>>From around the globe, but it's the cube presenting active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by IO Tahoe. >>Now we're going to look at the role automation plays in mobilizing your data on snowflake. Let's welcome. And Duncan Turnbull who's partner sales engineer at snowflake and AIG Vihara is back CEO of IO. Tahoe is going to share his insight. Gentlemen. Welcome. >>Thank you, David. Good to have you back. Yeah, it's great to have you back >>A J uh, and it's really good to CIO Tao expanding the ecosystem so important. Um, now of course bringing snowflake and it looks like you're really starting to build momentum. I mean, there's progress that we've seen every month, month by month, over the past 12, 14 months, your seed investors, they gotta be happy. >>They are all that happy. And then I can see that we run into a nice phase of expansion here and new customers signing up. And now you're ready to go out and raise that next round of funding. I think, um, maybe think of a slight snowflake five years ago. So we're definitely on track with that. A lot of interest from investors and, um, we're right now trying to focus in on those investors that can partner with us, understand AI data and, and automation. >>So personally, I mean, you've managed a number of early stage VC funds. I think four of them, uh, you've taken several comp, uh, software companies through many funding rounds and growth and all the way to exit. So, you know how it works, you have to get product market fit, you know, you gotta make sure you get your KPIs, right. And you gotta hire the right salespeople, but, but what's different this time around, >>Uh, well, you know, the fundamentals that you mentioned though, those are never change. And, um, what we can say, what I can say that's different, that's shifted, uh, this time around is three things. One in that they used to be this kind of choice of, do we go open source or do we go proprietary? Um, now that has turned into, um, a nice hybrid model where we've really keyed into, um, you know, red hat doing something similar with Santos. And the idea here is that there is a core capability of technology that independence a platform, but it's the ability to then build an ecosystem around that made a pervade community. And that community may include customers, uh, technology partners, other tech vendors, and enabling the platform adoption so that all of those folks in that community can build and contribute, um, while still maintaining the core architecture and platform integrity, uh, at the core of it. >>And that's one thing that's changed was fitting a lot of that type of software company, um, emerge into that model, which is different from five years ago. Um, and then leveraging the cloud, um, every cloud snowflake cloud being one of them here in order to make use of what customers, uh, and customers and enterprise software are moving towards. Uh, every CIO is now in some configuration of a hybrid. Um, it is state whether those cloud multi-cloud on prem. That's just the reality. The other piece is in dealing with the CIO is legacy. So the past 15, 20 years they've purchased many different platforms, technologies, and some of those are still established and still, how do you, um, enable that CIO to make purchase while still preserving and in some cases building on and extending the, the legacy, um, material technology. So they've invested their people's time and training and financial investment into solving a problem, customer pain point, uh, with technology, but, uh, never goes out of fashion >>That never changes. You have to focus like a laser on that. And of course, uh, speaking of companies who are focused on solving problems, don't can turn bill from snowflake. You guys have really done a great job and really brilliantly addressing pain points, particularly around data warehousing, simplified that you're providing this new capability around data sharing, uh, really quite amazing. Um, Dunkin AAJ talks about data quality and customer pain points, uh, in, in enterprise. It, why is data quality been such a problem historically? >>Oh, sorry. One of the biggest challenges that's really affected by it in the past is that because to address everyone's need for using data, they've evolved all these kinds of different places to store all these different silos or data marts or all this kind of clarification of places where data lives and all of those end up with slightly different schedules to bringing data in and out. They end up with slightly different rules for transforming that data and formatting it and getting it ready and slightly different quality checks for making use of it. And this then becomes like a big problem in that these different teams are then going to have slightly different or even radically different ounces to the same kinds of questions, which makes it very hard for teams to work together, uh, on their different data problems that exist inside the business, depending on which of these silos they end up looking at and what you can do. If you have a single kind of scalable system for putting all of your data into it, you can kind of sidestep along to this complexity and you can address the data quality issues in a, in a single and a single way. >>Now, of course, we're seeing this huge trend in the market towards robotic process automation, RPA, that adoption is accelerating. Uh, you see, in UI paths, I IPO, you know, 35 plus billion dollars, uh, valuation, you know, snowflake like numbers, nice cops there for sure. Uh, agent you've coined the phrase data RPA, what is that in simple terms? >>Yeah, I mean, it was born out of, uh, seeing how in our ecosystem concern community developers and customers, uh, general business users for wanting to adopt and deploy a tar hose technology. And we could see that, um, I mean, there's not monkeying out PA we're not trying to automate that piece, but wherever there is a process that was tied into some form of a manual overhead with handovers and so on. Um, that process is something that we were able to automate with, with our ties technology and, and the deployment of AI and machine learning technologies specifically to those data processes almost as a precursor to getting into financial automation that, um, that's really where we're seeing the momentum pick up, especially in the last six months. And we've kept it really simple with snowflake. We've kind of stepped back and said, well, you know, the resource that a snowflake can leverage here is, is the metadata. So how could we turn snowflake into that repository of being the data catalog? And by the way, if you're a CIO looking to purchase a data catalog tool stop, there's no need to, um, working with snowflake, we've enable that intelligence to be gathered automatically and to be put, to use within snowflake. So reducing that manual effort, and I'm putting that data to work. And, um, and that's where we've packaged this with, uh, AI machine learning specific to those data tasks. Um, and it made sense that's, what's resonated with, with our customers. >>You know, what's interesting here, just a quick aside, as you know, I've been watching snowflake now for awhile and, and you know, of course the, the competitors come out and maybe criticize why they don't have this feature. They don't have that feature. And it's snowflake seems to have an answer. And the answer oftentimes is, well, its ecosystem ecosystem is going to bring that because we have a platform that's so easy to work with though. So I'm interested Duncan in what kind of collaborations you are enabling with high quality data. And of course, you know, your data sharing capability. >>Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, the ability to work on, on datasets, isn't just limited to inside the business itself or even between different business units. And we were kind of discussing maybe with their silos. Therefore, when looking at this idea of collaboration, we have these where we want to be >>Able to exploit data to the greatest degree possible, but we need to maintain the security, the safety, the privacy, and governance of that data. It could be quite valuable. It could be quite personal depending on the application involved. One of these novel applications that we see between organizations of data sharing is this idea of data clean rooms. And these data clean rooms are safe, collaborative spaces, which allow multiple companies or even divisions inside a company where they have particular, uh, privacy requirements to bring two or more data sets together for analysis. But without having to actually share the whole unprotected data set with each other, and this lets you to, you know, when you do this inside of snowflake, you can collaborate using standard tool sets. You can use all of our SQL ecosystem. You can use all of the data science ecosystem that works with snowflake. >>You can use all of the BI ecosystem that works with snowflake, but you can do that in a way that keeps the confidentiality that needs to be presented inside the data intact. And you can only really do these kinds of, uh, collaborations, especially across organization, but even inside large enterprises, when you have good reliable data to work with, otherwise your analysis just isn't going to really work properly. A good example of this is one of our large gaming customers. Who's an advertiser. They were able to build targeting ads to acquire customers and measure the campaign impact in revenue, but they were able to keep their data safe and secure while doing that while working with advertising partners, uh, the business impact of that was they're able to get a lifted 20 to 25% in campaign effectiveness through better targeting and actually, uh, pull through into that of a reduction in customer acquisition costs because they just didn't have to spend as much on the forms of media that weren't working for them. >>So, ha I wonder, I mean, you know, with, with the way public policy shaping out, you know, obviously GDPR started it in the States, you know, California, consumer privacy act, and people are sort of taking the best of those. And, and, and there's a lot of differentiation, but what are you seeing just in terms of, you know, the government's really driving this, this move to privacy, >>Um, government public sector, we're seeing a huge wake up an activity and, uh, across the whole piece that, um, part of it has been data privacy. Um, the other part of it is being more joined up and more digital rather than paper or form based. Um, we've all got stories of waiting in line, holding a form, taking that form to the front of the line and handing it over a desk. Now government and public sector is really looking to transform their services into being online, to show self service. Um, and that whole shift is then driving the need to, um, emulate a lot of what the commercial sector is doing, um, to automate their processes and to unlock the data from silos to put through into those, uh, those processes. Um, and another thing I can say about this is they, the need for data quality is as a Dunkin mentions underpins all of these processes, government pharmaceuticals, utilities, banking, insurance, the ability for a chief marketing officer to drive a, a loyalty campaign. >>They, the ability for a CFO to reconcile accounts at the end of the month. So do a, a, uh, a quick, accurate financial close. Um, also the, the ability of a customer operations to make sure that the customer has the right details about themselves in the right, uh, application that they can sell. So from all of that is underpinned by data and is effective or not based on the quality of that data. So whilst we're mobilizing data to snowflake cloud, the ability to then drive analytics, prediction, business processes off that cloud, um, succeeds or fails on the quality of that data. >>I mean it, and, you know, I would say, I mean, it really is table stakes. If you don't trust the data, you're not gonna use the data. The problem is it always takes so long to get to the data quality. There's all these endless debates about it. So we've been doing a fair amount of work and thinking around this idea of decentralized data, data by its very nature is decentralized, but the fault domains of traditional big data is that everything is just monolithic and the organizations monolithic technology's monolithic, the roles are very, you know, hyper specialized. And so you're hearing a lot more these days about this notion of a data fabric or what calls a data mesh. Uh, and we've kind of been leaning in to that and the ability to, to connect various data capabilities, whether it's a data warehouse or a data hub or a data Lake that those assets are discoverable, they're shareable through API APIs and they're governed on a federated basis. And you're using now bringing in a machine intelligence to improve data quality. You know, I wonder Duncan, if you could talk a little bit about Snowflake's approach to this topic. >>Sure. So I'd say that, you know, making use of all of your data, is there a key kind of driver behind these ideas that they can mesh into the data fabrics? And the idea is that you want to bring together not just your kind of strategic data, but also your legacy data and everything that you have inside the enterprise. I think I'd also like to kind of expand upon what a lot of people view as all of the data. And I think that a lot of people kind of miss that there's this whole other world of data they could be having access to, which is things like data from their business partners, their customers, their suppliers, and even stuff that's more in the public domain, whether that's, you know, demographic data or geographic or all these kinds of other types of data sources. And what I'd say to some extent is that the data cloud really facilitates the ability to share and gain access to this both kind of between organizations inside organizations. >>And you don't have to, you know, make lots of copies of the data and kind of worry about the storage and this federated, um, you know, idea of governance and all these things that it's quite complex to kind of manage this. Uh, you know, the snowflake approach really enables you to share data with your ecosystem all the world, without any latency with full control over what's shared without having to introduce new complexities or having complex attractions with APIs or software integration. The simple approach that we provide allows a relentless focus on creating the right data product to meet the challenges facing your business today. >>So, Andrea, the key here is to don't get to talking about it in my mind. Anyway, my cake takeaway is to simplicity. If you can take the complexity out of the equation, we're going to get more adoption. It really is that simple. >>Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that that whole journey, maybe five, six years ago, the adoption of data lakes was, was a stepping stone. Uh, however, the Achilles heel there was, you know, the complexity that it shifted towards consuming that data from a data Lake where there were many, many sets of data, um, to, to be able to cure rate and to, um, to consume, uh, whereas actually, you know, the simplicity of being able to go to the data that you need to do your role, whether you're in tax compliance or in customer services is, is key. And, you know, listen for snowflake by auto. One thing we know for sure is that our customers are super small and they're very capable. They're they're data savvy and know, want to use whichever tool and embrace whichever, um, cloud platform that is gonna reduce the barriers to solving. What's complex about that data, simplifying that and using, um, good old fashioned SQL, um, to access data and to build products from it to exploit that data. So, um, simplicity is, is key to it to allow people to, to, to make use of that data. And CIO is recognize that >>So Duncan, the cloud obviously brought in this notion of dev ops, um, and new methodologies and things like agile that brought that's brought in the notion of data ops, which is a very hot topic right now. Um, basically dev ops applies to data about how D how does snowflake think about this? How do you facilitate that methodology? >>Yeah, sorry. I agree with you absolutely. That they drops takes these ideas of agile development of >>Agile delivery and of the kind of dev ops world that we've seen just rise and rise, and it applies them to the data pipeline, which is somewhere where it kind of traditionally hasn't happened. And it's the same kinds of messages as we see in the development world, it's about delivering faster development, having better repeatability and really getting towards that dream of the data-driven enterprise, you know, where you can answer people's data questions, they can make better business decisions. And we have some really great architectural advantages that allow us to do things like allow cloning of data sets without having to copy them, allows us to do things like time travel so we can see what data looked like at some point in the past. And this lets you kind of set up both your own kind of little data playpen as a clone without really having to copy all of that data. >>So it's quick and easy, and you can also, again, with our separation of storage and compute, you can provision your own virtual warehouse for dev usage. So you're not interfering with anything to do with people's production usage of this data. So the, these ideas, the scalability, it just makes it easy to make changes, test them, see what the effect of those changes are. And we've actually seen this. You were talking a lot about partner ecosystems earlier. Uh, the partner ecosystem has taken these ideas that are inside snowflake and they've extended them. They've integrated them with, uh, dev ops and data ops tooling. So things like version control and get an infrastructure automation and things like Terraform. And they've kind of built that out into more of a data ops products that, that you can, you can make yourself so we can see there's a huge impact of, of these ideas coming into the data world. >>We think we're really well-placed to take advantage to them. The partner ecosystem is doing a great job with doing that. And it really allows us to kind of change that operating model for data so that we don't have as much emphasis on like hierarchy and change windows and all these kinds of things that are maybe use as a lot of fashioned. And we kind of taking the shift from this batch data integration into, you know, streaming continuous data pipelines in the cloud. And this kind of gets you away from like a once a week or once a month change window, if you're really unlucky to, you know, pushing changes, uh, in a much more rapid fashion as the needs of the business change. >>I mean, those hierarchical organizational structures, uh, w when we apply those to begin to that, what it actually creates the silos. So if you're going to be a silo Buster, which aji look at you guys in silo busters, you've got to put data in the hands of the domain experts, the business people, they know what data they want, if they have to go through and beg and borrow for a new data sets, et cetera. And so that's where automation becomes so key. And frankly, the technology should be an implementation detail, not the dictating factor. I wonder if you could comment on this. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, making the, the technologies more accessible to the general business users >>Or those specialists business teams that, um, that's the key to unlocking is it is interesting to see is as people move from organization to organization where they've had those experiences operating in a hierarchical sense, I want to break free from that and, um, or have been exposed to, um, automation, continuous workflows, um, change is continuous in it. It's continuous in business, the market's continuously changing. So having that flow across the organization of work, using key components, such as get hub, similar to what you drive process Terraform to build in, um, code into the process, um, and automation and with a high Tahoe leveraging all the metadata from across those fragmented sources is, is, is good to say how those things are coming together. And watching people move from organization to organization say, Hey, okay, I've got a new start. I've got my first hundred days to impress my, my new manager. >>Uh, what kind of an impact can I, um, bring to this? And quite often we're seeing that as, you know, let me take away the good learnings from how to do it, or how not to do it from my previous role. And this is an opportunity for me to, to bring in automation. And I'll give you an example, David, you know, recently started working with a, a client in financial services. Who's an asset manager, uh, managing financial assets. They've grown over the course of the last 10 years through M and a, and each of those acquisitions have bought with it tactical data. It's saying instead of data of multiple CRM systems now multiple databases, multiple bespoke in-house created applications. And when the new CIO came in and had a look at those well, you know, yes, I want to mobilize my data. Yes, I need to modernize my data state because my CEO is now looking at these crypto assets that are on the horizon and the new funds that are emerging that around digital assets and crypto assets. >>But in order to get to that where absolutely data underpins and is the core asset, um, cleaning up that, that legacy situation mobilizing the relevant data into the Safelite cloud platform, um, is where we're giving time back, you know, that is now taking a few weeks, whereas that transitioned to mobilize that data, start with that, that new clean slate to build upon a new business as a, a digital crypto asset manager, as well as the legacy, traditional financial assets, bonds stocks, and fixed income assets, you name it, uh, is where we're starting to see a lot of innovation. >>Yeah. Tons of innovation. I love the crypto examples and FTS are exploding and, you know, let's face it, traditional banks are getting disrupted. Uh, and so I also love this notion of data RPA. I, especially because I've done a lot of work in the RPA space. And, and I want to, what I would observe is that the, the early days of RPA, I call it paving the cow path, taking existing processes and applying scripts, get letting software robots, you know, do its thing. And that was good because it reduced, you know, mundane tasks, but really where it's evolved is a much broader automation agenda. People are discovering new, new ways to completely transform their processes. And I see a similar, uh, analogy for data, the data operating model. So I'm wonder whenever you think about that, how a customer really gets started bringing this to their ecosystem, their data life cycles. >>Sure. Yeah. So step one is always the same is figuring out for the CIO, the chief data officer, what data do I have, um, and that's increasingly something that they want towards a mate, so we can help them there and, and do that automated data discovery, whether that is documents in the file, share backup archive in a relational data store, in a mainframe really quickly hydrating that and bringing that intelligence, the forefront of, of what do I have, and then it's the next step of, well, okay. Now I want to continually monitor and curate that intelligence with the platform that I've chosen. Let's say snowflake, um, in order such that I can then build applications on top of that platform to serve my, my internal, external customer needs and the automation around classifying data reconciliation across different fragmented data silos, building that in those insights into snowflake. >>Um, as you say, a little later on where we're talking about data quality, active DQ, allowing us to reconcile data from different sources, as well as look at the integrity of that data. Um, so they can go on to remediation, you know, I, I wanna, um, harness and leverage, um, techniques around traditional RPA. Um, but to get to that stage, I need to fix the data. So remediating publishing the data in snowflake, uh, allowing analysis to be formed performance snowflake. Th those are the key steps that we see and just shrinking that timeline into weeks, giving the organization that time back means they're spending more time on their customer and solving their customer's problem, which is where we want them to be. >>This is the brilliance of snowflake actually, you know, Duncan is, I've talked to him, then what does your view about this and your other co-founders and it's really that focus on simplicity. So, I mean, that's, you, you picked a good company to join my opinion. So, um, I wonder if you could, you know, talk about some of the industry sectors that are, again, going to gain the most from, from data RPA, I mean, traditional RPA, if I can use that term, you know, a lot of it was back office, a lot of, you know, financial w what are the practical applications where data RPA is going to impact, you know, businesses and, and the outcomes that we can expect. >>Yes, sir. So our drive is, is really to, to make that, um, business general user's experience of RPA simpler and, and using no code to do that, uh, where they've also chosen snowflake to build that their cloud platform. They've got the combination then of using a relatively simple script scripting techniques, such as SQL, uh, without no code approach. And the, the answer to your question is whichever sector is looking to mobilize their data. Uh, it seems like a cop-out, but to give you some specific examples, David, um, in banking where, uh, customers are looking to modernize their banking systems and enable better customer experience through, through applications and digital apps. That's where we're, we're seeing a lot of traction, uh, and this approach to, to pay RPA to data, um, health care, where there's a huge amount of work to do to standardize data sets across providers, payers, patients, uh, and it's an ongoing, um, process there for, for retail, um, helping to, to build that immersive customer experience. >>So recommending next best actions, um, providing an experience that is going to drive loyalty and retention, that's, that's dependent on understanding what that customer's needs intent, uh, being out to provide them with the content or the outfit at that point in time, or all data dependent utilities is another one great overlap there with, with snowflake where, you know, helping utilities, telecoms energy, water providers to build services on that data. And this is where the ecosystem just continues to, to expand. If we, if we're helping our customers turn their data into services for, for their ecosystem, that's, that's exciting. And they were more so exciting than insurance, which we always used to, um, think back to, uh, when insurance used to be very dull and mundane, actually, that's where we're seeing a huge amounts of innovation to create new flexible products that are priced to the day to the situation and, and risk models being adaptive when the data changes, uh, on, on events or circumstances. So across all those sectors that they're all mobilizing that data, they're all moving in some way, shape or form to a, a multi-cloud, um, set up with their it. And I think with, with snowflake and without Tahoe, being able to accelerate that and make that journey simple and as complex is, uh, is why we found such a good partner here. >>All right. Thanks for that. And then thank you guys. Both. We gotta leave it there. Uh, really appreciate Duncan you coming on and Aja best of luck with the fundraising. >>We'll keep you posted. Thanks, David. All right. Great. >>Okay. Now let's take a look at a short video. That's going to help you understand how to reduce the steps around your data ops. Let's watch.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube presenting active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by Io Tahoe. (indistinct) >> Got it? all right if everybody is ready we'll opening on Dave in five, four, three. Now we're going to look at the role automation plays in mobilizing your data on snowflake. Let's welcome. And Duncan Turnbull who's partner sales engineer at snowflake, Ajay Vohora is back CEO of IO. Tahoe he's going to share his insight. Gentlemen. Welcome. >> Thank you, David good to be back. >> Yes it's great to have you back Ajay and it's really good to see Io Tahoe expanding the ecosystem so important now of course bringing snowflake in, it looks like you're really starting to build momentum. I mean, there's progress that we've seen every month month by month, over the past 12, 14 months. Your seed investors, they got to be happy. >> They are they're happy and they can see that we're running into a nice phase of expansion here new customers signing up, and now we're ready to go out and raise that next round of funding. Maybe think of us like Snowflake five years ago. So we're definitely on track with that. A lot of interest from investors and right now trying to focus in on those investors that can partner with us and understand AI data and an automation. >> Well, so personally, I mean you've managed a number of early stage VC funds. I think four of them. You've taken several comm software companies through many funding rounds and growth and all the way to exit. So you know how it works. You have to get product market fit, you got to make sure you get your KPIs, right. And you got to hire the right salespeople, but what's different this time around? >> Well, you know, the fundamentals that you mentioned those that never change. What I can see that's different that's shifted this time around is three things. One in that they used to be this kind of choice of do we go open source or do we go proprietary? Now that has turned into a nice hybrid model where we've really keyed into RedHat doing something similar with Centos. And the idea here is that there is a core capability of technology that underpins a platform, but it's the ability to then build an ecosystem around that made up of a community. And that community may include customers, technology partners, other tech vendors and enabling the platform adoption so that all of those folks in that community can build and contribute whilst still maintaining the core architecture and platform integrity at the core of it. And that's one thing that's changed. We're seeing a lot of that type of software company emerge into that model, which is different from five years ago. And then leveraging the Cloud, every Cloud, Snowflake Cloud being one of them here. In order to make use of what customers end customers in enterprise software are moving towards. Every CIO is now in some configuration of a hybrid. IT is state whether that is Cloud, multi-Cloud, on-prem. That's just the reality. The other piece is in dealing with the CIO, his legacy. So the past 15, 20 years I've purchased many different platforms, technologies, and some of those are still established and still (indistinct) How do you enable that CIO to make purchase whilst still preserving and in some cases building on and extending the legacy material technology. So they've invested their people's time and training and financial investment into. Yeah, of course solving a problem, customer pain point with technology that never goes out in a fashion >> That never changes. You have to focus like a laser on that. And of course, speaking of companies who are focused on solving problems, Duncan Turnbull from Snowflake. You guys have really done a great job and really brilliantly addressing pain points particularly around data warehousing, simplified that you're providing this new capability around data sharing really quite amazing. Duncan, Ajay talks about data quality and customer pain points in enterprise IT. Why is data quality been such a problem historically? >> So one of the biggest challenges that's really affected that in the past is that because to address everyone's needs for using data, they've evolved all these kinds of different places to store it, all these different silos or data marts or all this kind of pluralfiation of places where data lives and all of those end up with slightly different schedules for bringing data in and out, they end up with slightly different rules for transforming that data and formatting it and getting it ready and slightly different quality checks for making use of it. And this then becomes like a big problem in that these different teams are then going to have slightly different or even radically different ounces to the same kinds of questions, which makes it very hard for teams to work together on their different data problems that exist inside the business, depending on which of these silos they end up looking at. And what you can do. If you have a single kind of scalable system for putting all of your data, into it, you can kind of side step along this complexity and you can address the data quality issues in a single way. >> Now, of course, we're seeing this huge trend in the market towards robotic process automation, RPA that adoption is accelerating. You see in UI paths, IPO, 35 plus billion dollars, valuation, Snowflake like numbers, nice comms there for sure. Ajay you've coined the phrase data RPA what is that in simple terms? >> Yeah I mean, it was born out of seeing how in our ecosystem (indistinct) community developers and customers general business users for wanting to adopt and deploy Io Tahoe's technology. And we could see that. I mean, there's not marketing out here we're not trying to automate that piece but wherever there is a process that was tied into some form of a manual overhead with handovers. And so on, that process is something that we were able to automate with Io Tahoe's technology and the employment of AI and machine learning technologies specifically to those data processes, almost as a precursor to getting into marketing automation or financial information automation. That's really where we're seeing the momentum pick up especially in the last six months. And we've kept it really simple with snowflake. We've kind of stepped back and said, well, the resource that a Snowflake can leverage here is the metadata. So how could we turn Snowflake into that repository of being the data catalog? And by the way, if you're a CIO looking to purchase the data catalog tool, stop there's no need to. Working with Snowflake we've enabled that intelligence to be gathered automatically and to be put to use within snowflake. So reducing that manual effort and I'm putting that data to work. And that's where we've packaged this with our AI machine learning specific to those data tasks. And it made sense that's what's resonated with our customers. >> You know, what's interesting here just a quick aside, as you know I've been watching snowflake now for awhile and of course the competitors come out and maybe criticize, "Why they don't have this feature. They don't have that feature." And snowflake seems to have an answer. And the answer oftentimes is, well ecosystem, ecosystem is going to bring that because we have a platform that's so easy to work with. So I'm interested Duncan in what kind of collaborations you are enabling with high quality data. And of course, your data sharing capability. >> Yeah so I think the ability to work on datasets isn't just limited to inside the business itself or even between different business units you're kind of discussing maybe with those silos before. When looking at this idea of collaboration. We have these challenges where we want to be able to exploit data to the greatest degree possible, but we need to maintain the security, the safety, the privacy, and governance of that data. It could be quite valuable. It could be quite personal depending on the application involved. One of these novel applications that we see between organizations of data sharing is this idea of data clean rooms. And these data clean rooms are safe, collaborative spaces which allow multiple companies or even divisions inside a company where they have particular privacy requirements to bring two or more data sets together, for analysis. But without having to actually share the whole unprotected data set with each other. And this lets you to you know, when you do this inside of Snowflake you can collaborate using standard tool sets. You can use all of our SQL ecosystem. You can use all of the data science ecosystem that works with Snowflake. You can use all of the BI ecosystem that works with snowflake. But you can do that in a way that keeps the confidentiality that needs to be presented inside the data intact. And you can only really do these kinds of collaborations especially across organization but even inside large enterprises, when you have good reliable data to work with, otherwise your analysis just isn't going to really work properly. A good example of this is one of our large gaming customers. Who's an appetizer. They were able to build targeted ads to acquire customers and measure the campaign impact in revenue but they were able to keep their data safe and secure while doing that while working with advertising partners. The business impact of that was they're able to get a lift of 20 to 25% in campaign effectiveness through better targeting and actually pull through into that of a reduction in customer acquisition costs because they just didn't have to spend as much on the forms of media that weren't working for them. >> So, Ajay I wonder, I mean with the way public policy is shaping out, you know, obviously GDPR started it in the States, California consumer privacy Act, and people are sort of taking the best of those. And there's a lot of differentiation but what are you seeing just in terms of governments really driving this move to privacy. >> Government, public sector, we're seeing a huge wake up an activity and across (indistinct), part of it has been data privacy. The other part of it is being more joined up and more digital rather than paper or form based. We've all got, so there's a waiting in the line, holding a form, taking that form to the front of the line and handing it over a desk. Now government and public sector is really looking to transform their services into being online (indistinct) self service. And that whole shift is then driving the need to emulate a lot of what the commercial sector is doing to automate their processes and to unlock the data from silos to put through into those processes. And another thing that I can say about this is the need for data quality is as Duncan mentions underpins all of these processes government, pharmaceuticals, utilities, banking, insurance. The ability for a chief marketing officer to drive a a loyalty campaign, the ability for a CFO to reconcile accounts at the end of the month to do a quick accurate financial close. Also the ability of a customer operations to make sure that the customer has the right details about themselves in the right application that they can sell. So from all of that is underpinned by data and is effective or not based on the quality of that data. So whilst we're mobilizing data to the Snowflake Cloud the ability to then drive analytics, prediction, business processes of that Cloud succeeds or fails on the quality of that data. >> I mean it really is table stakes. If you don't trust the data you're not going to use the data. The problem is it always takes so long to get to the data quality. There's all these endless debates about it. So we've been doing a fair amount of work and thinking around this idea of decentralized data. Data by its very nature is decentralized but the fault domains of traditional big data is that everything is just monolithic. And the organizations monolithic that technology's monolithic, the roles are very, you know, hyper specialized. And so you're hearing a lot more these days about this notion of a data fabric or what Jimit Devani calls a data mesh and we've kind of been leaning into that and the ability to connect various data capabilities whether it's a data, warehouse or a data hub or a data lake, that those assets are discoverable, they're shareable through API APIs and they're governed on a federated basis. And you're using now bringing in a machine intelligence to improve data quality. You know, I wonder Duncan, if you could talk a little bit about Snowflake's approach to this topic >> Sure so I'd say that making use of all of your data is the key kind of driver behind these ideas of beta meshes or beta fabrics? And the idea is that you want to bring together not just your kind of strategic data but also your legacy data and everything that you have inside the enterprise. I think I'd also like to kind of expand upon what a lot of people view as all of the data. And I think that a lot of people kind of miss that there's this whole other world of data they could be having access to, which is things like data from their business partners, their customers, their suppliers, and even stuff that's, more in the public domain, whether that's, you know demographic data or geographic or all these kinds of other types of data sources. And what I'd say to some extent is that the data Cloud really facilitates the ability to share and gain access to this both kind of, between organizations, inside organizations. And you don't have to, make lots of copies of the data and kind of worry about the storage and this federated, idea of governance and all these things that it's quite complex to kind of manage. The snowflake approach really enables you to share data with your ecosystem or the world without any latency with full control over what's shared without having to introduce new complexities or having complex interactions with APIs or software integration. The simple approach that we provide allows a relentless focus on creating the right data product to meet the challenges facing your business today. >> So Ajay, the key here is Duncan's talking about it my mind and in my cake takeaway is to simplicity. If you can take the complexity out of the equation you're going to get more adoption. It really is that simple. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that, that whole journey, maybe five, six years ago the adoption of data lakes was a stepping stone. However, the Achilles heel there was the complexity that it shifted towards consuming that data from a data lake where there were many, many sets of data to be able to cure rate and to consume. Whereas actually, the simplicity of being able to go to the data that you need to do your role, whether you're in tax compliance or in customer services is key. And listen for snowflake by Io Tahoe. One thing we know for sure is that our customers are super smart and they're very capable. They're data savvy and they'll want to use whichever tool and embrace whichever Cloud platform that is going to reduce the barriers to solving what's complex about that data, simplifying that and using good old fashioned SQL to access data and to build products from it to exploit that data. So simplicity is key to it to allow people to make use of that data and CIO is recognize that. >> So Duncan, the Cloud obviously brought in this notion of DevOps and new methodologies and things like agile that's brought in the notion of DataOps which is a very hot topic right now basically DevOps applies to data about how does Snowflake think about this? How do you facilitate that methodology? >> So I agree with you absolutely that DataOps takes these ideas of agile development or agile delivery and have the kind of DevOps world that we've seen just rise and rise. And it applies them to the data pipeline, which is somewhere where it kind of traditionally hasn't happened. And it's the same kinds of messages. As we see in the development world it's about delivering faster development having better repeatability and really getting towards that dream of the data-driven enterprise, where you can answer people's data questions they can make better business decisions. And we have some really great architectural advantages that allow us to do things like allow cloning of data sets without having to copy them, allows us to do things like time travel so we can see what the data looked like at some point in the past. And this lets you kind of set up both your own kind of little data playpen as a clone without really having to copy all of that data so it's quick and easy. And you can also, again with our separation of storage and compute, you can provision your own virtual warehouse for dev usage. So you're not interfering with anything to do with people's production usage of this data. So these ideas, the scalability, it just makes it easy to make changes, test them, see what the effect of those changes are. And we've actually seen this, that you were talking a lot about partner ecosystems earlier. The partner ecosystem has taken these ideas that are inside Snowflake and they've extended them. They've integrated them with DevOps and DataOps tooling. So things like version control and get an infrastructure automation and things like Terraform. And they've kind of built that out into more of a DataOps products that you can make use of. So we can see there's a huge impact of these ideas coming into the data world. We think we're really well-placed to take advantage to them. The partner ecosystem is doing a great job with doing that. And it really allows us to kind of change that operating model for data so that we don't have as much emphasis on like hierarchy and change windows and all these kinds of things that are maybe viewed as a lot as fashioned. And we kind of taken the shift from this batch stage of integration into streaming continuous data pipelines in the Cloud. And this kind of gets you away from like a once a week or once a month change window if you're really unlucky to pushing changes in a much more rapid fashion as the needs of the business change. >> I mean those hierarchical organizational structures when we apply those to begin to that it actually creates the silos. So if you're going to be a silo buster, which Ajay I look at you guys in silo busters, you've got to put data in the hands of the domain experts, the business people, they know what data they want, if they have to go through and beg and borrow for a new data sets cetera. And so that's where automation becomes so key. And frankly the technology should be an implementation detail not the dictating factor. I wonder if you could comment on this. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think making the technologies more accessible to the general business users or those specialists business teams that's the key to unlocking. So it is interesting to see is as people move from organization to organization where they've had those experiences operating in a hierarchical sense, I want to break free from that. And we've been exposed to automation. Continuous workflows change is continuous in IT. It's continuous in business. The market's continuously changing. So having that flow across the organization of work, using key components, such as GitHub and similar towards your drive process, Terraform to build in, code into the process and automation and with Io Tahoe, leveraging all the metadata from across those fragmented sources is good to see how those things are coming together. And watching people move from organization to organization say, "Hey okay, I've got a new start. I've got my first hundred days to impress my new manager. What kind of an impact can I bring to this?" And quite often we're seeing that as, let me take away the good learnings from how to do it or how not to do it from my previous role. And this is an opportunity for me to bring in automation. And I'll give you an example, David, recently started working with a client in financial services. Who's an asset manager, managing financial assets. They've grown over the course of the last 10 years through M&A and each of those acquisitions have bought with its technical debt, it's own set of data, that multiple CRM systems now multiple databases, multiple bespoke in-house created applications. And when the new CIO came in and had a look at those he thought well, yes I want to mobilize my data. Yes, I need to modernize my data state because my CEO is now looking at these crypto assets that are on the horizon and the new funds that are emerging that's around digital assets and crypto assets. But in order to get to that where absolutely data underpins that and is the core asset cleaning up that that legacy situation mobilizing the relevant data into the Snowflake Cloud platform is where we're giving time back. You know, that is now taking a few weeks whereas that transitioned to mobilize that data start with that new clean slate to build upon a new business as a digital crypto asset manager as well as the legacy, traditional financial assets, bonds, stocks, and fixed income assets, you name it is where we're starting to see a lot of innovation. >> Tons of innovation. I love the crypto examples, NFTs are exploding and let's face it. Traditional banks are getting disrupted. And so I also love this notion of data RPA. Especially because Ajay I've done a lot of work in the RPA space. And what I would observe is that the early days of RPA, I call it paving the cow path, taking existing processes and applying scripts, letting software robots do its thing. And that was good because it reduced mundane tasks, but really where it's evolved is a much broader automation agenda. People are discovering new ways to completely transform their processes. And I see a similar analogy for the data operating model. So I'm wonder what do you think about that and how a customer really gets started bringing this to their ecosystem, their data life cycles. >> Sure. Yeah. Step one is always the same. It's figuring out for the CIO, the chief data officer, what data do I have? And that's increasingly something that they want to automate, so we can help them there and do that automated data discovery whether that is documents in the file share backup archive in a relational data store in a mainframe really quickly hydrating that and bringing that intelligence the forefront of what do I have, and then it's the next step of, well, okay now I want to continually monitor and curate that intelligence with the platform that I've chosen let's say Snowflake. In order such that I can then build applications on top of that platform to serve my internal external customer needs. and the automation around classifying data, reconciliation across different fragmented data silos building that in those insights into Snowflake. As you say, a little later on where we're talking about data quality, active DQ, allowing us to reconcile data from different sources as well as look at the integrity of that data. So then go on to remediation. I want to harness and leverage techniques around traditional RPA but to get to that stage, I need to fix the data. So remediating publishing the data in Snowflake, allowing analysis to be formed, performed in Snowflake but those are the key steps that we see and just shrinking that timeline into weeks, giving the organization that time back means they're spending more time on their customer and solving their customer's problem which is where we want them to be. >> Well, I think this is the brilliance of Snowflake actually, you know, Duncan I've talked to Benoit Dageville about this and your other co-founders and it's really that focus on simplicity. So I mean, that's you picked a good company to join in my opinion. So I wonder Ajay, if you could talk about some of the industry sectors that again are going to gain the most from data RPA, I mean traditional RPA, if I can use that term, a lot of it was back office, a lot of financial, what are the practical applications where data RPA is going to impact businesses and the outcomes that we can expect. >> Yes, so our drive is really to make that business general user's experience of RPA simpler and using no code to do that where they've also chosen Snowflake to build their Cloud platform. They've got the combination then of using a relatively simple scripting techniques such as SQL without no code approach. And the answer to your question is whichever sector is looking to mobilize their data. It seems like a cop-out but to give you some specific examples, David now in banking, where our customers are looking to modernize their banking systems and enable better customer experience through applications and digital apps, that's where we're seeing a lot of traction in this approach to pay RPA to data. And health care where there's a huge amount of work to do to standardize data sets across providers, payers, patients and it's an ongoing process there. For retail helping to to build that immersive customer experience. So recommending next best actions. Providing an experience that is going to drive loyalty and retention, that's dependent on understanding what that customer's needs, intent are, being able to provide them with the content or the offer at that point in time or all data dependent utilities. There's another one great overlap there with Snowflake where helping utilities telecoms, energy, water providers to build services on that data. And this is where the ecosystem just continues to expand. If we're helping our customers turn their data into services for their ecosystem, that's exciting. Again, they were more so exciting than insurance which it always used to think back to, when insurance used to be very dull and mundane, actually that's where we're seeing a huge amounts of innovation to create new flexible products that are priced to the day to the situation and risk models being adaptive when the data changes on events or circumstances. So across all those sectors that they're all mobilizing their data, they're all moving in some way but for sure form to a multi-Cloud setup with their IT. And I think with Snowflake and with Io Tahoe being able to accelerate that and make that journey simple and less complex is why we've found such a good partner here. >> All right. Thanks for that. And thank you guys both. We got to leave it there really appreciate Duncan you coming on and Ajay best of luck with the fundraising. >> We'll keep you posted. Thanks, David. >> All right. Great. >> Okay. Now let's take a look at a short video. That's going to help you understand how to reduce the steps around your DataOps let's watch. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and multicloud brought to you by io/tahoe >> Hello everyone, and welcome to our continuing series covering data automation brought to you by io/tahoe. Today we're going to look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multicloud, let's welcome in Ajay Vohora who's the CEO of io/tahoe Ajay, always good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back David, pleasure. >> And he's joined by Fadzi Ushewokunze, who is a global principal architect for financial services, the vertical of financial services at Red Hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome Fadzi, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Fadzi, let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and how it works. >> Sure, Yeah. So, a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private clouds or public clouds or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand allocation of resources across clouds. And separate clouds can become hybrid when you're seamlessly interconnected. And it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads to be moved and how management can be unified and orchestration can work. And how well you have these interconnections has a direct impact of how well your hybrid cloud will work. >> Okay, so well Fadzi, staying with you for a minute. So, in the early days of cloud that term private cloud was thrown around a lot. But it often just meant virtualization of an on-prem system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >> Sure, so, for modern hybrid clouds we see that teams or organizations need to focus on the portability of applications across clouds. That's very important, right. And when organizations build applications they need to build and deploy these applications as a small collections of independently loosely coupled services. And then have those things run on the same operating system, which means in other words, running it all Linux everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage it and orchestrate these applications with platforms like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, for example. >> Okay, so, Fadzi that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and doesn't move. So, what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud is as you've just described it as it skillsets, is it the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your View there? >> So, I mean, from what we've seen around the industry especially around financial services where I spend most of my time. We see that the first thing that we see is management, right. Now, because you have all these clouds, you know, all these applications. You have a massive array of connections, of interconnections. You also have massive array of integrations portability and resource allocation as well. And then orchestrating all those different moving pieces things like storage networks. Those are really difficult to manage, right? So, management is the first challenge. The second one is workload placement. Where do you place this cloud? How do you place these cloud native operations? Do you, what do you keep on site on prem and what do you put in the cloud? That is the other challenge. The major one, the third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we're going to talk about how to address that. >> Yeah, we're definitely going to dig into that. Let's bring Ajay into the conversation. Ajay, you know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every company face is data fragmentation. Talk a little bit about how io/tahoe, unifies data across both traditional systems, legacy systems and it connects to these modern IT environments. >> Yeah, sure Dave. I mean, a Fadzi just nailed it there. It used to be about data, the volume of data and the different types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected the location of that data really matters. How we serve that data up to those apps. So, working with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. Being able to inject our data discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. whether it be an AWS or an IBM cloud or a GCP or on prem. Being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view of where is all my data, then allows the CIO to manage cost. They can do things like, one, I keep the data where it is, on premise or in my Oracle cloud or in my IBM cloud and connect the application that needs to feed off that data. And the way in which we do that is machine learning that learns over time as it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to classify that data and brings it all together with automation. >> Right, and one of the big themes that we've talked about this on earlier episodes is really simplification, really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away. So, we can focus on things Ajay, as you just mentioned. I mean, Fadzi, one of the big challenges that of course we all talk about is governance across these disparate data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts how does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations? Which of course are particularly acute within financial services. >> Oh yeah, yes. So, for banks and payment providers like you've just mentioned there. Insurers and many other financial services firms, you know they have to adhere to a standard such as say a PCI DSS. And in Europe you've got the GDPR, which requires stringent tracking, reporting, documentation and, you know for them to, to remain in compliance. And the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy, right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance of of your organization and reduce the risk out of the business, right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start with our consulting services, residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And there's also, we help organizations build security into their applications with our open source middleware offerings and even using a platform like OpenShift, because it allows you to run legacy applications and also containerized applications in a unified platform. Right, and also that provides you with, you know with the automation and the tooling that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance purposes. >> Ajay, anything, any color you could add to this conversation? >> Yeah, I'm pleased Fadzi brought up OpenShift. I mean we're using OpenShift to be able to take that security application of controls to the data level and it's all about context. So, understanding what data is there, being able to assess it to say, who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That's a great combination of Red Hat and io/tahoe. >> Fadzi, what about multi-cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even further, maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud as well. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So, the right automation solution, you know can be the difference between, you know cultivating an automated enterprise or automation carries. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So, that means have an automation solution that provides, you know, promotes IT availability and reliability with your platform so that, you can provide enterprise grade support, including security and testing integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability in that, you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So, you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds seamlessly, right? And with that comes the challenge of maintainability. So, you're going to need to look into a automation solution that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then, the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability. In the hybrid cloud space, scale is the big, big deal here. And you need to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a consistent manner, right. And then also that allows you finally to integrate the multiple data centers that you have. >> So, Ajay, I mean, this is a complicated situation for if a customer has to make sure things work on AWS or Azure or Google. They're going to spend all their time doing that. What can you add to really just simplify that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud equation. >> Yeah, I can give a few customer examples here. One being a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification. And the real bonuses for them has been a reduction in cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost spend down by $10 million in 2021. So, they could hit that reduced budget. And, what we brought to that was the ability to deploy using OpenShift templates into their different environments, whether it was on premise or in, as you mentioned, AWS. They had GCP as well for their marketing team and across those different platforms, being able to use a template, use prebuilt scripts to get up and running and catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having to jump on workshop calls. And I know we're all on a lot of teams zoom calls. And in these current times. They're just simply using enough hours of the day to manually perform all of this. So, yeah, working with Red Hat, applying machine learning into those templates, those little recipes that we can put that automation to work regardless which location the data's in allows us to pull that unified view together. >> Great, thank you. Fadzi, I want to come back to you. So, the early days of cloud you're in the Big Apple, you know financial services really well. Cloud was like an evil word and within financial services, and obviously that's changed, it's evolved. We talk about the pandemic has even accelerated that. And when you really dug into it, when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud, it was not that it wasn't good, it was great, whatever, but it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools, set up teams. are really overburdened. But in the cloud requires, you know, new thinking you've got the shared responsibility model. You've got to obviously have specific corporate, you know requirements and compliance. So, this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So, what are the differences that you can share from your experiences running on a sort of either on prem or on a mono cloud or, you know, versus across clouds? What, do you suggest there? >> Sure, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here mixed configurations and the inadequate change control are the top security threats. So, human error is what we want to avoid, because as you know, as your clouds grow with complexity then you put humans in the mix. Then the rate of errors is going to increase and that is going to expose you to security threats. So, this is where automation comes in, because automation will streamline and increase the consistency of your infrastructure management also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection compliance and change control. So, you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre-approved, you know, pre-approved policies and you want to proactively maintain them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then, you also want to rapidly the identify system that require patches and reconfiguration and automate that process of patching and reconfiguring. So that, you don't have humans doing this type of thing, And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistance settings according to a pre-defined base like I explained before, you know with the pre-approved policies. And also you want ease of auditing and troubleshooting, right. And from a Red Hat perspective we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example a tool called Ansible that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications. And also OpenShift itself, it automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers and causing, you know potentially introducing errors, right. Now, in looking into the new world of multiple clouds and so forth. The differences that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas, which is control, security and compliance, right. Control here, it means if you're on premise or you have one cloud you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference that the ownership it is still yours, but your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds, EWS and so forth infrastructure. So, people that are going to do these need to really, especially banks and governments need to be aware of the regulatory constraints of running those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers rationalize some of these choices. And also on security, you will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud you have more control, especially if you're on prem. You can control the sensitive information that you have. However, in the cloud, that's a different situation especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful with that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then, the last one is compliance. As well, you see that if you're running on prem on single cloud, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running on prem, you have control over that. You can document everything, you have access to everything that you need, but if you're going to go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation and we have standards that can help you you know, address some of these challenges. >> So, that's really strong insights, Fadzi. I mean, first of all Ansible has a lot of market momentum, you know, Red Hat's done a really good job with that acquisition. Your point about repeatability is critical, because you can't scale otherwise. And then, that idea you're putting forth about control, security and compliance. It's so true, I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe AWS is going to physically secure the you know, the S3, but in the bucket but we saw so many misconfigurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So, this all sounds great. Ajay, you're sharp, financial background. What about the economics? You know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. I mean, especially when you think about the work from home pivot and all the areas that they had to, the holes that they had to fill there, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, et cetera. So, how to organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs, so I can pay it forward or there's a there's a risk reduction angle. What can you share there? >> Yeah, I mean, that perspective I'd like to give here is not being multi-cloud as multi copies of an application or data. When I think back 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at was managing copies of data that were feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now, what we're seeing at io/tahoe a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data. So that, if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer I'm just going to keep that at one location. But across my different clouds, I'm going to have best of breed applications developed in-house, third parties in collaboration with my supply chain, connecting securely to that single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So, a lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on Kubernetes that are decoupled from the data source. That allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from a security capability and resilience, because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data. And with that come cost of storage and a cost to compute. So, what we're saying is using multi-cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer. And that goes all the way to Snowflake and Heroku on a cloud managed databases too. >> Well and the people cost too as well. When you think about, yes, the copy creep. But then, you know, when something goes wrong a human has to come in and figure it out. You know, you brought up Snowflake, I get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know data. I think we're going to be rethinking Ajay, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs, it's distributed and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications. Applications as we talked about with Fadzi, much more portable. So, it's really the last 10 years it'd be different than the next 10 years ago Ajay. >> Definitely, I think the people cost reduction is used. Gone are the days where you needed to have a dozen people governing, managing byte policies to data. A lot of that repetitive work, those tasks can be in part automated. We're seen examples in insurance where reduced teams of 15 people working in the back office, trying to apply security controls, compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDPR and CCPA. Last year, very much the economic effect to reduce head counts and enterprises running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives, such as net zero emissions. How they use data to understand how they can become more, have a better social impact and using data to drive that. And that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So, those regulatory compliance issues that might have been external. We see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that are benefiting that environment, social impact, and of course costs. >> Great perspectives. Jeff Hammerbacher once famously said, the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and Ajay those examples that you just gave of, you know social good and moving things forward are really critical. And I think that's where data is going to have the biggest societal impact. Okay guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming to the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> Keep it right there, for more insight and conversation around creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching theCube. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and multicloud brought to you by io/tahoe >> Hello everyone, and welcome to our continuing series covering data automation brought to you by io/tahoe. Today we're going to look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multicloud, let's welcome in Ajay Vohora who's the CEO of io/tahoe Ajay, always good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back David, pleasure. >> And he's joined by Fadzi Ushewokunze, who is a global principal architect for financial services, the vertical of financial services at Red Hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome Fadzi, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Fadzi, let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and how it works. >> Sure, Yeah. So, a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private clouds or public clouds or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand allocation of resources across clouds. And separate clouds can become hybrid when you're seamlessly interconnected. And it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads to be moved and how management can be unified and orchestration can work. And how well you have these interconnections has a direct impact of how well your hybrid cloud will work. >> Okay, so well Fadzi, staying with you for a minute. So, in the early days of cloud that term private cloud was thrown around a lot. But it often just meant virtualization of an on-prem system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >> Sure, so, for modern hybrid clouds we see that teams or organizations need to focus on the portability of applications across clouds. That's very important, right. And when organizations build applications they need to build and deploy these applications as a small collections of independently loosely coupled services. And then have those things run on the same operating system, which means in other words, running it all Linux everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage it and orchestrate these applications with platforms like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, for example. >> Okay, so, Fadzi that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and doesn't move. So, what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud is as you've just described it as it skillsets, is it the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your View there? >> So, I mean, from what we've seen around the industry especially around financial services where I spend most of my time. We see that the first thing that we see is management, right. Now, because you have all these clouds, you know, all these applications. You have a massive array of connections, of interconnections. You also have massive array of integrations portability and resource allocation as well. And then orchestrating all those different moving pieces things like storage networks. Those are really difficult to manage, right? So, management is the first challenge. The second one is workload placement. Where do you place this cloud? How do you place these cloud native operations? Do you, what do you keep on site on prem and what do you put in the cloud? That is the other challenge. The major one, the third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we're going to talk about how to address that. >> Yeah, we're definitely going to dig into that. Let's bring Ajay into the conversation. Ajay, you know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every company face is data fragmentation. Talk a little bit about how io/tahoe, unifies data across both traditional systems, legacy systems and it connects to these modern IT environments. >> Yeah, sure Dave. I mean, a Fadzi just nailed it there. It used to be about data, the volume of data and the different types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected the location of that data really matters. How we serve that data up to those apps. So, working with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. Being able to inject our data discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. whether it be an AWS or an IBM cloud or a GCP or on prem. Being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view of where is all my data, then allows the CIO to manage cost. They can do things like, one, I keep the data where it is, on premise or in my Oracle cloud or in my IBM cloud and connect the application that needs to feed off that data. And the way in which we do that is machine learning that learns over time as it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to classify that data and brings it all together with automation. >> Right, and one of the big themes that we've talked about this on earlier episodes is really simplification, really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away. So, we can focus on things Ajay, as you just mentioned. I mean, Fadzi, one of the big challenges that of course we all talk about is governance across these disparate data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts how does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations? Which of course are particularly acute within financial services. >> Oh yeah, yes. So, for banks and payment providers like you've just mentioned there. Insurers and many other financial services firms, you know they have to adhere to a standard such as say a PCI DSS. And in Europe you've got the GDPR, which requires stringent tracking, reporting, documentation and, you know for them to, to remain in compliance. And the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy, right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance of of your organization and reduce the risk out of the business, right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start with our consulting services, residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And there's also, we help organizations build security into their applications with our open source middleware offerings and even using a platform like OpenShift, because it allows you to run legacy applications and also containerized applications in a unified platform. Right, and also that provides you with, you know with the automation and the tooling that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance purposes. >> Ajay, anything, any color you could add to this conversation? >> Yeah, I'm pleased Fadzi brought up OpenShift. I mean we're using OpenShift to be able to take that security application of controls to the data level and it's all about context. So, understanding what data is there, being able to assess it to say, who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That's a great combination of Red Hat and io/tahoe. >> Fadzi, what about multi-cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even further, maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud as well. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So, the right automation solution, you know can be the difference between, you know cultivating an automated enterprise or automation carries. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So, that means have an automation solution that provides, you know, promotes IT availability and reliability with your platform so that, you can provide enterprise grade support, including security and testing integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability in that, you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So, you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds seamlessly, right? And with that comes the challenge of maintainability. So, you're going to need to look into a automation solution that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then, the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability. In the hybrid cloud space, scale is the big, big deal here. And you need to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a consistent manner, right. And then also that allows you finally to integrate the multiple data centers that you have. >> So, Ajay, I mean, this is a complicated situation for if a customer has to make sure things work on AWS or Azure or Google. They're going to spend all their time doing that. What can you add to really just simplify that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud equation. >> Yeah, I can give a few customer examples here. One being a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification. And the real bonuses for them has been a reduction in cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost spend down by $10 million in 2021. So, they could hit that reduced budget. And, what we brought to that was the ability to deploy using OpenShift templates into their different environments, whether it was on premise or in, as you mentioned, AWS. They had GCP as well for their marketing team and across those different platforms, being able to use a template, use prebuilt scripts to get up and running and catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having to jump on workshop calls. And I know we're all on a lot of teams zoom calls. And in these current times. They're just simply using enough hours of the day to manually perform all of this. So, yeah, working with Red Hat, applying machine learning into those templates, those little recipes that we can put that automation to work regardless which location the data's in allows us to pull that unified view together. >> Great, thank you. Fadzi, I want to come back to you. So, the early days of cloud you're in the Big Apple, you know financial services really well. Cloud was like an evil word and within financial services, and obviously that's changed, it's evolved. We talk about the pandemic has even accelerated that. And when you really dug into it, when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud, it was not that it wasn't good, it was great, whatever, but it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools, set up teams. are really overburdened. But in the cloud requires, you know, new thinking you've got the shared responsibility model. You've got to obviously have specific corporate, you know requirements and compliance. So, this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So, what are the differences that you can share from your experiences running on a sort of either on prem or on a mono cloud or, you know, versus across clouds? What, do you suggest there? >> Sure, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here mixed configurations and the inadequate change control are the top security threats. So, human error is what we want to avoid, because as you know, as your clouds grow with complexity then you put humans in the mix. Then the rate of errors is going to increase and that is going to expose you to security threats. So, this is where automation comes in, because automation will streamline and increase the consistency of your infrastructure management also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection compliance and change control. So, you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre-approved, you know, pre-approved policies and you want to proactively maintain them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then, you also want to rapidly the identify system that require patches and reconfiguration and automate that process of patching and reconfiguring. So that, you don't have humans doing this type of thing, And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistance settings according to a pre-defined base like I explained before, you know with the pre-approved policies. And also you want ease of auditing and troubleshooting, right. And from a Red Hat perspective we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example a tool called Ansible that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications. And also OpenShift itself, it automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers and causing, you know potentially introducing errors, right. Now, in looking into the new world of multiple clouds and so forth. The differences that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas, which is control, security and compliance, right. Control here, it means if you're on premise or you have one cloud you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference that the ownership it is still yours, but your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds, EWS and so forth infrastructure. So, people that are going to do these need to really, especially banks and governments need to be aware of the regulatory constraints of running those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers rationalize some of these choices. And also on security, you will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud you have more control, especially if you're on prem. You can control the sensitive information that you have. However, in the cloud, that's a different situation especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful with that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then, the last one is compliance. As well, you see that if you're running on prem on single cloud, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running on prem, you have control over that. You can document everything, you have access to everything that you need, but if you're going to go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation and we have standards that can help you you know, address some of these challenges. >> So, that's really strong insights, Fadzi. I mean, first of all Ansible has a lot of market momentum, you know, Red Hat's done a really good job with that acquisition. Your point about repeatability is critical, because you can't scale otherwise. And then, that idea you're putting forth about control, security and compliance. It's so true, I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe AWS is going to physically secure the you know, the S3, but in the bucket but we saw so many misconfigurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So, this all sounds great. Ajay, you're sharp, financial background. What about the economics? You know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. I mean, especially when you think about the work from home pivot and all the areas that they had to, the holes that they had to fill there, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, et cetera. So, how to organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs, so I can pay it forward or there's a there's a risk reduction angle. What can you share there? >> Yeah, I mean, that perspective I'd like to give here is not being multi-cloud as multi copies of an application or data. When I think back 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at was managing copies of data that were feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now, what we're seeing at io/tahoe a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data. So that, if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer I'm just going to keep that at one location. But across my different clouds, I'm going to have best of breed applications developed in-house, third parties in collaboration with my supply chain, connecting securely to that single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So, a lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on Kubernetes that are decoupled from the data source. That allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from a security capability and resilience, because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data. And with that come cost of storage and a cost to compute. So, what we're saying is using multi-cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer. And that goes all the way to Snowflake and Heroku on a cloud managed databases too. >> Well and the people cost too as well. When you think about, yes, the copy creep. But then, you know, when something goes wrong a human has to come in and figure it out. You know, you brought up Snowflake, I get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know data. I think we're going to be rethinking Ajay, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs, it's distributed and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications. Applications as we talked about with Fadzi, much more portable. So, it's really the last 10 years it'd be different than the next 10 years ago Ajay. >> Definitely, I think the people cost reduction is used. Gone are the days where you needed to have a dozen people governing, managing byte policies to data. A lot of that repetitive work, those tasks can be in part automated. We're seen examples in insurance where reduced teams of 15 people working in the back office, trying to apply security controls, compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDPR and CCPA. Last year, very much the economic effect to reduce head counts and enterprises running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives, such as net zero emissions. How they use data to understand how they can become more, have a better social impact and using data to drive that. And that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So, those regulatory compliance issues that might have been external. We see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that are benefiting that environment, social impact, and of course costs. >> Great perspectives. Jeff Hammerbacher once famously said, the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and Ajay those examples that you just gave of, you know social good and moving things forward are really critical. And I think that's where data is going to have the biggest societal impact. Okay guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming to the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> Keep it right there, for more insight and conversation around creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching theCube. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and multicloud brought to you by io/tahoe >> Hello everyone, and welcome to our continuing series covering data automation brought to you by io/tahoe. Today we're going to look at how to ensure enterprise resilience for hybrid and multicloud, let's welcome in Ajay Vohora who's the CEO of io/tahoe Ajay, always good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back David, pleasure. >> And he's joined by Fadzi Ushewokunze, who is a global principal architect for financial services, the vertical of financial services at Red Hat. He's got deep experiences in that sector. Welcome Fadzi, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Fadzi, let's start with you. Look, there are a lot of views on cloud and what it is. I wonder if you could explain to us how you think about what is a hybrid cloud and how it works. >> Sure, Yeah. So, a hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration and management across multiple clouds. Those clouds could be private clouds or public clouds or even your own data centers. And how does it all work? It's all about secure interconnectivity and on demand allocation of resources across clouds. And separate clouds can become hybrid when you're seamlessly interconnected. And it is that interconnectivity that allows the workloads to be moved and how management can be unified and orchestration can work. And how well you have these interconnections has a direct impact of how well your hybrid cloud will work. >> Okay, so well Fadzi, staying with you for a minute. So, in the early days of cloud that term private cloud was thrown around a lot. But it often just meant virtualization of an on-prem system and a network connection to the public cloud. Let's bring it forward. What, in your view does a modern hybrid cloud architecture look like? >> Sure, so, for modern hybrid clouds we see that teams or organizations need to focus on the portability of applications across clouds. That's very important, right. And when organizations build applications they need to build and deploy these applications as a small collections of independently loosely coupled services. And then have those things run on the same operating system, which means in other words, running it all Linux everywhere and building cloud native applications and being able to manage it and orchestrate these applications with platforms like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, for example. >> Okay, so, Fadzi that's definitely different from building a monolithic application that's fossilized and doesn't move. So, what are the challenges for customers, you know, to get to that modern cloud is as you've just described it as it skillsets, is it the ability to leverage things like containers? What's your View there? >> So, I mean, from what we've seen around the industry especially around financial services where I spend most of my time. We see that the first thing that we see is management, right. Now, because you have all these clouds, you know, all these applications. You have a massive array of connections, of interconnections. You also have massive array of integrations portability and resource allocation as well. And then orchestrating all those different moving pieces things like storage networks. Those are really difficult to manage, right? So, management is the first challenge. The second one is workload placement. Where do you place this cloud? How do you place these cloud native operations? Do you, what do you keep on site on prem and what do you put in the cloud? That is the other challenge. The major one, the third one is security. Security now becomes the key challenge and concern for most customers. And we're going to talk about how to address that. >> Yeah, we're definitely going to dig into that. Let's bring Ajay into the conversation. Ajay, you know, you and I have talked about this in the past. One of the big problems that virtually every company face is data fragmentation. Talk a little bit about how io/tahoe, unifies data across both traditional systems, legacy systems and it connects to these modern IT environments. >> Yeah, sure Dave. I mean, a Fadzi just nailed it there. It used to be about data, the volume of data and the different types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected the location of that data really matters. How we serve that data up to those apps. So, working with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. Being able to inject our data discovery machine learning into these multiple different locations. whether it be an AWS or an IBM cloud or a GCP or on prem. Being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view of where is all my data, then allows the CIO to manage cost. They can do things like, one, I keep the data where it is, on premise or in my Oracle cloud or in my IBM cloud and connect the application that needs to feed off that data. And the way in which we do that is machine learning that learns over time as it recognizes different types of data, applies policies to classify that data and brings it all together with automation. >> Right, and one of the big themes that we've talked about this on earlier episodes is really simplification, really abstracting a lot of that heavy lifting away. So, we can focus on things Ajay, as you just mentioned. I mean, Fadzi, one of the big challenges that of course we all talk about is governance across these disparate data sets. I'm curious as your thoughts how does Red Hat really think about helping customers adhere to corporate edicts and compliance regulations? Which of course are particularly acute within financial services. >> Oh yeah, yes. So, for banks and payment providers like you've just mentioned there. Insurers and many other financial services firms, you know they have to adhere to a standard such as say a PCI DSS. And in Europe you've got the GDPR, which requires stringent tracking, reporting, documentation and, you know for them to, to remain in compliance. And the way we recommend our customers to address these challenges is by having an automation strategy, right. And that type of strategy can help you to improve the security on compliance of of your organization and reduce the risk out of the business, right. And we help organizations build security and compliance from the start with our consulting services, residencies. We also offer courses that help customers to understand how to address some of these challenges. And there's also, we help organizations build security into their applications with our open source middleware offerings and even using a platform like OpenShift, because it allows you to run legacy applications and also containerized applications in a unified platform. Right, and also that provides you with, you know with the automation and the tooling that you need to continuously monitor, manage and automate the systems for security and compliance purposes. >> Ajay, anything, any color you could add to this conversation? >> Yeah, I'm pleased Fadzi brought up OpenShift. I mean we're using OpenShift to be able to take that security application of controls to the data level and it's all about context. So, understanding what data is there, being able to assess it to say, who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That's a great combination of Red Hat and io/tahoe. >> Fadzi, what about multi-cloud? Doesn't that complicate the situation even further, maybe you could talk about some of the best practices to apply automation across not only hybrid cloud, but multi-cloud as well. >> Yeah, sure, yeah. So, the right automation solution, you know can be the difference between, you know cultivating an automated enterprise or automation carries. And some of the recommendations we give our clients is to look for an automation platform that can offer the first thing is complete support. So, that means have an automation solution that provides, you know, promotes IT availability and reliability with your platform so that, you can provide enterprise grade support, including security and testing integration and clear roadmaps. The second thing is vendor interoperability in that, you are going to be integrating multiple clouds. So, you're going to need a solution that can connect to multiple clouds seamlessly, right? And with that comes the challenge of maintainability. So, you're going to need to look into a automation solution that is easy to learn or has an easy learning curve. And then, the fourth idea that we tell our customers is scalability. In the hybrid cloud space, scale is the big, big deal here. And you need to deploy an automation solution that can span across the whole enterprise in a consistent manner, right. And then also that allows you finally to integrate the multiple data centers that you have. >> So, Ajay, I mean, this is a complicated situation for if a customer has to make sure things work on AWS or Azure or Google. They're going to spend all their time doing that. What can you add to really just simplify that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud equation. >> Yeah, I can give a few customer examples here. One being a manufacturer that we've worked with to drive that simplification. And the real bonuses for them has been a reduction in cost. We worked with them late last year to bring the cost spend down by $10 million in 2021. So, they could hit that reduced budget. And, what we brought to that was the ability to deploy using OpenShift templates into their different environments, whether it was on premise or in, as you mentioned, AWS. They had GCP as well for their marketing team and across those different platforms, being able to use a template, use prebuilt scripts to get up and running and catalog and discover that data within minutes. It takes away the legacy of having teams of people having to jump on workshop calls. And I know we're all on a lot of teams zoom calls. And in these current times. They're just simply using enough hours of the day to manually perform all of this. So, yeah, working with Red Hat, applying machine learning into those templates, those little recipes that we can put that automation to work regardless which location the data's in allows us to pull that unified view together. >> Great, thank you. Fadzi, I want to come back to you. So, the early days of cloud you're in the Big Apple, you know financial services really well. Cloud was like an evil word and within financial services, and obviously that's changed, it's evolved. We talk about the pandemic has even accelerated that. And when you really dug into it, when you talk to customers about their experiences with security in the cloud, it was not that it wasn't good, it was great, whatever, but it was different. And there's always this issue of skill, lack of skills and multiple tools, set up teams. are really overburdened. But in the cloud requires, you know, new thinking you've got the shared responsibility model. You've got to obviously have specific corporate, you know requirements and compliance. So, this is even more complicated when you introduce multiple clouds. So, what are the differences that you can share from your experiences running on a sort of either on prem or on a mono cloud or, you know, versus across clouds? What, do you suggest there? >> Sure, you know, because of these complexities that you have explained here mixed configurations and the inadequate change control are the top security threats. So, human error is what we want to avoid, because as you know, as your clouds grow with complexity then you put humans in the mix. Then the rate of errors is going to increase and that is going to expose you to security threats. So, this is where automation comes in, because automation will streamline and increase the consistency of your infrastructure management also application development and even security operations to improve in your protection compliance and change control. So, you want to consistently configure resources according to a pre-approved, you know, pre-approved policies and you want to proactively maintain them in a repeatable fashion over the whole life cycle. And then, you also want to rapidly the identify system that require patches and reconfiguration and automate that process of patching and reconfiguring. So that, you don't have humans doing this type of thing, And you want to be able to easily apply patches and change assistance settings according to a pre-defined base like I explained before, you know with the pre-approved policies. And also you want ease of auditing and troubleshooting, right. And from a Red Hat perspective we provide tools that enable you to do this. We have, for example a tool called Ansible that enables you to automate data center operations and security and also deployment of applications. And also OpenShift itself, it automates most of these things and obstruct the human beings from putting their fingers and causing, you know potentially introducing errors, right. Now, in looking into the new world of multiple clouds and so forth. The differences that we're seeing here between running a single cloud or on prem is three main areas, which is control, security and compliance, right. Control here, it means if you're on premise or you have one cloud you know, in most cases you have control over your data and your applications, especially if you're on prem. However, if you're in the public cloud, there is a difference that the ownership it is still yours, but your resources are running on somebody else's or the public clouds, EWS and so forth infrastructure. So, people that are going to do these need to really, especially banks and governments need to be aware of the regulatory constraints of running those applications in the public cloud. And we also help customers rationalize some of these choices. And also on security, you will see that if you're running on premises or in a single cloud you have more control, especially if you're on prem. You can control the sensitive information that you have. However, in the cloud, that's a different situation especially from personal information of employees and things like that. You need to be really careful with that. And also again, we help you rationalize some of those choices. And then, the last one is compliance. As well, you see that if you're running on prem on single cloud, regulations come into play again, right? And if you're running on prem, you have control over that. You can document everything, you have access to everything that you need, but if you're going to go to the public cloud again, you need to think about that. We have automation and we have standards that can help you you know, address some of these challenges. >> So, that's really strong insights, Fadzi. I mean, first of all Ansible has a lot of market momentum, you know, Red Hat's done a really good job with that acquisition. Your point about repeatability is critical, because you can't scale otherwise. And then, that idea you're putting forth about control, security and compliance. It's so true, I called it the shared responsibility model. And there was a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of cloud. I mean, yeah, maybe AWS is going to physically secure the you know, the S3, but in the bucket but we saw so many misconfigurations early on. And so it's key to have partners that really understand this stuff and can share the experiences of other clients. So, this all sounds great. Ajay, you're sharp, financial background. What about the economics? You know, our survey data shows that security it's at the top of the spending priority list, but budgets are stretched thin. I mean, especially when you think about the work from home pivot and all the areas that they had to, the holes that they had to fill there, whether it was laptops, you know, new security models, et cetera. So, how to organizations pay for this? What's the business case look like in terms of maybe reducing infrastructure costs, so I can pay it forward or there's a there's a risk reduction angle. What can you share there? >> Yeah, I mean, that perspective I'd like to give here is not being multi-cloud as multi copies of an application or data. When I think back 20 years, a lot of the work in financial services I was looking at was managing copies of data that were feeding different pipelines, different applications. Now, what we're seeing at io/tahoe a lot of the work that we're doing is reducing the number of copies of that data. So that, if I've got a product lifecycle management set of data, if I'm a manufacturer I'm just going to keep that at one location. But across my different clouds, I'm going to have best of breed applications developed in-house, third parties in collaboration with my supply chain, connecting securely to that single version of the truth. What I'm not going to do is to copy that data. So, a lot of what we're seeing now is that interconnectivity using applications built on Kubernetes that are decoupled from the data source. That allows us to reduce those copies of data within that you're gaining from a security capability and resilience, because you're not leaving yourself open to those multiple copies of data. And with that come cost of storage and a cost to compute. So, what we're saying is using multi-cloud to leverage the best of what each cloud platform has to offer. And that goes all the way to Snowflake and Heroku on a cloud managed databases too. >> Well and the people cost too as well. When you think about, yes, the copy creep. But then, you know, when something goes wrong a human has to come in and figure it out. You know, you brought up Snowflake, I get this vision of the data cloud, which is, you know data. I think we're going to be rethinking Ajay, data architectures in the coming decade where data stays where it belongs, it's distributed and you're providing access. Like you said, you're separating the data from the applications. Applications as we talked about with Fadzi, much more portable. So, it's really the last 10 years it'd be different than the next 10 years ago Ajay. >> Definitely, I think the people cost reduction is used. Gone are the days where you needed to have a dozen people governing, managing byte policies to data. A lot of that repetitive work, those tasks can be in part automated. We're seen examples in insurance where reduced teams of 15 people working in the back office, trying to apply security controls, compliance down to just a couple of people who are looking at the exceptions that don't fit. And that's really important because maybe two years ago the emphasis was on regulatory compliance of data with policies such as GDPR and CCPA. Last year, very much the economic effect to reduce head counts and enterprises running lean looking to reduce that cost. This year, we can see that already some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives, such as net zero emissions. How they use data to understand how they can become more, have a better social impact and using data to drive that. And that's across all of their operations and supply chain. So, those regulatory compliance issues that might have been external. We see similar patterns emerging for internal initiatives that are benefiting that environment, social impact, and of course costs. >> Great perspectives. Jeff Hammerbacher once famously said, the best minds of my generation are trying to get people to click on ads and Ajay those examples that you just gave of, you know social good and moving things forward are really critical. And I think that's where data is going to have the biggest societal impact. Okay guys, great conversation. Thanks so much for coming to the program. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> Keep it right there, for more insight and conversation around creating a resilient digital business model. You're watching theCube. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe its "theCUBE" presenting Adaptive Data Governance, brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> And we're back with the Data Automation series. In this episode we're going to learn more about what Io-Tahoe is doing in the field of adaptive data governance, how can help achieve business outcomes and mitigate data security risks. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Ajay Vohora the CEO of Io-Tahoe, and Lester Waters the CTO of Io-Tahoe. Gentlemen it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa is good to be back. >> Great to see you Lisa. >> Likewise, very seriously this isn't cautious as we are. Lester were going to start with you, what's going on at Io-Tahoe, what's new? >> Well, I've been with Io-Tahoe for a little over the year, and one thing I've learned is every customer needs are just a bit different. So we've been working on our next major release of the Io-Tahoe product and to really try to address these customer concerns because we want to be flexible enough in order to come in and not just profile the data and not just understand data quality and lineage, but also to address the unique needs of each and every customer that we have. And so that required a platform rewrite of our product so that we could extend the product without building a new version of the product, we wanted to be able to have pluggable modules. We are also focused a lot on performance, that's very important with the bulk of data that we deal with and we're able to pass through that data in a single pass and do the analytics that are needed whether it's a lineage data quality or just identifying the underlying data. And we're incorporating all that we've learned, we're tuning up our machine learning, we're analyzing on more dimensions than we've ever done before, we're able to do data quality without doing an initial reggie expert for example, just out of the box. So I think it's all of these things are coming together to form our next version of our product and We're really excited about. >> Sounds exciting, Ajay from the CEOs level what's going on? >> Wow, I think just building on that, what Lester just mentioned now it's we're growing pretty quickly with our partners, and today here with Oracle we're excited to explain how that's shaping up lots of collaboration already with Oracle, and government in insurance and in banking. And we're excited because we get to have an impact, it's really satisfying to see how we're able to help businesses transform and redefine what's possible with their data. And having Oracle there as a partner to lean in with is definitely helping. >> Excellent, we're going to dig into that a little bit later. Lester let's go back over to you, explain adaptive data governance, help us understand that. >> Really adaptive data governance is about achieving business outcomes through automation. It's really also about establishing a data-driven culture and pushing what's traditionally managed in IT out to the business. And to do that, you've got to enable an environment where people can actually access and look at the information about the data, not necessarily access the underlying data because we've got privacy concern system, but they need to understand what kind of data they have, what shape it's in, what's dependent on it upstream and downstream, and so that they can make their educated decisions on what they need to do to achieve those business outcomes. A lot of frameworks these days are hardwired, so you can set up a set of business rules, and that set of business rules works for a very specific database and a specific schema. But imagine a world where you could just say, you know, (tapping) the start date of a loan must always be before the end date of a loan, and having that generic rule regardless of the underlying database, and applying it even when a new database comes online and having those rules applied, that's what adaptive data governance about. I like to think of it as the intersection of three circles, really it's the technical metadata coming together with policies and rules, and coming together with the business ontologies that are unique to that particular business. And bringing this all together allows you to enable rapid change in your environment, so, it's a mouthful adaptive data governance, but that's what it kind of comes down to. >> So Ajay help me understand this, is this what enterprise companies are doing now or are they not quite there yet? >> Well, you know Lisa I think every organization is going at his pace, but markets are changing economy and the speed at which some of the changes in the economy happening is compelling more businesses to look at being more digital in how they serve their own customers. So what we're saying is a number of trends here from heads of data, chief data officers, CIO stepping back from a one size fits all approach because they've tried that before and it just hasn't worked. They've spent millions of dollars on IT programs trying to drive value from that data, and they've ended up with large teams of manual processing around data to try and hard-wire these policies to fit with the context and each line of business, and that hasn't worked. So, the trends that we're seeing emerge really relate to how do I as a chief data officer, as a CIO, inject more automation and to allow these common tasks. And we've been able to see that impact, I think the news here is if you're trying to create a knowledge graph, a data catalog, or a business glossary, and you're trying to do that manually, well stop, you don't have to do that manual anymore. I think best example I can give is Lester and I we like Chinese food and Japanese food, and if you were sitting there with your chopsticks you wouldn't eat a bowl of rice with the chopsticks one grain at a time, what you'd want to do is to find a more productive way to enjoy that meal before it gets cold. And that's similar to how we're able to help organizations to digest their data is to get through it faster, enjoy the benefits of putting that data to work. >> And if it was me eating that food with you guys I would be not using chopsticks I would be using a fork and probably a spoon. So Lester how then does Io-Tahoe go about doing this and enabling customers to achieve this? >> Let me show you a little story here. So if you take a look at the challenges that most customers have they're very similar, but every customer is on a different data journey, so, but it all starts with what data do I have, what shape is that data in, how is it structured, what's dependent on it upstream and downstream, what insights can I derive from that data, and how can I answer all of those questions automatically? So if you look at the challenges for these data professionals, you know, they're either on a journey to the cloud, maybe they're doing a migration to Oracle, maybe they're doing some data governance changes, and it's about enabling this. So if you look at these challenges, I'm going to take you through a story here, and I want to introduce Amanda. Amanda is not Latin like anyone in any large organizations, she is looking around and she just sees stacks of data, I mean, different databases the one she knows about, the ones she doesn't know about but should know about, various different kinds of databases, and Amanda is this tasking with understanding all of this so that they can embark on her data journey program. So Amanda goes through and she's great, (snaps finger) "I've got some handy tools, I can start looking at these databases and getting an idea of what we've got." But when she digs into the databases she starts to see that not everything is as clear as she might've hoped it would be. Property names or column names have ambiguous names like Attribute one and Attribute two, or maybe Date one and Date two, so Amanda is starting to struggle even though she's got tools to visualize and look at these databases, she's still knows she's got a long road ahead, and with 2000 databases in her large enterprise, yes it's going to be a long journey. But Amanda is smart, so she pulls out her trusty spreadsheet to track all of her findings, and what she doesn't know about she raises a ticket or maybe tries to track down in order to find what that data means, and she's tracking all this information, but clearly this doesn't scale that well for Amanda. So maybe the organization will get 10 Amanda's to sort of divide and conquer that work. But even that doesn't work that well 'cause there's still ambiguities in the data. With Io-Tahoe what we do is we actually profile the underlying data. By looking at the underlying data, we can quickly see that Attribute one looks very much like a US social security number, and Attribute two looks like a ICD 10 medical code. And we do this by using ontologies, and dictionaries, and algorithms to help identify the underlying data and then tag it. Key to doing this automation is really being able to normalize things across different databases so that where there's differences in column names, I know that in fact they contain the same data. And by going through this exercise with Io-Tahoe, not only can we identify the data, but we also can gain insights about the data. So for example, we can see that 97% of that time, that column named Attribute one that's got US social security numbers, has something that looks like a social security number. But 3% of the time it doesn't quite look right, maybe there's a dash missing, maybe there's a digit dropped, or maybe there's even characters embedded in it, that may be indicative of a data quality issues, so we try to find those kinds of things. Going a step further, we also try to identify data quality relationships. So for example we have two columns, one date one date two, through observation we can see the date one 99% of the time is less than date two, 1% of the time it's not, probably indicative of the data quality issue, but going a step further we can also build a business rule that says date one is actually than date two, and so then when it pops up again we can quickly identify and remediate that problem. So these are the kinds of things that we can do with Io-Tahoe. Going even a step further, we can take your favorite data science solution, productionize it, and incorporate it into our next version as what we call a worker process to do your own bespoke analytics. >> Bespoke analytics, excellent, Lester thank you. So Ajay, talk us through some examples of where you're putting this to use, and also what is some of the feedback from some customers. >> Yeah, what I'm thinking how do you bring into life a little bit Lisa lets just talk through a case study. We put something together, I know it's available for download, but in a well-known telecommunications media company, they have a lot of the issues that lasted just spoke about lots of teams of Amanda's, super bright data practitioners, and are maybe looking to get more productivity out of their day, and deliver a good result for their own customers, for cell phone subscribers and broadband users. So, there are so many examples that we can see here is how we went about auto generating a lot of that old understanding of that data within hours. So, Amanda had her data catalog populated automatically, a business glossary built up, and maybe I would start to say, "Okay, where do I want to apply some policies to the data to set in place some controls, whether I want to adapt how different lines of business maybe tasks versus customer operations have different access or permissions to that data." And what we've been able to do that is to build up that picture to see how does data move across the entire organization, across the state, and monitor that over time for improvement. So we've taken it from being like reactive, let's do something to fix something to now more proactive. We can see what's happening with our data, who's using it, who's accessing it, how it's being used, how it's being combined, and from there taking a proactive approach is a real smart use of the tanons in that telco organization and the folks that work there with data. >> Okay Ajay, so digging into that a little bit deeper, and one of the things I was thinking when you were talking through some of those outcomes that you're helping customers achieve is ROI. How do customers measure ROI, What are they seeing with Io-Tahoe solution? >> Yeah, right now the big ticket item is time to value. And I think in data a lot of the upfront investment costs are quite expensive, they happen today with a lot of the larger vendors and technologies. Well, a CIO, an economic buyer really needs to be certain about this, how quickly can I get that ROI? And I think we've got something that we can show just pull up a before and after, and it really comes down to hours, days, and weeks where we've been able to have that impact. And in this playbook that we put together the before and after picture really shows those savings that committed a bit through providing data into some actionable form within hours and days to drive agility. But at the same time being able to enforce the controls to protect the use of that data and who has access to it, so atleast the number one thing I'd have to say is time, and we can see that on the graphic that we've just pulled up here. >> Excellent, so ostensible measurable outcomes that time to value. We talk about achieving adaptive data governance. Lester, you guys talk about automation, you talk about machine learning, how are you seeing those technologies being a facilitator of organizations adopting adaptive data governance? >> Well, as we see the manual date, the days of manual effort are out, so I think this is a multi-step process, but the very first step is understanding what you have in normalizing that across your data estate. So, you couple this with the ontologies that are unique to your business and algorithms, and you basically go across it and you identify and tag that data, that allows for the next steps to happen. So now I can write business rules not in terms of named columns, but I can write them in terms of the tags. Using that automated pattern recognition where we observed the loan starts should be before the loan (indistinct), being able to automate that is a huge time saver, and the fact that we can suggest that as a rule rather than waiting for a person to come along and say, "Oh wow, okay, I need this rule, I need this rule." These are steps that increase, or I should say decrease that time to value that Ajay talked about. And then lastly, a couple of machine learning, because even with great automation and being able to profile all your data and getting a good understanding, that brings you to a certain point, but there's still ambiguity in the data. So for example I might have two columns date one and date two, I may have even observed that date one should be less than date two, but I don't really know what date one and date two are other than a date. So, this is where it comes in and I'm like, "As the user said, can you help me identify what date one and day two are in this table?" It turns out they're a start date and an end date for a loan, that gets remembered, cycled into machine learning step by step to see this pattern of date one date two. Elsewhere I'm going to say, "Is it start date and end date?" Bringing all these things together with all this automation is really what's key to enable this data database, your data governance program. >> Great, thanks Lester. And Ajay I do want to wrap things up with something that you mentioned in the beginning about what you guys are doing with Oracle, take us out by telling us what you're doing there, how are you guys working together? >> Yeah, I think those of us who worked in IT for many years we've learned to trust Oracle's technology that they're shifting now to a hybrid on-prem cloud generation 2 platform which is exciting, and their existing customers and new customers moving to Oracle are on a journey. So Oracle came to us and said, "Now, we can see how quickly you're able to help us change mindsets," and as mindsets are locked in a way of thinking around operating models of IT that are maybe not agile or more siloed, and they're wanting to break free of that and adopt a more agile API driven approach with their data. So, a lot of the work that we're doing with Oracle is around accelerating what customers can do with understanding their data and to build digital apps by identifying the underlying data that has value. And the time we're able to do that in hours, days, and weeks, rather than many months is opening up the eyes to chief data officers, CIO is to say, "Well, maybe we can do this whole digital transformation this year, maybe we can bring that forward and transform who we are as a company." And that's driving innovation which we're excited about, and I know Oracle keen to drive through. >> And helping businesses transform digitally is so incredibly important in this time as we look to things changing in 2021. Ajay and Lester thank you so much for joining me on this segment, explaining adaptive data governance, how organizations can use it, benefit from it, and achieve ROI, thanks so much guys. >> Thanks you. >> Thanks again Lisa. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of Smart Data Marketplaces brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> We're back. We're talking about smart data and have been for several weeks now. Really it's all about injecting intelligence and automation into the data life cycle of the data pipeline. And today we're drilling into Smart Data Marketplaces, really trying to get to that self-serve, unified, trusted, secured, and compliant data models. And this is not trivial. And with me to talk about some of the nuances involved in actually getting there with folks that have experienced doing that. They'd send a series of digital evangelist with Tata Consultancy Services, TCS. And Ajay Vohora is back, he's the CEO of Io-Tahoe. Guys, great to see you, thanks so much for coming on. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> Hey Dave. >> Ajay, let's start with you. Let's set up the sort of smart data concept. What's that all about? What's your perspective? >> Yeah, so I mean, our way of thinking about this is you you've got data, it has latent value, and it's really about discovering what the properties of that data. Does it have value? Can you put that data to work? And the way we go about that with algorithms and machine learning, to generate signals in that data identified patterns, that means we can start to discover how can we apply that data to down stream? What value can we unlock for a customer and business? >> Well, so you've been on this, I mean, really like a laser, why? I mean, why this issue? Did you see a gap in the marketplace in terms of talking to customers and maybe you can help us understand the origin? >> Yeah, I think that the gap has always been there. They've been, it's become more apparent over recent times with big data. So the ability to manually work with volumes of data in petabytes is prohibitively complex and expensive. So you need the different routes, you need different set of tools and methods to do that. Metadata are data that you can understand about data. That's what we at Io-Tahoe focus on, discovering and generating that metadata. That ready, that analogy to automate those data ops processes. So the gap David, is being felt by a business owner prizes and all sectors, healthcare, telecoms, and putting that data to work. >> So Ved, Let's talk a little bit about your role. You work with a lot of customers. I see you as an individual in a company who's really trying to transform what is a very challenging industry. That's sort of ripe for transformation, but maybe you could give us your perspective on this, what kind of signals you're looking for from the data pipeline and we'll get into how you are helping transform healthcare? >> Thanks, David. You know I think this year has been one of those years where we've all realized about this idea of unknown unknowns, where something comes around the corner that you're completely not expecting. And that's really hard to plan for obviously. And I think what we need is the ability to find early signals and be able to act on things as soon as you can. Sometimes, and you know, the COVID-19 scenario of course, is hopefully once in a generation thing, but most businesses struggle with the idea that they may have the data there in their systems, but they still don't know which bit of that is really valuable and what are the signals they should be watching for. And I think the interesting thing here is the ability for us to extract from a massive data, the most critical and important signals. And I think that's where we want to focus on. >> And so, talk a little bit about healthcare in particular and sort of your role there, and maybe at a high level. How Tata and your eco-system are helping transform healthcare? >> So if you look at healthcare, you've got the bit where people need active intervention from a medical professional. And then you've got this larger body of people, typically elderly people who aren't unwell, but they have frailties. They have underlying conditions and they're very vulnerable, especially in the world that we're in now in the post-COVID-19 scenario. And what we were trying to look at is how do we keep people who are elderly, frail and vulnerable? How can we keep them safe in their own homes rather than moving to care homes, where there has been an incredibly high level of infection for things like COVID-19. So the world works better if you can keep people safe in their own homes, if you can see the slide we've got. We're also talking about a world where care is expensive. In most Western countries, especially in Western Europe, the number of elderly people is increasing as a percentage of the population, quite significantly, and resources just are not keeping up. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough funding to look after them effectively. And the care industry that used to do that job has been struggling of late. So it's kind of a perfect storm for the need for technology intervention there. And in that space, what we're saying is the data signal that we want to receive are exactly what as a relative, or a son or daughter you might want from a parent to say, "Everything's okay. "We know that today's been just like every other day "there are no anomalies in your daily living." If you could get the signals that might tell us that something's wrong, something not quite right. We don't need very complex diagnostics. We just need to know something's not quite right, that my dad hasn't woken up as has always at seven o'clock, but till nine o'clock there's no movement. Maybe he's a bit unwell. It's that kind of signal that if we can generate, can make a dramatic difference to how we can look out for these people, whether through professional carers or through family members. So what we're looking to do is to sensor-enable homes of vulnerable people so that those data signals can come through to us in a curated manner, in a way that protects privacy and security of the individual, but gives the right people, which is carers or chosen family members the access to the signals, which is alerts that might tell you there was too much movement at night, or the front door was been left open, things like that that would give you a reason to call him and check. Everybody has spoken to in this always has an example of an uncle or a relative or parent that they've looked after. And all they're looking for is a signal. Even stories like my father's neighbor calls me when he doesn't open his curtain by 11 o'clock, that actually, if you think about it is a data signal that something might be all right. And I think what we're trying to do with technology is create those kinds of data signals because ultimately, the healthcare system works much better if you can prevent rather than cure. So every dollar that you put into prevention saves maybe $3 to $5 downstream. The economic summit also are working our favor. >> And those signals give family members the confidence to act. Ajay, it is interesting to hear what Ved was talking about in terms of the unknowns, because when you think about the early days of the computer industry, there were a lot of knowns, the processes were known. It was like the technology was the big mystery. Now, I feel like it's flipped. We've certainly seen that with COVID. The technology is actually quite well understood and quite mature and reliable. One of the examples is automated data discovery, which is something that you guys have been been focused on at Io-Tahoe. Why is automated data discovery such an important component of a smart data life cycle? >> Yeah. I mean, if we look David at the schematic and this one moves from left to right where right at the outset with that latent data, the value is late because you don't know. Does it have? Can it be applied? Can that data be put to work or not? And the objective really is about driving some form of exchange or monetization of data. If you think about it in insurance or healthcare, you've got lots of different parties, providers, payers, patients, everybody's looking to make some kind of an exchange of information. The difficulty is in all of those organizations, that data sits within its own system. So data discovery, if we drill into the focus itself that, it's about understanding which data has value, classifying that data so that it can be applied and being able to tag it so that it can then be put to use it's the real enabler for DataOps. >> So maybe talk a little bit more about this. We're trying to get to self-service. It's something that we hear a lot about. You mentioned putting data to work. It seems to me that if the business can have access to that data and serve themselves, that's the way to put data to work. Do you have thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, thinking back in terms of what IT and the IT function in a business could provide, there have been limitations around infrastructure, around scaling, around compute. Now that we're in an economy that is digital driven by API's your infrastructure, your data, your business rules, your intelligence, your models, all of those on the back of an API. So the options become limitless. How you can drive value and exchange that data. What that allows us to do is to be more creative, if we can understand what data has value for what use case. >> Ved, Let's talk a little bit about the US healthcare system. It's a good use case. I was recently at a chief data officer conference and listening to the CDO of Johns Hopkins, talk about the multiple different formats that they had to ingest to create that COVID map. They even had some PDFs, they had different definitions, and that's sort of underscored to me, the state of the US healthcare industry. I'm not as familiar with the UK and Europe generally, but I am familiar with the US healthcare system and the diversity that's there, the duplication of information and the like, maybe you could sort of summarize your perspectives and give us kind of the before and your vision of the after, if you will? >> The use of course, is particularly large and complex system. We all know that. We also know, I think there is some research that suggests that in the US the per-capita spend on healthcare is among the highest in the world. I think it's like 70%, and that compares to what just under 9%, which is going to be European, typical European figure. So it's almost double of that, but the outcomes are still vastly poor. When Ajay and I were talking earlier, I think we believe that there is a concept of a data friction. When you've got multiple players in an eco-system, trying to provide a single service as a patient, you're receiving a single health care service. There are probably a dozen up to 20 different organizations that have to collaborate to make sure you get that top of the line health care service. That kind of investment deserves. And what prevents it from happening very often is what we would call data friction, which is the ability to effectively share data. Something as simple as a healthcare record, which says, "This is Dave, this is Ved, this is Ajay." And when we go to hospital for anything, whatever happens, that healthcare record can capture all the information and tie to us as an individual. And if you go to a different hospital, then that record will follow you. This is how you would expect that to be implemented, but I think we're still on that journey. There are lots and lots of challenges. I've seen anecdotal data around people who suffered because they weren't carrying a card when they went into hospital, because that card has the critical elements of data, but in today's world, should you need to carry a piece of paper or can the entire thing be a digital data flow that can easily be, can certainly navigate through lack of paper and those kinds of things. So the vision that I think we need to be looking at is an effective data exchange or marketplace back with a kind of a backbone model where people agree and sign off a data standard, where each individual's data is always tied to the individual. So if you were to move States, if you would move providers, change insurance companies, none of that would impact your medical history, your data, and the ability to have the other care and medical professionals to access the data at the point of need and at the point of healthcare delivery. So I think that's the vision we're looking at, but as you rightly you said that there are enormous number of challenges, partly because of the history, of healthcare, I think it was technology enablement of healthcare started early. So there's a lot of legacy as well. So we shouldn't trivialize the challenges that the industry faces, but that I think is the way we want to go. >> Well, privacy is obviously a huge one, and a lot of the processes are built around non-digital processes and what you're describing as a flip for digital first. I mean, as a consumer, as a patient, I want an app for that. So I can see my own data. I can see price, price transparency, give access to people that I think need it. And that is a daunting task, isn't it? >> Absolutely. And I think the implicit idea and what you just said, which is very powerful is also on the app you want to control. >> Yes. >> And sometimes you want to be able to change access on data at that point. Right now, I'm at the hospital. I would like to access my data. And when I walk away or maybe three days later, I want to revoke that access. It's that level of control. And absolutely, it is by no means a trivial problem, but I think that's where you need the data automation tools. If you try to do any of this manually, we'd be here for another decade trying to solve this, but that's where tools like Io-Tahoe come in because to do this, a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes has to be automated. There has to be a machine churning that and presenting the simpler options. And I know you were talking about it just a little while ago Ajay. I was reminded of the example of a McDonald's or a Coke, because the sales store idea that you can go in and you can do your own ordering off a menu, or you can go in and select five different flavors from a Coke machine and choose your own particular blend of Coke. It's a very trivial example, but I think that's the word we want to get to with access of data as well. If it was that simple for consumers, for enterprise, business people, for doctors, then that's where we ultimately want to be able to arrive. But of course, to make something very simple for the end-user, somebody has to solve for complexity behind the scenes. >> So Ajay, it seems to me Ajay there're two major outcomes here. One is of course, the most important I guess, is patient outcomes, and the other is cost. I mean, they talked about the cost issues, we all, US especially understand the concerns about rising costs of healthcare. My question is this, how does a Smart Data Marketplace fit into achieving those two very important outcomes? >> When we think about how automation is enabling that, where we've got different data formats, the manual tasks are involved, duplication of information. The administrative overhead of that alone and the work, the rework, and the cycles of work that generates. That's really what we're trying to help with data is to eliminate that wasted effort. And with that wasted effort comes time and money to employ people to work through those siloed systems. So getting to the point where there is an exchange in a marketplace just as they would be for banking or insurance is really about automating the classification of data to make it available to a system that can pick it up through an API and to run a machine learning model and to manage a workflow, a process. >> Right, so you mentioned backing insurance, you're right. I mean, we've actually come a long way and just in terms of, know the customer and applying that to know the patient would be very powerful. I'm interested in what you guys are doing together, just in terms of your vision. Are you going to market together, kind of what you're seeing in terms of promoting or enabling this self-service, self-care. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Io-Tahoe and Tata, the intersection at the customer? >> Sure. I think we've been very impressed with the TCS vision of 4.0, how the re-imagining traditional industries, whether it's insurance, banking, healthcare, and bringing together automation, agile processes, robotics, AI, and once those enablers, technology may have brought together to re-imagine how those services can be delivered digitally. All of those are dependent on data. So we see that there's a really good fit here to enable understanding the legacy, the historic situation that has built up over time in an organization, a business and to help shine a light on what's meaningful in that to migrate to the cloud or to drive a digital twin, data science project. >> Ved, anything you can add to that? >> Sure. I mean, we do take the business 4.0 model quite seriously in terms of a lens with which you look at any industry, and what I talked about in healthcare was an example of that. And for us business 4.0, means a few very specific things. The technology that we use in today's verse should be agile, automated, intelligent, and cloud-based. These have become kind of hygiene factors now. On top of that, the businesses we build should be mass customized. They should be risk embracing. They should engage ecosystems, and they should strive for exponential value, not 10% growth year on year, but doubling, tripling every three, four years, because that's the competition that most businesses are facing today. And within that, the Tata group itself, is an extremely purpose-driven business. We really believe that we exist to serve communities, not just one specific set, i.e. shareholders, but the broader community in which we live and work. And I think this framework also allows us to apply that to things like healthcare, to education and to a whole vast range of areas where, everybody has a vision of using data science or doing really clever stuff at the gradients. But what becomes clear is, to do any of that, the first thing you need is a foundational piece. And as a foundation isn't right, then no matter how much you invest in the data science tools you won't get the answers you want. And the work we're doing with the Io-Tahoe really, for me, is particularly exciting because it sorts out that foundational piece. And at the end of it, to make all of this, again, I will repeat that, to make it simple and easy to use for the end user, whoever that is. And I realized that I'm probably the first person who's used fast food as a shining example for healthcare in this discussion, but you can make a lot of different examples. And today, if you press a button and start a car, that's simplicity, but someone has solved for that. And that's what we want to do with data as well. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. We talk a lot about digital transformation and a digital business, and I would observe that a digital business puts data at the core. And you can certainly be the best example. There is, of course, Google is an all digital business, but take a company like Amazon, Who's got obviously a massive physical component to its business. Data is at the core. And that's exactly my takeaway from this discussion. Both of you are talking about putting data at the core, simplifying it, making sure that it's compliant, and healthcare it's taking longer, 'cause it's such a high risk industry, but it's clearly happening, COVID I guess, was an accelerant. Guys, Ajay, I'll start with you. Any final thoughts that you want to leave the audience with? _ Yeah, we're really pleased to be working with TCS. We've been able to explore how we're able to put dates to work in a range of different industries. Ved has mentioned healthcare, telecoms, banking and insurance are others. And the same impact they speak to whenever we see the exciting digital transformations that are being planned, being able to accelerate those, unlock the value from data is where we're having a purpose. And it's good that we can help patients in the healthcare sector, consumers in banking realize a better experience through having a more joined up marketplace with their data. >> Ved, you know what excites me about this conversation is that, as a patient or as a consumer, if I'm helping loved ones, I can go to the web and I can search, and I can find a myriad of possibilities. What you're envisioning here is really personalizing that with real time data. And that to me is a game changer. Your final thoughts? >> Thanks, David. I absolutely agree with you that the idea of data centricity and simplicity are absolutely forefront, but I think if we were to design an organization today, you might design it very differently to how most companies today are structured. And maybe Google and Amazon are probably better examples of that because you almost have to think of a business as having a data engine room at its core. A lot of businesses are trying to get to that stage, whereas what we call digital natives, are people who have started life with that premise. So I absolutely agree with you on that, but extending that a little bit. If you think of most industries as eco-systems that have to collaborate, then you've got multiple organizations who will also have to exchange data to achieve some shared outcomes. Whether you look at supply chains of automobile manufacturers or insurance companies or healthcares we've been talking about. So I think that's the next level of change we want to be able to make, which is to be able to do this at scale across organizations at industry level or in population scheme for healthcare. >> Yeah, Thank you for that. Go ahead Ajay. >> David that's where it comes back to again, the origination where we've come from in big data. The volume of data combined with the specificity of individualizing, personalizing a service around an individual amongst that massive data from different providers is where is exciting, that we're able to have an impact. >> Well, and you know Ajay, I'm glad you brought that up because in the early days of big data, there were only a handful of companies, the biggest financial institutions. Obviously, the internet giants who had all these engineers that were able to take advantage of it. But with companies like Io-Tahoe and others, and the investments that the industry has made in terms of providing the tools and simplifying that, especially with machine intelligence and AI and machine learning, these are becoming embedded into the tooling so that everybody can have access to them, small, medium, and large companies. That's really, to me, the exciting part of this new era that we're entering. >> Yeah, and we have placed those, take it down to the level of not-for-profits and smaller businesses that want to innovate and leapfrog into, to growing their digital delivery of their service. >> And I know a lot of time, but Ved, what you were saying about TCS's responsibility to society, I think is really, really important. Large companies like yours, I believe, and you clearly do as well, have a responsibility to society more than just a profit. And I think, Big Tech it's a better app in a lot of cases, but so thank you for that and thank you gentlemen for this great discussion. I really appreciate it. >> Thanks David. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. I'll be right back right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of smart data marketplaces. Brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Digital transformation has really gone from a buzzword to a mandate, but digital business is a data business. And for the last several months we've been working with Io-Tahoe on an ongoing content series, focused on smart data and automation to drive better insights and outcomes, essentially putting data to work. And today we're going to do a deeper dive on automating data discovery. And one of the thought leaders in this space is Ajay Vohora, who's the CEO of Io-Tahoe. Once again, joining me, Ajay good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here, David, thank you. >> So let's, let's start by talking about some of the business realities and what are the economics that are driving automated data discovery? Why is that so important? >> Yeah, on this one, David it's a number of competing factors. We've got the reality of data which may be sensitive. So there's control. Three other elements wanting to drive value from that data to innovation. You can't really drive a lot of value without exchanging data. So the ability to exchange data and to manage those cost overheads and data discovery is at the root of managing that in an automated way to classify that data and set some policies to put that automation in place. >> Yeah, look, we have a picture of this. If we could bring it up guys, cause I want to, Ajay, help the audience understand kind of where data discovery fits in here. This is, as we talked about, this is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. They've got variety of different tools and you've really laid it out nicely here in this diagram. So, take us through sort of where that piece fits. >> Yeah, I mean, we're at the right hand side of this exchange, you know. We're really now in a data driven economy that is everything's connected through APIs that we consume online through mobile apps. And what's not apparent is the chain of activities and tasks that have to go into serving that data to an API at the outset. They may be many legacy systems, technologies, platforms On-premise, in cloud, hybrid, you name it and across those silos, getting to a unified view is the heavy lifting. I think we've seen some, some great impacts that BI tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and so on, and Qlik have had, and they're in our ecosystem on visualizing Data and, you know, CEOs, managers, people that are working in companies day-to-day get a lot of value from saying, "What's the real time activity? "What was the trend over this month versus last month?" The tools to enable that, you know, we hear a lot of good things that we're doing with Snowflake, MongoDB on the public Cloud platforms, GCP Azure about enabling building those pipelines to feed into those analytics. But what often gets hidden is how do you source that data that could be locked into a mainframe, a data warehouse, IOT data, and pull over all of that together. And that is the reality of that is it's a lot of heavy lifting. It's hands on work that can be time consuming. And the issue there is that data may have value. It might have potential to have an impact on the top line for a business, on outcomes for consumers, but you're never really sure unless you've done the investigation, discovered it, unified that, and be able to serve that through to other technologies. >> Guys, if you would bring that picture back up again, because Ajay you made a point and I want to land on that for a second. There's a lot of manual curating. An example would be the data catalog. You know, data scientists complain all the time that they're manually wrangling data. And so you're trying to inject automation into the cycle. And then the other piece that I want you to address is the importance of APIs. You really can't do this without an architecture that allows you to connect things together that sort of enables some of the automation. >> Yep, I mean, I'll take that in two parts, David, the APIs, so virtual machines connected by APIs, business rules, and business logic driven by APIs, applications, so everything across the stack from infrastructure down to the network, hardware is all connected through APIs and the work of serving data through to an API, building those pipelines, is often miscalculated, just how much manual effort that takes and that manual effort, we've got a nice list here of what we automate down at the bottom, those tasks of indexing, labeling, mapping across different legacy systems, all of that takes away from the job of a data scientist or data engineer, looking to produce value, monetize data, and to help that business convey to consumers. >> Yeah, it's that top layer that the business sees, of course, there's a lot of work that has to go into achieving that. I want to talk about some of the key tech trends that you're seeing. And one of the things that we talk about a lot is metadata. The importance of metadata, you know, can't be understated. What are some of the big trends that you're seeing metadata and others? >> Yeah, I'll summarize it as five. There's a trend now look at metadata more holistically across the enterprise. And that really makes sense from trying to look across different data silos and apply a policy to manage that data. So that's the control piece. That's that lever. The other side, sometimes competing with that control around sensitive data around managing the cost of data is innovation. Innovation being able to speculate and experiment and try things out where you don't really know what the outcome is if you're a data scientist and engineer, you've got a hypothesis and therefore you've got that tension between control over data and innovation and driving value from it. So enterprise wide metadata management is really helping to unlock where might that latent value be across that sets of data. The other piece is adaptive data governance. Those controls that stick from the data policemen, data stewards, where they're trying to protect the organization, protect the brand, protect consumers data necessary, but in different use cases, you might want to nuance and apply a different policy to govern that data relevant to the context where you might have data that is less sensitive, that can be used for innovation and adapting the style of governance to fit the context is another trend that we're seeing coming up here. A few others is where we're sitting quite extensively in working with automating data discovery. We're now breaking that down into what can we direct? What do we know is a business outcome is a known upfront objective and direct that data discovery to towards that. And that means applying our algorithms around technology and our tools towards solving a known problem. The other one is autonomous data discovery. And that means, you know, trying to allow background processes to understand what changes are happening with data over time, flagging those anomalies. And the reason that's important is when you look over a length of time to see different spikes, different trends and activity, that's really giving a data ops team the ability to manage and calibrate how they're applying policies and controls the data. And the last two, David, that we're seeing is this huge drive towards self-service. So re-imagining how to apply policy data governance into the hands of a data consumer inside a business, or indeed the consumer themselves, to self-service if they're a banking customer or healthcare customer and the policies and the controls and rules, making sure that those are all in place to adaptively serve those data marketplaces that when are involved in creating. >> I want to ask you about the autonomous data discovering, the adaptive data governance, is the problem we're addressing there one of quality, in other words, machines are better than humans are at doing this? Is it one of scale? That humans just don't don't scale that well? Is it both? Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, honestly, it's the same equation that existed 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it's being exacerbated, but it's that equation of how do I control all the things that I need to protect? How do I enable innovation where it is going to deliver business value? How do I exchange data between a customer, somebody in my supply chain safely, and do all of that whilst managing the fourth leg, which is cost overheads. There's not an open checkbook here. I've got to figure out if I'm the CIO and CDO, how I do all of this within a fixed budget. So those aspects have always been there, now with more choices, infrastructure in the Cloud, API driven applications, On-premises, and that is expanding the choices that a business has and how they put their data to work. It's also then creating a layer of management and data governance that really has to now manage those four aspects, control, innovation, exchange of data, and the cost overhead. >> That top layer of the first slide that we showed was all about the business value. So, I wonder if we could drill into the business impact a little bit. What are your customers seeing specifically in terms of the impact of all this automation on their business? >> Yeah, so we've had some great results. I think a few of the biggest have been helping customers move away from manually curating their data and their metadata. It used to be a time where if data initiatives or data governance initiatives, there'd be teams of people manually feeding a data catalog. And it's great to have that inventory of classified data to be able to understand single version of the truth, but having 10, 15 people manually process that, keep it up to date, when it's moving feet, the reality of it is what's true about data today, add another few sources and a few months time to your business, start collaborating with new partners, suddenly the landscape has changed. The amount of work has gone up, but what we're finding is through automating, creating that data discovery, feeding our data catalog, that's releasing a lot more time for our customers to spend on innovating and managing their data. A couple of others is around self service data analytics, moving the choices of what data might have business value into the hands of business users and data consumers to have faster cycle times around generating insights. And we're really helping them by automating the creation of those data sets that are needed for that. And the last piece, I'd have to say where we're seeing impacts more recently is in the exchange of data. There are a number of marketplaces out there who are now being compelled to become more digital, to rewire their business processes and everything from an RPA initiative to automation involving digital transformation is having CIOs, chief data officers and enterprise architects rethink how do they, how do they rewire the pipelines for their data to feed that digital transformation? >> Yeah, to me, it comes down to monetization. Now, of course, that's for a for-profit industry. For non-profits, for sure, the cost cutting or in the case of healthcare, which we'll talk about in a moment, I mean, it's patient outcomes, but the job of a Chief Data Officer has gone from data quality and governance and compliance to really figuring out how data can be monetized, not necessarily selling the data, but how it contributes to the monetization of the company. And then really understanding specifically for that organization, how to apply that. And that is a big challenge. We sort of chatted about 10 years ago, the early days of a dupe. And then 1% of the companies had enough engineers to figure it out, but now the tooling is available. The technology is there and the practices are there. And that really, to me is the bottom line, Ajay, is it's show me the money. >> Absolutely. It's definitely is focusing in on the single view of that customer and where we're helping there is to pull together those disparate, siloed sources of data to understand what are the needs of the patient, of the broker of the, if it's insurance? What are the needs of the supply chain manager, if it's manufacturing? And providing that 360 view of data is helping to see, helping that individual unlock the value for the business. So data's providing the lens provided, you know which data it is that can assist in doing that. >> And, you know, you mentioned RPA before, I had an RPA customer tell me she was a Six Sigma expert and she told me, "We would never try to apply Six Sigma "to a business process, "but with RPA we can do so very cheaply." Well, what that means is lower costs. It means better employee satisfaction and really importantly, better customer satisfaction and better customer outcomes. Let's talk about healthcare for a minute because it's a really important industry. It's one that is ripe for disruption and has really been, up until recently, pretty slow to adopt a lot of the major technologies that have been made available. But what are you seeing in terms of this theme we're using a putting data to work in healthcare specifically? >> Yeah, I mean, health care's has had a lot thrown at it. There's been a lot of change in terms of legislation recently, particularly in the U.S. market, in other economies, healthcare is on a path to becoming more digital. And part of that is around transparency of price. So, to be operating effectively as a healthcare marketplace, being able to have that price transparency around what an elective procedure is going to cost before taking that step forward. It's super important to have an informed decision around that. So if we look at the U.S., for example, we've seen that healthcare costs annually have risen to $4 trillion, but even with all of that cost, we have healthcare consumers who are reluctant sometimes to take up healthcare even if they have symptoms. And a lot of that is driven through not knowing what they're opening themselves up to. And, you know, I think David, if you or I were to book travel a holiday, maybe, or trip, we'd want to know what we're in for, what we're paying for upfront. But sometimes in healthcare that choice, the option might be the plan, but the cost that comes with it isn't. So recent legislation in the U.S. is certainly helpful to bring forward that price transparency. The underlying issue there though is the disparate different format types of data that are being used from payers, patients, employers, different healthcare departments to try and make that work. And where we're helping on that aspect in particular related to price transparency is to help make that data machine readable. So, sometimes with data, the beneficiary might be a person, but in a lot of cases, now we're seeing the ability to have different systems interact and exchange data in order to process the workflow to generate online lists of pricing from a provider that's been negotiated with a payer is really an enabling factor. >> So guys, I wonder if you could bring up the next slide, which is kind of the nirvana. So, if you saw the previous slide that the middle there was all different shapes and presumably to disparate data, this is the outcome that you want to get, where everything fits together nicely. And you've got this open exchange. It's not opaque as it is today. It's not bubble gum, band-aids and duct tape, but describe this sort of outcome that you're trying to achieve and maybe a little bit about what it's going to take to get there. >> Ajay: Yeah, that that's the culmination of a number of things. It's making sure that the data is machine readable, making it available to APIs, that could be RPA tools. We're working with technology companies that employ RPA for healthcare, and specifically to manage that patient and payer data to bring that together. In our data discovery, what we're able to do is to classify that data and have it made available to a downstream tool technology or person to apply that, that workflow to the data. So this looks like nirvana, it looks like utopia, but it's, you know, the end objective of a journey that we can see in different economies, that are at different stages of maturity in turning healthcare into a digital service even so that you can consume it from where you live, from home with telemedicine and tele care. >> Yeah, so, and this is not just for healthcare, but you know, you want to achieve that self-service data marketplace in virtually any industry. You're working with TCS, Tata Consulting Services to achieve this. You know, a company like Io-Tahoe has to have partnerships with organizations that have deep industry expertise. Talk about your relationship with TCS and what you guys are doing specifically in this regard. >> Yeah, we've been working with TCS now for a long while and we'll be announcing some of those initiatives here where we're now working together to reach their customers where they've got a brilliant framework of business, 4.0, where they're re-imagining with the clients, how their business can operate with AI, with automation and become more agile and digital. Our technology, now, the reams of patients that we have in our portfolio, being able to apply that at scale, on a global scale across industries, such as banking, insurance and healthcare is really allowing us to see a bigger impact on consumer outcomes, patient outcomes. And the feedback from TCS is that we're really helping in those initiatives remove that friction. They talk a lot about data friction. I think that's a polite term for the image that we just saw with the disparate technologies that the legacy that has built up. So if we want to create a transformation, having that partnership with TCS across industries is giving us that reach and that impact on many different people's day-to-day jobs and lives. >> Let's talk a little bit about the Cloud. It's a topic that we've hit on quite a bit here in this content series. But, but you know, the Cloud companies, the big hyper-scalers, they've put everything into the Cloud, right? But customers are more circumspect than that. But at the same time, machine intelligence, ML, AI, the Cloud is a place to do a lot of that. That's where a lot of the innovation occurs. And so what are your thoughts on getting to the Cloud, putting data to work, if you will, with machine learning, stuff that you're doing with AWS, what's your fit there? >> Yeah, we, David, we work with all of the Cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure, GCP, IBM, but we're expanding our partnership now with AWS. And we're really opening up the ability to work with their Greenfield accounts, where a lot of that data, that technology is in their own data centers at the customer. And that's across banking, healthcare, manufacturing, and insurance. And for good reason, a lot of companies that have taken the time to see what works well for them with the technologies that the Cloud providers are offering, and a lot of cases, testing services or analytics using the Cloud to move workloads to the Cloud to drive data analytics is a real game changer. So there's good reason to maintain a lot of systems On-premise. If that makes sense from a cost, from a liability point of view and the number of clients that we work with that do have, and will keep their mainframe systems when in Cobra is no surprise to us, but equally they want to tap into technologies that AWS has such as SageMaker. The issue is as a Chief Data Officer, I didn't have the budget to move everything to the Cloud they want, I might want to show some results first upfront to my business users and work closely with my Chief Marketing Officer to look at what's happening in terms of customer trends and customer behavior> What are the customer outcomes, patient outcomes and partner outcomes that you can achieve through analytics, data science? So, working with AWS and with clients to manage that hybrid topology of some of that data being in the Cloud, being put to work with AWS SageMaker and Io-Tahoe being used to identify where is the data that needs to be amalgamated and curated to provide the dataset for machine learning, advanced analytics to have an impact for the business. >> So what are the critical attributes of what you're looking at to help customers decide what to move and what the keep if you will? >> Well, one of the quickest outcomes that we help customers achieve is to buy that business glossary, you know, that the items of data, that means something to them across those different silos and pull all of that together into a unified view. Once they've got that data engineer working with a business manager to think through, how do we want to create this application? Now, what is the churn model, the loyalty or the propensity model that we want to put in place here? How do we use predictive analytics to understand what needs for a patient that sort of innovation is what we're unlocking, applying a tools such as SageMaker on AWS to then do the computation and to build those models to deliver that outcome is across that value chain. And it goes back to the first picture that we put up, David, you know, the outcome is that API on the back of it, you've got a machine learning model that's been developed in a tool such as Databricks or Jupiter notebook. That data has to be sourced from somewhere. Somebody has to say that, "Yep, "You've got permission to do what you're trying to do without falling foul "of any compliance around data." And it all goes back to discovering that data, classifying it, indexing it in an automated way to cut those timelines down to hours and days. >> Yeah, it's the innovation part of your data portfolio, if you will, that you're going to put into the Cloud, apply tools like SageMaker and others, your tool Azure. I mean, whatever your favorite tool is, you don't care. The customer's going to choose that. And you know, the Cloud vendors, maybe they want you to use their tool, but they're making their marketplaces available to everybody, but it's that innovation piece, the ones that you, where you want to apply that self-service data marketplace to, and really drive, as I said before, monetization, All right, give us your final thoughts. Ajay, bring us home. >> So final thoughts on this, David, is at the moment, we're seeing a lot of value in helping customers discover their data using automation, automatically curating a data catalog. And that unified view is then being put to work through our API is having an open architecture to plug in whatever tool technology our clients have decided to use. And that open architecture is really feeding into the reality of what CIOs and Chief Data Officers are managing, which is a hybrid On-premise Cloud approach to use best of breed. But business users wanting to use a particular technology to get their business outcome, having the flexibility to do that no matter where your data is sitting On-premise, on Cloud is where self-service comes in so that sales service view of what data I can plug together, jive exchange, monetizing that data is where we're starting to see some real traction with customers. Now accelerating, becoming more digital to serve their own customers. >> Yeah, we really have seen a cultural mind shift going from sort of complacency, and obviously COVID has accelerated this, but the combination of that cultural shift, the Cloud machine intelligence tools give me a lot of hope that the promises of big data will ultimately be lived up to in this next 10 years. So Ajay Vohora, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're a great guest and appreciate your insights. >> Appreciate it, David. See you next time. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody, right back after this short break. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of smart data. Marketplace is brought to You by Io Tahoe Digital transformation is really gone from buzzword to a mandate. Additional businesses, a data business. And for the last several months, we've been working with Iot Tahoe on an ongoing content. Serious, serious, focused on smart data and automation to drive better insights and outcomes, essentially putting data to work. And today we're gonna do a deeper dive on automating data Discovery. And one of the thought leaders in this space is a J ahora who is the CEO of Iot. Tahoe's once again joining Me A J Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>A great to be here, David. Thank you. >>So let's start by talking about some of the business realities. And what are the economics that air? That air driving, automated data Discovery? Why is that so important? >>Yeah, and on this one, David, it's It's a number of competing factors we've got. The reality is data which may be sensitive, so this control on three other elements are wanting to drive value from that data. So innovation, you can't really drive a lot of value without exchanging data. So the ability to exchange data and to manage those costs, overheads and data discovery is at the roots of managing that in an automated way to classify that data in sets and policies to put that automation in place. >>Yeah. Okay, look, we have a picture of this. We could bring it up, guys, because I want oh, A j help the audience. Understand? Unaware data Discovery fits in here. This is as we talked about this, a complicated situation for a lot of customers. They got a variety of different tools, and you really laid it out nicely here in this diagram. So take us through. Sort of where that he spits. >>Yeah. I mean, where at the right hand side, This exchange. You know, we're really now in a data driven economy that is, everything's connected through AP, eyes that we consume on mine free mobile relapse. And what's not a parent is the chain of activities and tasks that have to go into serving that data two and eight p. I. At the outset, there may be many legacy systems, technologies, platforms on premise and cloud hybrids. You name it. Andi across those silos. Getting to a unified view is the heavy lifting. I think we've seen Cem some great impacts that be I titles such as Power Bi I tableau looker on DSO on in Clear. Who had Andi there in our ecosystem on visualising Data and CEO's managers, people that are working in companies day to day get a lot of value from saying What's the was the real time activity? What was the trend over this month? First his last month. The tools to enable that you know, we here, Um, a lot of good things are work that we're doing with snowflake mongo db on the public cloud platforms gcpd as your, um, about enabling building those pay planes to feed into those analytics. But what often gets hidden is have you sauce that data that could be locked into a mainframe, a data warehouse? I ot data on DPA, though, that all of that together that is the reality of that is it's it's, um, it's a lot of heavy lifting It z hands on what that, um, can be time consuming on the issue There is that data may have value. It might have potential to have an impact on the on the top line for a business on outcomes for consumers. But you never any sure unless you you've done the investigation discovered it unified that Onda and be able to serve that through to other technologies. >>Guys have. You would bring that picture back up again because A. J, you made a point, and I wanna land on that for a second. There's a lot of manual curating. Ah, an example would be the data catalogue if they decide to complain all the time that they're manually wrangling data. So you're trying to inject automation in the cycle, and then the other piece that I want you to addresses the importance of AP eyes. You really can't do this without an architecture that allows you to connect things together. That sort of enables some of the automation. >>Yeah, I mean, I don't take that in two parts. They would be the AP eyes so virtual machines connected by AP eyes, um, business rules and business logic driven by AP eyes applications. So everything across the stack from infrastructure down to the network um, hardware is all connected through AP eyes and the work of serving data three to an MP I Building these pipelines is is often, um, miscalculated. Just how much manual effort that takes and that manual ever. We've got a nice list here of what we automate down at the bottom. Those tasks of indexing, labeling, mapping across different legacy systems. Um, all of that takes away from the job of a data scientist today to engineer it, looking to produce value monetize data on day two to help their business day to conceive us. >>Yes. So it's that top layer that the business sees, of course, is a lot of work that has to go went into achieving that. I want to talk about some of the key tech trends that you're seeing and one of the things that we talked about a lot of metadata at the importance of metadata. It can't be understated. What are some of the big trends that you're seeing metadata and others? >>Yeah, I'll summarize. It is five. There's trains now, look, a metadata more holistically across the enterprise, and that really makes sense from trying. Teoh look across different data silos on apply, um, a policy to manage that data. So that's the control piece. That's that lever the other side's on. Sometimes competing with that control around sense of data around managing the costs of data is innovation innovation, being able to speculate on experiment and trying things out where you don't really know what the outcome is. If you're a data scientist and engineer, you've got a hypothesis. And now, before you got that tension between control over data on innovation and driving value from it. So enterprise wide manage data management is really helping to enough. Where might that latent value be across that sets of data? The other piece is adaptive data governance. Those controls that that that stick from the data policemen on day to steer its where they're trying to protect the organization, protect the brand, protect consumers data is necessary. But in different use cases, you might want to nuance and apply a different policy to govern that data run of into the context where you may have data that is less sensitive. Um, that can me used for innovation. Andi. Adapting the style of governance to fit the context is another trend that we're seeing coming up here. A few others is where we're sitting quite extensively and working with automating data discovery. We're now breaking that down into what can we direct? What do we know is a business outcome is a known up front objective on direct that data discovery to towards that. And that means applying around with Dems run technology and our tools towards solving a known problem. The other one is autonomous data discovery. And that means, you know, trying to allow background processes do winds down what changes are happening with data over time flagging those anomalies. And the reason that's important is when you look over a length of time to see different spikes, different trends and activity that's really giving a day drops team the ability to to manage and calibrate how they're applying policies and controls today. There, in the last two David that we're seeing is this huge drive towards self service so reimagining how to play policy data governance into the hands off, um, a day to consumer inside a business or indeed, the consumer themselves. The South service, um, if their banking customer or healthcare customer and the policies and the controls and rules, making sure that those are all in place to adaptive Lee, um, serve those data marketplaces that, um when they're involved in creating, >>I want to ask you about the autonomous data discovering the adaptive data. Governance is the is the problem where addressing their one of quality. In other words, machines air better than humans are doing this. Is that one of scale that humans just don't don't scale that well, is it? Is it both? Can you add some color to that >>yet? Honestly, it's the same equation that existed 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It's It's being exacerbated, but it's that equation is how do I control both things that I need to protect? How do we enable innovation where it is going to deliver business value? Had to exchange data between a customer, somebody in my supply chains safely. And all of that was managing the fourth that leg, which is cost overheads. You know, there's no no can checkbook here. I've got a figure out. If only see io and CDO how I do all of this within a fixed budget so that those aspects have always been there. Now, with more choices. Infrastructure in the cloud, um, NPR driven applications own promise. And that is expanding the choices that a a business has and how they put mandated what it's also then creating a layer off management and data governance that really has to now, uh, manage those full wrath space control, innovation, exchange of data on the cost overhead. >>That that top layer of the first slide that we showed was all about business value. So I wonder if we could drill into the business impact a little bit. What do your customers seeing you know, specifically in terms of the impact of all this automation on their business? >>Yeah, so we've had some great results. I think view the biggest Have Bean helping customers move away from manually curating their data in their metadata. It used to be a time where for data quality initiatives or data governance initiative that be teams of people manually feeding a data Cavallo. And it's great to have the inventory of classified data to be out to understand single version of the trees. But in a having 10 15 people manually process that keep it up to date when it's moving feet. The reality of it is what's what's true about data today? and another few sources in a few months. Time to your business on start collaborating with new partners. Suddenly the landscape has changed. The amount of work is gonna But the, um, what we're finding is through automating creating that data discovery feeding a dent convoke that's releasing a lot more time for our CAS. Mr Spend on innovating and managing their data. A couple of others is around cell service data and medics moving the the choices of what data might have business value into the hands of business users and and data consumers to They're faster cycle times around generating insights. Um, we really helping that by automating the creation of those those data sets that are needed for that. And in the last piece, I'd have to say where we're seeing impacts. A more recently is in the exchange of data. There are a number of marketplaces out there who are now being compelled to become more digital to rewire their business processes. Andi. Everything from an r p a initiative. Teoh automation involving digital transformation is having, um, see iose Chief data officers Andi Enterprise architects rethink how do they how they re worthy pipelines? But they dated to feed that additional transformation. >>Yeah, to me, it comes down to monetization. Of course, that's for for profit in industry, from if nonprofits, for sure, the cost cutting or, in the case of healthcare, which we'll talk about in a moment. I mean, it's patient outcomes. But you know, the the job of ah, chief data officer has gone from your data quality and governance and compliance to really figuring out how data and be monetized, not necessarily selling the data, but how it contributes for the monetization of the company and then really understanding specifically for that organization how to apply that. And that is a big challenge. We chatted about it 10 years ago in the early days of a Duke. And then, you know, 1% of the companies had enough engineers to figure it out. But now the tooling is available, the technology is there and the the practices air there, and that really to me, is the bottom line. A. J is it says to show me the money. >>Absolutely. It's is definitely then six sing links is focusing in on the saying over here, that customer Onda, where we're helping there is dio go together. Those disparities siloed source of data to understand what are the needs of the patient of the broker of the if it's insurance? Ah, one of the needs of the supply chain manager If its manufacturing onda providing that 3 60 view of data, um is helping to see helping that individual unlock the value for the business. Eso data is providing the lens, provided you know which data it is that can God assist in doing that? >>And you know, you mentioned r p A. Before an r p A customer tell me she was a six Sigma expert and she told me we would never try to apply six segment to a business process. But with our P A. We can do so very cheaply. Well, what that means is lower costs means better employee satisfaction and, really importantly, better customer satisfaction and better customer outcomes. Let's talk about health care for a minute because it's a really important industry. It's one that is ripe for disruption on has really been up until recently, pretty slow. Teoh adopt ah, lot of the major technologies that have been made available, but come, what are you seeing in terms of this theme, we're using a putting data to work in health care. Specific. >>Yeah, I mean, healthcare's Havlat thrown at it. There's been a lot of change in terms of legislation recently. Um, particularly in the U. S. Market on in other economies, um, healthcare ease on a path to becoming more digital on. Part of that is around transparency of price, saying to be operating effectively as a health care marketplace, being out to have that price transparency, um, around what an elective procedure is going to cost before taking that that's that forward. It's super important to have an informed decision around there. So we look at the US, for example. We've seen that health care costs annually have risen to $4 trillion. But even with all of that on cost, we have health care consumers who are reluctant sometimes to take up health care if they even if they have symptoms on a lot of that is driven through, not knowing what they're opening themselves up to. Andi and I think David, if you are, I want to book, travel, holiday, maybe, or trip. We want to know what what we're in for what we're paying for outfront, but sometimes in how okay, that choice, the option might be their plan, but the cost that comes with it isn't so recent legislation in the US Is it certainly helpful to bring for that tryst price, transparency, the underlying issue there? There is the disparity. Different formats, types of data that being used from payers, patients, employers, different healthcare departments try and make that make that work. And when we're helping on that aspect in particular related to track price transparency is to help make that date of machine readable. So sometimes with with data, the beneficiary might be on a person. I've been a lot of cases now we're seeing the ability to have different systems, interact and exchange data in order to process the workflow. To generate online at lists of pricing from a provider that's been negotiated with a payer is, um, is really a neighboring factor. >>So, guys, I wonder if you bring up the next slide, which is kind of the Nirvana. So if you if you saw the previous slide that the middle there was all different shapes and presumably to disparage data, this is that this is the outcome that you want to get. Everything fits together nicely and you've got this open exchange. It's not opaque as it is today. It's not bubble gum band aids and duct tape, but but but described this sort of outcome the trying to achieve and maybe a little bit about what gonna take to get there. >>Yeah, that's a combination of a number of things. It's making sure that the data is machine readable. Um, making it available to AP eyes that could be our ph toes. We're working with technology companies that employ R P. A full health care. I'm specifically to manage that patient and pay a data. Teoh, bring that together in our data Discovery. What we're able to do is to classify that data on having made available to eight downstream tour technology or person to imply that that workflow to to the data. So this looks like nirvana. It looks like utopia. But it's, you know, the end objective of a journey that we can see in different economies there at different stages of maturity, in turning healthcare into a digital service, even so that you could consume it from when you live from home when telling medicine. Intellicast >>Yes, so And this is not just health care but you wanna achieve that self service doing data marketplace in virtually any industry you working with TCS, Tata Consultancy Services Toe Achieve this You know, if you are a company like Iota has toe have partnerships with organizations that have deep industry expertise Talk about your relationship with TCS and what you guys are doing specifically in this regard. >>Yeah, we've been working with TCS now for room for a long while. Andi will be announcing some of those initiatives here where we're now working together to reach their customers where they've got a a brilliant framework of business for that zero when there re imagining with their clients. Um, how their business cause can operate with ai with automation on, become more agile in digital. Um, our technology, the dreams of patients that we have in our portfolio being out to apply that at scale on the global scale across industries such as banking, insurance and health care is is really allowing us to see a bigger impact on consumer outcomes. Patient outcomes And the feedback from TCS is that we're really helping in those initiatives remove that friction. They talk a lot about data. Friction. Um, I think that's a polite term for the the image that we just saw with the disparity technologies that the legacy that has built up. So if we want to create a transformation, Um, having a partnership with TCS across Industries is giving us that that reach and that impacts on many different people's day to day jobs and knives. >>Let's talk a little bit about the cloud. It's It's a topic that we've hit on quite a bit here in this in this content Siri's. But But you know, the cloud companies, the big hyper scale should put everything into the cloud, right? But but customers are more circumspect than that. But at the same time, machine intelligence M. L. A. The cloud is a place to do a lot of that. That's where a lot of the innovation occurs. And so what are your thoughts on getting to the cloud? Ah, putting dated to work, if you will, with machine learning stuff you're doing with aws. What? You're fit there? >>Yeah, we we and David. We work with all of the cloud platforms. Mike stuffed as your G, c p IBM. Um, but we're expanding our partnership now with AWS Onda we really opening up the ability to work with their Greenfield accounts, where a lot of that data that technology is in their own data centers at the customer, and that's across banking, health care, manufacturing and insurance. And for good reason. A lot of companies have taken the time to see what works well for them, with the technologies that the cloud providers ah, are offered a offering in a lot of cases testing services or analytics using the cloud to move workloads to the cloud to drive Data Analytics is is a real game changer. So there's good reason to maintain a lot of systems on premise. If that makes sense from a cost from a liability point of view on the number of clients that we work with, that do have and we will keep their mainframe systems within kobo is is no surprise to us, but equally they want to tap into technologies that AWS have such a sage maker. The issue is as a chief data officer, I don't have the budget to me, everything to the cloud day one, I might want to show some results. First upfront to my business users Um, Onda worked closely with my chief marketing officer to look at what's happening in terms of customer trains and customer behavior. What are the customer outcomes? Patient outcomes and partner at comes I can achieve through analytics data signs. So I, working with AWS and with clients to manage that hybrid topology of some of that data being, uh, in the cloud being put to work with AWS age maker on night, I hope being used to identify where is the data that needs to bay amalgamated and curated to provide the data set for machine learning advanced and medics to have an impact for the business. >>So what are the critical attributes of what you're looking at to help customers decide what what to move and what to keep, if you will. >>Well, what one of the quickest outcomes that we help custom achieve is to buy that business blustery. You know that the items of data that means something to them across those different silos and pour all of that together into a unified view once they've got that for a data engineer working with a a business manager to think through how we want to create this application. There was the turn model, the loyalty or the propensity model that we want to put in place here. Um, how do we use predictive and medics to understand what needs are for a patient, that sort of innovation is what we're looking applying the tools such a sagemaker, uh, night to be west. So they do the the computation and to build those models to deliver the outcome is is across that value chain, and it goes back to the first picture that we put up. David, you know the outcome Is that a P I On the back of it, you've got the machine learning model that's been developed in That's always such as data breaks. But with Jupiter notebook, that data has to be sourced from somewhere. Somebody has to say that yet you've got permission to do what you're trying to do without falling foul of any compliance around data. Um, it'll goes back to discovering that data, classifying it, indexing it in an automated way to cut those timelines down two hours and days. >>Yeah, it's the it's the innovation part of your data portfolio, if you will, that you're gonna put into the cloud. Apply tools like sage maker and others. You told the jury. Whatever your favorite tool is, you don't care. The customer's gonna choose that and hear the cloud vendors. Maybe they want you to use their tool, but they're making their marketplaces available to everybody. But it's it's that innovation piece, the ones that you where you want to apply that self service data marketplace to and really drive. As I said before monetization. All right, give us your final thoughts. A. J bring us home. >>So final thoughts on this David is that at the moment we're seeing, um, a lot of value in helping customers discover that day the using automation automatically curating a data catalogue, and that unified view is then being put to work through our A B. I's having an open architecture to plug in whatever tool technology our clients have decided to use, and that open architecture is really feeding into the reality of what see Iose in Chief Data Officers of Managing, which is a hybrid on premise cloud approach. Do you suppose to breed Andi but business users wanting to use a particular technology to get their business outcome having the flexibility to do that no matter where you're dating. Sitting on Premise on Cloud is where self service comes in that self service. You of what data I can plug together, Dr Exchange. Monetizing that data is where we're starting to see some real traction. Um, with customers now accelerating becoming more digital, uh, to serve their own customers, >>we really have seen a cultural mind shift going from sort of complacency. And obviously, cove, it has accelerated this. But the combination of that cultural shift the cloud machine intelligence tools give give me a lot of hope that the promises of big data will ultimately be lived up to ah, in this next next 10 years. So a J ahora thanks so much for coming back on the Cube. You're you're a great guest. And ah, appreciate your insights. >>Appreciate, David. See you next time. >>All right? And keep it right there. Very right back. Right after this short break

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of Smart Data Marketplaces brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> We're back. We're talking about smart data and have been for several weeks now. Really it's all about injecting intelligence and automation into the data life cycle of the data pipeline. And today we're drilling into Smart Data Marketplaces, really trying to get to that self-serve, unified, trusted, secured, and compliant data models. And this is not trivial. And with me to talk about some of the nuances involved in actually getting there with folks that have experienced doing that. They'd send a series of digital evangelist with Tata Consultancy Services, TCS. And Ajay Vohora is back, he's the CEO of Io-Tahoe. Guys, great to see you, thanks so much for coming on. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> Hey Dave. >> Ajay, let's start with you. Let's set up the sort of smart data concept. What's that all about? What's your perspective? >> Yeah, so I mean, our way of thinking about this is you you've got data, it has latent value, and it's really about discovering what the properties of that data. Does it have value? Can you put that data to work? And the way we go about that with algorithms and machine learning, to generate signals in that data identified patterns, that means we can start to discover how can we apply that data to down stream? What value can we unlock for a customer and business? >> Well, so you've been on this, I mean, really like a laser, why? I mean, why this issue? Did you see a gap in the marketplace in terms of talking to customers and maybe you can help us understand the origin? >> Yeah, I think that the gap has always been there. They've been, it's become more apparent over recent times with big data. So the ability to manually work with volumes of data in petabytes is prohibitively complex and expensive. So you need the different routes, you need different set of tools and methods to do that. Metadata are data that you can understand about data. That's what we at Io-Tahoe focus on, discovering and generating that metadata. That ready, that analogy to automate those data ops processes. So the gap David, is being felt by a business owner prizes and all sectors, healthcare, telecoms, and putting that data to work. >> So Ved, Let's talk a little bit about your role. You work with a lot of customers. I see you as an individual in a company who's really trying to transform what is a very challenging industry. That's sort of ripe for transformation, but maybe you could give us your perspective on this, what kind of signals you're looking for from the data pipeline and we'll get into how you are helping transform healthcare? >> Thanks, David. You know I think this year has been one of those years where we've all realized about this idea of unknown unknowns, where something comes around the corner that you're completely not expecting. And that's really hard to plan for obviously. And I think what we need is the ability to find early signals and be able to act on things as soon as you can. Sometimes, and you know, the COVID-19 scenario of course, is hopefully once in a generation thing, but most businesses struggle with the idea that they may have the data there in their systems, but they still don't know which bit of that is really valuable and what are the signals they should be watching for. And I think the interesting thing here is the ability for us to extract from a massive data, the most critical and important signals. And I think that's where we want to focus on. >> And so, talk a little bit about healthcare in particular and sort of your role there, and maybe at a high level. How Tata and your eco-system are helping transform healthcare? >> So if you look at healthcare, you've got the bit where people need active intervention from a medical professional. And then you've got this larger body of people, typically elderly people who aren't unwell, but they have frailties. They have underlying conditions and they're very vulnerable, especially in the world that we're in now in the post-COVID-19 scenario. And what we were trying to look at is how do we keep people who are elderly, frail and vulnerable? How can we keep them safe in their own homes rather than moving to care homes, where there has been an incredibly high level of infection for things like COVID-19. So the world works better if you can keep people safe in their own homes, if you can see the slide we've got. We're also talking about a world where care is expensive. In most Western countries, especially in Western Europe, the number of elderly people is increasing as a percentage of the population, quite significantly, and resources just are not keeping up. We don't have enough people. We don't have enough funding to look after them effectively. And the care industry that used to do that job has been struggling of late. So it's kind of a perfect storm for the need for technology intervention there. And in that space, what we're saying is the data signal that we want to receive are exactly what as a relative, or a son or daughter you might want from a parent to say, "Everything's okay. "We know that today's been just like every other day "there are no anomalies in your daily living." If you could get the signals that might tell us that something's wrong, something not quite right. We don't need very complex diagnostics. We just need to know something's not quite right, that my dad hasn't woken up as has always at seven o'clock, but till nine o'clock there's no movement. Maybe he's a bit unwell. It's that kind of signal that if we can generate, can make a dramatic difference to how we can look out for these people, whether through professional carers or through family members. So what we're looking to do is to sensor-enable homes of vulnerable people so that those data signals can come through to us in a curated manner, in a way that protects privacy and security of the individual, but gives the right people, which is carers or chosen family members the access to the signals, which is alerts that might tell you there was too much movement at night, or the front door was been left open, things like that that would give you a reason to call him and check. Everybody has spoken to in this always has an example of an uncle or a relative or parent that they've looked after. And all they're looking for is a signal. Even stories like my father's neighbor calls me when he doesn't open his curtain by 11 o'clock, that actually, if you think about it is a data signal that something might be all right. And I think what we're trying to do with technology is create those kinds of data signals because ultimately, the healthcare system works much better if you can prevent rather than cure. So every dollar that you put into prevention saves maybe $3 to $5 downstream. The economic summit also are working our favor. >> And those signals give family members the confidence to act. Ajay, it is interesting to hear what Ved was talking about in terms of the unknowns, because when you think about the early days of the computer industry, there were a lot of knowns, the processes were known. It was like the technology was the big mystery. Now, I feel like it's flipped. We've certainly seen that with COVID. The technology is actually quite well understood and quite mature and reliable. One of the examples is automated data discovery, which is something that you guys have been been focused on at Io-Tahoe. Why is automated data discovery such an important component of a smart data life cycle? >> Yeah. I mean, if we look David at the schematic and this one moves from left to right where right at the outset with that latent data, the value is late because you don't know. Does it have? Can it be applied? Can that data be put to work or not? And the objective really is about driving some form of exchange or monetization of data. If you think about it in insurance or healthcare, you've got lots of different parties, providers, payers, patients, everybody's looking to make some kind of an exchange of information. The difficulty is in all of those organizations, that data sits within its own system. So data discovery, if we drill into the focus itself that, it's about understanding which data has value, classifying that data so that it can be applied and being able to tag it so that it can then be put to use it's the real enabler for that per day drops. >> So maybe talk a little bit more about this. We're trying to get to self-service. It's something that we hear a lot about. You mentioned putting data to work. It seems to me that if the business can have access to that data and serve themselves, that's the way to put data to work. Do you have thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, thinking back in terms of what IT and the IT function in a business could provide, there have been limitations around infrastructure, around scaling, around compute. Now that we're in an economy that is digital driven by API's your infrastructure, your data, your business rules, your intelligence, your models, all of those on the back of an API. So the options become limitless. How you can drive value and exchange that data. What that allows us to do is to be more creative, if we can understand what data has value for what use case. >> Ved, Let's talk a little bit about the US healthcare system. It's a good use case. I was recently at a chief data officer conference and listening to the CDO of Johns Hopkins, talk about the multiple different formats that they had to ingest to create that COVID map. They even had some PDFs, they had different definitions, and that's sort of underscored to me, the state of the US healthcare industry. I'm not as familiar with the UK and Europe generally, but I am familiar with the US healthcare system and the diversity that's there, the duplication of information and the like, maybe you could sort of summarize your perspectives and give us kind of the before and your vision of the after, if you will? >> The use of course, is particularly large and complex system. We all know that. We also know, I think there is some research that suggests that in the US the per-capita spend on healthcare is among the highest in the world. I think it's like 70%, and that compares to what just under 9%, which is going to be European, typical European figure. So it's almost double of that, but the outcomes are still vastly poor. When Ajay and I were talking earlier, I think we believe that there is a concept of a data friction. When you've got multiple players in an eco-system, trying to provide a single service as a patient, you're receiving a single health care service. There are probably a dozen up to 20 different organizations that have to collaborate to make sure you get that top of the line health care service. That kind of investment deserves. And what prevents it from happening very often is what we would call data friction, which is the ability to effectively share data. Something as simple as a healthcare record, which says, "This is Dave, this is Ved, this is Ajay." And when we go to hospital for anything, whatever happens, that healthcare record can capture all the information and tie to us as an individual. And if you go to a different hospital, then that record will follow you. This is how you would expect that to be implemented, but I think we're still on that journey. There are lots and lots of challenges. I've seen anecdotal data around people who suffered because they weren't carrying a card when they went into hospital, because that card has the critical elements of data, but in today's world, should you need to carry a piece of paper or can the entire thing be a digital data flow that can easily be, can certainly navigate through lack of paper and those kinds of things. So the vision that I think we need to be looking at is an effective data exchange or marketplace back with a kind of a backbone model where people agree and sign off a data standard, where each individual's data is always tied to the individual. So if you were to move States, if you would move providers, change insurance companies, none of that would impact your medical history, your data, and the ability to have the other care and medical professionals to access the data at the point of need and at the point of healthcare delivery. So I think that's the vision we're looking at, but as you rightly you said that there are enormous number of challenges, partly because of the history, of healthcare, I think it was technology enablement of healthcare started early. So there's a lot of legacy as well. So we shouldn't trivialize the challenges that the industry faces, but that I think is the way we want to go. >> Well, privacy is obviously a huge one, and a lot of the processes are built around non-digital processes and what you're describing as a flip for digital first. I mean, as a consumer, as a patient, I want an app for that. So I can see my own data. I can see price, price transparency, give access to people that I think need it. And that is a daunting task, isn't it? >> Absolutely. And I think the implicit idea and what you just said, which is very powerful is also on the app you want to control. >> Yes. >> And sometimes you want to be able to change access on data at that point. Right now, I'm at the hospital. I would like to access my data. And when I walk away or maybe three days later, I want to revoke that access. It's that level of control. And absolutely, it is by no means a trivial problem, but I think that's where you need the data automation tools. If you try to do any of this manually, we'd be here for another decade trying to solve this, but that's where tools like Io-Tahoe come in because to do this, a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes has to be automated. There has to be a machine churning that and presenting the simpler options. And I know you were talking about it just a little while ago Ajay. I was reminded of the example of a McDonald's or a Coke, because the sales store idea that you can go in and you can do your own ordering off a menu, or you can go in and select five different flavors from a Coke machine and choose your own particular blend of Coke. It's a very trivial example, but I think that's the word we want to get to with access of data as well. If it was that simple for consumers, for enterprise, business people, for doctors, then that's where we ultimately want to be able to arrive. But of course, to make something very simple for the end-user, somebody has to solve for complexity behind the scenes. >> So Ajay, it seems to me Ajay there're two major outcomes here. One is of course, the most important I guess, is patient outcomes, and the other is cost. I mean, they talked about the cost issues, we all, US especially understand the concerns about rising costs of healthcare. My question is this, how does a Smart Data Marketplace fit into achieving those two very important outcomes? >> When we think about how automation is enabling that, where we've got different data formats, the manual tasks are involved, duplication of information. The administrative overhead of that alone and the work, the rework, and the cycles of work that generates. That's really what we're trying to help with data is to eliminate that wasted effort. And with that wasted effort comes time and money to employ people to work through those siloed systems. So getting to the point where there is an exchange in a marketplace just as they would be for banking or insurance is really about automating the classification of data to make it available to a system that can pick it up through an API and to run a machine learning model and to manage a workflow, a process. >> Right, so you mentioned backing insurance, you're right. I mean, we've actually come a long way and just in terms of, know the customer and applying that to know the patient would be very powerful. I'm interested in what you guys are doing together, just in terms of your vision. Are you going to market together, kind of what you're seeing in terms of promoting or enabling this self-service, self-care. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Io-Tahoe and Tata, the intersection at the customer? >> Sure. I think we've been very impressed with the TCS vision of 4.0, how the re-imagining traditional industries, whether it's insurance, banking, healthcare, and bringing together automation, agile processes, robotics, AI, and once those enablers, technology may have brought together to re-imagine how those services can be delivered digitally. All of those are dependent on data. So we see that there's a really good fit here to enable understanding the legacy, the historic situation that has built up over time in an organization, a business and to help shine a light on what's meaningful in that to migrate to the cloud or to drive a digital twin, data science project. >> Ved, anything you can add to that? >> Sure. I mean, we do take the business 4.0 model quite seriously in terms of a lens with which you look at any industry, and what I talked about in healthcare was an example of that. And for us business 4.0, means a few very specific things. The technology that we use in today's verse should be agile, automated, intelligent, and cloud-based. These have become kind of hygiene factors now. On top of that, the businesses we build should be mass customized. They should be risk embracing. They should engage ecosystems, and they should strive for exponential value, not 10% growth year on year, but doubling, tripling every three, four years, because that's the competition that most businesses are facing today. And within that, the Tata group itself, is an extremely purpose-driven business. We really believe that we exist to serve communities, not just one specific set, i.e. shareholders, but the broader community in which we live and work. And I think this framework also allows us to apply that to things like healthcare, to education and to a whole vast range of areas where, everybody has a vision of using data science or doing really clever stuff at the gradients. But what becomes clear is, to do any of that, the first thing you need is a foundational piece. And as a foundation isn't right, then no matter how much you invest in the data science tools you won't get the answers you want. And the work we're doing with the Io-Tahoe really, for me, is particularly exciting because it sorts out that foundational piece. And at the end of it, to make all of this, again, I will repeat that, to make it simple and easy to use for the end user, whoever that is. And I realized that I'm probably the first person who's used fast food as a shining example for healthcare in this discussion, but you can make a lot of different examples. And today, if you press a button and start a car, that's simplicity, but someone has solved for that. And that's what we want to do with data as well. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. We talk a lot about digital transformation and a digital business, and I would observe that a digital business puts data at the core. And you can certainly be the best example. There is, of course, Google is an all digital business, but take a company like Amazon, Who's got obviously a massive physical component to its business. Data is at the core. And that's exactly my takeaway from this discussion. Both of you are talking about putting data at the core, simplifying it, making sure that it's compliant, and healthcare it's taking longer, 'cause it's such a high risk industry, but it's clearly happening, COVID I guess, was an accelerant. Guys, Ajay, I'll start with you. Any final thoughts that you want to leave the audience with? _ Yeah, we're really pleased to be working with TCS. We've been able to explore how we're able to put dates to work in a range of different industries. Ved has mentioned healthcare, telecoms, banking and insurance are others. And the same impact they speak to whenever we see the exciting digital transformations that are being planned, being able to accelerate those, unlock the value from data is where we're having a purpose. And it's good that we can help patients in the healthcare sector, consumers in banking realize a better experience through having a more joined up marketplace with their data. >> Ved, you know what excites me about this conversation is that, as a patient or as a consumer, if I'm helping loved ones, I can go to the web and I can search, and I can find a myriad of possibilities. What you're envisioning here is really personalizing that with real time data. And that to me is a game changer. Your final thoughts? >> Thanks, David. I absolutely agree with you that the idea of data centricity and simplicity are absolutely forefront, but I think if we were to design an organization today, you might design it very differently to how most companies today are structured. And maybe Google and Amazon are probably better examples of that because you almost have to think of a business as having a data engine room at its core. A lot of businesses are trying to get to that stage, whereas what we call digital natives, are people who have started life with that premise. So I absolutely agree with you on that, but extending that a little bit. If you think of most industries as eco-systems that have to collaborate, then you've got multiple organizations who will also have to exchange data to achieve some shared outcomes. Whether you look at supply chains of automobile manufacturers or insurance companies or healthcares we've been talking about. So I think that's the next level of change we want to be able to make, which is to be able to do this at scale across organizations at industry level or in population scheme for healthcare. >> Yeah, Thank you for that. Go ahead Ajay. >> David that's where it comes back to again, the origination where we've come from in big data. The volume of data combined with the specificity of individualizing, personalizing a service around an individual amongst that massive data from different providers is where is exciting, that we're able to have an impact. >> Well, and you know Ajay, I'm glad you brought that up because in the early days of big data, there were only a handful of companies, the biggest financial institutions. Obviously, the internet giants who had all these engineers that were able to take advantage of it. But with companies like Io-Tahoe and others, and the investments that the industry has made in terms of providing the tools and simplifying that, especially with machine intelligence and AI and machine learning, these are becoming embedded into the tooling so that everybody can have access to them, small, medium, and large companies. That's really, to me, the exciting part of this new era that we're entering. >> Yeah, and we have placed those, take it down to the level of not-for-profits and smaller businesses that want to innovate and leapfrog into, to growing their digital delivery of their service. >> And I know a lot of time, but Ved, what you were saying about TCS's responsibility to society, I think is really, really important. Large companies like yours, I believe, and you clearly do as well, have a responsibility to society more than just a profit. And I think, Big Tech it's a better app in a lot of cases, but so thank you for that and thank you gentlemen for this great discussion. I really appreciate it. >> Thanks David. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. I'll be right back right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. (calm music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation an event Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe. >>Okay, we're back. Welcome back to data Automated. A J ahora is CEO of I o Ta ho, JJ. Good to see you. How have things in London? >>Big thing. Well, thinking well, where we're making progress, I could see you hope you're doing well and pleasure being back here on the Cube. >>Yeah, it's always great to talk to. You were talking enterprise data automation. As you know, with within our community, we've been pounding the whole data ops conversation. Little different, though. We're gonna We're gonna dig into that a little bit. But let's start with a J how you've seen the response to Covert and I'm especially interested in the role that data has played in this pandemic. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think everyone's adapting both essentially, um, and and in business, the customers that I speak to on day in, day out that we partner with, um they're busy adapting their businesses to serve their customers. It's very much a game of and showing the week and serve our customers to help their customers um, you know, the adaptation that's happening here is, um, trying to be more agile, kind of the most flexible. Um, a lot of pressure on data. A lot of demand on data and to deliver more value to the business, too. Serve that customer. >>Yeah. I mean, data machine intelligence and cloud, or really three huge factors that have helped organizations in this pandemic. And, you know, the machine intelligence or AI piece? That's what automation is all about. How do you see automation helping organizations evolve maybe faster than they thought they might have to >>Sure. I think the necessity of these times, um, there's there's a says a lot of demand doing something with data data. Uh huh. A lot of a lot of businesses talk about being data driven. Um, so interesting. I sort of look behind that when we work with our customers, and it's all about the customer. You know, the mic is cios invested shareholders. The common theme here is the customer. That customer experience starts and ends with data being able to move from a point that is reacting. So what the customer is expecting and taking it to that step forward where you can be proactive to serve what that customer's expectation to and that's definitely come alive now with they, um, the current time. >>Yes. So, as I said, we've been talking about data ops a lot. The idea being Dev Ops applied to the data pipeline. But talk about enterprise data automation. What is it to you and how is it different from data off? >>Yeah, Great question. Thank you. I am. I think we're all familiar with felt more more awareness around. So as it's applied, Teoh, uh, processes methodologies that have become more mature of the past five years around devil that managing change, managing an application, life cycles, managing software development data about, you know, has been great. But breaking down those silos between different roles functions and bringing people together to collaborate. Andi, you know, we definitely see that those tools, those methodologies, those processes, that kind of thinking, um, landing itself to data with data is exciting. We're excited about that, Andi shifting the focus from being I t versus business users to you know who are the data producers. And here the data consumers in a lot of cases, it concert in many different lines of business. So in data role, those methods those tools and processes well we look to do is build on top of that with data automation. It's the is the nuts and bolts of the the algorithms, the models behind machine learning that the functions. That's where we investors our R and D and bringing that in to build on top of the the methods, the ways of thinking that break down those silos on injecting that automation into the business processes that are going to drive a business to serve its customers. It's, um, a layer beyond Dev ops data ops. They can get to that point where well, I think about it is, Is the automation behind the automation we can take? I'll give you an example. Okay, a bank where we did a lot of work to do make move them into accelerating that digital transformation. And what we're finding is that as we're able to automate the jobs related to data a managing that data and serving that data that's going into them as a business automating their processes for their customer. Um, so it's it's definitely having a compound effect. >>Yeah, I mean I think that you did. Data ops for a lot of people is somewhat new to the whole Dev Ops. The data ops thing is is good and it's a nice framework. Good methodology. There is obviously a level of automation in there and collaboration across different roles. But it sounds like you're talking about so supercharging it, if you will, the automation behind the automation. You know, I think organizations talk about being data driven. You hear that? They have thrown around a lot of times. People sit back and say, We don't make decisions without data. Okay? But really, being data driven is there's a lot of aspects there. There's cultural, but it's also putting data at the core of your organization, understanding how it effects monetization. And, as you know, well, silos have been built up, whether it's through M and a, you know, data sprawl outside data sources. So I'm interested in your thoughts on what data driven means and specifically Hi, how Iot Tahoe plays >>there. Yeah, I'm sure we'll be happy. That look that three David, we've We've come a long way in the last four years. We started out with automating some of those simple, um, to codify. Um, I have a high impact on organization across the data, a data warehouse. There's data related tasks that classify data on and a lot of our original pattern. Senai people value that were built up is is very much around. They're automating, classifying data across different sources and then going out to so that for some purpose originally, you know, some of those simpler I'm challenges that we have. Ah, custom itself, um, around data privacy. You know, I've got a huge data lake here. I'm a telecoms business. I've got millions of six subscribers. Um, quite often the chief data office challenges. How do I cover the operational risk? Where, um, I got so much data I need to simplify my approach to automating, classifying that data. Recent is you can't do that manually. We can for people at it. And the the scale of that is is prohibitive, right? Often, if you had to do it manually by the time you got a good picture of it, it's already out of date. Then, starting with those those simple challenges that we've been able to address, we're then going on and build on that to say, What else do we serve? What else do we serve? The chief data officer, Chief marketing officer on the CFO. Within these times, um, where those decision makers are looking for having a lot of choices in the platform options that they say that the tooling they're very much looking for We're that Swiss army. Not being able to do one thing really well is is great, but more more. Where that cost pressure challenge is coming in is about how do we, um, offer more across the organization, bring in those business lines of business activities that depend on data to not just with a T. Okay, >>so we like the cube. Sometimes we like to talk about Okay, what is it? And then how does it work? And what's the business impact? We kind of covered what it is but love to get into the tech a little bit in terms of how it works. And I think we have a graphic here that gets into that a little bit. So, guys, if you bring that up, I wonder if you could tell us and what is the secret sauce behind Iot Tahoe? And if you could take us through this slot. >>Sure. I mean, right there in the middle that the heart of what we do It is the intellectual property. Yeah, that was built up over time. That takes from Petra genius data sources Your Oracle relational database, your your mainframe. If they lay in increasingly AP eyes and devices that produce data and that creates the ability to automatically discover that data, classify that data after it's classified them have the ability to form relationships across those different, uh, source systems, silos, different lines of business. And once we've automated that that we can start to do some cool things that just puts a contact and meaning around that data. So it's moving it now from bringing data driven on increasingly well. We have really smile, right people in our customer organizations you want do some of those advanced knowledge tasks, data scientists and, uh, quants in some of the banks that we work with. The the onus is on, then, putting everything we've done there with automation, pacifying it, relationship, understanding that equality policies that you apply to that data. I'm putting it in context once you've got the ability to power. A a professional is using data, um, to be able to put that data and contacts and search across the entire enterprise estate. Then then they can start to do some exciting things and piece together the tapestry that fabric across that different systems could be crm air P system such as s AP on some of the newer cloud databases that we work with. Snowflake is a great Well, >>yes. So this is you're describing sort of one of the one of the reasons why there's so many stove pipes and organizations because data is gonna locked in the silos of applications. I also want to point out, you know, previously to do discovery to do that classification that you talked about form those relationship to glean context from data. A lot of that, if not most of that in some cases all that would have been manual. And of course, it's out of date so quickly. Nobody wants to do it because it's so hard. So this again is where automation comes into the the the to the idea of really becoming data driven. >>Sure. I mean the the efforts. If we if I look back, maybe five years ago, we had a prevalence of daily technologies at the cutting edge. Those have said converging me to some of these cloud platforms. So we work with Google and AWS, and I think very much is, as you said it, those manual attempts to try and grasp. But it is such a complex challenge at scale. I quickly runs out of steam because once, um, once you've got your hat, once you've got your fingers on the details Oh, um, what's what's in your data estate? It's changed, you know, you've onboard a new customer. You signed up a new partner, Um, customer has no adopted a new product that you just Lawrence and there that that slew of data it's keeps coming. So it's keeping pace with that. The only answer really is is some form of automation. And what we found is if we can tie automation with what I said before the expertise the, um, the subject matter expertise that sometimes goes back many years within an organization's people that augmentation between machine learning ai on and on that knowledge that sits within inside the organization really tends to involve a lot of value in data? >>Yes, So you know Well, a J you can't be is a smaller company, all things to all people. So your ecosystem is critical. You working with AWS? You're working with Google. You got red hat. IBM is as partners. What is attracting those folks to your ecosystem and give us your thoughts on the importance of ecosystem? >>Yeah, that's that's fundamental. So I mean, when I caimans, we tell her here is the CEO of one of the, um, trends that I wanted us to to be part of was being open, having an open architecture that allowed one thing that was nice to my heart, which is as a CEO, um, a C I O where you've got a budget vision and you've already made investments into your organization, and some of those are pretty long term bets. They should be going out 5 10 years, sometimes with CRM system training up your people, getting everybody working together around a common business platform. What I wanted to ensure is that we could openly like it using ap eyes that were available, the love that some investment on the cost that has already gone into managing in organizations I t. But business users to before So part of the reason why we've been able to be successful with, um, the partners like Google AWS and increasingly, a number of technology players. That red hat mongo DB is another one where we're doing a lot of good work with, um, and snowflake here is, um it's those investments have been made by the organizations that are our customers, and we want to make sure we're adding to that, and they're leveraging the value that they've already committed to. >>Okay, so we've talked about kind of what it is and how it works, and I want to get into the business impact. I would say what I would be looking for from from this would be Can you help me lower my operational risk? I've got I've got tasks that I do many year sequential, some who are in parallel. But can you reduce my time to task? And can you help me reduce the labor intensity and ultimately, my labor costs? And I put those resources elsewhere, and ultimately, I want to reduce the end and cycle time because that is going to drive Telephone number R. A. Y So, um, I missing anything? Can you do those things? And maybe you could give us some examples of the tiara y and the business impact. >>Yeah. I mean, the r a y David is is built upon on three things that I mentioned is a combination off leveraging the existing investment with the existing state, whether that's home, Microsoft, Azure or AWS or Google IBM. And I'm putting that to work because, yeah, the customers that we work with have had made those choices. On top of that, it's, um, is ensuring that we have you got the automation that is working right down to the level off data, a column level or the file level so we don't do with meta data. It is being very specific to be at the most granular level. So as we've grown our processes and on the automation, gasification tagging, applying policies from across different compliance and regulatory needs, that an organization has to the data, everything that then happens downstream from that is ready to serve a business outcome. It could be a customer who wants that experience on a mobile device. A tablet oh, face to face within, within the store. I mean game. Would you provision the right data and enable our customers do that? But their customers, with the right data that they can trust at the right time, just in that real time moment where decision or an action is being expected? That's, um, that's driving the r a y two b in some cases, 20 x but and that's that's really satisfying to see that that kind of impact it is taking years down to months and in many cases, months of work down to days. In some cases, our is the time to value. I'm I'm impressed with how quickly out of the box with very little training a customer and think about, too. And you speak just such a search. They discovery knowledge graph on DM. I don't find duplicates. Onda Redundant data right off the bat within hours. >>Well, it's why investors are interested in this space. I mean, they're looking for a big, total available market. They're looking for a significant return. 10 X is you gotta have 10 x 20 x is better. So so that's exciting and obviously strong management and a strong team. I want to ask you about people and culture. So you got people process technology we've seen with this pandemic that processes you know are really unpredictable. And the technology has to be able to adapt to any process, not the reverse. You can't force your process into some static software, so that's very, very important. But the end of the day you got to get people on board. So I wonder if you could talk about this notion of culture and a data driven culture. >>Yeah, that's that's so important. I mean, current times is forcing the necessity of the moment to adapt. But as we start to work their way through these changes on adapt ah, what with our customers, But that is changing economic times. What? What we're saying here is the ability >>to I >>have, um, the technology Cartman, in a really smart way, what those business uses an I T knowledge workers are looking to achieve together. So I'll give you an example. We have quite often with the data operations teams in the companies that we, um, partnering with, um, I have a lot of inbound enquiries on the day to day level. I really need this set of data they think it can help my data scientists run a particular model? Or that what would happen if we combine these two different silence of data and gets the Richmond going now, those requests you can, sometimes weeks to to realize what we've been able to do with the power is to get those answers being addressed by the business users themselves. And now, without without customers, they're coming to the data. And I t folks saying, Hey, I've now built something in the development environment. Why don't we see how that can scale up with these sets of data? I don't need terabytes of it. I know exactly the columns and the feet in the data that I'm going to use on that gets seller wasted in time, um, angle to innovate. >>Well, that's huge. I mean, the whole notion of self service and the lines of business actually feeling like they have ownership of the data as opposed to, you know, I t or some technology group owning the data because then you've got data quality issues or if it doesn't line up there their agenda, you're gonna get a lot of finger pointing. So so that is a really important. You know a piece of it. I'll give you last word A J. Your final thoughts, if you would. >>Yeah, we're excited to be the only path. And I think we've built great customer examples here where we're having a real impact in in a really fast pace, whether it helping them migrate to the cloud, helping the bean up their legacy, Data lake on and write off there. Now the conversation is around data quality as more of the applications that we enable to a more efficiently could be data are be a very robotic process automation along the AP, eyes that are now available in the cloud platforms. A lot of those they're dependent on data quality on and being able to automate. So business users, um, to take accountability off being able to so look at the trend of their data quality over time and get the signals is is really driving trust. And that trust in data is helping in time. Um, the I T teams, the data operations team, with do more and more quickly that comes back to culture being out, supply this technology in such a way that it's visual insensitive. Andi. How being? Just like Dev Ops tests with with a tty Dave drops putting intelligence in at the data level to drive that collaboration. We're excited, >>you know? You remind me of something. I lied. I don't want to go yet. It's OK, so I know we're tight on time, but you mentioned migration to the cloud. And I'm thinking about conversation with Paula from Webster Webster. Bank migrations. Migrations are, you know, they're they're a nasty word for for organizations. So our and we saw this with Webster. How are you able to help minimize the migration pain and and why is that something that you guys are good at? >>Yeah. I mean, there were many large, successful companies that we've worked with. What's There's a great example where, you know, I'd like to give you the analogy where, um, you've got a lot of people in your teams if you're running a business as a CEO on this bit like a living living grade. But imagine if those different parts of your brain we're not connected, that with, um, so diminish how you're able to perform. So what we're seeing, particularly with migration, is where banks retailers. Manufacturers have grown over the last 10 years through acquisition on through different initiatives, too. Um, drive customer value that sprawl in their data estate hasn't been fully dealt with. It sometimes been a good thing, too. Leave whatever you're fired off the agent incent you a side by side with that legacy mainframe on your oracle, happy and what we're able to do very quickly with that migration challenges shine a light on all the different parts. Oh, data application at the column level or higher level if it's a day late and show an enterprise architect a CDO how everything's connected, where they may not be any documentation. The bright people that created some of those systems long since moved on or retired or been promoted into so in the rose on within days, being out to automatically generate Anke refreshed the states of that data across that man's game on and put it into context, then allows you to look at a migration from a confidence that you did it with the back rather than what we've often seen in the past is teams of consultant and business analysts. Data around this spend months getting an approximation and and a good idea of what it could be in the current state and try their very best to map that to the future Target state. Now, without all hoping out, run those processes within hours of getting started on, um well, that picture visualize that picture and bring it to life. You know, the Yarra. Why, that's off the bat with finding data that should have been deleted data that was copies off on and being able to allow the architect whether it's we're working on gcb or migration to any other clouds such as AWS or a multi cloud landscape right now with yeah, >>that visibility is key. Teoh sort of reducing operational risks, giving people confidence that they can move forward and being able to do that and update that on an ongoing basis, that means you can scale a J. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your insights and your experience is great to have >>you. Thank you, David. Look towards smoking in. >>Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We're here with data automated on the Cube. This is Dave Volante and we'll be right back. Short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From around the globe, its theCUBE! With digital coverage of enterprise data automation. An event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Okay, we're back, welcome back to Data Automated, Ajay Vohora is CEO of Io-Tahoe. Ajay, good to see you, how are things in London? >> Things are doing well, things are doing well, we're making progress. Good to see you, hope you're doing well, and pleasure being back here on theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's always great to talk to you, we're talking enterprise data automation, as you know, within our community we've been pounding the whole DataOps conversation. A little different, though, we're going to dig into that a little bit, but let's start with, Ajay, how are you seeing the response to COVID, and I'm especially interested in the role that data has played in this pandemic. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think everyone's adapting, both socially and in business, the customers that I speak to, day in, day out, that we partner with, they're busy adapting their businesses to serve their customers, it's very much a game of ensuring that we can serve our customers to help their customers, and the adaptation that's happening here is trying to be more agile, trying to be more flexible, and there's a lot of pressure on data, lot of demand on data to deliver more value to the business, to serve that customer. >> Yeah, I mean data, machine intelligence and cloud are really three huge factors that have helped organizations in this pandemic, and the machine intelligence or AI piece, that's what automation is all about, how do you see automation helping organizations evolve, maybe faster than they thought they might have to? >> For sure, I think the necessity of these times, there's, as they say, there's a lot of demand on doing something with data, data, a lot of businesses talk about being data-driven. It's interesting, I sort of look behind that when we work with our customers, and it's all about the customer. My peers, CEOs, investors, shareholders, the common theme here is the customer, and that customer experience starts and ends with data. Being able to move from a point that is reacting to what the customer is expecting, and taking it to that step forward where you can be proactive to serve what that customer's expectation to, and that's definitely come alive now with the current time. >> Yeah, so as I said, we were talking about DataOps a lot, the idea being DevOps applied to the data pipeline, but talk about enterprise data automation, what is it to you and how is it different from DataOps? >> Yeah, great question, thank you. I think we're all familiar with, got more and more awareness around DevOps as it's applied to processes, methodologies that have become more mature over the past five years around DevOps, but managing change, managing application life cycles, managing software development, DevOps has been great, but breaking down those silos between different roles, functions, and bringing people together to collaborate. And we definitely see that those tools, those methodologies, those processes, that kind of thinking, lending itself to data with DataOps is exciting, we're excited about that, and shifting the focus from being IT versus business users to, who are the data producers and who are the data consumers, and in a lot of cases it can sit in many different lines of business. So with DataOps, those methods, those tools, those processes, what we look to do is build on top of that with data automation, it's the nuts and bolts of the algorithms, the models behind machine learning, the functions, that's where we invest our R&D. And bringing that in to build on top of the methods, the ways of thinking that break down those silos, and injecting that automation into the business processes that are going to drive a business to serve its customer. It's a layer beyond DevOps, DataOps, taking it to that point where, way I like to think about it is, is the automation behind the automation. We can take, I'll give you an example of a bank where we've done a lot of work to move them into accelerating their digital transformation, and what we're finding is that as we're able to automate the jobs related to data, and managing that data, and serving that data, that's going into them as a business automating their processes for their customer. So it's definitely having a compound effect. >> Yeah, I mean I think that DataOps for a lot of people is somewhat new, the whole DevOps, the DataOps thing is good and it's a nice framework, good methodology, there is obviously a level of automation in there, and collaboration across different roles, but it sounds like you're talking about sort of supercharging it if you will, the automation behind the automation. You know, organizations talk about being data-driven, you hear that thrown around a lot. A lot of times people will sit back and say "We don't make decisions without data." Okay, but really, being data-driven is, there's a lot of aspects there, there's cultural, but there's also putting data at the core of your organization, understanding how it affects monetization, and as you know well, silos have been built up, whether it's through M&A, data sprawl, outside data sources, so I'm interested in your thoughts on what data-driven means and specifically how Io-Tahoe plays there. >> Yeah, sure, I'd be happy to put that through, David. We've come a long way in the last three or four years, we started out with automating some of those simple, to codify, but have a high impact on an organization across a data lake, across a data warehouse. Those data-related tasks that help classify data. And a lot of our original patents and IP portfolio that were built up is very much around there. Automating, classifying data across different sources, and then being able to serve that for some purpose. So originally, some of those simpler challenges that we help our customers solve, were around data privacy. I've got a huge data lake here, I'm a telecoms business, so I've got millions of subscribers, and quite often a chief data office challenge is, how do I cover the operational risk here, where I've got so much data, I need to simplify my approach to automating, classifying that data. Reason is, can't do that manually, we can't throw people at it, and the scale of that is prohibitive. Quite often, if you were to do it manually, by the time you've got a good picture of it, it's already out of date. So in starting with those simple challenges that we've been able to address, we've then gone on and built on that to see, what else do we serve? What else do we serve for the chief data officer, chief marketing officer, and the CFO, and in these times, where those decision-makers are looking for, have a lot of choices in the platform options that they take, the tooling, they're very much looking for that Swiss army knife, being able to do one thing really well is great, but more and more, where that cost pressure challenge is coming in, is about how do we offer more across the organization, bring in those business, lines of business activities that depend on data, to not just with IT. >> So we like, in theCUBE sometimes we like to talk about okay, what is it, and then how does it work, and what's the business impact? We kind of covered what it is, I'd love to get into the tech a little bit in terms of how it works, and I think we have a graphic here that gets into that a little bit. So guys, if you could bring that up, I wonder, Ajay, if you could tell us, what is the secret sauce behind Io-Tahoe, and if you could take us through this slide. >> Ajay: Sure, I mean right there in the middle, the heart of what we do, it is the intellectual property that were built up over time, that takes from heterogeneous data sources, your Oracle relational database, your mainframe, your data lake, and increasingly APIs and devices that produce data. And now creates the ability to automatically discover that data, classify that data, after it's classified then have the ability to form relationship across those different source systems, silos, different lines of business, and once we've automated that, then we can start to do some cool things, such as put some context and meaning around that data. So it's moving it now from being data-driven, and increasingly where we have really smart, bright people in our customer organizations who want to do some of those advanced knowledge tasks, data scientists, and quants in some of the banks that we work with. The onus is on them, putting everything we've done there with automation, classifying it, relationship, understanding data quality, the policies that you can apply to that data, and putting it in context. Once you've got the ability to power a professional who's using data, to be able to put that data in context and search across the entire enterprise estate, then they can start to do some exciting things, and piece together the tapestry, the fabric, across their different system. Could be CRM, ELP systems, such as SAP, and some of the newer cloud databases that we work with, Snowflake is a great one. >> Yeah, so this is, you're describing sort of one of the reasons why there's so many stovepipes in organizations, 'cause data is kind of locked into these silos and applications, and I also want to point out that previously, to do discovery, to do that classification that you talked about, form those relationships, to glean context from data, a lot of that, if not most of that, in some cases all of that would've been manual. And of course it's out of date so quickly, nobody wants to do it because it's so hard, so this again is where automation comes into the idea of really becoming data-driven. >> Sure, I mean the efforts, if I look back maybe five years ago, we had a prevalence of data lake technologies at the cutting edge, and those have started to converge and move to some of the cloud platforms that we work with, such as Google and AWS. And I think very much as you've said it, those manual attempts to try and grasp what is such a complex challenge at scale, quickly runs out of steam, because once you've got your fingers on the details of what's in your data estate, it's changed. You've onboarded a new customer, you've signed up a new partner, a customer has adopted a new product that you've just launched, and that slew of data keeps coming, so it's keeping pace with that, the only answer really here is some form of automation. And what we've found is if we can tie automation with what I said before, the expertise, the subject matter experience that sometimes goes back many years within an organization's people, that augmentation between machine learning, AI, and that knowledge that sits inside the organization really tends to allot a lot of value in data. >> Yeah, so you know well, Ajay, you can't be as a smaller company all things to all people, so the ecosystem is critical. You're working with AWS, you're working with Google, you got Red Hat, IBM as partners. What is attracting those folks to your ecosystem, and give us your thoughts on the importance of ecosystem. >> Yeah, that's fundamental, I mean when I came into Io-Tahoe here as CEO, one of the trends that I wanted us to be part of was being open, having an open architecture that allowed one thing that was close to my heart, which was as a CEO, a CIO, well you've got a budget vision, and you've already made investments into your organization, and some of those are pretty long term bets, they could be going out five, 10 years sometimes, with a CRM system, training up your people, getting everybody working together around a common business platform. What I wanted to ensure is that we could openly plug in, using APIs that were available, to a lot of that sunk investment, and the cost that has already gone into managing an organization's IT, for business users to perform. So, part of the reason why we've been able to be successful with some of our partners like Google, AWS, and increasingly a number of technology players such as Red Hat, MongoDB is another one that we're doing a lot of good work with, and Snowflake, there is, those investments have been made by the organizations that are our customers, and we want to make sure we're adding to that, and then leveraging the value that they've already committed to. >> Okay, so we've talked about what it is and how it works, now I want to get into the business impact, I would say what I would be looking for, from this, would be can you help me lower my operational risk, I've got tasks that I do, many are sequential, some are in parallel, but can you reduce my time to task, and can you help me reduce the labor intensity, and ultimately my labor cost, so I can put those resources elsewhere, and ultimately I want to reduce the end to end cycle time, because that is going to drive telephone number ROI, so am I missing anything, can you do those things, maybe you can give us some examples of the ROI and the business impact. >> Yeah, I mean the ROI, David, is built upon three things that I've mentioned, it's a combination of leveraging the existing investment with the existing estate, whether that's on Microsoft Azure, or AWS, or Google, IBM, and putting that to work, because the customers that we work with have made those choices. On top of that, it's ensuring that we have got the automation that is working right down to the level of data, at a column level or the file level. So we don't deal with metadata, it's being very specific, to be at the most granular level. So as we run our processes and the automation, classification, tagging, applying policies from across different compliance and regulatory needs an organization has to the data, everything that then happens downstream from that is ready to serve a business outcome. It could be a customer who wants that experience on a mobile device, a tablet, or face to face, within a store. And being able to provision the right data, and enable our customers to do that for their customers, with the right data that they can trust, at the right time, just in that real time moment where a decision or an action is being expected, that's driving the ROI to be in some cases 20x plus, and that's really satisfying to see, that kind of impact, it's taking years down to month, and in many cases months of work down to days, and some cases hours, the time to value. I'm impressed with how quickly out of the box, with very little training a customer can pick up our tool, and use features such as search, data discovery, knowledge graph, and identifying duplicates, and redundant data. Straight off the bat, within hours. >> Well it's why investors are interested in this space, I mean they're looking for a big, total available market, they're looking for a significant return, 10x is, you got to have 10x, 20x is better. So that's exciting, and obviously strong management, and a strong team. I want to ask you about people, and culture. So you got people process technology, we've seen with this pandemic that the processes are really unpredictable, and the technology has to be able to adapt to any process, not the reverse, you can't force your process into some static software, so that's very very important, but at the end of the day, you got to get people on board. So I wonder if you could talk about this notion of culture, and a data-driven culture. >> Yeah, that's so important, I mean, current times is forcing the necessity of the moment to adapt, but as we start to work our way through these changes and adapt and work with our customers to adapt to these changing economic times, what we're seeing here is the ability to have the technology complement, in a really smart way, what those business users and IT knowledge workers are looking to achieve together. So, I'll give you an example. We have quite often with the data operations teams, in the companies that we are partnering with, have a lot of inbound inquiries on a day to day level, "I really need this set of data because I think it can help "my data scientists run a particular model," or "What would happen if we combine these two different "silos of data and get some enrichment going?" Now those requests can sometimes take weeks to realize, what we've been able to do with the power of (audio glitches) technology, is to get those answers being addressed by the business users themselves, and now, with our customers, they're coming to the data and IT folks saying "Hey, I've now built something in a development environment, "why don't we see how that can scale up "with these sets of data?" I don't need terabytes of it, I know exactly the columns and the feats in the data that I'm going to use, and that cuts out a lot of wastage, and time, and cost, to innovate. >> Well that's huge, I mean the whole notion of self-service in the lines of business actually feeling like they have ownership of the data, as opposed to IT or some technology group owning the data because then you've got data quality issues, or if it doesn't line up with their agenda, you're going to get a lot of finger pointing, so that is a really important piece of it. I'll give you a last word, Ajay, your final thoughts if you would. >> Yeah, we're excited to be on this path, and I think we've got some great customer examples here, where we're having a real impact in a really fast pace, whether it's helping them migrate to the cloud, helping them clean up their legacy data lake, and quite often now, the conversation is around data quality. As more of the applications that we enable to work more proficiently could be data, RPA, could be robotic process automation, a lot of the APIs that are now available in the cloud platforms, a lot of those are dependent on data quality and being able to automate for business users, to take accountability of being able to look at the trend of their data quality over time and get those signaled, is really driving trust, and that trust in data is helping in turn, the IT teams, the data operations teams they partner with, do more, and more quickly. So it comes back to culture, being able to apply the technology in such a way that it's visual, it's intuitive, and helping just like DevOps has with IT, DataOps, putting the intelligence in at the data level, to drive that collaboration. We're excited. >> You know, you remind me of something, I lied, I don't want to go yet, if it's okay. I know we're tight on time, but you mentioned a migration to the cloud, and I'm thinking about the conversation with Paula from Webster Bank. Migrations are, they're a nasty word for organizations, and we saw this with Webster, how are you able to help minimize the migration pain and why is that something that you guys are good at? >> Yeah, I mean there are many large, successful companies that we've worked with, Webster's a great example. Where I'd like to give you the analogy where, you've got a lot of bright people in your teams, if you're running a business as a CEO, and it's a bit like a living brain. But imagine if those different parts of your brain were not connected, that would certainly diminish how you're able to perform. So, what we're seeing, particularly with migration, is where banks, retailers, manufacturers have grown over the last 10 years, through acquisition, and through different initiatives to drive customer value. That sprawl in their data estate hasn't been fully dealt with. It's sometimes been a good thing to leave whatever you've acquired or created in situ, side by side with that legacy mainframe, and your Oracle ERP. And what we're able to do very quickly with that migration challenge is shine a light on all the different parts of data application at the column level, or at the file level if it's a data lake, and show an enterprise architect, a CDO, how everything's connected, where there may not be any documentation. The bright people that created some of those systems have long since moved on, or retired, or been promoted into other roles, and within days, being able to automatically generate and keep refreshed the states of that data, across that landscape, and put it into context, then allows you to look at a migration from a confidence that you're dealing with the facts, rather than what we've often seen in the past, is teams of consultants and business analysts and data analysts, spend months getting an approximation, and a good idea of what it could be in the current state, and try their very best to map that to the future target state. Now with Io-Tahoe being able to run those processes within hours of getting started, and build that picture, visualize that picture, and bring it to life. The ROI starts off the bat with finding data that should've been deleted, data that there's copies of, and being able to allow the architect, whether it's we have working on GCP, or in migration to any of the clouds such as AWS, or a multicloud landscape, quite often now. We're seeing, yeah. >> Yeah, that visi-- That visibility is key to sort of reducing operational risk, giving people confidence that they can move forward, and being able to do that and update that on an ongoing basis means you can scale. Ajay Vohora, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your insights and your experiences, great to have you. >> Thank you David, look forward to talking again. >> All right, and keep it right there everybody, we're here with Data Automated on theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we'll be right back right after this short break. (calm music)

>>LA Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019, brought to you by Amazon web services and they don't care along with its ecosystem partners. >>Fine. Oh, welcome back here to Las Vegas. We are alive at AWS. Reinvent a lot with Justin Warren. I'm John Walls day one of a jam pack show. We had great keynotes this morning from Andy Jassy, uh, also representatives from Goldman Sachs and number of other enterprises on this stage right now we're gonna talk about data. It's all about data with IO Tahoe, a couple of the companies, representatives, CEO H J for horror. Jorge J. Thanks for being with us. Thank you Joan. And uh, Lester waters is the CSO at IO Tahoe. Leicester. Good afternoon to you. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for having us. CJ, you brought a football with you there. I see. So you've come prepared for a sport sport. I love it. All right. But if this is that your booth and your, you're showing here I assume and exhibiting and I know you've got a big offering we're going to talk about a little bit later on. First tell us about IO Tahoe a little bit to inform our viewers right now who might not be too familiar with the company. >>Sure. Well, our background was dealing with enterprise scale data issues that were really about the complexity, the amount of data and different types of data. So 2014 around when we're in stealth, kind of working on our technology, uh, the, a lot of the common technologies around them were Apache base. So Hadoop, um, large enterprises that were working with like a GE, Comcast had a cow help us come out of stealth in 2017. Uh, and grave, it's gave us a great story of solving petabyte scale data challenges, uh, using machine learning. So, uh, that manual overhead, that more and more as we look at, uh, AWS services, how do we drive the automation and get the value from data, uh, automation. >>It's gotta be the way forwards. All right, so let's, let's jump onto that then. Uh, on, on that notion, you've got this exponential growth in data, obviously working off the edge internet of things. Um, all these inputs, right? And we have so much more information at our disposal. Some of it's great, some of it's not. How do we know the difference, especially in this world where this exponential increase has happened. Lester, I mean, just tackle that for, from a, uh, from a company perspective and identifying, you know, first off, how do we ever figure out what do we have that's that valuable? Where do we get the value out of that, right? And then, um, how do we make sense of it? How do we put it into practice? >>Yeah. So I think not most enterprises have a problem with data sprawl. There's project startup, we get a block of data and then all of a sudden the new, a new project comes along, they take a copy of that data. There's another instance of it. Then there's another instance for another project. >>And suddenly these different data sources become authoritative and become production. So now I have three, four, or five different instances. Oh, and then there's the three or four that got canceled and they're still sitting around. And as an information security professional, my challenge is to know where all of those pieces of data are so that, so that I can govern it and make sure that the stuff I don't need is gotten rid of it deleted. Uh, so you know, using the IO Tahoe software, I'm able to catalog all of that. I'm able to garner insights into that data using the, the nine patent pending algorithms that we have, uh, to, to find that, uh, to do intelligent tagging, if you will. So, uh, from my perspective, I'm very interested in making sure that I'm adhering to compliance rules. So the really cool thing about the stuff is that we go and tag data, we look at it and we actually tie it to lines of regulations. So you could go CC CCPA. This bit of text here applies to this. And that's really helpful for me as an information security professional because I'm not necessarily versed on every line of regulation, but when I can go and look at it handily like that, it makes it easier for me to go, Oh, okay, that's great. I know how to treat that in terms of control. So that for, that's the important bit for me. So if you don't know where your data is, you can't control it. You can't monitor it. >>Governance. Yeah. The, the knowing where stuff is, I'm familiar with a framework that was developed at Telstra back in Australia called the five no's, which is about exactly that. Knowing where your data is, what is it, who has access to it? Cause I actually being able to cattle on the data then like knowing what it is that you have. This is a mammoth task. I mean that's, that's hard enough 12 years ago. But like today with the amount of data that's actually actively being created every single day, so how, how does your system help CSOs tackle this, this kind of issue and maybe less listed. You can, you can start off and then, then you can tell us a bit more of yourself. >>Yeah, I mean I'll start off on that. It's a, a place to kind of see the feedback from our enterprise customers is as that veracity and volume of data increases. The, the challenge is definitely there to keep on top of governing that. So continually discovering that new data created, how is it different? How's it adding to the existing data? Uh, using machine learning and the models that we create, whether it's anomaly detection or classifying the data based on certain features in the data that allows us to tag it, load that in our catalog. So I've discovered it now we've made it accessible. Now any BI developer data engineer can search for that data in a catalog and make something from it. So if there were 10 steps in that data mile, we definitely sold the first four or five to of bring that momentum to getting value from that data. So discovering it, catalog it, tagging the data to make it searchable, and then it's free to pick up for whatever use case is out there, whether it's migration, security, compliance, um, security is a big one for you. >>And I would also add too, for the data scientists, you know, knowing all the assets they have available to them in order to, to drive those business value insights that they're so important these days. For companies because you know, a lot of companies compete on very thin margins and, and, and having insights into their data and to the way customers can use their data really can make, make or break a company these days. So that's, that's critical. And as Aja pointed out, being able to automate that through, through data ops if you will, uh, and drive those insights automatically is great. Like for example, from an information security standpoint, I want to fingerprint my data and I want to feed it into a DLP system. And so that, you know, I can really sort of keep an eye out if this data is actually going out. And it really is my data versus a standard reject kind of matching, which isn't the best, uh, techniques. So >>yeah. So walk us through that in a bit more detail. So you mentioned tagging is essentially that a couple of times. So let's go into the details a little bit about what that, what that actually means for customers. My understanding is that you're looking for things like a social security number that could be sitting somewhere in this data. So finding out where are all these social security numbers that I may not be aware of and it could be being shared with someone who shouldn't have access to that, but it is there, is that what it is or are they, are there other kinds of data that you're able to tag that traditional purchase? >>Yeah. Was wait straight out of the box. You've got your um, PII or personally, um, identifiable information, that kind of day that is covered under the CCPA GDPR. So there are those standards, regulatory driven definitions that is social security number name, address would fall under. Um, beyond that. Then in a large enterprise, you've got a clever data scientists, data engineers you through the nature of their work can combine sets of data that could include work patterns, IDs, um, lots of activity. You bring that together and that suddenly becomes, uh, under that umbrella of sensitive. Um, so being able to tag and classify data under those regulatory policies, but then is what and what could be an operational risk to an organization, whether it's a bank, insurance, utility, health care in particular, if you work in all those verticals or yeah, across the way, agnostic to any vertical. >>Okay. All right. And the nature of being able to do that is having that machine learning set up a baseline, um, around what is sensitive and then honing that to what is particular to that organization. So, you know, lots of people will use ever sort of seen here at AWS S three, uh, Aurora, Postgres or, or my sequel Redshift. Um, and also different ways the underlying sources of that data, whether it's a CRM system, a IOT, all of those sources have got nuances that makes every enterprise data landscape just slightly different. So China make a rules based, one size fits all approach is, is going to be limiting, um, that the increase your manual overhead. So customers like GE, Comcast, um, that move way beyond throwing people at the problem, that's no longer possible. Uh, so being smart about how to approach this, classifying the data, using features in the data crane, that metadata as an asset just as an eight data warehouse would be, allows you to, to enable the rest of the organization. >>So, I mean, you've talked about, um, you know, deriving value and identifying value. Um, how does ultimately, once you catalog your tag, what does this mean to the bottom line of terms of ROI? How does AWS play into that? Um, you know, why am I as, as a, as a company, you know, what value am I getting out of, of your abilities with AWS and then having that kind of capability. >>Yeah. We, we did a great study with Forester. Um, they calculated the ROI and it's a mixture of things. It's that manual personnel overhead who are locked into that. Um, pretty unpleasant low productivity role of wrangling with data for want of a better words to make something of it. They'd much rather be creating the dashboards that the BI or the insights. Um, so moving, you know, dozens of people from the back office manual wrangling into what's going to make difference to the chief marketing officer and your CFO bring down the cost of served your customer by getting those operational insights is how they want to get to working with that data. So that automation to take out the manual overhead of the upfront task is an allowing that, that resource to be better deployed onto the more interesting productive work. So that's one part of the ROI. >>The other is with AWS. What we've found here engaging with the AWS ecosystem is just that speed of migration to AWS. We can take months out of that by cataloging what's on premise and saying, huh, I date aside. So our data engineering team want to create products on for their own customers using Sage maker using Redshift, Athena. Um, but what is the exact data that we need to push into the cloud to use those services? Is it the 20 petabytes that we've accumulated over the 20 last 20 years? That's probably not going to be the case. So tiering the on prem and cloud, um, base of that data is, is really helpful to a data officer and an information architect to set themselves up to accelerate that migration to AWS. So for people who've used this kind of system and they've run through the tagging and seen the power of the platform that you've got there. So what are some of the things that they're now able to do once they've got these highly qual, high quality tagged data set? >>So it's not just tagging too. We also do, uh, we do, we do, we do fuzzy, fuzzy magic so we can find relationships in the data or even relationships within the data in terms of duplicate. So, so for example, somebody, somebody got married and they're really the same, you know, so now there's their surname has changed. We can help companies find that, those bits of a matching. And I think we had one customer where we saved about, saved him about a hundred thousand a year in mailing costs because they were sending, you know, to, you know, misses, you know, right there anymore. Her name was. And having the, you know, being able to deduplicate that kind of data really helps with that helps people save money. >>Yep. And that's kind of the next phase in our journey is moving beyond the tag in the classification is uh, our roadmap working with AWS is very much machine learning driven. So our engineering team, uh, what they're excited about is what's the next model, what's the next problem we can solve with AI machine learning to throw at the large scale data problem. So we'll continually be curating and creating that metadata catalog asset. So allow that to be used as a resource to enable the rest of the, the data landscape. >>And I think what's interesting about our product is we really have multiple audiences for it. We've got the chief data officer who wants to make sure that we're completely compliant because it doesn't want that 4% potential fine. You know, so being able to evidence that they're having due diligence and their data management will go a long way towards if there is a breach because zero days do happen. But if you can evidence that you've really been, been, had a good discipline, then you won't get that fine or hopefully you won't get a big fine. And that the second audience is going to be information security professionals who want to secure that perimeter. The third is going to be the data architects who are trying to, to uh, to, you know, manage and, and create new solutions with that data. And the fourth of course is the data scientists trying to drive >>new business value. >>Alright, well before we, we, we, we um, let y'all take off, I want to know about, uh, an offering that you've launched this week, uh, apparently to great success and you're pretty excited about just your space alone here, your presence here. But tell us a little bit about that before you take off. >>Yeah. So we're here also sponsoring the jam lounge and everybody's welcome to sign up. It's, um, a number of our friends there to competitively take some challenges, come into the jam lounge, use our products, and kind of understand what it means to accelerate that journey onto AWS. What can I do if I show what what? Yeah, give me, give me an idea about the blog. You can take some chances to discover data and understand what data is there. Isn't there fighting relationships and intuitively through our UI, start exploring that and, and joining the dots. Um, uh, what, what is my day that knowing your data and then creating policies to drive that data into use. Cool. Good. And maybe pick up a football along the way so I know. Yeah. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for half the time. And, uh, again, the jam lounge, right? Right, right here at the SAS Bora AWS reinvent. We are alive. And you're watching this right here on the queue.

(gentle music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting Building Immersive Customer Experiences with Customer Data 360. Brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to Io-Tahoe's seventh installment of their Data Automation series, Building Immersive Customer Experiences with Customer Data 360. Now in this first segment, we're to catch up with Yusef Khan, who is Io-Tahoe's Head of Data Services. Yusef, always great to see you. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. It's great to be back. Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. So let's talk about Customer Data 360. What does that actually mean in terms of the data? Give us a little background here. >> Well, Dave, we're living in a world now, where customer expectations are really, really high. A world in which the customer ethos if you like, is almost, talk to me like you love me. And that attitude is pretty common. So it's a world in which if you've shared your data with an organization, you absolutely expect that organization, that company to optimize your experience using that data. And when it comes to data, these very high expectations can be challenging to meet and there are several reasons for that. I mean, to mention just a few, an enterprise can have many different diverse data sources. It can have customer records that are duplicated or incomplete, the data quality itself can be poor, and what Customer Data 360 does, is help enterprises understand their data states, get more insight on their customer base, improve data quality, and then ultimately improve their customer experience and bring it in line with the expectation of today's customers. >> Great. Thank you for that. Well, so maybe not love me, but at least know me, right? So, poor data quality, and I think we can all relate to this. Like, you call a service provider, they either have old data, or bad data, you sometimes get double billed and it's up to you to figure that out. So, can the 360 degree view help with this problem? How so? What data does it generate to address this? >> Yeah, absolutely. It can help. So Customer Data 360 allows organizations to produce a fundamentally more personalized experience for customers. It helps eliminate the often generic sales pitches people get on email or in social media ads. It helps curate recommendations that add genuine value to that specific customer. So for example, if you typically buy three products from a certain brand every month, that data is going to be tracked, saved for the future, and it will make the next month's shopping more convenient by suggesting the same products or complementary products. Not only that, Customer Data 360 will track purchases across all touch points, and understand the customer in the round. So across in store, online, mobile app, tracking all those patterns. Same time, all your data is kept secure and private, and it's only used in ways that you expect it to be used. >> Well, to me, this is really, really important. I mean, especially after this year, we've seen online purchases go through the roof. (chuckles) Every time I buy something, I get an ad for that something, then for the next week, until I turn it off. I mean, it's clear that the state of data still has a way to go based on the quality and so you're addressing that, but take us through the process of identifying for instance, incorrect data or duplicate customer data. How do you do that? >> Well, Dave customer data changes so frequently. So for example, people get married and there are name changes. People move homes, so the address changes. Emails change or get updated, people change phones or phone numbers. The list goes on. Customer Data 360 identifies records that probably belong to the same customer, and offers a unified view of the customer for insights and for campaigns. It also offers a single household view, hoping to link together data from customers based at the same address. And then finally, it gives a datum, a data target operating model, to help drive continuous improvement through the enterprise. This means it helps embed the right process and culture with the organization's people, as well as the technology. >> So Yusef, just a quick aside, if I may. So essentially, I presume you're using some kind of machine intelligence which we've talked about before, to infer from, triangulate different data points and identify the probability that this individual is the same person, right? And then making that call. >> Yeah. Using machine learning and algorithms, you're able to do this much more quickly, much more effectively, much more cost-effectively than doing it via manual methods. Sometimes using manual methods, it's not really possible to do this type of work. So absolutely, there is a technological core backend that enables this work. >> Yeah, the manual just doesn't scale and humans just frankly aren't that good at it. So besides incorrect customer data, what other kinds of challenges are companies facing, and how are you addressing those? >> There are lots of different challenges. The data quality itself may be poor, so you've got the classic, "I've got the wrong address for that customer or the wrong email address", and that can happen multiple times over if you've got multiple records for each customer as well. The customer age might not be there, can be quite critical for streaming and other online services, so who's really a child and who's an adult? That can be very, very key for consent and things like that. Data relationships and data lineage may be unclear. Updating one system may not flow through into another system. Marketing and other permissions may not be captured correctly, and even sensitive data, PII, Personally Identifiable Information may be spread through the enterprise with no real understanding of where it is. And finally, there are cultural factors, like individual functions may jealously guard their own database, they may not share data in a way that's collaborative or useful for the whole enterprise. >> Great. Thank you for that. So, the big picture is this is going to drop right to my bottom line. I mean, if I'm sending duplicate communications, physical flyers, snail mail to the same household, people are just tossing it, they get frustrated. Or if I'm unknowingly giving minors access to restricted information, we've seen horror shows like that before, if that happens, you're going to lose customers, you're going to lose money. We all know the cost of losing customers is much, much higher (chuckles) than getting them. You have to get them back, forget it. It's three, four times X, what it originally cost. Where is Io-Tahoe going, to address this and remediate these problems? >> Well, Customer Data 360 really starts by understanding and fixing the fundamentals. So it starts by helping the customer understand their data estate, mapping the data relationships and the data lineage, automatically populating a data catalog so the customer knows what they have in terms of data, automatically assessing data quality, and recommending how it can be improved, automatically analyzing data record duplication and data source redundancy, and the customer can then get to a single view of the customer and the household as we said, this is enabled by the data target operating model which embeds this process and drives continuous improvement. The enterprise can then deploy raw data for analytics, model building, data science, can then productionize those models and related pipelines, and use them to start pushing out relevant messages and offers to customers. Obviously then, you capture the results. You use those to refine the offering and continuously improve, win customers, win friends, influence people, and grow revenue times a thousand. >> So, I've got to ask you another aside, if I may. I mean, we've talked about this in previous episodes. A lot of this, correct me if I'm wrong, you've got data source issues as well. I mean, you may not know that the address has changed but there may be other data sources that you can ingest that where the address has changed and you can bring that into your platform, but oftentimes, organizations don't want to do that. They don't want to add the data source, it's too complex, it adds more data quality issues, so it's a challenge somewhat. So, I'm just kind of connecting the dots from previous conversations that we've had. You know, we're at number seven now, but I can start to see this coming together. Maybe you could comment on that data source challenge. >> Yeah, absolutely. Organizations often have, I suppose you could call it dark data or data that they don't know that they have. So it does partly start with going back to the fundamentals of what data do you hold, rationalizing that data, using automated processes and machine learning to do that so you can do it more rapidly and effectively, getting them to a single view of the customer, and then using that in all the ways that advanced analytics and data science give you these days to get to a better customer experience and a better customer outcome. But as you say, a lot of that starts with identifying your data sources and understanding your data sources in the first place. >> Well, I've been watching you guys, your progress since COVID began and you're making some good moves here, Yusef and always great to catch up. I really appreciate your time and insights. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to speak to you. Thanks for having me. >> Our pleasure. Okay, don't go away folks. Up next, we've got Ajay Vohora. He's the CEO of Io-Tahoe, and he's going to be joined by Mongo DB's principal solutions architect, talking through how to build modern apps using data RPA. Keep it right there, be right back. (gentle music)