I mean, you know, you have, you have a teenage daughter or a teenage son as I have. You know, you want to make it really interesting for them to go into a store and have a different kind of experience, right? And so, you know, location based services, all these, all these things that you can enable in terms of, you know, helping them buy new things or getting, you know, I don't know, some sort of discount when they go into the store. Or really seeing what it looks like when it's on. You know, those are the experiences of the future that are going to make that retailer relevant, you know, especially moving on. >> John: Well, we're going to have my daughter-- She's down in the front desk. She's interning for us. She's a Berkeley student. Say hi to her. She's going to come in and tell us about what she thinks of HPE as a youngster. >> Ana: Oh, good. >> John: But more importantly, this is a big trend. I mean, we're seeing-- I want to talk about the women in tech piece of what you're involved in because, you know, we were having a conversation at dinner two nights ago that, you know, people consume technology, whether they're the end user, and that word to even exist. End user, or consumer. >> Ana: That's right. >> End user isn't even a word anymore. >> Ana: Isn't that, yeah-- Who is that? >> John: Who do we call end user? >> Ana: I know. Or end thing. >> John: But people who are-- >> Ana: In the future. >> We're all connected, right? >> Ana: That's right. >> So, so this makes up this-- 50 percent of the population's women. >> Ana: That's right. >> And they're not making the products as much, so the percentage of women in tech is a big issue. I know you're, you're involved with Grace Hopper. >> Ana: Yes. >> Your thoughts on women in tech, because we need more women building products or being involved in the design or something. >> Ana: Yeah, yeah. It's a great, as you know, a great passion area for me. And we've got about-- You know, if you think about computing, we've got about 17 percent or 18 percent of the graduates come out in computer science, right. But if you think about technology in general, you know, because everything is going to be digital, because everything is going to compute, you now have, for example, women that are going into tech that have, sort of, a real different variety of backgrounds, right? I mean, they could be designers, because your fabrics are going to be, sort of, lit up with, you know, with sensor technologies. Your knees will be, you know, will have capabilities that are computational. You know, so. What we're seeing is the opportunity to open up the space for women because some of the things that are out there that are going to be technology are going to be much more interesting generally to, to women. >> John: So if I get this right, you're saying is that it's, "Okay, we want more people, more women in software." Except that's not the restriction. It should be computer science, now, is broader. >> Ana: That's right. >> John: And in analytics, I mean, we see a lot of women who are crushing it and being great data scientists. >> Ana: That's right. >> Bring some creativity to it or expertise. >> Dave: In that stat, you said 17 percent with a degree and a small, a much smaller percentage actually enter the technology field, correct? >> Yeah, you know, yeah. What happens, I mean, especially, we get about 17 to 22 percent or so that enter the technology field, but then many of them don't stay. You know, especially those, you know-- There's attrition as you go up the, up the chain as well. >> Okay, so maybe this new dynamic >> Ana: Yeah. >> Changes that. >> Ana: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the kinds of degrees that people are getting. You know, every degree will have a technology aspect to it, right? You're in textiles or you're in, you know, design. >> John: Healthcare. Science, everywhere. >> Or you're in healthcare. And, you're in-- Yeah, you know, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer. Every degree will have an aspect of tech, that means, frankly, that we as a tech industry have to open up the kinds of people that we attract, right? We've got to look for, not just computer science people, but people that understand business processes. You know, people that understand industry verticals, because digital's going to all these different, sort of, you know, places. >> John: And you're an inspiration. Thanks for all that work. And we agree. Science is everywhere now. >> Ana: Yeah, that's right. >> And whether it's block chain or some sort of medical breakthrough, >> Ana: That's right. >> You don't have to be a hardcore programmer. >> Ana: That's right, that's right. >> Ana, thanks so much for coming on theCube. Really appreciate you sharing your insight. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> John: Congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, appreciate it. >> John: And Pointnext is, points to what's next. >> The place to be. That's right. As I try to tell people. (laughter) >> John: It's like dabbing and pointing at the same time. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Ana: Thank you so much. >> John: I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, live coverage of HPE Discover 2017. Our 7th year covering HP Discover, now HPE Discover in it's 2nd year. Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)