(upbeat music) (logo shimmers) >> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to AWS re Invent 2022. We are live here from the show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada, we're theCUBE, my name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier, John, are you excited for the next segment? >> I love the innovation story, this next segment's going to be really interesting, an example of ecosystem innovation in action, it'll be great. >> Yeah, our next guests are actually award-winning, I am very excited about that, please welcome Alan and Becky from IBM. Thank you both so much for being here, how's the show going for ya? Becky you got a, just a platinum smile, I'm going to go to you first, how's the show so far? >> No, it's going great. There's lots of buzz, lots of excitement this year, of course, three times the number of people, but it's fantastic. >> Three times the number of people- >> (indistinct) for last year. >> That is so exciting, so what is that... Do you know what the total is then? >> I think it's over 55,000. >> Ooh, loving that. >> John: A lot. >> It's a lot, you can tell by the hallways- >> Becky: It's a lot. >> John: It's crowded, right. >> Yeah, you can tell by just the energy and the, honestly the heat in here right now is pretty good. Alan, how are you feeling on the show floor this year? >> Awesome, awesome, we're meeting a lot of partners, talking to a lot of clients. We're really kind of showing them what the new IBM, AWS relationship is all about, so, beautiful time to be here. >> Well Alan, why don't you tell us what that partnership is about, to start us off? >> Sure, sure. So the partnership started with the relationship in our consulting services, and Becky's going to talk more about that, right? And it grew, this year it grew into the IBM software realm where we signed an agreement with AWS around May timeframe this year. >> I love it, so, like you said, you're just getting started- >> Just getting started. >> This is the beginning of something magic. >> We're just scratching the surface with this right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> But it represents a huge move for IBM to meet our clients where they are, right? Meet 'em where they are with IBM technology, enterprise technology they're used to, but with the look and feel and usage model that they're used to with AWS. >> Absolutely and so to build on that, you know, we're really excited to be an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. We've had this relationship for a little over five years with AWS, I'd say it's really gone up a notch over the last year or two as we've been working more and more closely, doubling down on our investments, doubling down on our certifications, we've got over 15,000 people certified now, almost 16,000 actually- >> Savannah: Wow. >> 14 competencies, 16 service deliveries and counting. We cover a mass of information and services from Data Analytics, IoT, AI, all the way to Modernization, SAP, Security Services, right. So it's pretty comprehensive relationship, but in addition to the fantastic clients that we both share, we're doing some really great things around joint industry solutions, which I'll talk about in a few minutes and some of those are being launched at the conference this year, so that's even better. But the most exciting thing to me right now is that we just found out that we won the Global Innovator Partner of the Year award, and a LATAM Partner of the Year award. >> Savannah: Wow. >> John: That's (indistinct) >> So, super excited for IBM Consulting to win this, we're honored and it's just a great, exciting part to the conference. >> The news coming out of this event, we know tomorrow's going to be the big keynote for the new Head of the ecosystem, Ruba. We're hearing that it's going to be all about the ecosystem, enabling value creation, enabling new kinds of solutions. We heard from the CEO of AWS, this nextGen environment's upon us, it's very solution-oriented- >> Becky: Absolutely. >> A lot of technology, it's not an either or, it's an and equation, this is a huge new shift, I won't say shift, a continuation for AWS, and you guys, we've been covering, so you got the and situation going on... Innovation solutions and innovation technology and customers can choose, build a foundation or have it out of the box. What's your reaction to that? Do you think it's going to go well for AWS and IBM? >> I think it fits well into our partnership, right? The the thing you mentioned that I gravitate to the most is the customer gets to choose and the thing that's been most amazing about the partnership, both of these companies are maniacally focused on the customer, right? And so we've seen that come about as we work on ways the customer to access our technology, consume the technology, right? We've sold software on-prem to customers before, right, now we're going to be selling SaaS on AWS because we had customers that were on AWS, we're making it so that they can more easily purchase it by being in the marketplace, making it so they can draw down their committed spin with AWS, their customers like that a lot- [John] Yeah. >> Right. We've even gone further to enable our distributor network and our resellers, 'cause a lot of our customers have those relationships, so they can buy through them. And recently we've enabled the customer to leverage their EDP, their committed spend with AWS against IBM's ELA and structure, right, so you kind of get a double commit value from a customer point of view, so the amazing part is just been all about the customers. >> Well, that's interesting, you got the technology relationship with AWS, you mentioned how they're engaging with the software consumption in marketplace, licensed deals, there's all kinds of new business model innovations on top of the consumption and building. Then you got the consulting piece, which is again, a big part of, Adam calls it "Business transformation," which is the result of digital transformation. So digital transformation is the process, the outcome is the business transformation, that's kind of where it all kind of connects. Becky, what's your thoughts on the Amazon consulting relationships? Obviously the awards are great but- >> They are, no- >> What's the next step? Where does it go from here? >> I think the best way for me to describe it is to give you some rapid flyer client examples, you know, real customer stories and I think that's where it really, rubber meets the road, right? So one of the most recent examples are IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, in his three key results actually mentioned one of our big clients with AWS which is the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US and is an AI solution that's helped automate claims processing. So the veterans are trying to get their benefits, they submit the claims, snail mail, phone calls, you know, some in person, some over email- >> Savannah: Oh, it gives me all the feels hearing you talk about this- >> It's a process that used to take 25 to 30 days depending on the complexity of the claims, we've gotten it down with AWS down to within 24 hours we can get the veterans what they need really quickly so, I mean, that's just huge. And it's an exciting story that includes data analytics, AI and automation, so that's just one example. You know, we've got examples around SAP where we've developed a next generation SAP for HANA Platform for Phillips Carbon Black hosted on AWS, right? For them, it created an integrated, scalable, digital business, that cut out a hundred percent the capital cost from on-prem solutions. We've got security solutions around architectures for telecommunications advisors and of course we have lots of examples of migration and modernization and moving workloads using Red Hat to do that. So there's a lot of great client examples, so to me, this is the heart of what we do, like you said, both companies are really focused on clients, Amazon's customer-obsessed, and doing what we can for our clients together is where we get the impact. >> Yeah, that's one of the things that, it sounds kind of cliche, "Oh we're going to work backwards from the customer," I know Amazon says that, they do, you guys are also very customer-focused but the customers are changing. So I'd love to get your reaction because we're now in that cloud 2.0, I call that 2.0 or you got the Amazon Classic, my word, and then Next Gen Cloud coming, the customers are different, they're transforming because IT's not a department anymore, it's in the DevOps pipeline. The developers are driving a lot of IT but security and on DataOps, it's the structural change happening at the customer, how do you guys see that at IBM? I know we cover a lot of Red Hat and Arvind talks to us all the time, meeting the customer where they are, where are they? Where are the customers? Can you share your perspective on where they are? >> It's an astute observation, right, the customer is changing. We have both of those sets of customers, right, we still have the traditional customer, our relationship with Central IT, right, and driving governance and all of those things. But the folks that are innovating many times they're in the line of business, they're discovering solutions, they're building new things. And so we need our offerings to be available to them. We need them to understand how to use them and be convenient for these guys and take them through that process. So that change in the customer is one that we are embracing by making our offerings easy to consume, easy to use, and easy to build into solutions and then easy to parlay into what central IT needs to do for governance, compliance, and these types of things, it's becoming our new bread and butter. >> And what's really cool is- >> Is that easy button- >> We've been talking about- >> It's the easy button. >> The easy button a lot on the show this week and if you just, you just described it it's exactly what people want, go on Becky. >> Sorry about that, I was going to say, the cool part is that we're co-creating these things with our clients. So we're using things like the Amazon Working Backward that you just mentioned.` We're using the IBM garage methodology to get innovative to do design working, design thinking workshops, and think about where is that end user?, Where is that stakeholder? Where are they, they thinking, feeling, doing, saying how do we make the easier? How do we get the easy button for them so that they can have the right solutions for their businesses. We work mostly with lines of business in my part of the organization, and they're hungry for that. >> You know, we had a quote on theCUBE yesterday, Savannah remember one of our guests said, you know, back in the, you know, 1990s or two 2000s, if you had four production apps, it was considered complex >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, now you got hundreds of workloads, thousands of workloads, so, you know, this end-to-end vision that we heard that's playing out is getting more complex, but the easy button is where these abstraction layers and technology could come in. So it's getting more complex because there's more stuff but it's getting easier because- >> Savannah: What is the magnitude? >> You can make it easier. This is a dynamic, share your thoughts on that. >> It's getting more complex because our clients need to move faster, right, they need to be more agile, right, so not only are there thousands of applications there are hundreds of thousands microservices that are composing those applications. So they need capabilities that help them not just build but govern that structure and put the right compliance over that structure. So this relationship- >> Savannah: Lines of governance, yeah- >> This relationship we built with AWS is in our key areas, it's a strategic move, not a small thing for us, it covers things like automation and integration where you need to build that way. It covers things like data and AI where you need to do the analytics, even things like sustainability where we're totally aligned with what AWS is talking about and trying to do, right, so it's really a good match made there. >> John: It really sounds awesome. >> Yeah, it's clear. I want to dig in a little bit, I love the term, and I saw it in my, it stuck out to me in the notes right away, getting ready for you all, "maniacal", maniacal about the customer, maniacal about the community, I think that's really clear when we're talking about 24 days to 24 hours, like the veteran example that you gave right there, which I genuinely felt in my heart. These are the types of collaborations that really impact people's lives, tell me about some of the other trends or maybe a couple other examples you might have because I think sometimes when our head's in the clouds, we talk a lot about the tech and the functionality, we forget it's touching every single person walking around us, probably in a different way right now than we may even be aware- >> I think one of the things that's been, and our clients have been asking us for, is to help coming into this new era, right, so we've come out of a pandemic where a lot of them had to do some really, really basic quick decisions. Okay, "Contact Center, everyone work from home now." Okay, how do we do that? Okay, so we cobbled something together, now we're back, so what do we do? How do we create digital transformation around that so that we are going forward in a really positive way that works for our clients or for our contact center reps who are maybe used to working from home now versus what our clients need, the response times they need, and AWS has all the technology that we're working with like Amazon Connect to be able to pull those things together with some of our software like Watson Assistant. So those types of solutions are coming together out of that need and now we're moving into the trend where economy's getting tougher, right? More cost cutting potentially is coming, right, better efficiencies, how do we leverage our solutions and help our clients and customers do that? So I think that's what the customer obsession's about, is making sure we really understand where their pain points are, and not just solve them but maybe get rid of 'em. >> John: Yeah, great one. >> Yeah. And not developing in a silo, I mean, it's a classic subway problem, you got to be communicating with your community if you want to continue to serve them. And IBM's been serving their community for a very long time, which is super impressive, do you think they're ready for the challenge? >> Let's do it. >> So we have a new thing on theCUBE. >> Becky: Oh boy. >> We didn't warn you about this, but here we go. Although you told, Alan, you've mentioned you're feeling very cool with the microphone on, so I feel like, I'm going to put you in the hot seat first on this one. Not that I don't think Becky's going to smash it, but I feel like you're channeling the power of the microphone. New challenges, treat it like a 32nd Instagram reel-style story, a hot take, your thought leadership, money clip, you know, this is your moment. What is the biggest takeaway, most important thing happening at the show this year? >> Most important thing happening at the show? Well, I'm glad you mentioned it that way, because earlier you said we may have to sing (presenters and guests all laughing) >> So this is much better than- >> That's actually part of the close. >> John: Hey, hey. >> Don't worry, don't worry, I haven't forgotten that, it's your Instagram reel, go. (Savannah laughs) >> Original audio happening here on theCUBE, courtesy of Alan and IBM, I am so here for it. >> So what my takeaway and what I would like for the audience to take away, out of this conversation especially, but even broadly, the IBM AWS relationship is really like a landmark type of relationship, right? It's one of the biggest that we've established on both sides, right- >> Savannah: It seems huge, okay you are too monolith in the world of companies, like, yeah- >> Becky: Totally. >> It's huge. And it represents a strategic change on both sides, right? With that customer- >> Savannah: Fundamentally- >> In the middle right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So we're seeing things like, you know, AWS is working with us to make sure we're building products the way that a AWS client likes to consume them, right, so that we have the right integration, so they get that right look and feel, but they still get the enterprise level capabilities they're used to from IBM, right? So the big takeaway I like for people to take, is this is a new IBM, it's a new AWS and IBM relationship, and so expect more of that goodness, more of those new things coming out of it. [John] Excellent, wow. >> That was great, well done, you nailed it. and you're going to finish with some acapella, right? (Alan laughs) >> You got a pitch pipe ready? (everyone laughs) >> All right Becky, what about you? Give us your hot take. >> Well, so for me, the biggest takeaway is just the way this relationship has grown so much, so, like you said, it's the new IBM it's the new AWS, we were here last year, we had some good things, this year we're back at the show with joint solutions, have been jointly funded and co-created by AWS and IBM. This is huge, this is a really big opportunity and a really big deal that these two companies have come together, identified joint customer needs and we're going after 'em together and we're putting 'em in the booth. >> Savannah: So cool. And there's things like smart edge for welding solutions that are out there. >> Savannah: Yes. >> You know, I talked about, and it's, you know you wouldn't think, "Okay, well what's that?" There's a lot to that, a lot of saving when you look at how you do welding and if you apply things like visual AI and auditory AI to make sure a weld is good. I mean, I think these are, these things are cool, I geek out on these things- >> John: Every vertical. >> I'm geeking out with you right now, just geeking- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so- >> Every vertical is infected. >> They are and it's so impactful to have AWS just in lockstep with us, doing these solutions, it's so different from, you know, you kind of create something that you think your customers like and then you put it out there. >> Yeah, versus this moment. >> Yeah, they're better together. >> It's strategic partnership- >> It's truly a strategic partnership. and we're really bringing that this year to reinvent and so I'm super excited about that. >> Congratulations. >> Wow, well, congratulations again on your awards, on your new partnership, I can't wait to hear, I mean, we're seven months in, eight months in to this this SaaS side of the partnership, can't wait to see what we're going to be talking about next year when we have you back on theCUBE. >> I know. >> and maybe again in between now and then. Alan, Becky, thank you both so much for being here, this was truly a joy and I'm sure you gave folks a taste of the new IBM, practicing what you preach. >> John: Great momentum. >> And I'm just, I'm so impressed with the two companies collaborating, for those of us OGs in tech, the big companies never collaborated before- >> Yeah. >> John: Yeah. Joint, co-created solutions. >> And you have friction between products and everything else. I mean's it's really, co-collaboration is, it's a big theme for us at all the shows we've been doing this year but it's just nice to see it in practice too, it's an entirely different thing, so well done. >> Well it's what gets me out of the bed in the morning. >> All right, congratulations. >> Very clearly, your energy is contagious and I love it and yeah, this has been great. Thank all of you at home or at work or on the International Space Station or wherever you might be tuning in from today for joining us, here in Las Vegas at AWS re Invent where we are live from the show floor, wall-to-wall coverage for three days with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the source for high tech coverage. (cheerful upbeat music)

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

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin and Dave ante here covering day one of HPE discover 22 live from Las Vegas. We've been having some great conversations today. So far. We've got three full days coming at you. This is close to the end of day one. We're gonna have an interesting conversation next with a may the executive vice president and chief people officer at HPE. Alan. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks Lisa. Great to be here. Thanks Dave. >>It's great to be back in person. The keynote this morning, standing room, only people are ready. People are ready to be back to hear what HPE has been doing the last couple of years since the last conference, but I've heard you and Antonio talk about the human side of change. It's challenging humans. Humans are uncomfortable with change, right? Unfortunately we are, but it is a big challenge. How, what are some of the things that you're seeing as organizations are really looking and have to transform digitally? They gotta bring the humans along >>Well. You know, our folks as anybody is just bombarded with data these days bombarded with issues and, and it's really down to share of mind when it comes down to it. If, if you're asking someone to change first, you gotta break through the clutter. There's so many things going on in their world and in their life as individuals. But to me, the foundation is you really have to define what is the mission and purpose of the organization, and then make sure that individual feels safe and comfortable participating at work. I know those sound like soft things, but at the end of the day, you're not gonna have the gumption or the desire to change unless you care about something bigger than yourself and that you feel safe bringing your authentic self to work. >>So you have to be kind of, yeah. Have to be good at sales, I guess, because you have to sell the mission. Well, what do you do if somebody's not comfortable? If they, how do you get them to align? I mean, you, you, it's always a challenge. And that's like, I think what makes the people side of the equation so hard? What's your sort of secret sauce there? >>Well, I wouldn't say it's secret sauce, but you know, we define our mission is improving the way people work and live. Now that sounds so general. But the good thing about that is I think about every one of our 60,000 associates around the world can write theirselves into that mission. Sign >>Up >>For that. Yeah. It's not so specific that you think am I opting in, I am opting out. The other piece is you've gotta give employee voice. You have to give your team members an opportunity, not just to, you know, follow blindly, whatever you're saying, you don't want that. You actually want them to challenge it. You want 'em to say, Hey, what does that really mean, Alan? What does that mean, Antonio? When you say we're improving the way, you know, people work and live, what does it mean when we say commit and go or force for good, these are not just pithy phrases. They're ways to engage dialogue. That's how you get people to think and to create and innovate and to change >>And creating that employee experience and changing that and, and transforming that as obviously the world change, especially the last couple of years, but the employee experience and what they think. And are they, are we part of the vision? Are we, part of the mission is directly relates to the customer experience. Those two things to me are inextricably linked well >>In, in our company, it's all about innovation, but not innovation just for the sake of designing things, but to meet customer needs. So you've actually gotta inculcate in your workforce. A couple of things. One obviously is that freedom to be creative, but the other piece is actually actively listening to our customers and recognizing and understanding what they need and how we can satisfy those needs. When you can bring both of those things together, I tell you, you can do all kinds of things with your workforce. >>So, I mean, I'm hearing you obviously look for common ground, but sometimes there's, there's the dissonance, right? The, you know, creating that great human condition might not necessarily be advantageous for short-term profits. You're a public company. So, so how what's that discussion like, and, and, and I presume there's gotta be a long-term vision, but still how, how do you handle those types of >>Things? Well, that, that's what I call dynamic tension. Good, great organizations, encourage dynamic tension. They don't simply ask people to blindly adhere to whatever they're saying. They actually ask their employees to think and to create and to debate and to argue respectfully, of course, that's how you really get to that virtuous circle of innovation and people moving forward. Now, look, I, I'm not naive. We don't have 60,000 team members totally aligned on every point every day. But I think we've got the vast majority knowing ultimately where we're going. And frankly, some of the fun is figuring out how to get there. And that means that you've gotta have those open discussions to get there. >>Well, you talk about dynamic tension and at the first sort of thought of it, it sounds like it can be a challenging thing, but it also sounds like it can really be an accelerant to the culture and the ability for the company to move forward and obviously meet those customer demands. >>Well, if you're defining what's new in the world, that's the only way you get there because nobody has, you know, basically a lock on innovation or what's the best next thing. When you have the power of bringing a diverse set of individuals together and really create forms for them to explore debate, argue, as I mentioned, that's where you really move forward. >>How do you think about how, how, how has your thinking changed? The company's thinking changed post pandemic with regard to hybrid work, you have something Elon Musk, you gotta come to work at least 40 hours, or you're gone. We, we, we heard someone on wall street have similar things, say similar things and others have said, Hey, we have no headquarters anymore. You know, we're moving to, you know, someplace remote what's H HP's point of view on >>That. Well, thanks for that question in particular. And Dave, what you outlined is we seem to have a world of two extremes out there. Yeah. Where either companies say it's back to the old days pre COVID and you're not working unless I see the sweat on your brow and you're there at eight o'clock on Monday morning, then we have other companies say, Hey, it doesn't matter. Mail it in wherever you are around the world. You know, we're in between that, we think it's important that people do get together face to face. And in fact, we've asked our team members to come back a couple of three days a week in the office, but to do it in a purposeful, thoughtful way, it doesn't mean just coming in, swiping your bad shame that you were there. It means coming in to collaborate, to meet with customers, to celebrate, to innovate, to work with groups. >>So what we're trying to do now is orchestrate those moments that matter for our team members, for a reason, for them to be together. Now, there's no reason for them to come in the office. If they're on zoom or team meetings all day, we know that. But the fact is we believe that our culture thrives when people get together at least a bit during the week. So we're looking for that happy medium. I can't say we've got it all figured out, but I can tell you right now, we're not on those two extremes. We're absolutely center the plate. >>So you encouraged that. That was a great description. If somebody says, Hey, but I, I really want to go move to Bozeman, you know, and hang out there and I'll work remote and I'll, I'll be productive. You, you enable that as well. Or would you discourage that? Yeah. We've >>Hired people all over the world and we actually have people based upon their job classified. If they're so-called hybrid employees, the, the, the situation I mentioned, which is you're not required to come to the office, but we encourage it. In some cases we do have telecomm commuters. If they have the kind of job where they can work from Bozeman or from Bangalore or from any place else, we're open to that as well. Cuz we don't wanna rule out that talent. But the vast majority of our folks, we'd like to be pretty close to one of our centers of excellence to one of our offices, to one of our locations because that fuels our customers, our, our culture, and really it creates community. Now I can't predict the future, but frankly, a lot of the issues that we've seen through a, the, the pandemic around mental health, around isolation, around increased stress, those are not all gonna go away because people are getting back together. But I do think that the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated, some of those conditions, people do want to be together and we're gonna make that happen. >>I, I can't predict the future, but I often try and I, I predict, I think the hybrid model, it will be the dominant model going forward. And I think that that, that smart organizations will put incentives in place to get people together. Not, oh, you won't get promoted. No, but you're gonna, you're gonna actually enjoy getting together periodically with, with your teammates and we're gonna support you, you know, wherever you want to live. >>Yeah. >>What are some of the key skill sets these days that HPE is looking for to attract these folks in an increasingly digital world? What are some of those things you say ABC gotta have it. >>Well, interesting. You ask that. Get asked that question a lot. And people expect me to say, they gotta know C plus plus they've gotta, you know, know all the latest on AI. They gotta be a mathematical wizard to do all kinds of things that we do in algorithms. You know, it's not, it's not those factors. It's the behavioral factors. We're looking for people. First of all, that have intellectual curiosity. They thrive to learn. They thrive to innovate. They don't want to just do a job. They want to come in and they want to create something big. So I think that's first and foremost, the second one is we look for people that have some resiliency have they had in their experience broadly in life ever had to deal with stress with resistance, with, you know, uncomfortable situations. Not because that's our work environment, but because that's the world, the world is an actively changing one. >>And we need people who have got that resilience and that intellectual curiosity to kind of move forward. And then last but not least. And this goes back to our founder DNA. I, I talk about this a lot. Our founders, bill and Dave talked a lot about basic things, respect for one another collaboration, teamwork. That's our culture. Now that's not the culture that a lot of other firms have out there. And in some companies they have maybe a harder edge, but those are the things that really propel our organization. Those are the things our customers appreciate the most. >>What's your point of view on the, the so-called great resignation? Is it a sort of a media created dynamic? Is it something that is maybe a, a somewhat of a knee jerk reaction in the post isolation economy? How do you think about that? >>You know, I, it's real obviously, and, and we've seen some uptick in our, our turnover, although I'm happy to say our turnovers a half to a third of what our competitors are. So we, we seem to have been able to retain our folks pretty well. But I do think that coming out of the pandemic was a, an inflection point. For many people. It was such a searing experience in so many ways. It caused people to really reflect and say, do I want to do something different now? That's great. But I'd like to have them do something different in HPE, if they're one of our employees. So what we're focusing on is gigs. What's your next opportunity to learn something new, do something new, move to a different area. You know, we used to call it career development. Those days are gone of just job ladders and wait for the next job and wait for the next promotion. It's all about how can you give someone a new opportunity and challenge them. And when you're able to do that, I think you can create a real positive dynamic that results in greater retention. But I do think the great resurrection it's real, it's gonna persist one other data point. Well, before COVID supply and demand, I'm an economist, not a psychologist. And at the end of the day, we have fewer and fewer people available to do the kinds of work that we're trying to hire. So those two factors together do create some, some turnover. >>You know, what's interesting is certainly pre pandemic. The prediction was that machines were gonna replace humans, which has always happened, but for the first time ever, it's in cognitive functions. And there's a lot of concern in the press about, you know, the impact on, on jobs and employment seems like the reverses happened, which is often the way, but, but, but longer term, what's your point of view on, on, on that, that piece of, of the equation, people are talking about digital transformation, AI, we see robotic process automation. Initially, a lot of employees are really concerned. Whoa, they're gonna replace my job. We've certainly seen that. And you know, if you were, you see kiosks at the airport, people used to actually put up, you know, billboards and with, with the glue and paper and you know, those jobs are gone, but now other jobs are, are, are at risk. How do you think about that? What, what should companies like HPE and society do to help people get to the point where they can thrive in that environment? >>Yeah. Look, I, it, it's an observation that, that I could say based upon my career, I've seen for many, many years, I can remember back manufacturing when at least from a us perspective, many of those manufacturing firms were shedding jobs because of automation. And there are short term disruptions and those are real. Those are human. And we do have to help people through those. Now I think one obligation an employer has, is let's start with our own folks. Let's make sure we retrain them. Let's make sure we expose them to the latest skills. Let's give them an opportunity to grow and develop. So I think if we do those things, we can help people through those transitions over the long haul. I'm actually very optimistic. I believe that over time, people self-select, these things don't happen overnight. I'll give you one tiny little anecdote before the pandemic. All of this world about autonomous vehicles can eliminate truck drivers. Well, you know, back in the day I actually drove a truck and it's not just driving. You've gotta interact with somebody in a dock door. You've gotta do all kinds of other tasks that can't be automated. And so things will happen over time, but I don't think we're gonna see this massive social disruption people were worried about. There is an incumbent responsibility on firms to train their own people and to keep them up to speed. And that's something we're deeply committed to at HPE >>Is information technology, employment, a parallel. I mean, everybody thought the cloud was gonna destroy the it, you know, worker that didn't happen. They just sort of changed their skillset. They became, you know, cloud experts or cloud architects. Is there a parallel there? >>Yeah, I think there's absolutely a parallel. And while probably the, the rate of change is quicker in, in some tech industries than perhaps others. All we're doing is creating new markets and new opportunities. And ultimately the lack of, of skill that we have, the lack of talent in the external marketplace is gonna mean that it's still very much an opportunity for people to learn, grow, develop, and be employed. >>Do you think that's, it's a matter of, of, of awareness on people not really understanding that whether it's still fear? >>Well, I, I think there may be some of that, but again, I, I, I do think from a, a broader social perspective, there's probably some things that in the public policy we can do to improve education and training, particularly for new entrants and make sure they're learning the skills for tomorrow's jobs and not just today's, but can I'm optimistic. And I actually think most responsible companies get this. And if you talk to their CEOs, the top tier or three issues that they have include access to talent. So why don't we recycle repurpose and reuse to use the sustainability phrase instead of throwing people outta work that have all kinds of intellectual property and capability to be very productive. And that's what we do at HPE. >>And that curiosity, that's something that you can't teach, right? Exactly. Have it, or >>You don't. Exactly. >>So last question, in terms of, of looking at culture corporate culture, as a, as an accelerant, as a catalyst of digital transformation, how do you advise leadership teams? >>Well, I, we've done a fair amount of work in the last five years, defining the culture in very small frankly soundbites. And the way you make that come to life is back what I mentioned before. You have to engage people and ask them to debate it. What does it mean to say, commit and go? What does it mean to say force for good, those kind of conversations, help your culture evolve, help your culture become real and not just a bunch of words on some piece of paper or, or posters someplace. I will say from my experience, and, and particularly with a new entrance to the workforce, if you can't define your culture quickly for this next generation coming in, you're, you're, there's no way you're gonna attract that talent. And so put me on the spot. HPE is here to help people live and grow and work better, and we try to be a force for good. We focus on that and we create work that fits your life. Not the other way around. That's my elevator speech. It sounds pithy, but it's an invitation to have a deeper discussion. >>I love it. And I think this is only day one for us here, but I think that we're, we're seeing, and we're feeling that culture there's 8,000 or so HP folks, executives, partners, customers, ready to come back and innovate with each other. I think that culture is palpable, that you've created. >>Great. It's exciting. And thank you so much for being part of it. >>Thanks, Alan. Pleasure. Thanks, Alan. We appreciate your insights. Okay. For our guests. I'm Dave ante. I Lisa Martin stick around. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're gonna be back after your short break.

>>The queue presents Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain and Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon, senior editor, enterprise architecture, Silicon angle. We are going to talk to some amazing folks, especially in today's segment. Paul there's a lot of companies here, like what what's been the, the consistent theme you've heard so far in the show. >>Well, you know, one thing that's different from this show, it seems to me than others I've attended is it's all around open source. We're not seeing a lot of companies bringing new proprietary technology to market. We are seeing them try to piece together, open source components with some kind of, perhaps there's a proprietary element to it, but to create some kind of a, a common management interface or control plane, and that's quite different from what I think we've seen in the past and open source business models have been difficult to make work historically. And these companies are all taking their, their own approaches to it. But I think the, the degree to which this, the people here of coalesced around the importance of open source is building blocks to the future of, of applications is something I've not seen quite this way before. >>Well, with our current segment guests, we're gonna go deep into kind of these challenges and how enterprises are addressing, and their partners are addressing with those challenges we have with us, a flower head of cloud native HCL technologies. We'll get into how a system integrator is helping with this transition to Ramon neon, senior product manager, redhead. Welcome to the show. You're now cute. Alum. Welcome. >>Thanks for having us. >>So we're gonna get right off, off the bat. We're gonna talk about this. What are some of the trends you're seeing when it comes to application migration? You've done, I'm assuming at this point, thousands of them, what are some of the common trends? >>Well, it's a very good question. And clearly a C we've helped thousands of clients move tens of thousands of applications to what we would call a cloud native, you know, environment. I think the overwhelming trend that we're seeing of course is clients realize it's a particularly complex, sophisticated journey. It requires a certain set of skills and capability clients increasingly asking us for anything that we can do to simplify and accelerate the journey, cuz what's really important to clients. If you're on a transformation journey to cloud is you wanna see some value very quickly. So I don't wanna wait three to five years to transform my applications portfolio. If you can do something in three to five days, that would be perfect. Thank you. >>Well, three to five days, that sounds more akin to when we were doing P to V or V to V migrations, I'm sure HCL is at this point done in the millions of those types of migrations. What are some of the challenges or the nuance in doing a traditional migration from a traditional MI monolithic application to a cloud native? >>Well, it's another good question. Of course you notice that there's a general trend in the industry. Clients don't really want to lift and shift anymore. Lift and shift doesn't really bring any transformational value to my, to my company. So clients are looking for increasingly what we could call cloud native modernization. I want my applications to really take advantage of the cloud native environment. They need to be elastic and kind of more robust than maybe before now in particular, I think a lot of clients have realized that this state of Nirvana, which was we're gonna modernize everything to be a cloud native microservices based application. That is a tremendous journey, but no client really has the time patient or resources to fully refactor or rearchitect all of their applications. They're looking for more immediate kind of impact. So a key trend that we've seen of course is clients still want to refactor and modernize applications, but they're focusing those resources on those applications that will bring greater impact to their business. >>What they now see as a better replacement for lift and shift is probably what we would call replatforming, where they want all of the advantages of a cloud native environment, but they haven't necessarily got the time to modernize the code base. They wanna refactor to Kubernetes and re replatform to Kubernetes in particular, and they want us to take them there quickly. And that's why, for example, this week at cuon eight sellers announced a new set of tools called KMP based on conveyor, an open source project supported by red hat. And the key attraction of KMP is it lets me replatform my applications to Kubernetes immediately, right? Within two or three minutes, I can bring an application from a legacy platform directly onto Kubernetes and I can take it straight into production. That's the kind of acceleration that clients are looking for today. Isn't >>That just a form of lift and shift though? >>Well, no lift and shift typically of course, was moving virtual machines from one place to another. You know, the focus of Kubernetes of course is containerization of solutions. And it's not just about containerizing the solution and movement. It it's the DevOps tool chain around the solution as well. And of course, when I take that application into production in a Kubernetes based environment, I'm expecting to operate it in a different way as well. So that's where we see tremendous focus on what we would call cloud native operations clients expecting to use practices like site reliability engineering, to run these replatformed applications in a different way to, >>It sounds like you're saying, I mean, replatforming has been a, a spectrum of options. I think Gartner has seven different types of platforming. Are you seeing clients take more mature attitude now to replatforming? Are they looking more carefully at the characteristics of their legacy applications and, and try to try to make maybe more nuanced choices about what to replatform, what to just leave >>Alone? I think clients and I I'm sure Ramon's got some comments on this too, but clients have a lot more insight now in terms of what works for them. They they've realized that this, this promise of maybe a microservices based applications estate is a good one, but I can't do that for every application. If I am a large enterprise with several thousand applications in my portfolio, I can't refactor everything to become microservices based. So clients see replatforming possibly it's a middle ground. I, I get a lot of the advantages from a cloud native environment. My applications are inherently more efficient, hopefully a lot more performance. >>Yeah. It's, it's a matter of software delivery performance. Yeah. So legacy workloads will definitely benefit from being brought into Kubernetes in the software delivery per performance department. So it's a matter of somehow revamping your, your legacy applications and getting the benefits in, in life's application, life cycle management, a full tolerance and all that stuff. It's about leveraging the, what Kubernetes offers. >>When you say bringing legacy applications into Kubernetes. It's not that simple, right? I mean, what's involved in doing that. >>It, it, isn't, it's just a matter of taking a holistic view at your application portfolio and understanding the nuance sets of each application type within your organization and trying to come up with a suitable migration strategy for each one of these application types. And for that, what we're trying to do is provide a series of standardized tools and methodologies from a community perspective, we created this conveyor community. It, it was kick started by red hat and IBM, but we are trying to bring as many vendors and GSI as possible to try to set up these standards to make these road towards Kubernetes as easy as >>Possible. So we've done a little bit of app modernization in the CTO advisor hybrid infrastructure. And one of the things that we've found is there's plenty of Avan advantages. If I take a monolithic application that has that I've traditionally had to scale off to game performance, I can take selective parts of that, and now I can add autoscaling to it. Exactly. However, as I look at a landscape Allen of thousands of applications, I need to dedicate developer resources to get that done in my traditional environment. But my traditional environment is busy building new. My traditional or my developers are building new applications and new capabilities. I just don't have the resources to do that. How does HCL and red hat team together to kind of fast track that capability? >>Well, I'll comment on two things in particular, actually the, the first thing when it comes to skilling, I think the thing that's really surprised us at HCL is so many of our clients around the world have said, we are desperately short of skills. We cannot hire ourselves out of this problem. We need to get our existing developer community reskilled around platforms like OpenShift, conveyor, and other projects too. So the first thing that's happened to us at eight seal is we've been incredibly busy undertaken, probably what we would call developer workforce modernization, right? Where we have to help the client reskill their entire technical and developer community to give them the skills, right. So we will help the clients develop a community, build the cloud native understanding, help them understand how to modernize tools for example, or applications. But the second thing I mention is, and this comes back to a comment the Ram made around around conveyor. >>It's been really encouraging to see the open source community, start to invest in building the supporting frameworks around my kind of modernization journey, because if I'm a developer that's reskilling and I'm attempting to maybe modernize an application, being able to dip into an opensource project, I mean, a good example would be tackled part of the conveyor project. Exactly. You now have open source based tools that will help you analyze your applications. They will go into the source code and they will give the developer guidance in terms of what would be effective treatments to undertake. So perhaps a development team that are new to this modernization journey, they would benefit from a project like conveyor, for example, exactly because I need to know where can I safely modernize my application now for experience organizations like HCL that comes naturally to us, but for people who are just starting this journey, if I can take an open source tool like tackle or the rest of conveyor, for example, and use that to accelerate my journey, it takes a lot of pressure off, off my organization, but it also accelerates the journey too. And >>It's not just a matter of, of tooling. We we're also, opensourcing the, the modernization methodology that we've been using in red hat consulting for years. So this whole conveyor communities, it's all about knowledge sharing on one hand and building a set of tools together based on that knowledge that we are sharing to make it as easy as possible. >>And what role does red hat play in all that, I mean is your, your, you you've carved out this position for yourself as the, as the true open source company. Is that, does that position you for a leadership role in helping or companies make this >>Transition? I wouldn't say we should be leading the whole thing. We, we kick started it, but we want to get other vendors on board for this thing. One cool thing about the Camra community is that IBM is opensourcing a lot of their IP. So IBM research is on board. In this thing, we have some really crazy stuff related to a AI being applied to application analysis. We have some machine learning in place. We have very cool stuff that has been sitting on a, on a corner in IBM research for quite some years that now it's being open sourced and integrated in a unified user experience to streamline the modernization process as much as possible. >>So let's talk about the elephant of the room. HCL was leading the conversation around cloud Foundry circa five plus years ago. And as customers are thinking about their journey to cloud native, how should they think about that cloud Foundry to cloud native or Kubernetes replatform? >>Well with within the cloud Foundry community, we've, we've been quite staunched supporters of Kubernetes for quite some time, right? It's, it's quite a, a stated intent of the cloud Foundry foundation to, to move across to Kubernetes platform right now that is a significant engineering journey for cloud Foundry to take. Now we're in this position where a lot of large users of cloud Foundry have a certain urgency to their journey. They, they want to consolidate on a single Kubernetes based infrastructure. We, we see a lot of traction around OpenShift, for example, from red hat in terms of its market leadership. So a lot of clients are saying we would like to consolidate all of our platforms around a single kind of Kubernetes vendor, whether that's red hat or anyone else, you know, quite frankly. So what HCL is doing right now with the tools and the solutions we've announced this week is we're simply accelerating that journey for clients. If I've got a large installed base of applications running in my cloud Foundry environment, and I've also started to invest in standardize on Kubernetes place platforms like OpenShift, most clients would see it as quite a sensible choice to now try and consolidate those two environments into one. And that's simply what we're doing at HCL. We're making it very, very easy. In fact, we fully automated the journey so I can move all of my applications from cloud Foundry into for example, OpenShift pretty much immediately, and it just simplifies the entire journey. >>So the, as we start to wrap up the segment, I like to know customer stories. What, what, how customers either surprised or challenged when they get into, even with the help of an ACL in redhead, why are they seeing the most difficult parts of their migrations? >>Well, my, my simple comment would be maybe complexity, right? And the, the associated requirement for skilled people to undertake this modernization work, right? We spoke about this, of course, in terms of clients now are a lot more realistic. They understand that their ambition now needs to be somewhat tempered by their ability to sort of drive modernization quickly. So we see a lot of clients when they look at their very large global portfolios of applications, they're trying to invest their resources in the higher priority applications, the revenue generative applications in particular, but they have to bring everything else with them as well. Now, a common kind of separation point was we see a lot of clients who might say I'm gonna properly modernize and refactor, maybe five to 10% of my portfolio, but the other 90% also needs to come on the journey as well. And that's really where replatforming in particular kicks in. So, so the key trend again, is, is clients send to us, I've gotta take the entire journey. All right, I've got the resources and the skills to really focus on this much of my application base. Can someone simplify the overall journey so I can afford to bring everything on a cloud native journey? >>So the key to success here is having a holistic view at the application portfolio, segmenting the application portfolio in different application types and ordering the, the priorities of these application types and come up with suitable migration strategies for each one of them is >>Really necessary to move everything though. >>Not necessarily, no. Yeah. Or not necessarily. Yeah, absolutely not everything, but it would make sense. As we were saying before, it will definitely move, make sense to move legacy applications towards Kubernetes, to leverage all the software delivery. >>That's, that's a big project, right? >>It is. >>If you're gonna restructure the application around eight API and microservices, >>That it should be taken the way I've seen organizations succeeding the most in these road towards cloud native and Kubernetes in general is trying to address the whole portfolio. Maybe not move everything, but try to have this holistic view and not leave anything behind. Because if you try to do this isolated initiatives of bringing these or that application in, in isolation, you're Def you, you will miss part of the picture and you might be doomed to fail >>There. Yeah. It's been my experience that if you don't have a plan to migrate your applications to a cloud native operating model, then you're doomed to follow lift and shift examples to the public cloud. Yeah. Whether you're going to any other clouds, if you don't make that, that operational transition. Last question on operational transition, we've talked a lot about the replatforming process itself. What about day two at the I've landed to the cloud? What are some of the top considerations for, for compliance op observability? Just making sure my apps stay up in transitioning my workforce to that model. >>I think the over, you know, the overarching trend or theme that, that I see is clients now are, are asking for what I would call cloud native operations. Now in particular, there's a very solid theme around what we would call reliability engineering. So think about site reliability, engineering, SRE platform, reliability engineering, PR E. These are the dominant topics that clients now want to engage HCL on in particular, because the point you make is a valid one. I've modernized my application. Now I need to modernize the way that I operate the application in production. Otherwise I won't see those benefits. So that general theme of SRE is keeping us really busy. We're busy, re-skilling all of those operations teams around the world as well, because they need to know how to run these environments appropriately >>Too. And also being able to measure your progress while your transitioning is important. And that's one of the concerns that we are addressing as well in the community with a called polars to, to measure and to effectively measure the software delivery performance of, of the organization after the transition has been done. >>And this is a really good point by the way, cuz most, most people think it's a bit of a black art. How do I understand how I modernize my application? How do I understand how I've improved my kind of value chain around software creation and many people thought you needed to bring in very expensive consultants to advise you on these, on these black lives? No, >>Definitely >>Not. But in open source projects like conveyor from, from red hat, the availability of these tools available on an open source model means exactly any engineer, any developer can get these tools off the shelf and get that immediate benefit. >>Well, a flower head of creative labs at HCL at Ramon neon, senior product manager, redhead. Thank you for joining the Q you now cube alum. You'll have a nice profile like the profile pictures on here. Awesome. Absolutely. Thank you. From Valencia Spain. I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the cue, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain and Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon, senior editor, enterprise architecture and Silicon angle. We are going to talk to some amazing folks, especially in today's segment. Paul, uh, there's a lot of companies here, like what what's been the, the consistent theme you've heard so far in the show. >>Well, you know, one thing that's different from this show, it seems to me than others I've attended is it's all around open source. We're not seeing a lot of companies bringing new proprietary technology to market. We are seeing them try to piece together, open source components with some kind of, perhaps there's a proprietary element to it, but to create some kind of a, a common management interface or control plane, and that's quite different from what I think we've seen in the past open source business models have been difficult to make work historically. Uh, and these companies are all taking their, their own approaches to it. But I think the, the degree to which this, the people here of coalesced around the importance of open source is building blocks to the future of, of applications is something I've not seen quite this way before. >>Well, with our current segment, guess we're gonna go deep into kind of these challenges and how enterprises are addressing, and their partners are addressing with those challenges we have with us, a flower head of cloud native HCL technologies. We'll get into how a system integrator is helping with this transition to Ramon neon, senior product manager, redhead. Welcome to the show. You're now cube alum. Welcome. Thanks for having us. So we're gonna get right off, uh, off the bat. We're gonna talk about this. What are some of the trends you're seeing when it comes to application migration? You've done, I'm assuming at this point, thousands of them, what are some of the common trends? >>Well, it's a very good question. And clearly ACL we've helped thousands of clients move tens of thousands of applications to what we would call a cloud native, um, you know, environment. I think the overwhelming trend that we're seeing of course is clients realize it's a particularly complex, sophisticated journey. It requires a certain set of skills and capability clients increasingly us for anything that we can do to simplify and accelerate the journey, cuz what's really important to clients. If you're on a transformation journey to cloud is you wanna see some value very quickly. So I don't wanna wait three to five years to transform my applications portfolio. If you can do something in three to five days, that would be perfect. Thank you. >>Well, three to five days, that sounds more akin to when we were doing, uh, P to V or V to V migrations. I'm sure. Uh, HCL is at this point done in the millions of those types of migrations. What are some of the challenges or the nuance in doing a traditional migration from a traditional MI monolithic application to a cloud native? >>Well, it's another good question. Of course you notice that there's a general trend in the industry. Clients don't really want to lift and shift anymore. Lift and shift doesn't really bring any transformational value to my, to my company. So clients are looking for increasingly what we could recall, cloud native modernization. I want my applications to really take advantage of the cloud native environment. They need to be elastic and kind of more robust than maybe before now in particular, I think a lot of clients have realized that this state of Nirvana, which was we're gonna modernize everything to be a cloud native microservices based application. That is a tremendous journey, but no client really has the time patient or resources to fully refactor or rearchitect all of their applications. They're looking for more immediate kind of impact. So a key trend that we've seen of course is clients still want to refactor and modernize applications, but they're focusing those resources on those applications that will bring greater impact to their business. >>What they now see as a better replacement for lift and shift is probably what we would call replatforming, where they want all of the advantages of a cloud native environment, but they haven't necessarily got the time to modernize the code base. They wanna refactor to Kubernetes in re replatform to Kubernetes in particular, and they want us to take them there quickly. And that's why, for example, this week at cuon eight sellers announced a new set of tools called KMP based on conveyor, an open source project supported by red hat. And the key attraction of KMP is it lets me replatform my applications to Kubernetes immediately, right? Within two or three minutes, I can bring an application from a legacy platform directly onto Kubernetes and I can take it straight into production. That's the kind of acceleration that clients are looking for today. Isn't >>That just a form of lift and shift though? >>Well, no lift and shift typically of course, was moving virtual machines from one place to another. You know, the focus of Kubernetes of course is containerization of solutions. And it's not just about containerizing the solution and moving it. It's the DevOps tool chain around the solution as well. And of course, when I take that application into production in a Kubernetes based environment, I'm expecting to operate it in a different way as well. So that's where we see tremendous focus on what we would call cloud native operations clients expecting to use practices like site reliability engineering, to run these replatformed applications in a different way to, so >>It sounds like you're saying, I, I mean, replatforming has been a, a spectrum of options. I think Gartner has seven different types of re-platforming. Uh, are you seeing clients take more mature attitude now toward replatforming? Are they looking more carefully at the characteristics of their legacy applications and, and trying to try to make maybe more nuanced choices about what to replatform, what to just leave >>Alone? I think clients and I I'm sure Ramon's got some comments on this too, but clients have a lot more insight now in terms of what works for them. They they've realized that this, this promise of maybe a microservices based applications estate is a good one, but I can't do that for every application. If I am a large enterprise with several thousand applications in my portfolio, I can't refactor everything to become microservices based. So clients see replatforming possibly is a middle ground. I, I get a lot of the advantages from a cloud native environment. My applications are inherently more efficient, hopefully a lot more performance. >>Yeah. It's, it's a matter of software delivery performance. Yeah. So, uh, legacy workloads will definitely benefit from, uh, being brought into Kubernetes in the software delivery per performance department. So, uh, it's a matter of, uh, somehow Rebump your, your legacy applications and getting the benefits in, in life's application, life cycle management, a, uh, full tolerance and all that stuff. It's about leveraging the, what Kubernetes offers. >>When you say bringing legacy applications into Kubernetes. It's not that simple, right? I mean, what's involved in doing that. >>It, it, isn't, it's just a matter of taking a holistic view at your application portfolio and understanding the nuances of each application type within your organization and trying to come up with a suitable migration strategy for each one of these application types. And for that, what we're trying to do is provide a series of standardized, um, tools and methodologies, uh, from a community perspective, uh, we created this conveyor community. Uh, it, it was kick started by red hat and IBM, but we are trying to bring as many vendors and GSI, uh, as possible to try to set up these standards to make these, uh, road towards Kubernetes as easy as >>Possible. So we've done a little bit of, uh, app modernization in the CTO advisor hybrid infrastructure. And one of the things that we've found, there's plenty of Avan advantages. If I take a monolithic application that has, uh, that I've traditionally had to scale off to, uh, game performance, I can take selective parts of that, and now I can add auto-scaling to it. Exactly. However, as I look at a landscape Allen of thousands of applications, uh, I need to dedicate developer resources to get that done and my traditional environment, but my traditional environment is busy building new. My traditional or my developers are building new applications and new capabilities. I just don't have the resources to do that. How does HCL and red hat team together to kind of fast track that capability? >>Well, um, I'll comment on two things in particular, actually the, the first thing when it comes to skilling, I think the thing that's really surprised us at HCL is so many of our clients around the world have said, we are desperately short of skills. We cannot hire ourselves out of this problem. We need to get our existing developer community re-skilled around platforms like OpenShift, conveyor, and other projects too. So the first thing that's happened to us at eight still is we've been incredibly busy undertaken, probably what we would call developer workforce modernization, right, where we have to help the client reskill their entire technical and developer community to give them the skills, right. So we will help the clients develop a community, build the cloud native understanding, help them understand how to modernize tools for example, uh, or applications. But the second thing I mention is, and this comes back to a comment that Ramon made around around conveyor. >>It's been really encouraging to see the open source community start to invest in building the supporting frameworks around my kind of modernization journey, because if I'm a developer that's re-skilling and I'm attempting to maybe modernize an application, being able to dip into an open source project, I mean, a good example would be tackled part of the conveyor project. Exactly. You now have open source based tools that will help you analyze your applications. They will go into the source code and they will give the developer guidance in terms of what would be effective treatments to undertake. So perhaps a development team that are new to this modernization journey, they would benefit from a project like conveyor, for example, because I need to know where can I safely modernize my application now for experience organizations like HCL that comes naturally to us, but for people who are just starting this journey, if I can take an open source tool like tackle or the rest of the conveyor, for example, and use that to accelerate my journey, it takes a lot of pressure off, off my organization, but it also accelerates the journey too. >>And it's not just a matter of, of tooling. We we're also opensourcing, uh, the, the modernization methodology that we've been using in red hat consulting for years. So this whole conveyor communities, it's all about knowledge sharing on one hand and building a set of tools together, based on that knowledge that we are sharing to make it as easy as possible. >>And what role does red hat play in all that, I mean, is your you've carved out this position for yourself as the, as the true open source company. Is that, does that position you for a leadership role in helping companies make this >>Transition? I wouldn't say we should be leading the whole thing. Uh, we, we kick started it, but we want to get other vendors on board for this thing. One cool thing about the Camira community is that IBM is, uh, opensourcing a lot of their IP. So IBM research is on board. In this thing, we have some really crazy stuff related to a AI being applied to application analysis. We have some machine learning in place. We have very cool stuff that has been sitting on a, on a corner in IBM research for quite some years that now it's being open sourced and integrated in a, uh, unified user experience to streamline the, uh, modernization process as much as >>Possible. So let's talk about the elephant of the room. Uh, HCL was leading the conversation around cloud Foundry circa five plus years ago. And as customers are thinking about their journey to cloud native, how should they think about that cloud Foundry to cloud native or Kubernetes, uh, replatforming? >>Well within the cloud Foundry community, we've, we've been quite staunched supporters of Kubernetes for quite some time, right? It's, it's quite a, a stated intent of the cloud Foundry foundation to, to move across to Kubernetes platform right now that is a significant engineering journey for cloud Foundry to take. Now we're in this position where a lot of large users of cloud Foundry have a certain urgency to their journey. They, they want to consolidate on a single Kubernetes based, okay. Um, infrastructure. We, we see a lot of traction around OpenShift, for example, from red hat in terms of its market leadership. So a lot of clients are saying we would like to consolidate all of our platforms around a single kind of Kubernetes vendor, whether that's red hat or anyone else, you know, quite frankly. So what ATL is doing right now with the tools and the solutions we've announced this week is we're simply accelerating that journey for clients. If I've got a large installed base of applications running in my cloud Foundry environment, and I've also started to invest in standardize on Kubernetes based platforms like OpenShift, most clients would see it as quite a sensible choice to now try and consolidate those two environments into one. And that's simply what we're doing at HCL. We're making it very, very easy. In fact, we fully automated the journey so I can move all of my applications from cloud Foundry into for example, OpenShift pretty much immediately. And it just simplifies the entire journey. >>So the, as we start to wrap up the segment, I like to know customer stories. What, what, how customers either surprised or challenged when they get into, even with the help of an ACL in redhead, why are they seeing the most difficult parts of their migrations? >>Well, my, my simple comment would be maybe complexity, right? And the, the associated requirement for skilled people to undertake this modernization work, right? We spoke about this, of course, in terms of clients now are a lot more realistic. They understand that their ambition now needs to be somewhat tempered by their ability to sort of drive modernization quickly. So we see a lot of clients when they look at their very large global portfolios of applications, they're trying to invest their resources in the higher priority applications, the revenue generative applications in particular, but they have to bring everything else with them as well. Now, a common kind of separation point was we see a lot of clients who might say I'm gonna properly modernize and refactor, maybe five to 10% of my portfolio, but the other 90% also needs to come on the journey as well. And that's really where replatforming in particular kicks in. So, so the key trend again, is, is clients send to us, I've gotta take the entire journey. All right, I've got the resources and the skills to really focus on this much of my application base. Can someone simplify the overall journey so I can afford to bring everything on a cloud native journey? >>So the key to success here is having a holistic view at the application portfolio, segmenting the application portfolio in different application types and ordering the, the priorities of these application types and come up with suitable migration strategies for each one of them is >>Really necess necessary to move everything though. >>Not necessarily no, or, uh, not necessarily. Yeah, absolutely not everything. But, uh, it would make sense. Uh, as we were saying before, it will definitely move, make sense to move legacy applications towards Kubernetes, to leverage all the, uh, software delivery >>That's >>That's project, right? >>It is. If >>You're gonna restructure the application around APIs and microservices, >>That it should be taken the, the way I've seen, uh, organizations succeeding the most in this, uh, road towards cloud native and Kubernetes in general is trying to address the whole portfolio. Maybe not move everything, but try, try to have this holistic view and not leave anything behind, because if you try to do this isolated, uh, initiatives of bringing this or that applications in a, in isolation, you're Def you, you will miss part of the picture and you might be, uh, doomed to fail >>There. Yeah. It's been my experience that if you don't have a plan to migrate your applications to a cloud native operating model, then you're doomed to follow lift and shift examples to the public cloud. Yeah. Whether you're, uh, going to any other clouds, if you don't make that, that operational transition. Last question on operational transition, we've talked a lot about the replatforming process itself. What about day two, uh, at the I've landed to the cloud? What are some of the top considerations for, for compliance, uh, op op observability, just making sure my apps stay up and transitioning my workforce to that model. >>I, I, I think the over, you know, the overarching trend or theme that, that I see is clients now are, are asking for what I would call cloud native operations. Now in particular, there's a very solid theme around what we would call reliability engineering. So think about site reliability, engineering, SRE platform, reliability engineering, PR E. These are the dominant topics that clients and I want to engage, uh, HCL on in particular, because the point you make is a valid one. I've modernized my application. Now I need to modernize the way that I operate the application in production. Otherwise I won't see those benefits. So that general theme of SRE is keeping us really busy. We're busy, re-skilling all of those operations teams around the world as well, because they need to know how to run these environments appropriately too. >>And also being able to measure your progress while your transitioning is important. And that's one of the concerns that we are addressing as well in the premier community with a tool called polars to, to measure, to effectively measure the software delivery performance of, of the organization after the transition has been done. >>And this is a really good point by the way, cuz most, most people think it's a bit of a black art. How do I understand how I modernize my application? How do I understand how I've improved my kind of value chain around software creation and many people thought you needed to bring in very expensive consultants to advise you on these, on these black lives? No, >>Definitely >>Not. But in open source projects like conveyor from, from red hat, the availability of these tools available on an open source model means exactly any engineer, any developer can get these tools off the shelf and get that immediate benefit. >>Well, a flower head of creative labs at HCL at Ramon neon, senior product manager, redhead. Thank you for joining the QPI. Now Cuba alum, uh, you'll have a nice profile like the profile picture on here. Awesome. >>Absolutely. Thank you. >>From Valencia Spain. I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the cue, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS re:invent 2021 live in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, with David Nicholson. We are running one of the industry's largest, most important hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its enormous ecosystem of partners. We've been talking yesterday and today about the next decade and cloud innovation. We're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Henson, the Vice President of Pariveda Solutions. Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So talk to us about what's going on at Pariveda. What are some of the things that you're focused on in the energy space? >> So for us, specifically, we're looking at energy as it's redefining itself, right? It's no longer just oil and gas. It's no longer just coal. It's renewable energies, it's carbon capture, it's retail energy, it's power generation. We're trying to understand as this energy industry redefines itself, how companies are starting to participate in there and how technologies are really helping them as they redefine their business models and go through their digital transformations. >> I was doing some reading that Amazon is already the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world and will be 100% renewable energy by 2025. Talk to me about the partnership with AWS. >> So our partnership goes back quite a while. We were one of their early partners. We saw the early potential of AWS, jumped in both feet in the deep end, and we've had a wonderful partnership ever since. More recently over the last couple of three years, as they've really matured their definition of energy, we've been right there with them, partnering with them on a number of different projects across multiple industries and really getting excited about how they define their journey going forward in the energy industry. >> We're in such a state of flux right now. We have been for quite a while, but talk about the energy transition. What is that? Why now? Are we all ready? >> Ooh, great question. So the energy transition is really about us as a society, looking to new sources of energy over fossil fuels. 83% of the world's energy today comes from fossil fuels, about 30% from coal, a little over 50% from oil and gas itself. We as a world are looking at this as this is energy that can't continue to be our primary source. It has been a pivot-able source of energy getting us here. It is cheap, it is reliable, it is abundant. It's very good at what it does today. However, it's causing harm. So we need to address that. So what we're doing looking forward is helping companies understand what does it mean to be net zero? What does it mean to monitor and capture your carbon? What does it mean to transition your business model from a pure oil and gas play to one that's looking at new energies like carbon capture, like wind, like solar. So we're helping all of these companies go through that journey as they figure out those next steps. >> So where does Pariveda come into the picture? Take this down to the level of an engagement with an energy company. Who are the people that you parachute in? >> Sure. >> To engage with the customer? Well let's talk about oil and gas first. The most near-term best solution that we're seeing is really about operational excellence. How can I better run my business so I reduce my footprint? Am I having better maintenance to reduce accidental spills? Am I controlling my unexpected emissions, like flaring? How can I use technology to help me run my business better? Then we have companies in the retail energy, who are looking at their customer base who are purchasing large amounts of energy, who they themselves are striving to be net zero by 2050, 2060 and creating solutions for them so they can begin to capture their carbon solutions. So we typically parachute in a couple of different types of groups. Pariveda is both an advisory services firm and a technology services firm. So based upon where a company is in their journey, we may start more in the strategy space, working with the C-Suite. What does it mean to build and structure an organization to strategically go after this new energy space or perhaps they're focusing more on operational excellence. They're trying to figure out how to leverage technology and process, to run their business better, more cost effectively. More importantly, more ESG friendly. >> ESG is a big buzzword these days. You were talking about conversations at the C-Suite level? Has it always been there or is that something that with climate change and all the things going on, you think of, you know, Hurricane Ida, the drought in California and the fires, the flooding in Washington, is that something that is now more of a focus of the C-suite level? >> I think it has to be. Global warming first became mainstream back in the seventies, when we first started realizing there was going to be an impact from our use of fossil fuels. Originally, it wasn't quite sure the scientific data wasn't there necessarily to support it. But now we're starting to see that there is a climate change. Whether or not it's caused by fossil fuels is a debate for another day. But we are starting to see that. As a result, we're also starting to see a lot of pressures coming from various different areas of our world, the financial industry, wanting to become a lot more transparent about their investment holdings. Which means they're looking at their portfolio and choosing whether or not to put investment into capital projects, which is the heart of oil and gas companies. We're seeing social pressers, not just with campaigns and protests, but where people are choosing to work, the products they're choosing to buy, the brand that they're using to associate their identity. And that's also creating pressures for the C-Suite to start to pay attention because that impacts their whole pipeline of talent. So I think we're starting to see that because of those impacts becoming much more far reaching than just some scientific publications. >> Well, the focus on people is critical. You know, we talk about often people process technology, but the people focus is critical, especially since this has such, from an optics perspective, global visibility. >> Yes, people is critically important, not just from a talent acquisition, but also from a talent development perspective. These organizations are going to be going through some pretty dramatic changes. They're going to be leveraging technology they're already familiar with, perhaps some processes they're already familiar with, but they're ultimately moving into new industries, new competitive markets. So you need to not only be able to recruit the top talent by promoting an image that people can align to, but also be able to build that talent internally so that you can make them effective as you go through these business model transformations. >> You know, there's been a theme that we've seen just in the first full day today here at AWS re:invent. And that theme is that the AWS ecosystem is thriving and critical to the success of what AWS is developing. You've given a great example of an organization, your organization, that connects or bridges the divide between technology and the value that technology can bring. You said it at the outset, you're not going in and talking technology first, typically. It's, let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about people and culture, and then let's find the tools that are best suited to leverage to achieve the goals. Because you started talking about energy, and it's like, well, so which compute instance do I need for that, exactly? Somebody has to connect those dots. >> Absolutely. That's what I love about AWS. They offer a broad suite of services in their overall cloud infrastructure that allow you to start in multiple areas. Let's start with one of the very first projects that we got into that really focused on operational excellence and improving how the organization ran its business. This is a public reference, I'm going to go ahead and say it, we did work with AWS, partnering with them at ExxonMobil to help them redefine how they collaborate with their engineering procurement and construction companies. So this was a cloud platform that allowed them to change the way they interface with those vendors as they took on these large capital projects. We were able to take time out of the system, help that organization run more profitably, which allows them to invest in that new energy technology. Then we moved to retail energy where we've been looking at a large adoption in IOT technologies. That IOT capability of AWS allows organizations to monitor their infrastructure, understand how their equipment is performing, where carbon emissions might be occurring, or other greenhouse gases might be occurring, and bringing that in. Then you bring in the AL and ML stack capabilities. One of the leading ways of detecting emissions right now is image machine learning around emissions, looking at satellite photos to see if there are changes in the atmosphere where there might be a methane leak. So all these technologies work together to help us derive better answers for how to be a better energy company and how to be a more environmentally friendly corporation. >> What's the customer flywheel like? You know, often we talk with AWS there, they talk about really-- we start backwards. We start from the customer, we work forward, our customer obsession. We saw the NASCAR slides this morning of all the logos and I'm sure many more that didn't fit. But talk to me about the alignment between Pariveda, your focus on the customers, how they help you guys innovate and create new solutions, I imagine similar culturally to AWS. >> That's one of my favorite aspects about being a premier partner with AWS is the cultural alignment. We have a process that we call right to left faking. It's beginning with business outcomes before we ever look at the technology, ever start to design the solution, ever start to build that solution. Are we meeting the end user's needs, and where that culturally aligns with AWS is it aligns with their working backwards process where they sit with their primary end users and pick some point in the future and say, if I were to do a press release today, announcing the solution that we just built, what would it say? And then if I had questions, I wanted people to be able to find answers to the frequently asked questions. What would be in those frequently asked questions and what would those answers look like? So those two approaches to starting with the right to left business outcome focus helps us begin with the most important thing that we call "jobs to be done". So we're not working on a symptom, we're working on the actual problem. And that's where we've really aligned with AWS and our cultures have helped us focus on the most critical issues at hand. >> So we've talked a lot about energy and your affiliation with AWS in these efforts, but tell us a little more about Pariveda in terms of in a more broad sense. What's the history? >> Sure. >> Give us the pitch. >> Yeah, absolutely. Pariveda has been around for over 18 years. It started with a vision that our mission should be about developing people to their fullest potential. Start there and everything else will come. Since then, we've developed into both a strategy services firm and a technology services firm where we want to bring together what we consider to be the three primary components of an enterprise architecture. Basically business, product, technology, all wrapped around strategy. And so we want to focus on those areas when we use those to help deliver projects. So whether it's technology, whether we're helping travel and hospitality companies that you probably would recognize, or we're working with sports leagues to help rebrand, we're working in the agricultural industry to change how they capture data from equipment in the field. To working in the medical industry, redefining the way that doctors work with your patients by capturing your entire conversation for them. So they're spending less time translating their notes and instead evaluating their notes to ensure top quality health care, to working energy. So we're based in North America. We have ten offices in the U.S., one in Toronto. We're about 750 strong. And we are really focused on deliberate growth versus just exponential growth. >> Well the outcomes focus is absolutely critical, as you talked about earlier. For every organization, you know, one of the things that we learned during the last 22 months is that real-time data access is no longer a "nice to have". It's absolutely essential. But we're also seeing every company's becoming a data company, but they have to learn how. How can we work with technology partners like AWS, like Pariveda, to be able to capture the value that it -- unlock it quickly so that we can iterate and be able to deliver, especially in this interesting climate that we're in and pivot and pivot and pivot. So that outcomes focus that Pariveda has, is really critical for enabling businesses in every industry to be able to survive and thrive these days. >> You said it well, we agree with you completely. What we've designed at Pariveda is what we call the modern data enterprise, where it looks at the holistic vision of becoming a data company, everything from governance to technology choices, to how I structure my organization to have the right roles, the right leadership, the right executive support, and thinking about the full picture of delivering a successful data platform so that we can really focus on something that one of my mentees calls "data liquidity". It's the ability of a company to convert their data to value as quickly as possible. In order to do that, you have to come at it from multiple angles. >> You do, and that's a competitive differentiator these days. >> Yes, absolutely. It's more than just "Let me bring you a data link and hookup some data pipelines". Again, if that's where you start, you're probably not starting in the right place. We want to start with the end users. What questions are they answering? What jobs they trying to get done? And then moving back and say, well, what data do we need? And what form do we need and how do we present it to them so they can do their job extremely well and create their own competitive differentiation. >> Right. That's really critical. Last question is -- we have just a few seconds left here, Alan -- is so much announced today alone. This is, like David said, the first full day of coverage at re:invent, but from a visionary perspective, what are some of the things that we can expect to see from Pariveda as we finish the year 2021 and enter 2022? >> So let me speak a little selfishly to the energy. What you are going to see is us as an organization are going to work side-by-side with AWS energy to help shape the picture. What does it mean to be an energy company? As these industries start to converge, we're going to build more holistic platforms and more holistic approaches so organizations can figure out "How do I still do the business I need to do today to fund the business I need to so tomorrow?" And you're going to start to see us bringing better messaging to that on both strategy, technology, and product approaches. >> Awesome. Alan, thank you for joining David and me, talking about what's going on with power data, awesome approach. I love the people focus. Great stuff. >> Lisa, David, thank you for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>mm we are back and with us now is Alan welcome from the 65 oh Group 650 is a market research company and their specialty focus areas are cloud and IOT. They look at growth markets, They also look at the broader communications and information technology industries. Alan has been a leading data center researcher for over a decade and an enterprise class switch designer. So he's got the chops in that in that sense. Alan, welcome to the cubes. Great to see you. >>Great. No thanks so much for having me looking forward to discussing this with you. >>Okay, so let's get right into it. I mean what is your initial reaction to this announcement? The news? What do we need to know about it? >>I think this is an amazing product. We're heading into a whole new class of product here. Something that can address future designs. So if we look at kind of data center switching in the market, we've been looking at market where we created a new class of category about 15 years ago in data center switching. And we're at a point where we need to start looking forward in the market to address new use cases and sort of customer pain points out there. >>So how should we think about this new category? What's your take on why this is necessary. Why now? >>Well, I think again, if we go back in time, about 15 years ago we created data center switching as a category and the reason for that was we had purpose built products to address a unique use case. When we look at now we have a new use case forming whether it's sort of multi cloud Or how we're deploying applications and security things are different and we need a new class of product in order to address that. And if we look at kind of the opportunity here, we're talking about a market and a class of product that's going to do north of $10 billion dollars in just a couple years. So we have a magnitude and sort of a market category that makes sense to kind of be differentiated and unique from the way we've been looking at the markets in the past. How >>should we think about sort of a follow up on this? If I may, how should we think about, you know, the history of whether it's F P G A or a C X. You're seeing a lot of more program ability built into the system on chip these days. How do you see that trend fitting in and is that an important trend that you would note? >>Yeah, absolutely. So if we look at kind of the way the servers evolved, we have F P G A S a six smart nick now we call them Gpus and it's really been to address these pain points via hardware and software out there and to a certain extent the server has been a little bit ahead with that smart nick and now DPU category and this creates a great opportunity for the network to embrace the same sort of technology and accelerate how we're deploying workloads and really sort of solve those customer pain points, right. The human just can't scale relative to what we've been doing in the past. Got >>it. So how do you think customers are gonna react to this used to be a designer of this type of equipment? How and why might a customer adopt this type of solution and maybe what are some of the barriers that they'll need to consider when, when moving to this approach? >>Yeah, I think customers are going to be excited, right? If you look at it again, they can't scale, they have application Creep, they have security creep, they have data creep out there and this class of product allows them to kind of look at the network a little bit differently and maybe build the network kind of on a go forward 10 year basis than sort of in the past out there. And that's why they're going to look at it in terms of deployments hurdles, I'd say not so much out there. Right. The hybrid cloud and enterprise is moving so fast these days, whether it's because we're working from home or just sort of the agility factor that I think they'll be quick to embrace this because it will enable them to move faster and be more agile or just say more cloud like >>so is that really the use case here? It's kind of cloud slash hybrid cloud on prem cloud and then ultimately connecting to the edge. >>It is, yeah, absolutely. So everyone uses a different term for hybrid cloud or co location or things like that. But ultimately this is the part of the market that's growing very rapidly for enterprises as they try to move their applications, their workflows and their data to more hybrid environment out there. And some of that is as simple as just moving the data. And some of that is kind of going into security and sort of questioning how you move that data around and secure it on a forward basis. A lot >>a lot of customers we talked to tell us, look, the security in the cloud is fine. It's just may be somewhat different and we want to have greater flexibility. So we either want to do this on prem or the other big trend that we see. And I wonder if you could talk about this is we see people putting infrastructure into a Coehlo uh to offer to allow themselves to maybe not get locked into a single cloud provider, expand their optionality building their own sort of infrastructure layer, their own sort of internal cloud, if you will. Can you comment on that? >>Yeah. Co location is a very big trend out there. As you said. It enables you to not be locked into your particular cloud provider. It also gives you proximity to all cloud providers, all staffs providers out there. Uh so deploying and polo makes a lot of sense out there and that creates another pool of data or pool of information that the IT managers need to think about in terms of managing out there. >>So what's the sweet spot for this? And thinking in terms of a business cases that consolidating sort of legacy infrastructure simplification, enabling people to transfer skills up up the stack if you will to support their digital transformation. How do you see the business case evolving here? Alan, >>yeah, it really is simplification and that digitization journey that all enterprises are on the human just simply can't scale with the number of applications or the complexity of those applications and as you get more complex, your costs go up. So this is really about simplification, reducing costs and again, kind of building and taking that journey Forward for the next 10 years vs doing things the same way you've been doing it there, which allows you to move up stack. How do you >>see this partnership, HP Ruba Pensando. Do you see it as unique in the business or the ahead of the game in your opinion? How do you sort of handicap that? >>Yeah, it is unique and it is ahead of the game. So there is a first mover advantage going on here, but I think this partnership shows how the data center is going to be different 5, 10 years in the future and we're starting to create purpose built products to address that change. We simply can't build the way we've been building in the past. Again, whether it's the device not scaling or the human not scaling, we need to look at this differently for many, many reasons. >>Awesome. Okay, alan, we got to leave it there really. Thanks for bringing the analyst perspective. We'll give you the last word. If there's any kind of research you've got, that's worth noting or any last thoughts, please bring it home. >>Yeah, we've been tracking this space for over, You know, 15 years personally. Uh, and there's a lot of new research we have in this area, whether it's this class of product data center switching, uh, location types out there, verticals. So we're really excited to kind of be at the forefront. Well, thanks vision on the future. >>Well, thanks for that, appreciate it. Look, we've been covering this announcement and the initiatives around disrupting the traditional space and uh we thank everybody for watching. Remember all this content is available on demand. If you want more information. Just hit up your HP Aruba rep, you know, I'm sure they'll be eager to help you out. So, again on demand, we will be available immediately. Appreciate you watching the cubes, coverage of the HP, Aruba Pensando announcements, appreciate it. >>Mm

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. >> Glad to be here. Thank you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? >> Certainly and thank you. So as many will know ExxonMobil as a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global Projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering, procurement, and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining and chemical activities. >> Terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with ExxonMobil? That would be terrific. >> Happy too. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering, procurement, and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS Premier Partner to help design an uplift, a new way to facilitate that collaboration between ExxonMobil and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline the process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both the combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved and really helped to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? >> Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner-operator side as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases, and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions, where questions are asked and answered and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history, when documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned. Some of those formal interactions, historically, had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Alan just did, quite toilsome. And what we were looking to do was to kind of come in to the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information, and to bring information to the surface. As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers, not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to, we don't have to revisit later. >> Terrific. Well, Alan can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud native serverless architecture? >> Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end-user, no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was going to be adding value because AWS infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipe work style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving in to the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering, procurement and construction vendors. >> Terrific. Now staying with you, Alan. I'd love to hear how is that helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? >> There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular based design. We knew there were going to be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy and every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing, things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly, so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined this solution. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? >> So, as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors, and so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations, all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements perhaps of unique relationships between us, our co-venture partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Pariveda did, what we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we will continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Pariveda put together allows us to anticipate that in future we can build that out to additional workflows. >> Terrific. Well, now shifting gears. I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me. How do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive, or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? >> Well, design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly. The user experience element of the design work, Pariveda brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design. So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning and is quite frankly, an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much, but the Pariveda team and the AWS team as they work together with us built in user experience from the very beginning. That doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach, so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. >> Yeah. And if either one of you want to jump in here. Obviously, you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? >> It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us in the beginning, was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS, but we also have a fair amount stored inside of AWS. And because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. >> Terrific. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious. How is this system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? >> One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of the toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback, or perhaps in reverse, where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to another EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involve multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and trance to document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in tool PDF markup capabilities. So they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit, and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduce the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. >> And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay I'll add to that? >> Oh, please do. >> Both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers 'cause we handle so many documents. But it's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach, but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers, but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do, losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments, that was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that, or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. >> Well, staying with you, Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? >> Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions. In underpinned by better information at hand to those who are or having to review, answer questions, review documents that are information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around. On either side, surfacing information, because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document, see what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away. Not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. >> Terrific. And Alan, now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. >> As Doug mentioned, we designed the system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular, to think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering, procurement, and construction companies, they're going to be able to quickly build new workflows leveraging component based design that we did from day one. So the efficiency is going to come as they or able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable and serving the businesses needs. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits would you expect can be realized? >> Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to get, to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do, just what Allan was just mentioning there, folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management. So there are a handful of interactions that happen between between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the Digital Project Home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioners daily work activities. >> Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. >> Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced and what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand, we'll make better decisions. >> Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, and I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by EBD. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and autoSQL, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of SQL. And now with autoSQL of spark SQL as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. Brought to you by enterprise Enterprise DB. >> Hello everyone, this is David Vellante, for the CUBE. And we're here covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual version, thCUBE virtual, if you will. And welcome to our power-panel. Now in this session, we'll dig into database modernization. We want to better understand how and why customers are tapping open source to drive innovation. But at the same time, they've got to deliver the resiliency and enterprise capabilities that they're used to that are now necessary to support today's digital business requirements. And with me are three experts on these matters. Abdul Sheik, is Global CTO and President of Cintra. Young Il Cho, aka Charlie, is High Availability Cluster Sales Manager, at Daone CNS. And Alan Villalobos, is the Director of Development Partnerships, at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave, nice to be here. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, let's talk trends and frame the problem. Abdul, I want to start with you? Cintra you're all about this topic. Accelerating innovation using EDB Postgres helping customers move to modern platforms. And doing so, you got to do it cost-effectively but what's driving these moves? What are the problems that you're seeing at the organizations that you serve? >> Oh, so let me quickly introduce, Abdul Sheik, CTO. I'll quickly introduce Cintra. So we are a multicloud and database architecture MSP. And we've been around for 25 plus years. Headquartered in New York and the UK. But as a global organization, we're serving our SMB customers as well as large enterprise customers. And the trends we're seeing certainly in this day and age is transformation and modernization. And what that means is, customers looking to get out of the legacy platforms, get out of the legacy data centers and really move towards a modern strategy with a lower cost base, while still retaining resiliency and freedom. Ultimately, in terms of where they're going. The key words that really I see driving this, number one is choice. They've been historically locked into vendors. With limited choice with a high cost base. So choice, freedom to choose in terms of what database technologies they apply to which workloads and certainly EDB and the work that has been done to closely marry what enterprise RD platforms offer with EDBs in a work that they've done in terms of filling those gaps and addressing where the resiliency monitoring performance and security requirements are, are certainly are required from an enterprise customer perspective. Choice is driving the move that we see and choice towards a lower cost platform that can be deployed anywhere. Both on-prem modernization customers are looking to retain on premise platforms or moving into any multi clouds whether it's an infrastructure cloud play or a platform cloud play. And certainly with EDBs offering in terms of, you know the latest cloud native offerings also very interesting. And lastly, aside from just cost and the freedom to choose where they deploy those platforms the SLA, the service level model where is the resiliency requirement where the which system is going to bronze, silver, gold? Which ones are the tier one revenue platform revenue generating platforms which are the lower, lower utility platforms. So a combination of choice, a combination of freedom to deploy anywhere and while still maintaining the resiliency and the service levels that the customers need to deliver to their businesses >> Abdul that was a beautiful setup. And, and we've got so much to talk about here because customers want to move from point A to point B but getting there and they, they need help. It's sometimes not trivial. So Charlie Daone is a consultancy. You've got a strong technical capabilities. What are you seeing in this space? You know, what are the major trends? Why are organizations considering that move? And what are some of the considerations there? >> Well, like in other country in South Korea or so our a lot of customers, banking's a manufacturing distributor. They are 90, over 90%. They are all are using Oracle DB and a rack system. But as the previous presenters pointed out, a lot of customers that are sick of the Oracle and they have to undergo the huge cost of a maintenance costs. They want to move away from this cost stress. And secondly, they can think about they're providing service to customer on their cloud base which is a private or the public. So we cannot imagine running on database, Oracle database running on the cloud the system that's not matches on this cloud. And first and second, and finally the customer what they want is the cost and they want to move away from the Oracle locking. They cannot be just a slave at Oracle for a long time and the premium for the new cloud the service for the customer. >> Great. Thank you for that. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Did you have something else to add Charlie go ahead and please. >> No that's all. >> Okay, great. Yeah, Allen, welcome to theCUBE. You know, it's very interesting to us. IBM, you, you, of course, you're a big player in database. You have a lot of expertise here. And you partner with EDB, you're offering Postgres to customers, you know, what are you seeing? Charlie was talking about Oracle and RAC. I mean, the, the, the thing there is obviously, we talked about the maintenance costs but there's also a lot of high availability capabilities. That's something that IBM really understands well. Do you see this as largely a cloud migration trend? Is it more modernization? Interested in what's IBM's perspective on this? >> I think modernization is the right word. The points that the previous panelists brought up or are on point, right? You know, lower TCO or lower costs in general but that of agility and then availability for developers and data scientists as well. And then of course, you know, hybrid cloud, right? You know, you want to be able to deploy on prem or in the cloud, or both in a mixture of all of that. And I think, I think what ties it together is the customers are looking for insights, right? And, you know, especially in larger organizations there's a myriad of data sources that they're already working with. And, you know, we, you know we want to be able to play in that space. We want to give an offering that is based on Postgres and open source and be able to further what they're strong at at and kind of, you know on top of that, you know, a layer of, of of need that we see is, is seamless data governance across all of those different stores. >> All right, I'm going to go right to the heart of the hard problem here. So if, I mean, I want to, it's just that I want to get from point A to point B, I want to save money. I want to modernize, but if I'm the canary in the coal mine at the customer, I'm saying guys, migration scares me. How do I do that? What are the considerations? And what do I need to know that I don't know. So Abdul, maybe you could walk us through what are some of the concerns that customers have? How do you help mitigate those? Whether it's other application dependencies, you know freezing code, you know, getting, again from that point A to point B without risking my existing business processes how do you handle that? >> Yeah, certainly I think a customer needs to understand what the journey looks like to begin with. So we've actually developed our own methodology that we call Rocket Cloud, which is also part of our cloud modernization strategy that builds in and database modernization strategy built into it starts with an assessment in terms of current state discovery. Not all customers totally understand where they are today. So understanding where the database state is, you know where the risks lie what are the criticality of the various databases? What technologies are used, where we have RAC or we don't have RAC but we have data God, where we have encryption. And so on. That gives the customer a very good insight in terms of the current state, both commercially and technically that's a key point to understand how they're licensed today and what costs could be freed up to free the journey to effectively fund the journey. It's a big, big topic, but once we do that, we get an idea and we've actually developed a tool called rapid discovery. That's able to discover a largest stake without knowing the database list. We just put the scripts at the database servers themselves and it tells us exactly which databases are suited to be you know, effectively migrated to Postgres with in terms of the feature function usage in terms of how heavy they are, would store procedures in the database amount of business logic use of technologies like RAC data guard and how they convert over to to Postgres specifically. That ultimately gives us the ability to give that customer an assessment and that assessment in a short sharp few weeks and get the customer view of all of my hundreds of databases. Here are the subset of candidates for Postgres and specifically than we do the schemer advisor tool the actual assessment tool from EDB, which gives us a sense of how well the schema gets converted and how best to then also look at the stored procedure conversion as well. That gives the customer a full view of their architecture mapping their specific candidate databases and then a cost analysis in terms of what that migration looks like and how we migrate. We also run and maintain those platforms once we're on EDB. >> Thank you for that again, very clear but so you're not replacing, doing an organ transplant. You may, you're you're, you know, this is not I don't mean this as a pejorative, but you're kind of cherry picking those workloads that are appropriate for EDB and then moving those and then maybe, maybe through attrition or, you know over time, sun-setting those other, those other core pieces. >> Exactly. >> Charlie, let me ask you, so we talked about RAC, real application clusters, data guard. These are, you know kind of high profile Oracle capabilities. Can you, can you really replicate the kind of resiliency at lower costs with open source, with EDB Postgres and how do you do that? >> It's my turn? >> yes, please. >> Quite technically, again, I go on in depths and technically the RAC, RAC system is so-called is the best you know, best the tool to protect data and especially in the Unix system, but apart from the RAC by the some nice data replication solution we just stream the application and log shipping and something and then monitor Pam and, and EFM solution which is enterprise failover manager. So even though it be compared to Apple the Apple RAC versus with EDB solution, we can definitely say that RAC is more stable one, but after migration, whatever, we can overcome the, you know, drawbacks of the HA cluster system by providing the EDB tools. So whatever the customer feel that after a successful migration, utilizing the EDB high availability failable solution they can make of themselves at home. So that's, that's how we approach it with the customers. >> So, Alan, again, to me, IBM is fascinating here with your level of involvement because you're the, you guys are sort of historically the master of proprietary the mainframes, VCM, CICF, EB2, all that stuff. And then, you know IBM was the first I remember Steve Mills actually announced we're going to invest a billion dollars in open source with Linux. And that was a major industry milestone. And of course, the, the acquisition of red hat. So you've got now this open source mindset this open source culture. So we, you know, as it's all about recovery in, in database and enterprise database and all the acid properties in two phase commits, and we're talking about, you know the things that Charlie just talked about. So what's your perspective here? IBM knows a lot about this. How do you help customers get there? >> Yeah, well, I mean the main, the main thrust right now IBM has a offering called IBM cloud Pak for data which from here, which runs EDB, right? EDB, Postgres runs on top of cloud Pak for Data But the, you know I think going back to Abdul's points about, you know migrating whatever's needed and whatever can be migrated to Postgres and maybe migrating other things other places, we have data virtualization and auto-sequel, right? So once you have migrated those parts of your database or those schemes that can be, having, you know a single point where you can query across them and by the way, being able to query across them you know, before, during and after migration as well. Right? So we're kind of have that seamless experience of layer of sequel. And now with auto sequel of sparks sequel as well, as you're, as you're migrating and after is, I'd say, you know, key to this. >> What, what's the typical migration look like? I know I'm sorry, but it's a consultant question but thinking about the, you know, the average, in terms of timeframe, what are the teams look like? You know who are the stakeholders that I need to get involved? If I'm a customer to really make this a success? maybe Abdul, you could talk about that and Charlie and Alan can chime in. >> Well, I think, well, number one you knew the exact sponsors bought into it in terms of the business case, supporting the business case an architect has got a big picture understanding not only database technology but also infrastructure that they're coming from as well as the target cloud platforms and how you ensure that the infrastructure can deliver the performance. So the architect role is important, of course the core DBA that lives within the scope of the database understands the schema of the data model the business logic itself, and the application on it. That's key specifically around the application certification testing connectivity and the migration of the code. And specifically in terms of timeline just to touch on that quickly. I mean, in our experience so far and we're seeing the momentum really really take off the last 18 months, a small project with limited business logic within the database itself can we migrate it in a couple of months but typically with all the testing and rigor around that you typically say three months timeline a medium-sized complexity projects, a six month timeline and a large complex project could be anything from nine months and beyond, but it really comes down to how heavy the database is with business logic and the database and how much effort it will take to re-engineer effectively migrate that PLC code, business logic into EDB given the compatibility level between Oracle and EDB it's relatively certainly an easier path than any other target platform in terms of options. Yeah. Not perspective. That's certainly looks like the composition of a team and timeline >> Charlie or Alan, anything you guys would add. >> Yeah. So, so I think all those personas make sense. I think you might, on the consumer side of the consumer the consumer of the data side the data scientists often we see, you know during migrations and then obviously the dev ops, I think or any operations, right, have to be heavily involved. And then lastly, you know, you see more and more data steward role or data steward type persona, CDO office type type person coming in there make sure that, you know, whatever data governance that is already in place or wants to be in place after the migration is also part of the conversation. >> Why EDB? You know, there's a lot of databases out there you know, it's funny, I always say like, you know, 10, 15 years ago databases were kind of sort of a boring market, right? It was like, okay, you're going to work or whatever. And now it's exploded. You got open source databases, you got, you know not only sequel databases, you got graph databases you know, you get cloud databases, it's going crazy. Why EDB? You wonder if you guys could address that? >> Allan why don't you go first this time? I'll compliment your answers. >> Yeah. I mean, again, I think it goes back to, to the, the I guess varying needs and, and enterprises. Right. And I think that's, what's driven this explosion in databases, whether it's a document store like you're saying, or, or new types of RDBMS, the needs that we talked about at the beginning, like lower TCO, and the push to open source. But you know, the fact of the matter is that that yes, there is a myriad, an ecosystem of databases, pretty much any organization. And so, yeah, we want to tap into that. And why EDB? EDB has done a great job of taking Postgres and making it enterprise ready, you know, that's what they're, they're good at and that, you know fits very nicely with the IBM story obviously. And, and so, you know, and they've they've worked with us as well. They have an operator on, on the runs on red hat OpenShift. So that makes it portable as well but also part of the IBM cloud Pak for data story. And, and yeah, you know, we want to break down those silos. We realized that that need is there for all of these, you know, there's this ecosystem of databases. And so, you know, we're, we see our role as being that platform, whether it's red hat OpenShift, or IBM cloud Pak for data that, that unifies, and kind of gives you that single pane of glass across all of those sources. >> And Charlie, you're obviously all in, you've got EDB in your background. Why EDB for you? >> Before talking about EDB you asked about the previous question about how the migration was different from Oracle to EDB. We had a couple of success story in Korea telecom and some banking area, and it was easier. So EDB provide MTK tool as a people know but it was an appropriate, like a 90%. So we are the channel partner of the EDB for four years. So what we have done was to hire the Oracle expert. So we train Oracle export as as EDB expert at the same time so that they can approach customer and make it easy. So you have no worry about that. Just migrating EDB, Oracle to EDB. There is a no issue. Those telltales include all the tasks, you know Stratus test and trainee, and a POC that we there. So by investing that Oracle expert that we could overcome and persuade the customer to adopt EDB. So, why EDB? Simply I can say there, is there any database they can finally replaced Oracle in the world? Why is the, it's the interoperability between Oracle to EDB as the many experts pointed out there is no other DBE. They can, you know, 90, 90% in compatibility and intercooperability with EDB. That's why, of course, there's the somewhat, you know budget issues or maintenance issue cost the issue escape from Oracle lock-in. But I think the the number one reason was the interoperability and the compatibility with database itself, Oracle database. That was a reason, I guess >> Great Abdul we've talked about, we all know the, as is, you've got a high maintenance costs. You got a lot of tuning, and it's just a lot of complexity. What about the 2B maybe you could share with us sort of the outcome some of the outcomes you've seen what the business impact has been of some of these migrations? >> Sure. I mean, I'll give you a very simple example then just the idea of running Oracle on prem a lot of customer systems teams, for example will drive a virtualization VMware strategy. We know some of the challenges of running Oracle MBM where from a license perspective. So giving the business the ability where I want to go customer in the financial services market in New York, heavy virtualization strategy the ability for them to move away from Oracle on, you know expensive hardware on to Postgres EDB on virtualization just leverage existing skillsets, leveraging existing investment in terms of infrastructure, and also give them portability in AWS. The other clouds, you know, in terms of a migration. More from a business perspective as well, I would say about some of the Allan's points in terms of just freeing up the ability for data scientists and data consumers, to, you know, to consume some of that data from an Postgres perspective more accessibility spinning up environments quicker less latency in terms of the agility is another key word in terms of the tangible differences, the business, lower cost agility, and the freedom to deploy anywhere at the end of the day. Choices, I think the key word that we could come back to and knowing that we can do that to Charlie's point specifically around maintaining service levels. And as architects, we support some of the big, big names out there in terms of airlines, online, cosmetic retailers, financial services, trading applications, hedge funds, and they all want one thing as architect: for us to deliver that resiliency and stand behind them. And as the MSP we're accountable to ensure those systems are up and running and performing. So knowing that the EDB is provided the compatibility but also plugged the specific requirements around performance management, security availability that's fundamentally been key. >> [Dave I mean, having done a lot of TCO studies in this area, it's, it's it Oracle's different. You know, normally the biggest component of TCO is labor with Oracle. The biggest component of TCO is licensed and maintenance costs. So if you can virtualize and reduce those costs and of course, of course the Oracle will fight you and say we won't support it in a VMware environment. Of course, you know, they will, but, but you got to really, you got to battle. But, so here's my last question. So if I'm a customer in that state that you described you know, a lot of sort of Oracle sprawl a lot of databases out there, high maintenance costs, the whole lock-in thing. I got to choices. I, you know, a lot of choices out there. One is EDB. You guys have convinced me that you've got the expertise If I can partner with firms like yours, it's safer route. Okay, cool. My other choice is Oracle is going to, The Oracle sales reps is going to get me in a headlock and talk about exit data and how their Oracle cloud, and how it's, they've invested a lot there. And they have, and, I can pay by the drink all this sort of modern sort of discussion, you know, Oracle act like they invented it late to the game. And then here we are. So, so help me. What's the pitch as to, well, that's kind of compelling. It's maybe the safe bet they're there. They're working with my CIO, whatever. Why should I go with the open source route versus that route? It sounds kind of attractive to me, help me understand that each of you maybe take me through that. Abdul, why don't you start. >> Yeah. I'd say, you know, Oracle's being the defacto for so many years that people have just assumed and defaulted saying, high availability, RAC, DR. Data guard, you know, and I'll apply to any database need that I have. And at the end of the day customers have a three tier database requirement: the lowest, less critical, bronze level databases that really don't need RAC or a high availability, silver tier that are departmental solutions. That means some level of resiliency. And then you've got your gold revenue producing brand impact databases that are they're down. And certainly they won. You see no reason why the bronze and silver databases can be targeted towards EDB. Admittedly, we have some of our largest customers are running platforms, are running $5 million an hour e-commerce platform or airlines running large e-commerce platforms. And exit data certainly has a place. RAC has a place in those, in those scenarios. Were not saying that the EDB is a solution for everything in all scenarios, but apply the technology where it's appropriate where it's required and, you know, generally wherever Oracle has being the defacto and it's being applied across the estate, that's fundamentally what's changed. It doesn't have to be the only answer you have multiple choices now. EDB provides us with the ability to probably address, you know more than 50% of the databases' state, and comfortably cope with that and just apply that more expensive kind of gold tier one cost-based but also capability, you know from the highest requirements of performance and availability where it's appropriate. >> Yeah. Very pragmatic approach. Abdul, thank you for that. And Charlie. Charlie, what's your perspective? Give us your closing thoughts. >> Well, it has been, Oracle has been dominating in Asia in South Korea has market or over many years. So customers got tired of this, continuous spending money for the maintenance costs and there is no discount. There is no negotiation. So they want to move away from expensive stuff. And they were looking for a flexible platform with the easygoing and the high speed and performance open source database like a possibly as career. And now the EDB cannot replace a hundred percent of existing legacy worker, but 10%, 20% 50% as time goes on the trend that will continue. And it will be reaching some high point or replacing the existing Oracle system. And it can, it can also leading to good business chance to a channel partner and EDB steps and other related business in open source. >> Great. Thank you, Charlie and Allen, bring us home here. Give us your follow up >> I think my, co- panelists hit the nail on the head, right? It's a menu, right? That's as things become more diverse and as people make more choices and as everybody wants more agility, you have to provide, I mean, and so that, that's where that's coming in and I liked the way that Andul I kind of split it into gold silver and bronze. Yeah. And I think that that's where, we're going, right? I mean you should ask your developers right? Are your developers like pining to start up a new instance of Oracle every time you're starting a new project? Probably not reach for their Postgres right? And so, because of that, that's where this is coming from and that's not going to change. And, and yeah, that that ecosystem is going to continue to, to thrive. And there'll be lots of different flavors in the growing open source ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, open source absolutely is the underpinning you know, the, the bedrock of innovation, these days. Gentlemen, great power panel. Thanks so much for bringing your perspectives and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you, next time we'll try and match our backgrounds >> Next time. Well, we'll up our game. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. Stay tuned for more great coverage. Postgres vision, 21. Be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> We just compressed about a decade of online commerce progress into about 13 or 14 months. So now we're going to look at how one retailer navigated through the pandemic and what the future of their business looks like. And with me is Alan Jensen who is the chief information officer and senior vice president of the Salling Group. Hello, Alan, how are you? >> Fine, thank you. >> Good to see you. Look, you know, when I look at the hundred year history plus of your company, I mean, it's a marked by transformations and some of them are quite dramatic. So you're Denmark's largest retailer. I wonder if you could share a little bit more about the company its history and how it continues to improve the customer experience while at the same time keeping costs under control so vital in your business. >> Yeah, the company founded approximately 100 year ago with a department store in Denmark. And I think in the 60s we founded the first supermarket in Denmark with the self-service and combined textile and food in the same store. And in the beginning 70s, we found that the first hypermarket in Denmark and then the discounter came from Germany early in 1980 and we started a discount chain. And so we are actually building department store in hypermarket in supermarket, and in the discount sector. And today we are more than 1,500 stores in three different countries in Denmark, Poland, and Germany. And especially for the Danish market we have a approximately 38% market share and it is the leader. We have over the last 10 years developed further into online first in non-food and now in food with home delivery with Clayton Calais. And we have done some acquisition in the convenience with me box solutions to our customers. And we have today also some restaurant burger chain and we are running the Starbucks in Denmark. So you can see a full plate of different opportunities for our customer in especially Denmark. >> It's an awesome story. And of course the founder's name is still on the masthead. What a great legacy. Now, of course the pandemic has forced many changes quite dramatic including the behaviors of retail customers. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how your digital transformation at the Salling Group prepared you for this shift in consumption patterns and any other challenges that you faced. >> I think luckily as for some of the you can say the coati solution in 19 we just roll out using our computers. We are direct access, so you can work from anywhere whether you are traveling from home and so on. We introduced a new age from delivery model and we just finalized the rolling out teams in January, February 20. And that was some very strong thing for suddenly moving all our employees from office to home and more or less overnight we succeed continuing our work and for IT We have not missed any deadline or task for the business in 2020. So I think that was a pretty awesome to see. And for the business, of course the pandemic changed a lot as the change in customer behavior, more or less overnight with plus 50, 80% on the online solution forced us to do some different priorities as we were looking at food home delivery and originally expected to start rolling out in 2022 but took a fast decision in April last year to launch immediately. And we have been developing that over the last eight months and has been live for the last three months now in the market. So you can say the pandemic really front-loaded some of our strategic actions for two to three years. >> What's that saying? Luck is the by-product of great planning and preparation. So let's talk about... what happened? >> And when you are in a company with some strong financial situation that you can move immediately with investment when you take such a decision, then it's really failing yeah. >> Right, awesome. Two-part question. Talk about how you leverage data to support the Solent group's mission and you know drive value for customers. And maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you face with just the amount of data, the speed of data, et cetera. >> Yeah, I said data is everything when you are in retail, as retail is detail as you need to monitor your operation down to each store each department. And if you can say, we have challenged that data is just growing rapidly as a year by year it's growing more and more because you're able to be more detailed, you're able to capture more data. And for a company like ours we need to be updated every morning as our fully updated sales for all unit department single skew selling in the stores is updated three o'clock in the night and send out to all top management and our managers all over the company. It's actually 8,000 reports going out before six o'clock every day in the morning. We have introduced a loyalty program and we are capturing a lot of data on customer behavior. What is their preferred of us? What is their preferred time in the week for buying different things. And all these data is now used to personalize our offers to our value customers. So we can be exactly hitting the best time and convert it to sales. Data is also now used for what we call intelligent price reductions so instead of just reducing prices with 50% if it's a close to running out of date now the system automatically calculate whether a store has just enough to finish with full price before end of day, or actually have too much and need to maybe reduce by 80% before. So being able to sell. So these automated solutions build on data is bringing efficiency into our operation. >> Wow, you make it sound easy. These are non-trivial items. So congratulations on that. I wonder if we could close HPE was kind enough to introduce us, tell us a little bit about the infrastructure of the solutions you're using how they differentiate you in the market. And I'm interested in you know why HPE what distinguishes them, why they choose there. >> When you look out a lot is looking at moving data to the cloud, but we still believe that due to performance, due to the availability, more or less on demand, we still don't see the cloud strong enough for Salling Group capturing all our data. We have been quite successfully having one data truth across the whole company and having one just one single BI solution and having that huge amount of data. I think we have one of the 10 largest sub business warehouses global. And on the other hand we also want to be agile and want to scale when needed. So getting close to a cloud solution, we saw it be GreenLake as a solution, getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem and could deliver what we need to have fast performance on data, but still in a high quality and still very secure for us to run. >> Great, thank you for that. Alan thanks so much for your time really appreciate your insights and congratulations on the progress and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. We have tons more content coming. You're watching Accelerating Next from HPE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban Cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. >>Welcome back to the Cubes. Special Presentation on the Future of Cloud. Three years ago, Alan Nance said to me that in order to really take advantage of Cloud and Dr Billions of dollars of value, you have to change the operating model. I've never forgotten that statement have explored it from many angles over the last three years. In fact, it was one of the motivations for me actually running this program for our audience. Of course with me is Alan Nance. He's a change agent. He's led transformations that large organizations, including I N G Bank, Royal, Philips, Barclays Bank and many others. He's also a co founder of Citrus Collab. Alan, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the program. >>Thanks for having me again there. >>All right. So when we were preparing for this interview you shared with me the following you said enterprise, I t often hasn't really tapped the true powers that are available to them to make real connections to take advantage of that opportunity. Connections to the business, That is What >>do >>you mean by that. >>Well, I think, you know, we've been saying for quite a long time that enterprise. It is certainly a big part of our past in technology. But you know, just how much is it going to be in the future on, you know, enterprise, I t has had a difficult time under The pressure's off being a centralized organization with large expanse of large Catholics, while at the same time we see obviously the digital operations growing oftentimes in separate reporting structures and closer to the business on. And what I'm thinking right now is enterprise i t. If it has made this transition to cloud operating models, whether they are proprietary or whether they are public cloud, there's a huge opportunity for enterprise. I t. Thio connect the dots in a way that no other part of the organization can do that. And when they connect those dots working closely with the business, they unleash a huge amount of value that is beyond things like efficiency or things like just just just providing cloud computing to be flexible. It has to be much more about value generation. Andi. I think that a lot of leaders of enterprise I t have not really grasped that, Andi. I think that's the opportunity is sitting right in front of them right now. >>You know what I've seen lately? I wonder if you could. Comment is You know, obviously we always talk about the stove pipes, but you've you've seen, you know, the CEO, >>the chief >>data officer that you just mentioned the chief digital officer, the chief information security officer. They've largely been in their own silos. I'm definitely seeing a move to bring those together. I'm seeing a lot of CDOs and CEO roles come together and even the chief information or the head of security reporting up into that where there's there seems to be as your sort of suggesting just a lot more visibility across the entire organization. Is it Is it an organizational issue? Is it? Ah, is it a mindset? But only if you could comment. >>Well, I would say it zits, two or three different things, but certainly it's an organizational issue. But I think it starts off with a cultural issue. Andi, I think what you're seeing, and if you look at the more progressive companies that you see, I think you are also seeing a new emergence off the enlightened technology leader s O. With all respect to me and my generation, our tenure as the owners off the large enterprise, it is coming to an end. And we grew up trying to master the complexity of the off the silos. As you so definitely pointed out, we were battling this falling technology, trying to get it under control, trying to get the costs down, trying to reduce Catholics. And a lot of that was focused on the partnerships that we had with technology suppliers on DSO. That mindset of being engineers struggling for control. Having your most important part of being a technology company itself that now I think is giving way is giving way to a new generation of technology leaders who haven't grown up with that culture. Onda. Oftentimes what I see is that the new enlightened CEOs are female, and they are coming into the role outside of the regular promotion change. So they're coming to these rolls through finance H R marketing on their bringing. A different focus on the focus is much more about how do we work together to create an amazing experience for our employees and for our customers on an experience that drives value. So I think there's a reset in the culture. And clearly, when you start talking about creating a value chain to improve experience, you're also talking about bringing people together from different multidisciplinary backgrounds to make that happen. >>Well, that's kind of, you know, it makes me think about Amazon's mantra of working backwards. You know, start with the experience and and and a lot of a lot of CEOs that I know would love tow beam or involved in the business. But they're just so busy trying to keep the lights on like you said, trying to manage vendors. And like, you know, I had a discussion the other day, Allen with an individual. We were talking about how you know, you got a shift from a product mindset to a platform mindset. But you know, you've said that that platform thinking you're always ahead of the game platform, thinking it needs to make way for ecosystem thinking, you know, unless you're Internet giant scale business like Amazon or Spotify, you said you're gonna be in a niche market if you really don't tap that ecosystem again. If you could explain what you mean by that. >>I think right now if this movement to experience is fundamental, right? So Joe Pine and Gilmore wrote about the experience economy as far back in 1990. But the things that they predicted then are here now. And so what we're now seeing is that consumers have choice. Employees have choice. I think the pandemic has accelerated that. And so what happens when you, when you when you put an enterprise under that type of external pressure, is that it fragments and even fragment into ways it can fragment dysfunctional E so that every silo tries to go into a a defensive mode protective mode? That's obviously the wrong way to go. But the fragmentation that's exciting is when it fragments into ecosystems that are actually working together to solve an experience problem. And those are not platforms. They're too big, you know, When I was Phillips, I was very enthusiastic about working on this connected health care platform, but I think what I started to realize was it takes too much time. It requires too much investment on you are bringing people to you based on your capability. Where is what the market needs is much more agile than that. So if we look in health care, for instance, and you want to connect patients at home with patient with the doctors in the hospital, in the old model you so I'm gonna build a platform for this. I'm gonna have doctors with a certain competence and they're gonna be connecting into this. And so are the patients in some way. And so are the insurers. I think what you're going to see now is different. We're going to say, Let's get together A small team that understands it's called, For instance, let's get a an insurance provider. Let's get a health care operator. Let's get a healthcare tech company on. Let's pull their data in a way that helps us to create solutions now that that can roll out in 30 60 or 90 days. And the thing that that makes that possible is the move to the public crowd because now there are so many specialized supplier, specialized skill sets available that you can connect to through Amazon through Google, through through azure that that these these things that we usedto I think we're very, very difficult are now much easier. I don't want to minimize the effort, but these things are on the table right now. Thio Revalue. >>So you're also a technologist and I wanna ask you and and everybody always says, it's the technology is easy part. It's the people in the process and, you know, way we can all agree on that. However, sometimes technology could be a blocker. And the example that you just mentioned, I have a couple of takeaways from that. First of all, you know the platform thinking it sounds like it's more command and control, and you're advocating for Let's get the ecosystem who are closest to the problem. To solve those problems, however, they decide and leverage the cloud. So my question is from a technology standpoint, does that echo have system have to be on the same cloud with the state of today's technology? Can it be across clouds can be there pieces on Prem? What's your thinking on that? >>I think I think exactly the opposite. It cannot be monolithic and centralized. It's just not practical because that was that was that would cause you too much time on interoperability and who owns what you see The power behind experience is data. And so the most important technical part of this is dealing with data liquidity. So the data that for instance, um, somebody like Kaiser has or the the Harvard Health Care have or the Philips have that's not going to be put into a central place. But for the ecosystem mobilization, there will be subsets of that data flowing between those parties. So the technical, the heart there is how do we manage data liquidity? How do we manage the security around the data liquidity on How do we also understand that what we're building is going to be ever changing and maybe temporary, because on idea may not work, eh? So you've got this idea that the timeliness is very, very important. The duration is very uncertain. The motor the energy for this is data liquidity data transfer, data sharing. But the vehicle is the combination off. Probably crowd in my mind. >>Somebody said to me, Hey, that data is like water. It'll go. It'll go where it wants to go where it needs to go. You can't try to control it. It's let it go. Uh, now, of course, many organizations, particularly large incumbent organizations there. They have many, many data pipelines. They have many processes, many roles, and they're struggling toe actually kind of inject automation into those pipelines. Maybe that's machine intelligence, uh, really doom or data sharing across that pipeline and and ultimately compress the end and cycle. Time to go from raw data insights that are actionable. What are you seeing there and what's your advice? >>Well, I think the the you make some really good points. But what I hear also a little bit in your observation is you're still observing Enterprises on the end of the focus of the enterprise has been on optimizing the processes within the boundaries of its own system. That's why we have s a P. And that's why we have a sales force and, to some degree, even service. Now it's all been about optimizing how we move data, how we create products and services on. That's not the game. Now that's not an important game. Three important game right now is how do I connect to my employees? How do I connect to my customers in a way that provides them a memorable experience? And the realization is we've seen this already a manufacturing for some years. I can't be allowed things to people. So I have to understand where the first part of data comes in. I have to understand who this person is that I am trying to target. Who is the person that needs this memorable experience on what is that memorable experience gonna look like? And I'm going to need my data. But I'm also going to need the data of other actors in that ecosystem. And then I'm gonna have to build that ecosystem really quickly to take advantage off the system. So this throws a monkey wrench in traditional ideas of standardization. It throws a monkey wrench in the idea that enterprise I t is about efficiency on. But if I may, I just want to come back to the day I because I think we're looking in the wrong places. Things like a I let me give you an example. Today there are 2.2 million people working in call centers around the world. If we imagine that they work in three shifts, that means that any one time there are 700,000 people on the phone to a customer on that customer is calling that company because they're vested. They're calling them with advice. They're calling them with a question. They're calling them with a complaint. It is the most important source off valuable data that any company has. And yet what have we done with that? What we've done with that is we have attacked it with efficiency. So instead of saying these are the most valuable sources of information, let's use a I to to tag the sentiment in the recordings that we make with our most valuable stakeholders on this and analyze them for trends, ideas, things that need to change. We don't do that. What we do is we were going to give every call agent two minutes to get them off the phone. For God's sake, don't ask so many import difficult questions. Don't spend money talking to the customer. Try to make them happy so they get a score and say they hire you at the end of the core and then you're done. So so where the AI and automation needs to come in is not in improving efficiency but in mining value. And the real opportunity with a I Is that Joe Pine says this. If you are able to understand the customer rather than interpret them, that is so valuable to the customer that they will pay money for that. I think that's where the whole focus needs to be in this new teaming of enterprise I t. And that's true business. >>It's a great observations. I think we can all relate to that in your call center example, or you've been in a restaurant. You're trying to turn the tables fast and get you out of there. And that's the last time you ever go to that restaurant and you're you're taking that notion of systems thinking and broadening it to ecosystems thinking. And you've said ecosystems have a better chance of success when they're used to stage an experience for whether it's the employees for the brand and of course, the customer and the partners. >>That's it. That's exactly yet. So every technology leader should be asking themselves what contribution can can my and my organization makes of this movement because the business understands the problem, they don't understand how to solve it, and we've chosen a different dialogues. We've been talking a lot about what cloud could do and the functionality that clown has and the potential that clown has on those aerial good things. But it really comes together now when we work together and we, as the technology group brings in, they know how we know how toe connect quickly through the public cloud. We know how to do that in a secure way. We know how to manage data, liquidity at scale, and we can stand these things up through our, you know, our new learning of agile and devils we can stand. These ecosystems are fairly quickly now. There's still a whole bunch of culture between different businesses that have to work together through the idea that I have to protect my data rather than serve the customer. But once you get past that, there's a whole new conversation enterprise. It you can have that, I think, gives them a new lease of life, new value. And I just think it's a really, really exciting time. Yes, >>so you're seeing the intersection of a lot of different things. You talk about cloud as you know, an enabler for sure, and that's great. We could talk about that, but you've got this what you're referring to before is, you know, maybe you're in a niche market, but you have your marketplace and like you're saying, you can actually use that through an ecosystem to really leave her a much, much broader available market and then vector that into the experience economy. You know, we talk about subscriptions, the AP economy. That really is new thinking, >>yes, and I think what you're seeing here is it zits, not radical. Inasmuch as all of these ideas have been around, some of them have been around since the nineties. But what's radical is the way in which we can now mix and match these technologies to make this happen. That's gone so quickly on, I would argue to you, and I've argued this before. Scale scale is a concept within an organization is dead. It doesn't give you enough value. It gives you enough efficiency, and it gives you a cloud. But it doesn't give you three opportunity to target the niche experiences that you need to do. So. If we start to think off an organization as a a combination off known and unknown potential ecosystems, you start to build a different operating model, a different architectural idea you start to look outside more than you start to look insight. Which is why the cultural change that we were talking about just now goes hand in hand with this because people have to be comfortable thinking in ecosystems that may not yet exist on partnering with people where they bring to the table there, you know, 2030 years of experience in a new and different way. >>Let me make sure I understand that. So you're basically if I understand you're saying that if you're sort of end goal is scale and efficiency at scale, you're you're gonna have a vanilla solution for your customers and your ecosystem. Whereas if you will allow this outside in thinking to come in, you're gonna be able to actually customize those experience experiences and get the value of scale and efficiency. >>Right? So, I mean, Rory Sutherland, who is ah, big finger in the in. The marketing world has always said, ultimately, scale standardization and best practice lead to mediocrity because you are not focused on the most important thing for your employees or your brand, or you're you're focused on the efficiency factors on. They create very little value in fact, we know that they subvert value. So, yes, we need to have a very big mindset change. >>Yeah, You're a top line thinker, Allen. And and always at the forefront. I really appreciate you coming on to the to the Cuban. Participate in this program. Give us the last word. So if you're a change agent, I wanna I'm an organization, and I want to inject this type of change. Where do I >>start? Well, I think it starts by identifying. Are we going to? Is it are we gonna work on the employee experience? Do we feel that we have a model where the employees that are on stage with customers are so important that the focus has to be employees? We go down that route and we look at what happened to the pandemic. What type of experiences are we going to bring to those employees around their ability to have flow in their work, to get returned on energy, to excite the customers? Let's do that. Let's figure out what experience are we driving now? What does that experience need to be if we're the customer side? As I said, let's look ALS. The sources of information that we already have. You know, I know companies to spend hundreds of millions a year trying to figure out what consumers what. And yet if we look in their call centers, you will call up and and they will say to Your call may be recorded for quality purposes and training on this is not true. Less than 10% of those calls that ever listened to on if they are listening to its compliance that's driving that, not the burning desire to better understand the consumer. So if we change that, then we say Okay, so what can we change? What is the experience that we are now able to stage with all we know and with all weaken dio on debts? Start there. Let's start with what is the experience you want to stage? What's the experience landscape look like now? And who do we bring together to make that happen? >>Allen. Fantastic. Having you back in the Cube, it's always a pleasure. And, uh, and thanks so much for participating. >>Thank you, Dave. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. >>Thank you. Everybody, this is Dave Volonte. The Cuban cloud will be right back right after this short break. Stay with

>>From around the globe. If the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 20, 20 special coverage sponsored by AWS worldwide public sector. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. To the cubes, virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, this is the cube virtual. I'm your host John farrier with the cube. The cube normally is there in person this year. It's all virtual. This is the cube virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and we're bringing in commentary and discussion around the themes of re-invent. And this today is public sector, worldwide public sector day. And the theme from Teresa Carlson, who heads up the entire team is to think big and look at the data. And I wanted to bring in a special cube alumni and special guests. Alan Cohen. Who's a partner at data collective venture capital or DCVC, um, which we've known for many, many years, founders, Matt OCO and Zachary Bogue, who started the firm, um, to over at about 10 years ago. We're on the really the big data wave and have grown into a really big firm thought big data, data, collective big ideas. That's the whole purpose of your firm. Alan. You're now a partner retired, retired, I mean a venture capitalist over at being a collective. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you as well. John, thanks for being so honest this morning. >>I love to joke about being retired because the VC game, it's not, um, a retirement for you. You guys made, you made some investments. Data collective has a unique, um, philosophy because you guys invest in essentially moonshots or big ideas, hard problems. And if I look at what's going on with Amazon, specifically in the public sector, genome sequencing now available in what they call the open data registry. You've got healthcare expanding, huge, you got huge demand and education, real societal benefits, uh, cybersecurity contested in space, more contention and congestion and space. Um, there's a lot of really hard science problems that are going on at the cloud. And AI are enabling, you're investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve these problems. What's your view of the big ideas? What are people missing? >>Well, I don't know if they're missing, but I think what I'd say, John, is that we're starting to see a shift. So if you look at the last, I don't know, forever 40, 50 years in the it and the tech industry, we took a lot of atoms. We built networks and data warehouses and server farms, and we, we kind of created software with it. So we took Adam's and we turned them into bets. Now we're seeing things move in the other direction where we're targeting bits, software, artificial intelligence, massive amount of compute power, which you can get from companies like, like AWS. And now we're creating better atoms. That means better met medicines and vaccines we're investor, um, and a company called abs Celera, which is the therapeutic treatment that J and J has, um, taken to market. Uh, people are actually spaces, a commercial business. >>If it's not a science fiction, novel we're investors in planet labs and rocket labs and compel a space so people can see right out. So you're sitting on your terrorists of your backyard from a satellite that was launched by a private company without any government money. Um, you talked about gene sequencing, uh, folding of proteins. Um, so I think the big ideas are we can look at some of the world's most intractable issues and problems, and we can go after them and turn them into commercial opportunities. Uh, and we would have been able to do that before, without the advent of big data and obviously the processing capabilities and on now artificial intelligence that are available from things like AWS. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of payback from the physical world to the physical world, from the virtual world. Okay. >>Pella space was featured in the keynote by Teresa Carlson. Um, great to tie that in great tie in there, but this is the kind of hard problems. And I want to get your take because entrepreneurs, you know, it reminds me of the old days where, you know, when you didn't go back to the.com, when that bubble was going on, and then you got the different cycles and the different waves, um, the consumer always got the best kind of valuations and got the most attention. And now B to B's hot, you got the enterprise is super hot, mainly because of Amazon >>Sure. Into the Jordash IPO. Obviously this morning, >>Jordache IPO, I didn't get a phone call for friends and family and one of their top customers. They started in Palo Alto. We know them since the carton Jordache, these are companies that are getting massive, uh, zoom. Um, the post pandemic is coming. It's going to be a hybrid world. I think there's clear recognition that this some economic values are digital being digitally enabled and using cloud and AI for efficiencies and philosophy of new things. But it's going to get back to the real world. What's your, it's still hard problems out there. I mean, all the valuations, >>Well, there's always hard problems, but what's different now. And from a perspective of venture and, and investors is that you can go after really hard problems with venture scale level of investments. Uh, traditionally you think about these things as like a division of a company like J and J or general electric or some very massive global corporation, and because of the capabilities that are available, um, in the computing world, um, as well as kind of great scientific research and we fund more PhDs probably than any other, uh, any other type of background, uh, for, for founders, they can go after these things, they can create. Uh, we, uh, we have a company called pivot bio, uh, and I think I've spoken to you about them in the past, Sean, they have created a series of microbes that actually do a process called nitrogen fixation. Um, so it attaches the nitrogen to the roots of corn, sorghum and wheat. >>So you don't have to use chemical fertilizer. Well, those microbes were all created through an enormous amount of machine learning. And where did that machine learning come from? So what does that mean? That means climate change. That means more profitable farmers. Uh, that means water and air management, all major issues in our society where if we didn't have the computing capabilities we have today, we wouldn't have been able to do that. We clearly would have not been able to do that, um, as a venture level of investments to get it started. So I think what's missing for a lot of people is a paucity of imagination. And you have to actually, you know, you actually have to take these intractable problems and say, how can I solve them and then tear it apart to its actual molecules, just the little inside joke, right? And, and then move that through. >>And, you know, this means that you have to be able to invest in work on things. You know, these companies don't happen in two or three years or five years. They take sometimes seven, 10, 15 years. So it's life work for people. Um, but though, but we're seeing that, uh, you know, that everywhere, I mean, rocket lab, a company of ours out of New Zealand and now out of DC, which we actually launched the last couple of space, um, satellites, they print their rocket engines with a 3d printer, a metal printer. So think about that. How did all that, that come to bear? Um, and it started as a dangerous scale style of investments. So, you know, Peter Beck, the founder of that company had a dream to basically launch a rocket, you know, once a year, once a month, once a week, and eventually to once a day. So he's effectively creating a huge, um, huge upswing in the ability of people to commercialize space. And then what does space do? It gives you better observability on the planet from a, not just from a security point of view, but from a weather and a commerce point of view. So all kinds of other things that looked like they were very difficult to go after it now starts to become enabled. Yeah. >>I love the, uh, your investment in Capella space because I think that speaks volumes. And one of the things that the founder was talking about was getting the data down is the hard part. He he's up, he's up there now. He can see everything, but now I've got to get the data down because say, say the wildfires in California, or whether, um, things happening around the globe now that you have the, uh, the observation space, you got to get the data down there. This is the huge scale challenge. >>Well, let me, let me, let me give you something. That's also, so w you know, we are in a fairly difficult time in this country, right? Because of the covert virus, uh, we are going to maybe as quickly as next week, start to deliver, even though not as many as we'd like vaccines and therapeutics into this virus situation, literally in a year, how did all these things, I mean, obviously one of the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes, and maybe, you know, uh, of the past century, uh, how did that happen? How did it all day? Well, you know, some, I mean, the ability to use, um, computing power in, in assistance, in laboratory, in, in, uh, in, um, development of, of pharmaceutical and therapeutics is a huge change. So something that is an intractable problem, because the traditional methods of creating vaccines that take anywhere from three to seven years, we would have a much worse public health crisis. I'm not saying that this one is over, right. We're in a really difficult situation, but our ability to start to address it, the worst public health crisis in our lifetime is being addressed because of the ability of people to apply technology and to accelerate the ability to create vaccines. So great points, absolutely amazing. >>Let's just, let's just pause that let's double down on that and just unpack that, think about that for a second. If you didn't, and then the Amazon highlight is on Andy Jesse's keynote carrier, which makes air conditioning. They also do refrigeration and transport. So one IOT application leveraging their cloud is they may call it cold chain managing the value chain of the transport, making sure food. And in this case vaccine, they saw huge value to reduce carbon emissions because of it does the waste involved in food alone was a problem, but the vaccine, they had the cold, the cold, cold, cold chain. Can you hear me? >>Maybe this year, the cold chain is more valuable than the blockchain. Yeah. >>Cold don't think he was cold chain. Sounds like a band called play. Um, um, I had to get that in and Linda loves Coldplay. Um, but if you think about like where we are to your point, imagine if this hit 15 years ago or 20 years ago, um, you know, YouTube was just hitting the scene 20 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, so, you know, that kind of culture, we didn't have zoom education would be where we would be Skyping. Um, there's no bandwidth. So, I mean, you, you know, the, the bandwidth Wars you would live through those and your career, you had no bandwidth. You had no video conferencing, no real IOT, no real supply chain management and therapeutics would have taken what years. What's your reaction to, to that and compare and contrast that to what's on full display in the real world stage right now on digital enablement, digital transformation. >>Well, look, I mean, ultimately I'm an optimist because of what this technology allows you to do. I'm a realist that, you know, you know, we're gonna lose a lot of people because of this virus, but we're also going to be able to reduce a lot of, um, uh, pain for people and potentially death because of the ability to accelerate, um, these abilities to react. I think the biggest and the, the thing that I look for and I hope for, so when Theresa says, how do you think big, the biggest lesson I think we're going to we've learned in the last year is how to build resilience. So all kinds of parts of our economy, our healthcare systems, our personal lives, our education, our children, even our leisure time have been tested from a resilience point of view and the ability of technology to step in and become an enabler for that of resilience. >>Like there isn't like people don't love zoom school, but without zoom school, what we're going to do, there is no school, right? So, which is why zoom has become an indispensable utility of our lives, whether you're on a too much, or you've got zoom fatigue, does it really matter the concept? What we're going to do, call into a conference call and listen to your teacher, um, right in, you know, so how are you going to, you're going to do that, the ability to repurpose, um, our supply chain and, you know, uh, we, we, we see this, we're going to see a lot of change in the, in the global supply chain. You're going to see, uh, whether it's re domestication of manufacturing or tightening of that up, uh, because we're never going to go without PPE again, and other vital elements. We've seen entire industries repurposed from B2B to B to C and their ability to package, deliver and service customers. That is, those are forms of resilience. >>And, and, and, and taking that to the next level. If you think about what's actually happening on full display, and again, on my one-on-one with Andy Jassy prior to the event, and he laid this out on stage, he kind of talks about this, every vertical being disrupted, and then Dr. Matt wood, who's the machine learning lead there in Swami says, Hey, you know, cloud compute with chips now, and with AI and machine learning, every industry, vertical global industry is going to be disrupted. And so, you know, I get that. We've been saying that in the queue for a long time, that that's just going to happen. So we've been kind of on this wave of horizontal, scalability and vertical specialization with data and modern applications with machine learning, making customization really high-fidelity decisions. Or as you say, down to the molecule level or atomic level, but this is clear what, what I found interesting. And I want to get your thoughts because you have one been there, done that through many ways of innovation and now investor leading investor >>Investor, and you made up a word. I like it. Okay. >>Jesse talks about leadership to invent and reinvent. Can't fight gravity. You've got to get talent hungry for invention, solve real-world problems. Speed. Don't complexify. That's his message. I said to him, in my interview, you need a wartime conciliary cause he's a big movie buff. I quote the godfather. Yeah. Don't you don't want to be the Tom Hagen. You don't want to be that guy, right? You're not a wartime. Conciliary this is a time there's times in companies' histories where there's peace and there's wartime, wartime being the startup, trying to find its way. And then they get product market fit and you're growing and scaling. You're operating, you're hiring people to operate. Then you get into a pivot or a competitive situation. And then you got to get out there and, and, and get dirty and reinvent or re-imagine. And then you're back to peace. Having the right personnel is critical. So one of the themes this year is if you're in the way, get out of the way, you know, and some people don't want to hold on to hold onto the past. That's the way we did it before I built this system. Therefore it has to work this way. Otherwise the new ways, terrible, the mainframe, we've got to keep the mainframe. So you have a kind of a, um, an accelerated leadership, uh, thin man mantra happening. What is your take on this? Because, >>Sorry. So if you're going to have your F R R, if you're going to, if you are going to use, um, mob related better for is I'll share one with you from the final season of the Soprano's, where Tony's Prado is being hit over the head with a bunch of nostalgia from one of his associates. And he goes, remember, when is the lowest form of conversation and which is iconic. I think what you're talking about and what Andy is talking about is that the thing that makes great leadership, and what I look for is that when you invest in somebody or you put somebody in a leadership position to build something, 50% of their experience is really important. And 50% of it is not applicable in the new situation. And the hard leadership initiative has to understand which 50 matters in which 50 doesn't matter. >>So I think the issue is that, yeah, I think it is, you know, lead follow or get out of the way, but it's also, what am I doing? Am I following a pattern for a, for a, for an, a, for a technology, a market, a customer base, or a set of people are managing that doesn't really exist anymore, that the world has moved on. And I think that we're going to be kind of permanent war time on some level we're going to, we're going to be co we're because I think the economy is going to shift. We're going to have other shocks to the economy and we don't get back to a traditional normal any time soon. Yep. So I, I think that is the part that leadership in, in technology really has to, would adopt. And it's like, I mean, uh, you know, the first great CEO of Intel reminded us, right. Then only the paranoid survive. Right. Is that it's you, some things work and some things don't work and that's, that's the hard part on how you parse it. So I always like to say that you always have to have a crisis, and if there is no crisis, you create the crisis. Yeah. And, you know, >>Sam said, don't let a good crisis go to waste. You know? Um, as a manager, you take advantage of the crisis. >>Yeah. I mean, look, it wouldn't have been bad to be in the Peloton business this year. Right, too. Right. Which is like, when people stayed home and like that, you know, you know, th that will fade. People will get back on their bikes and go outside. I'm a cyclist, but you know, a lot more people are going to look at that as an alternative way to exercise or exercising, then when it's dark or when the weather is inclement. So what I think is that you see these things, they go in waves, they crest, they come back, but they never come back all the way to where they were. And as a manager, and then as a builder in the technology industry, you may not get like, like, like, okay, maybe we will not spend as much time on zoom, um, in a year from now, but we're going to still spend a lot of time on zoom and it's going to still be very important. >>Um, what I, what I would say, for example, and I, and looking at the COVID crisis and from my own personal investments, when I look at one thing is clear, we're going to get our arms around this virus. But if you look at the history of airborne illnesses, they are accelerating and they're coming every couple of years. So being able to be in that position to, to more react, more rapidly, create vaccines, the ability to foster trials more quickly to be able to use that information, to make decisions. And so the duration when people are not covered by therapeutics or vaccines, um, short, and this, that is going to be really important. So that form of resilience and that kind of speed is going to happen again and again, in healthcare, right. There's going to be in, you know, in increasing pressure across that in part of the segment food supply, right. I mean, the biggest problem in our food supply today is actually the lack of labor. Um, and so you have far, I mean, you know, farmers have had a repurpose, they don't sell to their traditional, like, so you're going to see increased amount of optimization automation and mechanization. >>Lauren was on the, um, keynote today talking about how their marketplaces collected as a collective, you know, um, people were working together, um, given that, given the big ideas. Well, let's, let's just, as we end the segment here, let's connect big ideas. And the democratization of, I mean, you know, the old expression Silicon Valley go big or go home. Well, I think now we're at a time where you can actually go big and stay and, and, and be big and get to be big at your own pace because the, the mantra has been thinking big in years, execute plan in months and execute weekly and month daily, you know, you can plan around, there's a management technique potentially to leverage cloud and AI to really think about bit the big idea. Uh, if I'm a manager, whether I'm in public sector or commercial or any vertical industry, I can still have that big idea that North star and then work backwards and figure that out. >>That sounds to the Amazon way. What's your take on how people should be. What's the right way to think about executing down that path so that someone who's say trying to re-imagine education. And I know a, some people that I've talked to here in California are looking at it and saying, Hey, I don't need to have silos students, faculty, alumni, and community. I can unify them together. That's an idea. I mean, execution of that is, you know, move all these events. So they've been supplying siloed systems to them. Um, I mean, cause people want to interact online. The Peloton is a great example of health and fitness. So there's, there's everyone is out there waiting for this playbook. >>Yeah. Unfortunately I, I had the playbook. I'd mail it to you. Uh, but you know, I think there's a couple of things that are really important to do. Maybe good to help the bed is one where is there structural change in an industry or a segment or something like that. And sorry to just people I'm home today, right? It's, everybody's running out of the door. Um, and you know, so I talked about this structural change and you, we talked about the structural change in healthcare. We talked about kind of maybe some of the structural change that's coming to agriculture. There's a change in people's expectations and how they're willing to work and what they're willing to do. Um, you, as you pointed out the traditional silos, right, since we have so much information at our fingertips, um, you know, people's responsibility as opposed to having products and services to deliver them, what they're willing to do on their own is really changed. >>Um, I think the other thing is that, uh, leadership is ultimately the most important aspect. And we have built a lot of companies in the industry based on forms of structural relations industry, um, background, I'm a product manager, I'm a sales person, I'm a CEO, I'm a finance person. And what we're starting to see is more whole thinking. Um, uh, particularly in early stage investors where they think less functionally about what people's jobs are and more about what the company is trying to get done, what the market is like. And it's infusing a lot more, how people do that. So ultimately most of this comes down to leadership. Um, uh, and, and that's what people have to do. They have to see themselves as a leader in their company, in their, in the business. They're trying to build, um, not just in their function, but in the market they're trying to win, which means you go out and you talk to a lot more people. >>You do a lot, you take a lot fewer things for granted. Um, you read less textbooks on how to build companies and you spend more time talking to your customers and your engineers, and you start to look at enabling. So the, we have made between machine learning, computer vision, and the amount of processing power that's available from things like AWS, including the services that you could just click box in places like the Amazon store. You actually have to be much more expansive in how you think about what you can get done without having to build a lot of things. Cause it's actually right there at your fingertips. Hopefully that kind of gets a little bit to what you were asking. >>Well, Alan, it's always great to have you on and great insight and, uh, always a pleasure to talk candidly. Um, normally we're a little bit more boisterous, but given how terrible the situation is with COVID while working at home, I'm usually in person, but you've been great. Take a minute to give a plug for the data collective venture capital firm. DCVC you guys have a really unique investment thesis you're in applied AI, computational biology, um, computational care, um, enterprise enablement. Geospatial is about space and Capella, which was featured carbon health, smart agriculture transportation. These are kind of like not on these are off the beaten path of like traditional herd mentality of venture capital. You guys are going after big problems. Give us an update on the firm. I know that firm has gotten bigger lately. You guys have >>No, I mean the further firm has gotten bigger, I guess since Matt, Zach started about a decade ago. So we have about $2.3 billion under management. We also have bio fund, uh, kind of a sister fund. That's part of that. I mean, obviously we are, uh, traditionally an early stage investor, but we have gone much longer now with these additional, um, um, investment funds and, and the confidence of our LPs. Uh, we are looking for bears. You said John, really large intractable, um, industry problems and transitions. Uh, we tend to back very technical founders and work with them very early in the creation of their business. Um, and we have a huge network of some of the leading people in our industry who work with us. Uh, we, uh, it's a little bit of our secret weapon. We call it our equity partner network. Many of them have been on the cube. >>Um, and these are people that work with us in the create, uh, you know, the creation of this. Uh, we've never been more excited because there's never been more opportunity. And you'll start to see, you know, you're starting to hear more and more about them, uh, will probably be a couple of years of report. We're a household name. Um, but you know, we've, we we're, we're washing deal flow. And the good news is I think more people want to invest in and build the things that we've. So we're less than itchy where people want to do what we're doing. And I think some of the large exits that starting to come our way or we'll attract more, more great entrepreneurs in that space. >>I really saw the data models, data, data trend early, you saw a Realty impacted, and I'll say that's front and center on Amazon web services reinvent this year. You guys were early super important firm. I'm really glad you guys exist. And you guys will be soon a household name if not already. Thanks for coming on. Right, >>Alan. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate >>It. Take care. I'm John ferry with the cube. You're watching a reinvent coverage. This is the cube live portion of the coverage. Three weeks wall to wall. Check out the cube.net. Also go to the queue page on the Amazon event page, there's a little click through the bottom and the metadata is Mainstage tons of video on demand and live programming there too. Thanks for watching.

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the cubes. Special presentation on the future of cloud. Three years ago, Alan Nance said to me that in order to really take advantage of cloud and drive billions of dollars of value, you have to change the operating model. I've never forgotten that statement and have explored it from many angles over the last three years. In fact it was one of the motivations for me actually running this program for our audience. Of course with me is Alan Nance. He is a change agent. He's led transformations at large organizations, including ING bank, Royal Phillips, Barclay's bank, and many others. He's also a co-founder of CitrusCollab. Alan, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the program. >> Thanks for having me again, Dave. >> All right, so when we were preparing for this interview, you shared with me the following, you said enterprise IT, often hasn't really tapped the true powers that are available to them to make real connections, to take advantage of that opportunity, connections to the business that is. What do you mean by that? >> Well I think we we've been saying for quite a long time that enterprise IT is certainly a big part of our past in technology. But just how much is it going to be in the future? And enterprise IT has had a difficult time under the cost pressures of being a centralized organization with large, expensive, large topics. While at the same time we see obviously the digital operations for growing oftentimes in separate reporting structures and closest to the business. And what I'm thinking right now is enterprise IT, if it has made this transition to a cloud operating models, whether they are proprietary or whether they are public cloud, there's a huge opportunity for enterprise IT to connect the dots in a way that no other part of the organization can do that. And when they connect those dots, working closely with the business, they unleash a huge amount of value that is beyond things like efficiency or things like just providing cloud computing to be flexible. It has to be much more about value generation. And I think that a lot of leaders of enterprise IT have not really grasped that. And I think that's the opportunity sitting right in front of them right now. >> You know what I've seen lately? I wonder if you could comment, is obviously we always talk about the stove pipes, but you've seen the CIO, the chief data officer that you just mentioned, the chief digital officer, the chief information security officer, they've largely been in their own silos of definitely seeing a move to bring those together. I'm seeing a lot of CDOs and CIO roles come together. And even the chief information or the head of security reporting up into that, where there seems to be as you're sort of suggesting just a lot more visibility across the entire organization. Is it an organizational issue? Is it a mindset? Go on if you could comment. >> Well I would say it's two or three different things. Certainly it's an organizational issue, but I think it starts off with a cultural issue. And I think what you're seeing, and if you look at the more progressive companies that you see, I think you are also seeing a new emergence of the enlightened technology leader. So with all respect to me and my generation our tenure as the owners of the large enterprise IT is coming to an end. And we grew up trying to master the complexity of the silos as you so deftly pointed out. Out we were battling this soaring technology, trying to get it under control, trying to get the costs down, trying to reduce CapEx. And a lot of that was focused on the partnerships that we had with technology suppliers. And so that mindset of being engineers struggling for control, having your most important part of being a technology company itself, I've got now, I think is giving way, giving way to a new generation of technology leaders who haven't grown up with that culture. And oftentimes what I see is that the new enlightened CIOs are female and they are coming into the role outside of the regular promotion chain, so they're coming to these roles through finance, HR, marketing, and they're bringing a different focus. And the focus is much more about how do we work together to create an amazing experience for our employees and for our customers and an experience that drives value. So I think there's a reset in the culture. And clearly when you start talking about creating a value chain to improve experience, you're also talking about bringing people together from different multidisciplinary backgrounds to make that happen. >> Well that's kind of, it makes me think about Amazon's mantra of working backwards, start with the experience. And then a lot of CIOs that I know would love to be more involved in the business, but they're just so busy trying to keep the lights on. Like you said, trying to manage vendors and in the like. I've had a discussion the other day with an individual, we were talking about how, you got to shift from a product mindset to a platform mindset, but you've said that the platform thinking you're always ahead of the game. Platform thinking it needs to make way for ecosystem thinking. Unless you're into that, it'd be giant scale business like Amazon or Spotify you said, you're going to be in a niche market if you really don't tap that ecosystem again . If you could explain what you mean by that? >> Well I think right now, if this movement to experience is fundamental. Right? So Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore wrote about the experience economy as far back in 1990, but the things that they predicted then are here now. And so what we're now seeing is that consumers have choice. Employees have choice. I think the pandemic has accelerated that. And so what happens when you put an enterprise under that type of external pressure, is that it fragments. And if it can fragment in two ways. It can fragment dysfunctionally so that every silo tries to go into a defensive mode, protective mode. That's obviously the wrong way to go. But the fragmentation that's exciting is when it fragments into ecosystems that are actually working together to solve and experience problem. And those are not platforms they're too big. When I was at Phillips, I was very enthusiastic about working on this connected healthcare platform. But I think what I started to realize was it takes too much time. It requires too much investment and you are bringing people who tune you based on your capability, whereas what the market needs is much more agile than that. So if we look in healthcare, for instance and you want to connect patients at home, with patients, with the doctors in the hospital. In the old model when you said, I'm going to build a platform for this, I'm going to have doctors with a certain competence, so they're going to be connecting into this. And so are the patients in some way. And so are the insurers. I think what you're going to see now is different. We're going to say let's get together a small team that understands its competence. So for instance, let's get an insurance provider, let's get a healthcare operator, let's get a healthcare tech company and let's pull their data in a way that helps us to create solutions now that can roll out in 30, 60 or 90 days. And the thing that makes that possible is the move to the public cloud. Because now there are so many specialized suppliers, specialized skillsets available that you can connect to through Amazon, through Google, through Azure, that these things that we used to think were very, very difficult, are now much easier. I don't want to minimize the effort, but these things are on the table right now to read value. >> So you're also technologist. And I want to ask you and everybody always says, technology is easy part of the people and the process. We can all agree on that. However sometimes technology can be a blocker. And the example that you just mentioned, I have a couple of takeaways from that. First of all the platform thinking is somewhat, sounds like it's more command and control and you're advocating for let's get the ecosystem who are closest to the problem to solve those problems. However they decide and they'll leverage the cloud. So my question is from a technology standpoint. Does that ecosystem have to be in the same cloud, with the state of today's technology? can it be across clouds? Can be there pieces on prem? What's your thinking on that? >> I think exactly the opposite. It cannot be monolithic and centralized. It's just not practical because that would cause you too much time on interoperability. And who owns what. You see the power behind experience is data. And so the most important technical part of this is dealing with data liquidity. So the data that, for instance somebody like Kaiser has or the Harvard Mental Healthcare have or the Phillips have, that's not going to be put into a central place for the ecosystem mobilization. There will be subsets of that data flowing between those parties. So the technical, the hardware. Is how do we manage data liquidity? How do we manage the security around data liquidity? And how do we also understand that what we're building is going to be ever changing and maybe temporary, because an idea may not work. And so you've got this idea that the timeliness is very very important. The duration is very uncertain. The mojo energy for this is data liquidity, data transfer, data sharing. But the vehicle is the combination of public cloud, in my mind. >> Somebody said to me, hey that data's like water. It'll go where it wants to go, where it needs to go and you can't try to control it. It's let it go. Now of course many organizations, particularly large incumbent organizations they have many many data pipelines. They have many processes, many roles, and they're struggling to actually kind of inject automation into those pipelines. Maybe that's machine intelligence really do more data sharing across that pipeline and ultimately compress the end and cycle time to go from raw data to insights that are actionable. What are you seeing there? And what's your advice? >> Well I think you make some really good points, but what I hear also a little bit in your observation is you're still observing enterprises. And the focus of the enterprise has been on optimizing the processes within the boundaries of its own system. That's why we have SAP and this why we have Salesforce. And to some degree even service now. It's all been about optimizing how we move data, how we create production services. And that's not the game now. That's not an important game. The important game right now is how do I connect to my employees? How do I connect to my customers in a way that provides them a memorable experience? And the realization is, I'm assuming it's already manufacturing for some years. I can't be all things to all people. So I have to understand this is where the first part of data comes in. I have to understand. Who this person is that I am trying to target? Who is the person that needs this memorable experience? And what is that memorable experience going to look like? And I'm going to need my data, but I'm also going to need the data of other actors in that ecosystem. And then I'm going to have to build that ecosystem really quickly to take advantage of the system. So this throws a monkey rage in traditional ideas of standardization. It throws a monkey rage in the idea that enterprise IT is about efficiency. If I may, I just want to come back to the AI because I think we're looking in the wrong places. Things like AI. And let me give you an example today, there are 2.2 million people working in call centers around the world. If we imagine that they work in three shifts, that means that anyone time there are 700,000 people on the phone to a customer, and that customer is calling that company because they're vested, they're calling them with advice. They're calling them with a question they're calling them with a complaint. It is the most important source of valuable data that any company has. And yet, what have we done with that? What we've done with that is we've attacked it with efficiency. So instead of saying, these are the most valuable sources of information, let's use AI to tag the sentiment in the recordings that we make with our most valuable stakeholders. And let's analyze them for trends, ideas things that needs to change. We don't do that. What we do is we're going to give every cool agent two minutes to get them off the phone. For God's sake, don't answer many important, difficult questions. Don't spend money talking to the customer, try to make them happy. So they get a score and say, they hire you at the end of the call, and then you're done. So where the AI automation needs to come in is not in improving your efficiency, but in mining value. And the real opportunity with AI is that Joe Pine says this. "If you are able to understand the customer, rather than interpret them, that is so valuable to the customer, that they will pay money for that". And I think that's where the whole focus needs to be in this new team in enterprise IT, and they're still in the business. >> That's a great observation. I think we can all relate to that in your call center example, or you've been a restaurant, and you're trying to turn the tables fast and get out of there. And it's the last time you ever go to that restaurant. And you're taking that notion of systems thinking and broadening it to ecosystems thinking. And you've said, ecosystems have a better chance of success when they're used to stage and experience for whether it's the employee for the brand. And of course the customer and the partners. >> That's it that's exactly it. So every technology leader should be asking themselves what contribution can I and my organization make to this movement, because the business understands the problem. They don't understand how to solve it, and we've chosen a different dialogue. So we've been talking a lot about what cloud can do and the functionality that cloud has and the potential that cloud has. And those are all good things, but it really comes together. Now when we work together and we as the technology group brings in the know how we know how to connect quickly through the public cloud, we know how to do that in a secure way. We know how to manage data liquidity at scale, and we can stand these things up through our new learning of agile and DevOps. We can stand these ecosystems up fairly quickly. Now there's still a whole bunch of culture between different businesses that have to work together. The idea that I have to protect my data rather than serve the customer. But once you get past that, there's a whole new conversation enterprise IT can have, that I think gives them a new lease of life, new value. And I just think it's a really really exciting time. >> (inaudible) The intersection of a lot of different things. You talk about cloud as an enabler for sure. And that's great. We can talk about that, but you've got this. What you were referring to before is maybe you're in a niche market, but you have your marketplace. And like you're saying, you can actually use that through an ecosystem to really leave a much, much broader available market. And then vector that into the experience economy. We talk about subscriptions, the API economy, that really is new thinking. >> It is and I think what you're seeing here it's not radical in as much as all of these ideas have been around. Some of them have been around since the nineties, but what's radical is the way in which we can now mix and match these technologies to make this happen. That's growing so quickly. And I would argue to you and I've argued this before. Scale, scale as a concept within an organization is dead. It doesn't give you enough value. It gives you enough efficiency and it gives you a cloud. And it doesn't give you the opportunity to target the niche experiences that you need to do. So if we start to think of an organization as a combination of known and unknown potential ecosystems, you start to build a different operating model, a different architectural idea. You start to look outside more than you start to look inside. Which is why the cultural change that we were talking about just now goes hand in hand with this because people have to be comfortable thinking in ecosystems that may not yet exist and partnering with people where they bring to the table. There 20, 30 years of experience in a new and different way. >> So let me make sure I understand that. So you basically, if I understand it, you're saying that if your sort of end goal is scale and efficiency at scale you're going to have a vanilla solution for your customers in your ecosystem. Whereas if you will allow this outside in thinking to come in, you're going to be able to actually customize those experience, experiences and get the value of scale and efficiency. >> Right, so I mean Rory Sutherland, who is a big thinker in the marketing world has always said, "ultimately scale standardization and best practice lead to mediocrity". Because you are not focused on the most important thing for your employee or your brand. You're focused on the efficiency factors and they create very little value. In fact we know that they subvert value. So yes we need to have a very big mindset change. >> Yeah you're a top line thinker Alan and always at the forefront. I really appreciate you coming on to the cube and participate in this program. Give us a last word. So if you're a change agent, I'm an organization and I want to inject this type of change. Where do I start? >> Well I think it starts by identifying. Are we going to work on the employee experience? Do we feel that we have a model where the employees that are on stage with customers are so important that the focus has to be employees. We go down that route and then we look at what's happened to the pandemic. What type of experiences are we going to bring to those employees around their ability to have flow in their work, to get return on energy, to excite the customers? Let's do that. Let's figure out what experience are we driving now? And what does that experience need to be? If we're the customer side. As I said let's look at all the sources of information that we already have. I know companies that spend hundreds of millions a year trying to figure out what consumers want. And yet if we look in their call sentences, you will call up and they will say to you, your call may be recorded for quality purposes and training. And it's not true, less than 10% of those calls are ever listened to. And if they listened to, it's compliance, that's driving that, not the burning desire to better understand the consumer. So if we change that, then we shall get to. What can we change? What is the experience we are now able to stage with all we know and with all we can do. And let's start there, let's start with, what is the experience you want to stage? What's the experience landscape look like now? And who do we bring together to make that happen? >> Alan fantastic. Having you back in the cube, it's always a pleasure and thanks so much for participating. >> Thank you, Dave. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. >> And thank you everybody. This is Dave Vellante the cube on cloud. We'll be right back right after this short break, stay with us. (soft music)

>> From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with coverage of SUSECON Digital. Brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is CUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Clark, he is in the CTO office of SUSE. He works on emerging technologies and open source. Sits on many of the boards for many of those open source organizations. Alan, nice to chat with you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate the opportunity. It's always fun to chat with you, Stu. >> All right, so Alan, you know, open source of course, you know, had a broad impact on the industry. Lots of talk. You know, we talk about soft breeding the world, the impact of open source. Haas on software. Give us, you know, start us a little bit kind of the state of the state as to what you're seeing broadly when it comes to. >> You know, I'm just, I keep, I enjoy this industry, 'cause it's just booming. I got into open source a long time ago, before my hair was gray, and I just can't, it just continues to surprise me and amaze me at how much it's grown. And even from, not just as projects, right? Those continue to exponentially grow, but think about the adoption, right? And from SUSE's perspective, we've got critical mission infrastructure running on open source and that is just totally amazing, right? And they've got aerospace manufacturing firms, Fortune 100s, Fortune 500s, Fortune 50s, the world's largest banks, four or five of the world's largest banks are running on SUSE Linux, right? Automotive vendors, 12 of the 15 largest automotive vendors are running on open source, running on SUSE Linux, and 10 of the largest telecommunications firms are running on SUSE, and it just goes to show that open source is really growing and is being adopted and used by critical infrastructure for the world. Particularly in these troubling days, right? >> Yeah, I mean, Alan, I've always loved diggin' into the data, you know? I haven't followed it for quite as long as you, but I've been involved for comin' up on 20 years now, and you think back 15 or 20 years it was somebody in the back room contributing some code in their spare time when they have it. When I look at the state of open source today, you mentioned lots of enterprises are using it, but lots of enterprises are contributing to it, and it's not necessarily somebody in their spare time doing it, but more and more it part of my job is leveraging and contributing back, upsource to what's happening there, so how are you seeing that? How does that impact the overall governance of open source? >> So, that's a very good question, 'cause the amount of change is huge, right? So these open source foundations have grown very large and the number of people that are contributing to them, not just in code, but in ideas, in best practices and so forth has exponentially grown, and it's amazing to see that. Plus, I guess the other part of it that I really enjoy is it's gone global, right? It used to be these projects were kind of regional, and perhaps North America to Europe, but it's, they've gone global, so these larger projects'll have 170, 180 countries that are involved. That's truly amazing. And the thing that I find very interesting, particularly given the pandemic era, we're all sitting at our homes right now. As open source developers, we're very used to this environment. We're working from home. We're scattered around the globe. We're used to working in different time zones, different geographies, and we know how to communicate and work together, so having this distance and lack of an office is actually not that much of an impediment for open source. So it's actually kind of to their advantage. >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I'd done lots of interviews with developer communities and remote work is just the way they do things. Contributing code is very much an asynchronous nature of what they were doing. Alan, I love you talked about the global nature. One of the things, I was looking forward to being at this event in person was we were going to go to Dublin, you know, great city. (Alan laughs) Love to travel. When we cover a European show, it's always, "Okay, what is different "about different geographies "compared to North America?" You know, you talk about cloud adoption in general tends to be a little bit higher in North America. Any data or anecdotes that you have globally as to how open source is maybe a little bit different and culturally thought of from organizations that might be based in Europe, Asia, Latin America, or the like? >> Yeah, that's to me one of the strengths of these communities now is the difference in perspectives that you get from the different geographies, right? From Europe to Asia and so forth, and it sometimes surprises you, right? You get so used to a few vendors maybe dominating a certain area, and what you find out is they may be strong in a certain geography, but they're not globally. And as other developers and community members and users come in and start talking about their needs and their use cases, you find that their perspective is different than yours and it's kind of that "Ah ha" moment of "Oh, we need to make sure "the software works for everybody "and fits their need." And I guess the second part of that would be, you know, with this pandemic, it's causing the whole industry dynamics to change, and businesses are finding that they've got to rapidly adapt and change, and open source is one of the ways they're able to do that, right? Our customer sentiments are changing. Their purchasing habits are obviously changed. The way we shop, the way we do business, the way we're meeting people, right? We're all doing it digitally now. That's changing the services that companies need to deliver. And one of the powers of open source is being able to provide that to them and deliver those services very rapidly to them. And another dynamic here that I'm finding is interesting is customers, or consumers of open source, the businesses that are consuming open source are realizing that with these times, you know, you've got to have multiple sources for your supply chain. We have a lot more discussion about being nationalized instead of globalized, you know, when borders shut down and you can't get your supplies from another country, where are you going to get them, right? So those kinds of discussions change your source of supplies and so forth, so you have to diversify a little bit, and that's causing new types of services that are going to be created, needed. The beauty of open source, though, is it's global, and so I can get access to it whether I'm here in Salt Lake City or I'm sitting up in Dublin, wherever I'm at. And it's awesome. It's just amazing. >> Excellent, Alan. So, you know, you talked about some of the impact of what the global pandemic happening. They can leverage remote work. Open source is something that they can get ready access to. I'm curious if there's any other things in the community, you know, rallying points that you're seeing, any good stories or anecdotes that you might be able to share. >> So, I guess the other aspect of this I find extremely encouraging is, open source is amazing for individuals, not just businesses, right, to consume it, but me as an individual to learn new ideas, new technologies, try things out. And it's a great opportunity right now, particularly for home bound to go out and learn new ideas, learn about new concepts, new technologies, learn about Kubernetes, learn about containers, learn about rapid software development, right? And SUSE's actually caught onto this. This is one of the things I find really cool is they've got a couple things that are going on. First, they've created a sandbox out there where I, as an individual, for free can go out there and give rapid application development a try. It's being at home, often I don't have the full equipment that I would have at the office, right? So getting an environment set up, having the equipment and access that I need to get an environment set up to try something out, you know, like Kubernetes or application development. I may not have that at my home. So SUSE's set up some sandboxes out there where, as a developer, I can go out and give SUSE's application platform development a try. It's easy, it's all set up for me. I can go out there and I can play. Try out new concepts, see what Kubernetes is about, see what rapid development is about. And it minimizes my, you know, the task and the equipment that I need to be able to do that. The second part of that is they've opened up a lot of their online training courses for free for developers as well and operators. So it's a great time for, we're stuck at home, it's a great time to take advantage of these resources and learn more about open source. >> Great, yeah, absolutely. Alan, I spoke to your CEO, Melissa, and we talked about the importance of the developer communities. You mentioned the sandbox there. I'm curious, anything else you've seen, kind of the changing dynamic about how developers integrate with the business. One of the constant themes we talk about is IT isn't just something that's on the side, but is a clear partner with the business and often is a driver for the business, so the developers often need some education, they need communication. What do you see and how are the development communities changing? >> Oh, so I think a great part of this, this year is all the events that are going virtual. So we've got tons of resources available within these communities and through companies like SUSE, as we just talked about, and we also have these events that are going virtual, so all this content is now becoming readily accessible. I hear often from developers saying, "Well, my company doesn't give us much "for money for traveling to these events "and conferences and so forth." Now that they're all going virtual it's given 'em great access to amazing materials, and the beauty of these events is that a lot of the material is framed around helping you understand how to develop open source, how to become a part of the community, and then also about what this technology is about, where it's heading. So you, particularly as an IT organization, I get a great insight as to where the technology's going. What's the future look like? What are the ideas that are being formed by all these individuals from around the world? What's their perspectives? And then I can turn, and tying that to the business, is I can take that and take that to my business and say, "Look, here's where the technology is heading. "Here's how we can use it to enhance our business "and deliver better services to our customer." So it's a great opportunity this year. >> Yeah, you're right, Alan. There's often that gap between the people that can attend and what content is available to everyone else, and, you know, seems to be opening up. Everything from, you know, it funny, Disney is giving away the recipes for some of the things that they're doing through the conferences, typically free to attend and on demand soon after doing. All right, Alan, you're in the emerging technologies group. So, last thing I want to ask is give us a little bit look forward. What is your group looking at or the communities that you're involved in? What are some of the things that are exciting you and your peers? >> So, SUSE expanding from the edge to the cloud, to the core, right? And so we're covering things all the way from the gamut. Lot of new exciting stuff happening out on the edge with IoT and with edge services. Pretty excited about that area. SUSE's had a lot of experience in that space, particularly if you look at manufacturing providing, helping them, those businesses, the manufacturing firms meet their SLAs. Had a lot of experience in the retail space, around point of service. That, of course, is pivoting to self-service, to frictionless shopping, that types of stuff, so it's pretty exciting in those areas. So there's a lot going on in the edge. Healthcare, SUSE's been very involved, embedded in a lot of healthcare devices. That business will continue to grow, so we're seeing a lot about, on the edge. We talked a bit about rapid development. So back at the core and the cloud we're trying to make that a seamless experience so you can push those workloads, build those workloads in a containerized, micro-service manner, and distribute those pieces where it makes sense, right? So we talk about artificial intelligence gathering the data out on the edge, doing a bit of filtering and processing, moving that up to the core and the cloud, being able to mine that data, learn intelligently, then orchestrate your services, orchestrate your core appropriately, right? To meet those demands that your customers are putting on you. There's just a lot going on. We got containers. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We got intelligent orchestration. Then we could go on and talk a ton, we could talk for 30 minutes just about what's happening in the data space. So there's a lot to look forward to when it comes to open source and the innovation that's happening out there. >> All right, well, Alan Clark. Great to catch up with you. Thank you so much for giving us a little bit of vision. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Where we've been, and where we're going. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and stay tuned for more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you for watching "theCUBE." (calm electronic music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome. As you know, I've been interviewing a number of CEOs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm really excited to have Alan Trefler here. He's the founder and CEO of Pegasystems. Alan, thanks for being part of the program. >> Oh, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So let's get into it. I mean when you were 27 years old, 37 years ago, 1983, you started Pega. Now you've seen a lot of cycles. Never seen anything like this, I know, but certainly there was the '87 crash. You saw, you know, the banking crisis in the late '80s, early '90s, the dotcom bubble, 2008, 2009, and now this. I want to ask you sort of how have you responded to crises in the past? I mean the hallmark of your company, the book you wrote is being able to manage through change. How did you manage through this one? What was your first move? >> Well, you know, what I'll tell you is from the inception we've always been a scrappy company. You know, we never took any venture capital. We bootstrapped this firm. I went public in the late '90s, and you know, we've now got a firm that will do over a billion in revenue this year and has 5,400 staff. So we've built, I think, a cohesive team around a set of principles that really have matched the way the software and technology have evolved, but has still taken a pretty radically different approach to how it should be used by businesses and business users. >> Well, so talk about some of the big waves that you've been riding over the years. I mean you set out to help business people really communicate better with IT. You laid out in your book some of the challenges there, and as you've pointed out many, many times, it gets more complex, people try to understand the customer better with terminology like customer relationship management. People don't necessarily want a relationship, right? Talk about some of the observations that you've made around customer behavior and channels, and how you've approached things a little bit differently as an entrepreneur. >> So I think organizations, when they think about how they want to engage with their customers, typically make a couple of serious mistakes. One is they say they want to do a good job for their clients, but especially if they're a big company they then devolve into actually doing the work in their channel. I mean they have a mobile group that builds the mobile app, which is different than the group that handles the call center, which is different than the group that handles the website, and all this business logic, it's baked into that. And that just destroys their ability to implement change rapidly, which particularly in this COVID era is so important for the organizations that are going to be successful. Now on the other side sometimes they get overly focused on their backend system. They're worrying about how they're going to put in the perfect ERP system or accounting system, that that will somehow support customer engagement better, but frankly it never does. We think you need to think about your business from the center out. How do I apply AI to what I want to do for and with my client? And then how do I apply workflow and work management capability to ensure that those decisions are done optimally and effectively? That's what Pega worked on from our inception, and now as we've gone into our fifth complete generation of software I think we've really crossed some boundaries that are pretty remarkable. >> So I mean, well what you've built is actually quite amazing. Since you've written your book the stock's exploded. I don't know if that's cause and effect, but nonetheless some of the things that you talk about again in the book, you talk about, you know, people looking at data the wrong way. What's impressed me is you've always taken a systems view. You're not trying to optimize, to your point, on one little either technology or maybe optimizing on cost. If you look at the whole system and think about outcomes, that is going to, you know, yield ultimately better businesses. And so I want to ask you-- >> Well, thinking about an end to end way of understanding how the technology should be applied is exactly what we've always believed, but the key is to be able to do this incrementally, iteratively, not monolithically, because no businesses can afford to rip out things. So you need to be able to do this what we call, say, "One microjourney at a time." One set of things that are good for a customer. In today's era it might send, as we do with many of our clients now under stress, we help them help their customers around things like loan forbearing. How do you give people a payment plan because they just don't have the money to pay their loan today. >> Right. >> And how do you do that while you keep them as customers, as opposed to, well, situations that could be far worse. >> Let's talk a little bit about machine intelligence. When you started Pega it was the same year I started in the industry at IDC, and AI was all the rage, and then, you know, it just never happened. You had the very long AI winter, but now it's, you know, starting to come back. You're seeing, you know, obviously there are certain technical capabilities, the amount of data, the processing power, et cetera, and the cost are much more aligned. You're seeing trends like AI. You're seeing things like RPA, you know, which you've brought in to your platform. Talk a little bit about that sort of incremental change that you're adding in to your platform and how you go about doing that. And I want to ask you about some of your thoughts on those trends. >> Certainly. Well, AI has been, from our point of view, a really big thing for the last decade. There was a set of false starts, and we actually saw that they were false starts, so we didn't get sucked into it, but come around 2010 we made an enormous push to bring machine learning and decisioning into our work management platform, and it's in there beautifully and it's doing amazing things. You know, I just saw one of our customers, Commonwealth Bank in Australia, their CEO in his quarterly earnings announcement led by talking about what the Pegasystem, what our system, which they call a customer engagement engine, is doing for them. During the fires that earlier this year were ravaging Australia, they used that to send personalized, not just messages, but also relief to people whose homes were burned out, so they weren't going to be able to pay their credit card bill. They didn't have to call the contact center. We reached out through the brilliant work that they did using our technology, reached out to preemptively make those customers feel great, and now with the COVID epidemic that organization is doing the same types of things, which really both endears them with their customers but also gets tied into that efficiency layer because you stop doing needless work because you're being smart as a result of using AI to figure out what to do, and to learn from the outcomes that come from that. >> So we've seen, you know, the playbook of you see, you know, startups, they get out, they're well-funded, and they point to the large established companies and they say, "Oh, that's an old stack." They can't respond, innovator's dilemma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things about Pega is you've been able to transform yourselves over the years. You know, build for change, I guess. An example, for instance, going from perpetual to an ARR type of model, which you very successfully have done, and now, you know, as I said, bringing in RPA, but I want to ask you about RPA. A lot of competitors out there, big valuations kind of pointing at you guys as the incumbent. You have RPA, but what do you see within that space specifically? >> I see a lot of delusional behavior. The ability to put robots in to do little pieces of task work can make sense in some situations, particularly if you don't have a good API, a good application programming interface, to get data in and out. A robot in that sort of situation can be a very, very helpful stopgap, but you really need an engine driven by AI and driven by process, process automation, that has to be at the heart. That's the dog to the robotic process automation tail, and a lot of these RPA vendors are running around saying, "You know, all you need's the tail." I'll tell you that in the last week two of the "biggest leaders" have both had massive layoffs. A little google work you can find out exactly who they are, and it's because their stuff isn't working well. >> I want to ask you about entrepreneurship during and coming out of a pandemic. Is it a good time to do a startup? Not that you're thinking about doing a startup, but you know, advice to entrepreneurs. >> Well, I think it's a terrific time to have a startup mentality. You know, part of why I think we've been able to reinvent our technology literally five times over our years is that we're always prepared to look from a new angle and apply that sort of entrepreneurial thinking and scrappiness. However, in terms of starting something right now, it's a very uncertain time. It's uncertain as to when customers will be back in the market. It's uncertain as to exactly how hard certain industry segments would be hit. And so whereas I think that even during recessions it can be a fine time to launch a startup, and in fact that's when I launched Pega was during a time when the economy was not doing that great, I would wait a little bit right now to see exactly when things are going to stabilize. I think that it's just a little too uncertain, but that time will emerge again. >> So I want to ask you, so again, in your book you talked about big data, big problems. I always joke to my friends who have little kids, little kids, little problems, (chuckling) and so little companies, little problems. You're now a billion dollar company, and you're bringing in new talent. You've set your sights on becoming a multibillion dollar company. You've got a great track record. I want you to talk about sort of how you see the future and what your aspirations are. You don't have to give specific numbers, but just frame that for us. >> Well, first of all, just to be clear the numbers in terms of a billion, that's an actual revenue number, as opposed to some of these valuations which we've seen with companies like WeWork might be a little bit tentative. What we see as being central to our growth and value prop are a couple of things. First, we've made our software tremendously easier to use, particularly our last release, which came out about six months ago, really, really straightforward for business people even to take ownership of their projects and work really collaboratively with IT. So that's one aspect of how we grow and want to accelerate the growth. The second aspect is Pega Cloud. Last year Pega Cloud grew enormously. It's now more than half our business, and for people to come on Pega Cloud where we do all of the database work, we do all the heavy lifting for them from a technology point of view, also provides a route to growth, though we also support what we call client cloud, which is where one of our customers wants to run it on their own cloud. And I think the third thing that we're doing that we're hoping is going to allow us to accelerate our growth is to broaden our go-to-market function, make our go-to-market function just larger by continuing to hire, and by the way, this is a great time for a company with a half a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be out looking to hire talent. Looking to hire and broaden and deepen our go-to-market and how we work, especially with those awesome customers, some of whom are suffering but are going to come back, and they're going to increasingly need to change their digital infrastructure. Their digital transformation, we think, is going to benefit from platforms like ours in unique ways. >> Well, Alan, I love the story. As you just pointed out, you just tapped the credit market. You've got a fantastic balance sheet. You've got a lot of tailwinds, you know, despite this pandemic, and as we often say, you've got a founder as the CEO and we've seen how that really culturally makes huge differences at companies. Alan, thanks so much for coming on our CEO series. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. It's been a real pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (smooth music)