(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, covering Coupa Insp!re 2022. theCUBE is really happy to be here at this event. About 2,500 folks are here, which is great to see. I have two guests from Microsoft with me. Please, welcome Jonathan Allen, the director of global network modeling design and planning, and Cassie Wang, senior global network model and design engineer. Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. >> No problem. Thanks Lisa for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's talk about what's going on at Microsoft, the Microsoft supply chain. Supply chain is a term that's on everyone's lips these days for some interesting reason, but talk to me a little bit about the Microsoft supply chain and how does it scale to meet the needs of business? >> Yeah, Lisa, it's really an interesting design at Microsoft. When you look at all the products we service, from Xbox consoles, controllers, Xbox games, Xbox Live cards, service devices for retail customers, for consumer customers and commercial customers. And then the way we go to market through distributors, retailers, and direct to consumer homes, we have to have a supply chain that actually executes across all the products and customer needs based on seasonality. When you think about our products, Xbox console heavy Christmas, heavy consumer, heavy retail commercial devices for service, heavy quarter ends, heavy periods of time back to school. So, we have to have a supply chain that effectively works across all of our products, all of our customers, and all the differences analogies that we have to manage. >> And do so globally? >> And do so globally. >> So talk to me about the transformation. That's a word that we talk a lot about digital transformation, right? >> Yes. >> Before COVID, now we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation during COVID, we've seen challenges with the supply chain. Talk to me about Microsoft supply chain journey from a digitalization perspective, what you guys have gone through. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is the key. And I have a philosophy which is around managing a business by facts and figures. And so, when Cassie first came on about a year and a half ago, our focus was on digitizing our supply chain. So how do you take our physical supply chain, digitize it in a way that you have a digital mapping and a duplication of what's happening physically in a digital way across the supply chain. So about every single day, we're grabbing in about 500 gigabytes of data, that then allows us to understand the physical and the virtual world of our supply chain, to understand how it's moving, how it's executing and how it's delivering. As for example, we were able to, when the war began in Ukraine, to understand where our trains were, how they were moving, and if they were continuing to move versus stopping. On the second side, we're leveraging that data now to make decisions about where our supply chain is today, which is really focused in the changing environments that are real time occurring. That's driving opportunities, whether it's about reducing carbon, whether it's driving cost down or whether it's servicing the customers to make real time decisions, while at the same time planning for three to five years out based on our growth, our projections, and making sure we'll have the right infrastructure partner supply chain in place to service with those changes in growth. >> Basically you need a crystal ball? >> Basically. >> Essentially? >> Yes. >> And Cassie, it sounds like from what Jonathan just said, you joined the team during the pandemic? >> Yes. >> So, during a time of massive change? >> Fully remote, yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that and some of the opportunities that you saw in helping the supply chain modernization. >> Yeah, definitely. So when I joined Microsoft, it's great time. And it's all the risks and challenges and dynamic changing environment that's really involved. So we spent a long time, like from the time I joined Microsoft, we spent the time to set up this digital chain of our supply chain. So really to transform what is happening physically to how do we see it digitally. So just to bring the visibility of the supply chain. So the great thing is we are able to leverage the tool from Coupa, the digital transformation and also supply chain design optimization tool to help us really build the digital twin, and also the model for Microsoft device supply chain. >> Now, interesting comment. So when I met Casie, the first time I met her, was in person when I interviewed her. Second time I met her in person was here at Coupa, and I was afraid I wouldn't recognize her. (all laughing) >> Of course, challenges of last year. Talk to me about speaking of challenges, talk to me about some of the challenges that Microsoft saw and said, "We need a partner like Coupa to help us eliminate these challenges. We don't have time. Real time is no longer nice to have. We've got to be able to transform, so we have that visibility in real time." >> Absolutely. When you think about time, time and decisions, overnight, cities get locked down in China, cities get locked down in Europe. And if you wait days or wait hours, that could be the difference between product on a boat, product on a plane, or product not arriving to support your customer needs. >> Right. And then the question is knowing that with that real time, how are you making decisions real time to change, to alternate airports? Making changes on the products you're making to make sure that, I was making this but now I should make this, because I have a risk of getting product to show. >> And you've got to do all that with very limited amount of time. And of course, cause there's the consumer. I mean, we think about the Microsoft on the business side but the consumer side, you mentioned some of the consumer products you don't offend the Xbox, the service consumers. One of the things that was really in short supply during the pandemic and probably still is to some degree, is patience. >> Yes. >> The consumer experience is so critical for a brand. >> Correct. >> And as is the employee experience. >> Yes. >> Talk to me a little bit about, from a supply chain digitization perspective, what was some of the executive sponsorships? Who were some of those executive sponsors that were involved in going, "Yeah, we need to move in this direction with Coupa, and it's got to be now."? >> The real supporter behind that is, my manager, Jeff Davidson, and then his leader, which is Donna Wharton, where they are truly about what are we doing next? How are we going to leverage the tools and the capabilities that are provided by others that allow us to do our job? So let's be clear on, let's use those that are designed to do what they're supposed to do, and then build where we need to. And that was the big difference, the digitization of the data, create the data, create the information so that we could then leverage the tools to create the information, right? And that information is then about bringing the facts, the information and the data forward, to have very fact-based conversations, which is back to manage the business by facts and figures. >> Right. Well, Cassie, one of the things that we've also learned in the last couple years, is that every company is a data company. If they're not a data company they're probably not going to be around. I even think of my grocery store and all that data that they have on me to be able to surface up. What did I buy last time, and I want to buy that again? Talk to me a little bit about why was Coupa the right choice to help facilitate this data strategy so that the visibility and the supply chain and the ability to tweak things on demand is there? >> Yeah. So, the main stuff that we are leveraging from Coupa are the data group and also the supply chain group. So data group enable us to really, for the people who do not have a intensive data manipulation backgrounds, they can use data group very straightfowardly to work on the data so they can build, they can grab the data transactional level and aggregate to the leadership level to see data in different aspects, tell the trends to get the key information. So that's the power of getting the massive data on a level that's like everybody can say, "Oh, wow! This is what it means." And another is definitely leveraging the data to get into a model, which is what we just talked about, the digital twin of our physical supply chain. So, we are able to like make analysis based on very easy design, like sensitive analysis, what-if analysis, to test out what our future supply chain can be. And what is the cost benefits? What is all the impacts on the on the lead times? On the carbons? So, yeah. So that's the power of leveraging the data. >> Speaking of carbons, how is Microsoft working towards being carbon negative, zero waste? What's some of the things that are going on there from a corporate responsibility perspective? >> Yeah, that's a really important one. As known about two years ago, we came out with a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. >> 2030. >> And so, the company as a whole is doing massive initiatives from different groups, but specifically in supply chain, we're constantly focusing on cutting our carbon footprint, whether it's the way we're making the products and designing the products, whether it's the way that we're designing our warehouses. So for example, just recently, we launched a Carbon Neutral DC in Europe, which is all solar panel based. We're about to do that as well in one of our US operations. We're working on other things that allow us to think about alternative pallets that eliminate the weight of wood, to a much lighter pallet that has a huge carbon reduction when you think about shipping things via the air and the carbon impact there. So, everything that we work on is really around three things; service, cost and sustainability. And our biggest objective is really taking all three of those objectives and trying to bring them closer to each other so that the decisions aren't as large against each other when you make one versus the other. That's our objective. So, how do we continue to move that ball forward, challenge the paradigms of the old, that we're so accustomed to and really move forward to changing? >> How does Coupa help with that? >> Oh, I can't say that, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the actual dimensions, Microsoft our goal is to achieve carbon neutral by 2030. So traditionally, the trade off might be between cost and service, right? >> Okay. And now, the carbon is the most important priority. So the trade off, the balance, are between cost, service, time and carbon. So one of the great thing that Coupa can help us is in the network modeling. There is actually objective for lowering the carbon emissions. So that can be the top priority that you wanted to solve through your network modeling like in parallel to cost, to service. So you can just like very straightforwardly put more weight into carbon when you're making your decisions, like that can be a higher penalty cost when you have more carbon emissions. It's like a very straightforward way to translate the carbon goal into some quantifiable goal into the modeling and data. >> Jonathan, I'm curious from a Microsoft strategic partnership perspective, how important is it from Microsoft to partner with companies that have that strong commitment to help facilitate being carbon neutral by 2030, having a strong ESG initiative? >> It's critical. Microsoft for the most part is an outsourced supply chain in which we measure partners across the network. We have our partners run our distribution and centers, we have outsource manufacturing, we have outsourced logistics. And it's important that we're working with them about what their plans are, because they're just simply an extension of the Microsoft supply chain. >> Right. >> Right. They're not not just companies we work with, they're companies we partner with, to think about how can we change the future? What are the alternatives that we can do? How do we think about alternative fuels? How do we think about alternative shipping ways? How do we think about creating density in the network? So one of the biggest things when you really think about optimization is really around creating deensity. How do I create more with less, and make sure I'm taking, for every dollar spent, for every shipment made, I maximize it to its fullest, and leave no waste behind it? That's the goal. And so, partners challenging us is probably the most important piece because they're on the front line. They actually see our shipments, they see our loads, they see the work we're doing and how it's translating to their environment. And it's important that they give us that hard feedback back that allows us know where we're not meeting the bar. >> Got it. Cassie, you guys are giving a presentation in about a couple of hours. Talk to me about some of the things that the audience, like if you had to summarize the top three takeaways that the audience is going to learn from the top, what would they be? >> I think the first is sustainability. So we want everybody to know that this is the key mission for Microsoft. That's one of the priorities for the next eight years for Microsoft to achieve. And the second is just how Coupa can help us achieve that goal. And how do we leverage the the applications, the tools, the cutting edge technologies for us to achieve a sweet balance between sustainability and technology supplychain? >> I think one of the greatest things about conferences like this, is that Coupa is great with that customer centricity, is it the opportunity to hear from the voice of the customer? What challenges you had? Why you chose Coupa? How you resolved them? And that crystal ball that you talked about in terms of where we're going from here. I think that there's so much value. I'm sure in what you're going to share today with the audience. Jonathan, last question for you, for other folks in any industry that are about to embark on, or are in the midst of a supply chain, digital transformation, what's your advice? What recommendations would you give? >> For me, it's really about two things. First and foremost is about creating data. Focus on data, not an answer, not a conversation. What is the information that you require? And then the second piece about that is then how do you make sure you stitch it together? And how you create, whether it's manufacturing data, whether it's purchase order data, whether it's sales order data, whether it's shipment data, whatever it is, making sure that you can stitch end-to-end together, because each individual decision by itself, may be right, but could be wrong, because ultimately, it's about the decision for the whole, not the decision for the one. And then making sure you focus on the cultural change, which is around, it's just not my area, it's just not my thing, it's about the end, it's about the planet, it's about Microsoft, it's about the customer, it's about the future, and making sure you're really really focused on making that change, right? Not my change. >> Right, and Rob Bernstein even alluded to that a little bit this morning in his keynote talking about one of the things that Coupa breaks is silos. >> Yes. >> Organizations that, cause to your point, something might be really good for sales or operations, but not good for marketing or logistics, for example, need to be able to have that visibility across, but also another thing that Coupa is famous for is collaboration. >> Correct. >> Being able to enable that collaboration across lines of business, across teams, across partners. >> Yep. And an important statement of that is, when you think about change, think of it like a stream, right? Streams, they create pathways with persistence. When you believe in something and you're truly behind it, just stay the path, right? There'll be a time and a place, cause sometimes the decisions just aren't now, but they will become. There's a lot of things that, for example, myself and Cassie are constantly working on, that might not be right now, but they will be right in the future. And it takes sometimes, just the right opportunity, the right situation, but the key is making ysure you understand those things so when those opportunities present themselves, you can just step in. >> Yep. Another thing we've learned, I think in the last two years, I'm losing count, is it's not a matter of if, but when. >> Correct. >> And you can apply that general statement to pretty much anything these days. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Microsoft's transformation of the supply chain, the digital twin that you've created. Have a great time in your session. I'm sure folks are going to learn a lot from you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, my pleasure. For Jonathan Allen and Cassie Wang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the the CUBE's coverage of Coupa Insp!re 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, be right back with my next guest. (upbeat msuic)

>>Okay. Okay. We're back on the cube here in cloud city. I'm John Farah, David latte. Thanks Adam. And guys in the studio. Awesome stuff. Dave mobile world Congress is happening. It's basically a hybrid show. Mostly virtual. Actually the physical action is a lot of booths. Cloud city is tricked out, big time made for TV. The cubes, obviously here, we've got the main stage with Adam and crew, Chloe and team, and it's pretty, pretty cool. Cloud cities, thematic John, we're going to see the next decade be about the cloudification of telco and major, major portions of telco. We're going to move to the cloud. It's very clear. And especially the front end stuff, a lot of the business support systems, some of the operational systems are going to go. When you're seeing that, you're seeing that with Amazon, you're seeing Microsoft, you're seeing Google. They're all moving in that direction. >>So it's inevitable. And I just love the fact that events are back. That's a game changing statement. Mobile world. Congress is not going to go away. There's no way they're going to let this event slide by. Even though we're coming out of the pandemic, clearly Bon Jovi was here. He said, quote, we met him last night, face to face. He's like, go Patriots. Hope they have a good season. This year. He's a big Patriots fan. He said, it's going to be better. This could be better. But he also said he it's the first time he's performed in a year and a half in front of all excited. He wasn't calm, small little intimate crowd. Again, look behind this. You can see the cloud city. This is really built out extremely well. A lot of executives here, but the content has been awesome here, but also remote. We've been bringing people in live remotes and we also had some prerecorded assets that we have. And we've got one here from Booz Allen, who I had a conversation with earlier in the month and grab some time to talk about the impact of 5g telecom and how it relates to national security for cover mints and society. And so let's take a look at that video right now. >>Hi, welcome to the cube conversation here in the cube studios in Palo Alto, California, I'm John for a, your host had a great conversation with two great guests gonna explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have the deep dive conversation around, um, how it's all transforming. We've got Kate Lee, vice president Booz Allen's digital business. Kate. Great to have you, uh, John Paisano principal at Booz Allen's digital cloud solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing, having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications, um, and consumer, and then here, uh, for national security and for governments here in the U S is in the military impact. >>And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you starting to see the architectures emerge, where the edge, the IOT edge, the industrial IOT edge, or any kind of edge concept 5g is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You've got Amazon with snowballs, snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology. That's it like and operational technologies it's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption. So I want to get into it. Let's key. Let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture, that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast and this new architecture of digital, >>Which I think is a great question. And, um, if I could just, uh, share our observation on why we even started investing in edge, um, you mentioned cloud, um, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of it on you to take a look from mainframes to desktops, to servers, to a cloud, to mobile, and now I have a T what we observed was that, um, industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of, uh, uh, of it, right? So as you mentioned with industry spending billions on IOT and edge, um, we've just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. Um, if you've take a look at, um, you mentioned 5g, I think 5g will be certainly, um, an accelerator to edge, um, because of the, the resilience, the lower latency and so forth, but, um, taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right. >>Um, and, uh, what, uh, Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space. Um, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows stores to be ubiquitous. We think that, you know, the next generation internet will be space-based. Um, so when you think about it, um, connected, it won't be connected servers per se. It will be connected devices. Um, so, uh, that's kind of, you know, some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in, in edge. >>Awesome. I'd love to sh to, uh, continue the conversation on space and the edge, um, and super great conversation to have you guys on and really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities, uh, this new shift that's happening is the next big thing is coming quickly and it's here on us and that's cloud. I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, uh, edge with 5g changing the game. I key, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and repivoting, or refactoring their, their, uh, existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers as a pattern emerge, right? You gotta be in the cloud, you gotta be leveraging data. You gotta be, uh, horizontally scalable, but you've gotta have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. >>That's the playbook. Some people are it, some people are not getting there. So I got to ask you guys, you know, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco. Now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance, uh, launching a satellite couple of hundred K you're going to launch a cube set. Um, that could be good and bad, right? So, so, you know, the telco business is changing radically cloud telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5g, certainly business commercial benefits, more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >>Um, you know, as we think through, um, cloud to edge, um, one thing that we realized, because our definition of edge, John was actually at the point of data collection, right on the sensor themselves, others definition of edge is we're a little bit further back when we call it the edge of the it enterprise. Um, but you know, as we look at this, we realize that you need, you needed this kind of multi echelon environment, right? From your cloud to your tactical clouds, right. Where you can do some processing and then at the edge themselves, really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about is still all about the data, right? The AI needs to Dane, the telco is transporting the data. Right. And so, um, I think if you think about it from a data perspective, in relationship to telcos, right, one edge will actually enable a very different paradigm in a distributed paradigm for data processing. Right. So instead of bringing the data to some central cloud, right. Um, which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data, right. So mitigate, what's actually being sent over to those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. Right. Um, so I think, you know, at the end of the day, uh, the telcos are gonna have a pretty big, uh, component to this, um, even from space down to ground station, right. How that works. Um, so, um, the, the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand >>John, what's your perspective. I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had like, I mean, you know, months and years, new towers go up and now you've got backbone. You've got, you know, it's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >>Yeah. So, um, I definitely echo the sentiments that Q would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, um, faster speeds being available, you know, in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about basing an adversary, that's a near peer threat. The first thing they're going to do is make it contested congested, and you have to be able to survive. I, while yes, the, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms. The places we've not had it before. Um, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over rely on it, assuming it will always be there because I know in my experience wearing the uniform and even if I'm up against it adversary, that's the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, you know, continued some survivable and lethal. And so that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that so low. And I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How could, how do I continue to mission? >>Yeah. It's interesting. Mean if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology key, it's been like siloed. Okay. We've got a workplace workforce project, uh, and we have the tactical edge and we have the, you know, siloed it solution when really work in play, whether it's work here. And John's example is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety is his life. Right. And, and protection, the department has to manage the coms. And so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. Right. So all this is integrate integrated. Now it's not like one department it's like, it's it's together. >>Yeah. Do you, I mean, you're, you're, uh, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed siloed banking. Um, not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. Right. Um, you know, from a digital battlefield perspective, you know, I, you know, it's a joint fight, right. So even across these enterprise of enterprises, right. So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally, uh, we have to integrate, we have to inter-operate. Um, and, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too. Right. Not reinventing the wheel. >>Yeah. You know, I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. Five GLC has much more, more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the, of the spectrum. Uh, it's more dense. It's gonna create more connectivity options. Um, how do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like, obviously not, not the centralized tower from a backhaul standpoint, but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless, uh, uh, uh, transit is key. Um, that's the real edge here. How does, how do you guys see that evolving? >>So, um, you know, we're seeing, uh, we're seeing a lot of, um, innovations actually through small companies. We're really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point, um, because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible, right. Um, because again, we're in a different environment now there's different rules, there's different capabilities now, but then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, um, uh, some of the larger companies, Amazon and Microsoft also investing, um, as well. Right. So, um, I think the merge of the, you know, are the unconstrained are the possible right by these small companies that are, you know, just kind of driving, you know, uh, innovations, uh, supported by the, the, the maturity and the, the, the heft of these large companies who are building out kind of these, um, pardoned kind of, uh, capabilities. Um, they're going to converge at some point, right. Um, and, and that's where I think they want to get further innovation. >>Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies, as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale role of data. We've got them, we hit out all the key points. I think here, as they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. You know, the developers are now going to be on the front lines. Um, mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning, architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and, and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >>Um, this is a quick question. Um, so I think, um, you, you touched upon it. Um, one is take the holistic approach. Uh, you mentioned orchestras a couple of times, and I think that's, that's critical understanding, um, how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture. So they're, they're not disjointed, right? They're not siloed, right. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. Um, I think the second thing is be patient. Uh, it took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for, uh, about three years now. Um, and we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were, you know, um, discussing around edge, um, and kind of pulling that all together, but it took us some time to even figure it out, kind of, Hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value, um, out for our clients? Right. So being a little bit patient, um, in thinking through kind of how you can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor, >>John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, in addition to the points, the key res I would, number one, amplified the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking, you know, open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques, and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that, that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, you know, patients open all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of, you know, upskilling it, this is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. Like, how do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded. So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation >>Back day, this is a great interview. We just had with Kaley for Booz Allen reason, why I wanted to bring that into the cube programming this week was because you heard him saying ivory cloud. You heard him say public cloud innovation, edge, all elements of the architecture. And he says, we are learning and it takes patience. And the other thing that he was hyper focused on was the horizontal scalability, not silos. And this is an architectural shift. Who's Alan again, premier firm, and they're doing like killer work. Those guys are amazing. So this brings up the whole theme here, which is you got to nail the architecture. If you don't know what checkmate looks like, don't play chess. That's what I always say. Well, you don't know what the game is, don't play it. And I think the telco story that we hear from Dr is that these guys don't know the game. >>Now I would question that Amazon and others think they do because as they're all partnering with them, yeah, Amazon's got great partnerships. Google just announced a partnership with Ericsson goes on and on. I think anything that can move into the hybrid cloud, Ken should and will that'll happen, but there's some stuff that's going to take some time. Maybe we'll never move. You see that with mainframes. But what they'll do is they'll put an abstraction layer around it and it's got to communicate. And I think the big question is, okay, is it going to be the cloud stack coming on prem, which I think is going to happen, or is it going to be the reverse? And I would bet on the former, well, you know, we've been covering the cloud from day one. We've been part of that wave. We've had all the top conversations with Andy Jassy when, and he was just breaking through the growth. All the cloud players we've been there. We talked to all their customers. We have our finger on the pulse of cloud and we are in cloud city. Main street of cloud city is where all the action is. And the main stage is up there. Adam and team take it from here.

>> Narrator: From theCUBES studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS global public sector partner awards. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable valuable Amazon connect appointment. And we are now joined by Steve Careful, adult social care expert PA consulting group and Graham Allen, the director of adults health and care at Hampshire county council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >> Thank you Natalie >> I love you Natalie. >> Well by now we are really familiar the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. >> Yeah, Thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire county council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when a lockdown was imposed by the national government of England in the 23rd of March 2020. Shortly thereafter the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self issolate. And for the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities needed to sheild and receive a variety of support shortly after that through the summer of 2020 that number increased some 50,000. And then by January of this year that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping food and so on and so forth, but also medications but also the real risks of self isolation. Many of the people that we were needing to support when here the two known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence needs and many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self isolation not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time and the risks of their wellbeing was something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact, being able to offer that support. >> Yeah and I'd love it now to get your take Steve on how PA consulting group helped deliver on that call on that need. >> True so we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council, we've been working together for number of years, delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, If they responded yes, to those, to that question we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in our call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things pet care came up quite often people who couldn't leave the house home and look after their dog, they just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until March of this year. >> Right well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and, you know evolved in different stages, you know, with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year or so, you know how did the technology develop how did the relationship develop and, you know tell us about that process that you had with each other. >> So the base service remained very consistent that different points in the year, when there were different issues that may be needed to be communicated to to the service users we were calling we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings checkpoint, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I don't think for all of us COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was going to happen in a week or a month. So we just have to all stay on our toes keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with we really were able to do something that was special and I'm very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. >> Right and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What of results have you seen, you know do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that use the service? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. We did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people when the first instance in terms of receiving calls, the fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within a Hampshire county council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in, day out we're well-known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services, like libraries and so on and so forth, and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to cover last. And Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand Hampshire county council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data-driven in real time, in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire county council we have some 76 elected members believe me they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents. And they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating. But as I say, thanking us and our partners PA at district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard. In terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the County of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. >> Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient on the person really made it more people focused and you know, obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because I myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology, it comes in with it with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience. And we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice invoicing the bulk call. that was very, very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring clear tone recognizing that many of the individuals we were calling would have been would have been older people maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call simple things like this were very important. One of the of the debates I remember having very early on was the choice as to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this? Or that could be by pressing a digital on the phone. We understood that again, because potentially of frailty maybe a little lack of dexterity amongst some of the people we'd be calling that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this say, yes if you don't want it to say no and those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed I think made a really big difference in terms of of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service run. >> Terrific. Well Graham I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? >> Yeah, I think the lessons in some of the lessons that we've, again learned through our response to the pandemic, are lessons that to a degree have traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period, working with PA, which is be outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver then to some degree it's going to fail And this might certainly did not fail in any way shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So, as I've already said we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population, accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more generally would a service offer not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre COVID was the using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do the access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, you know face-to-face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less then and there. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice. If I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. >> Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now, moving forward like to shift over to our other guests, you know, what do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? >> Well, there's certainly been an uptake in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with these are often older people people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way in a way that isn't as intrusive. It isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding a ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're going to see for five minutes in a unfamiliar building. I think that that in a sense COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context, but I think where it's really worked well and works is a great example of that. Is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately the kinds of resources Graham's talked about the people need to access the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip will outstrip supply. therefore being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction, using a technology ruse enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices, having spent a working at home? You know, I think the answer is invariably going to be no, some will but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. >> Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful PA consulting group and Graham Allen Hampshire county council really appreciate your, your insights on how this important technology helped people who were suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. >> Steve: You're welcome. >> Graham: Thank you. >> Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021. The virtual cube. You know, the pandemic has caused us to really rethink this whole concept of operational resilience. So we're going to dig into that and talk about the importance of constructing a holistic resilience plan and get the perspective of some really great domain experts. Allen Downs is the Vice President in Global Cloud Security and Resiliency Services at IBM. And he's joined by Ms. Michelle Weston who is the Director of Cloud Security and Resiliency Offerings at IBM. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Now, before we get into it, I said, IBM, but I want to ask you Allen, about an announcement you made last month about Kyndryl, new spinout from IBM. What can you tell us? >> Very excited about the name. I think there's a lot of meaning in the name censored around new growth and censored around partnership and relationship. So if you look at the name that was announced, I think it really does typify what we set out to be as a trusted partner in the industry. All born around new growth, censored around strong partnership and relationship. So very pleased and excited. I look forward to the opportunity we have going forward. >> Yeah. Congratulations on that. Add some clarity, Martin Schroeder, new CEO, Cube alum, great exec. Love it. So good luck. Allen, let me stay with you for a second. I mean, operational resilience it means different things to different people. And we know from speaking with CIOs in our community during the pandemic, it doesn't just mean Disaster Recovery. In fact, a lot of CIO said that their business continuing strategy were too focused on DR. Allen, what does operational resilience mean from your perspective? >> So I'll answer it this way. Operational resiliency risk is defined as the quantifiable steps is defined as the quantifiable steps that any client needs to take in order to respond, recover from an unplanned outage. It sits squarely within operational risk and if you think about it operational risk is the kind of non-financial element of risk and defined within that category, operational resiliency risk is trying to identify those steps, trying to identify those steps, both preactive and reactive both preactive and reactive that a client needs to consider that they would have to take in the event of an unplanned disruption or an unplanned outage that would impact their ability to serve their clients or to serve their organization. That's how I define operational resiliency risk. >> Great. And I wonder Michelle if you can add to that, but I think, you know, I sometimes say that the pandemic was like a forced march to digital and part of that was business resilience but you know, where do we go from here? You know, we had 14 months shoved into our face and now we have some time to think about. So how should clients think about evolving their strategies in this regard? >> Yeah, well certainly with respect to what was called NewCo now, Kyndryl, our approach has been advisory-led. We will help clients along this journey. One thing that I'd like to point out and one of the journeys that we've been taking over the last couple of years is it really is about security and resiliency together. If you think of that planning and how to mitigate your operational risk, if the security and resiliency go hand in hand, they're the same people within the organization that are planning for that and worried about it. And so we had already started about three years ago to pull the two together and to have a unified value proposition for clients around security and resiliency both being advisory-led doing everything for a client from project-based to the digital consumption world, which we know clients live in today to a fully managed service all around security and resiliency together. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it's a really important topic. I mean, you heard Chair Powell last month. He was, he was on 60 Minutes saying, well, yeah, yeah. We're worried about inflation but we're way more worried about the security. So, so Allen, where, let's say you're in the virtual conference room with the board of directors, what's that conversation like? Where does it start? >> I think there is a huge concern right now with regards to security and obviously resiliency as well. But if you just think about what we've all been through and what's transpired in the last 12 months, the, what we call the threat landscape has broadened significantly. And therefore clients have had to go through a rapid transformation not just by moving employees to home base, but also their clients having a much higher expectation in terms of access to systems, access to transactions, which are all digital. So you referred to it earlier but the transformation our clients have had to go on driving a higher dependence on those systems that enable them to serve their clients digitally and enable them to and allow the employees to work remotely in this period has increased the dependencies that they have across the environment that are running many of the critical business processes. So the discussion of the boardroom is very much, are we secure? Are we safe? How do we know? How safe and secure and resilient should we be? And based on that facts about how fit, safe and secure should we be, where are we today as an organization? And I think these are the questions that are at the boardroom. It's basically from a resiliency, security perspective where should we be that supports our strategy, vision and our client expectation? And then the second question is very much, where are we today? How do we know that we are secure? How do we know that we can recover from any unplanned or unforeseen disruption to our environments? >> So Michelle, I mean Allen just mentioned the threat surface is expanding and we're just getting started. Everybody's like crazy about 5G, leaning in the Edge, IoT and that's just going to be orders of magnitude by the end of the decade compared to where it is today. So how do you think about the key steps that organizations should take to ensure operational resilience? You know, not only today, but also putting in a roadmap. >> Yeah. Yeah. And one thing that we do know from our clients is those that have actually planned for resiliency and security at the forefront. They tend to do that more effectively and more efficiently. It's much better to do that than to try to do that after an outage. You'll certainly learn a lot but that's not the experience that you want to go through. You want to have that planning and strategy in the forefront as Allen said. In terms of the threat vector, the pandemic brought that on as well. We saw a surgent of cyber attacks, opportunistic attacks. You know, we saw the best of people in the pandemic as well as the worst in people. Some of those attacks were on agencies that were trying to recover or trying to treat the public with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. So none of us can let our guard down here. I think we can anticipate that that's only going to increase. And with the emergence of these new technologies like Cloud, we know that there's been such a massive benefit to clients. In fact those that were Cloud-enabled sustained their businesses during the pandemic. Full stop. But with that comes a lot more complexity. Those threat vectors increased, 5G, I expect to be the same. So again, resiliency and security have never been more relevant, more important. We see a lot of our clients putting budget there and those that plan for it with a strategic mindset and understand that whatever they have today may be good enough, but in the future they're going to have to invest and continue to evolve that strategy, are those that have done the best. >> Yeah. The bolt-on strategy doesn't really work that well. But, and I, and I wonder if you think about when when we talk to CSOs for example, and you ask them, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say things like lack of talent. We got too many tools. It's just as we're under the hamsters on wheels. So I would think that's, you know, unfortunately for some, but it's good for your, your business. That's a dynamic that you can help with. I mean, you're a services organization. You've got deep expertise in this. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, that lack of talent that skills gap and how you guys address that. >> I think this is really the fit for managed services providers like Kyndryl. Certainly with some of our largest clients, if we look at Pettus as an example, that notion of phone a friend is really important. When it starts to go down, and you're not sure, you know, what you're going to do next, you want the expertise. You want to be able to phone someone and you want to be able to rely on them to help you recover your most critical data. One of the things clients have also been asking us for is a vaulted capability. Almost like the safe deposit box for your data and your critical applications being able to put them somewhere and then in the event of needing to recover, you certainly could call someone to help you do exactly that. >> Allen, I wonder if you could address this. I mean, I like IBM. I was, I'm a customer. I, I trust IBM, what's your relationship? Are you still going to, you know, be able to allow me to tap the pieces that I like and maybe you guys can be more agile in some respects? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, sure Dave. And many of our clients we have a long history with and a very positive experience of delivering, you know, market-leading and high, high quality of services and product. The relationship continues. So we will remain very close to IBM and we will continue to work with many of IBM's customers as well, IBM work with our customers going forward. So the relationship I believe whilst the different dynamic, will continue and I believe engenders an opportunity for growth. And, you know, we mentioned it earlier the very name signifies the fact that it's new growth. And I do think that partnership will continue and will continue together to deliver the type of service, the quality of products and services that our clients have you know, enjoyed from IBM over the last number of years. >> Michelle, I might take one of my takeaways from your earlier comments that you guys are hands on, consultative in nature. And I think about the comment I made about a lot of CIOs said we were way too, DR-focused, but when I think about DR, a lot of times it was a checkbox to the board. Hey, we got it. But when was the last time you tested it? Well, we don't test it because it's too risky to test. We do, we do fail over but we don't want to fail back because it's just too risky. Can I stress test? You know, my environment. Are we at the point now where technology and expertise will allow us to do that is that part of what you bring to the table? >> It is exactly what we bring to the table. So from a first of all, from a compliance and regulatory perspective, you no longer have that option. A lot of the auditors are asking you to demonstrate your DR plan. We have technology and I think we've talked about this before. About the automation that we have in our portfolio with resiliency orchestration that allows you to see the risk in your environment on a day-to-day basis, proactively manage it. I tried to recover this. There's a, there's a failure and then you're able to proactively address it. I also give the example from a resiliency work restoration perspective in this very powerful software automation that we have for DR. We've had clients that have come in scheduled a DR Test. It was to be all day they've ordered in lunch. And the DR Test fail over, fail back, took 22 minutes and lunch was canceled. (Dave laughs) >> I love it. >> So that is very powerful and very powerful with an auditor. >> That's awesome. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there. Really great to get the update. Best of luck to you. And congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's continuous coverage of IBM Think 2021. Be right back. (calm music)

>>Overnight 2020 forced us to get digital video, right? For the first 90 days, it was pretty awkward to say the least, but as people became more comfortable with home setups and lighting and just the weirdness of being locked down and shut in the frequency, the quality, and I think the watch ability of virtual conversations improved quite dramatically welcome to the cube. My name is Dave Vellante. And with me to talk about what we learned and can take away from producing video content during the isolation economy is event expert conference facilitator and MC extraordinary Sam Allen, Sam, come inside the cube. Welcome. >>Thank you so much for having me really lovely to be here with you. >>Pleasure. So I gotta ask you, you know, am I right? Do we actually have more watchable video online or now, or are we all sort of zoom fatigued out? >>I think if people watch the cube, I think you've got some incredible content online. You guys are the pros. I think we are still in this change format right now. Uh, we've got people who are doing it well, who started really early, tried failed, pick themselves back up, try it again, and are producing some really good pieces of content looking outside of perhaps the norm to create some great visual, some great conferences and events. I think on the whole, sadly, I think we still have a way to go, which is great for the likes of us in terms of helping those professionals become more professional and just trying to differentiate between what's just a zoom meeting. And actually what's an experience for communications for our audiences. >>I want to get into some of the best practice and maybe some of the do's and don'ts, but, but let's roll back a little bit. Tell us about yourself and how you got into this business. >>I'd love to say I've been a virtual event designer and MC moderator for years, but as we know, the world has turned itself on its head in the past 14, 15 months. Prior to that, I've been in the event and conference industry for about 20 years. Most recently, traveling the world, uh, onstage presenting moderating, hosting conferences, across various different industries from pharmaceuticals to finance, through to industry associations, telecoms, et cetera. Um, my world fell apart just about February 23rd, 2020, as many people did. I was excitingly booked to work with a lot of clients through Nova, uh, through to November, 2020. That didn't happen. And we have a couple of choices as an entrepreneur, uh, pick ourselves up or stay down on the ground. So I chose that first option. I studied online event design. I was a meeting and event designer already, but there are big nuances. When we work in the world of online, I've picked myself up, started studying online event design. I was fortunate. My clients trusted me. So we managed to pivot, uh, several of their events early on during the pandemic into the world of virtual. We've had some incredible feedback from our participants and we have gone from strength to strength. I now work with several other associate MCs experienced in this digital field, working with new and existing clients in terms of designing a better experience for those who are watching us on our screens. Now >>That's awesome. I love the reinvention story. I, Sam, I didn't know. You could take a class in this stuff. So tell me about that. And what was that like? >>I think one of the things when, you know, when we are in, and I'm sure many of our viewers today have said in the wonderful conference theaters and we'll be back in those rooms soon, uh, everything is done with experienced a V and technical and event producers and venue people. Whereas in the online world, I'm here, uh, in sunny London on my own, making sure that I have the right sound, the right connectivity, the rights, uh, visuals, all of these things are things that we just didn't have to do. And we have to do that for every single content contributors. So studying an online event design course back at the very beginning of lockdown really helped me understand the checklist that we need to have for our clients, the things that we need to assume. And most importantly, the things that can go wrong so that we can pick up on those as quickly as we can and try and create these seamless and engaging experiences for our audiences. So I would say to anyone, who's sort of looking into this and really don't know where to start. It's probably good to go and have a look at an online event design course. >>Thank you for that. So, so tell me what, what were some of the things as you look back on 2020, and you think about the work that you did with your clients and maybe even observing some, some of your non-clients, what were the, some of the, some of the mistakes that people made and we can get into some of the best practice. >>Well, as all good people who are being interviewed say, well, you're going to have to wait for my book to be published later on in the year with all the things that have gone wrong and all the ways we've rectified it. But I think one of the major things that we've we've had is obviously this world of distraction, we've all seen it with the cat lawyer. We've seen it with the kids coming in and we've humanized. I think the world of events, which I think is a really positive experience for us all, we are all humans and events are about bringing humans together, human connection. So I think there's a positive side to that, but equally by the same token, we we've seen people, maybe not really getting under the skin of, you know, what's the difference between a zoom meeting and an event experience in terms of what people have been wearing. >>Um, I've had an awkward conversation when we've taken a zoom background away from a speaker and you don't want to know what was hanging on the door. We also had a situation where we lost, um, we've, we've lost speakers and we've had to jump in due to connectivity issues that, you know, we've tested them, but then they've ended up broadcasting from somewhere else. So I think some of that seamless technology, and I would say to anyone, uh, to try and not suffer those challenges, I would say, test, test, rehearse, test, and rehearse again, and make sure you've got that team of people around you. I think a lot of people think that it's very easy to do this, Dave, as I know you and your team will know it is not a, you wouldn't just because I happen to like flying. You wouldn't want me to fly your aircraft. And I think there's the same analogy in terms of running your online event, um, and digital communication experiences. >>Oh, you think, I mean, I w I think we found it that running virtual events is, is harder because there's, first of all, there's so much unknown. You can't really call a late, late stage audible. I mean, things are locked in when you're doing a simulive. I presume you found the same thing and your clients have, have learned a lot in that regard. >>I think it's, um, a lot more work. I think there's a lot more work pre event. Pre-conference pre-meeting that, um, people are still trying to get their, their minds around when we hosted an event in person where you'll get there the day or two before during set-up, we then have a very, very long two, three, four days, depending on how long that event is, where we've got our speakers of the same room, they've all flown in. We know that they've arrived. We know they've checked into the hotel. What we don't have are any of those variables in this world. So we need to make sure that we're working with all of those content providers. And if like me, you work in the association world where you can have up to 90 or a hundred different speakers over a course of a Congress, we've got to fit in the time to make sure that we've tech checked. >>We've worked with panels so that we can make sure that they're dynamic and we've got people looking as well as sounding good. So I think one of those things is that is exceptionally, uh, huge amounts of pre-planning that people need to factor in. I think the second thing is people need to not underestimate how exhausting it is when you don't have the vibe of a live audience. Uh, especially as they'd be considerate of your keynote speakers, especially if they're not professionals, they haven't been doing this. They're not comfortable with a green light. It is tiring, um, trying to visualize 1,004 and a half thousand 25 people, one person in the same room as you would be quite nice. And we haven't had that for the past 12 months. So I think we've learned a lot from that. And we've got some good tips and tricks now that we can, we can use, but, um, I'm pretty sure a lot of our content providers and speakers are looking forward to seeing people back in a really, yeah, fantastic. Well, >>That brings me to my next question. Let's make this the last one, just as we begin to get a little bit more comfortable with, with virtual now we're getting vaccinated. People are, there's huge up demand for face to face. So now we have this new thing of hybrid, uh, which is going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. What are you seeing? What's your expectation for that sort of new abnormal? >>That's an incredibly good question. And we have to start with the new C word is the H word, which is hybrid. I think we have a lot of people getting worried about what hybrid looks like, but I think if, if you think with a design thinking mind, when you're looking at event planning, the virtual or the in-person audience adjust another stakeholder. So if you're spending that time to plan out your meeting or event, the way you should be, then you can factor those people in. I am excited about this world. I think it becomes so much more inclusive for organizations moving forward. And DNI is something that has often been forgotten in the world of conferences and events. And I think the hybrid role gives us all the opportunity to, to have that choice. I think people especially event organizers because it's their job believe that everybody wants to be in a room and not everybody does and not everybody can. And now this is a really, really exciting opportunity to do things differently, to do things, to become more inclusive. And of course, to be more sustainable. >>Sam, you're really an inspiration. I mean, a lot of people out there have to reinvent themselves. You've, you've done it. You retrained you, you started a new type of business that drew on your existing passion, but it's really fantastic to have you on. Thanks for sharing your expertise best of luck in the future. It's great having you. >>Thanks, Dave. >>All right. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> The next normal is upon us. And the way we run corporate communications, brand accelerators and events has changed inextricably from 12 months ago. Will this last? Welcome to theCUBE. My name is Samme Allen. It's great to have you with us. Joining me today to discuss what looks like success for us all in terms of communications and events, we have long time industry analyst, TV host, entrepreneur and of course, many other accolades, please welcome co-founder and CEO of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. Dave, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey Samme, thank you very much. I've been in theCUBE a lot, but really not often in this format, so thanks for having me. >> It is a pleasure to be interviewing you today. How does it feel being in the hot seat about to be grilled about the future of events? >> A little weird, little uncomfortable. But bring it on. >> So we talk about this next normal. Some people called it the new normal. We're coming out of the world of pandemic. Thank God. We are seeing returning to live events. We are seeing returning to travel. But what do you think this looks like for the big brands in terms of how they start building out their communications strategy, including events for, say, the next 12 months, the immediate strategy for the future? >> Well, that's a great question. And it's interesting when you look back in the last 12, 13, 14 months, and you compare, let's say, last April to this April in terms of the quality of the events that not only the production value, but also the content and the formats and the intensive attempt to engage with people, you're seeing people, big organizations especially, really raised the bar quite dramatically. And now just as they've sort of become comfortable with virtual events, they're trying to figure out, okay, what's next? So we've seen with theCUBE, we're getting demand now for hybrid events. We're going to be at Mobile World Congress. We're seeing other events that people are asking us to attend. We've got some events in the fall. Smatterings, you know. It's not huge. But when you talk to people, pretty much everybody now is planning on some type of physical activity in 2021. So there's huge pent-up demand. We would expect, Samme, to have these, let's call'em VIP events, where you might have an audience of, local audience, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25 people, selected audience of CEOs or CTOs or business executives, and then broadcast that to a much wider audience. I personally think this notion of virtual events, which nobody really wanted, you know, a couple of years ago, everybody wanted belly-to-belly, I think it's here to stay, because the long tail of consumption post-event is actually paying dividens, even though it's taking much, much longer to see those results. >> And we're seeing here in the UK. As you know, I'm based in our London studio. We are, you know, we're hearing from Sir David Attenborough who pretty much everyone around the globe knows as the global voice of sustainability saying that actually what we do in the next 5 to 10 years could potentially have a much bigger impact on the world than Corona virus has done so far. Do you think brands are taking this seriously in terms of the evolution of how they communicate, how they attend events, where things like theCUBE will be placed in the future? Are you seeing that from your clients, Dave? >> You know, that's a really tough question. Because on the one hand, and I often joke that, you know, it used to be the case that, you know, the only goal of a public company was to make profit. And now, you're seeing companies from IBM and Cisco and Salesforce, name a company, a large company, they're standing up and saying ESG, diversity, inclusion, these are not only the right thing to do, but they're good business. And so tie that into your question, which is, you know, can we affect the environment, for example, maybe by, you know, being more productive with travel? And the reason I think it's such a tough question is because I think the sales people who are under such pressure to perform, and the companies are under pressure to perform, clearly can be more productive face-to-face, and they can accelerate time to close, for example. At the same time, nobody's really excited to get back on a plane on a Sunday night every week and fly back on a Friday and see their family, maybe, you know, for a day or two. So I think we've got to figure that out. And I think to answer your question specifically, I think there's no question that we can do much more virtually. And I think we will, over the next 10 years, learn how to do that in a much more productive way. >> You hit quite a true point from the brands that we've been speaking with in terms of the desire to see people, to hug people, to be in a room. I think the one thing we hear all the time is that you can't network. Well, we know you can network, because we have algorithms, we have AI and big data. But actually, that socialization. Do you think once we've all got to that first conference and then actually, we have maybe, exactly as you said, that fatigue of not being with our families when the world has changed so much, so after this initial rush, do you think that then that blend of the world of hybrid will remain stable? >> Another really tough question. I think, you know, having, for myself, I'm not fully baked. I've had my second vaccine. And so when I see people, I'm really confident. I'm kind of a, you know, chest pumper, a handshaker, a hugger, whatever. So I'm much more comfortable doing that. But we don't know what we don't know. You know, do we need a booster shot in six months? You know, what is the data telling us? The science, I mean. Everybody says follow the science. But the Alzheimer, the science doesn't know what's happening. I would say this. I think unquestionably, from a business standpoint, that this notion of being able to expose your brand to many, many more, a much, much larger audience, is going to continue. That has legs. And I think people are very comfortable that, if you do that, you're not going to limit the number of people who actually, you know, show up live. It's like when TED decided to actually broadcast, the brand went through the roof. I think the same thing will happen here that you're going to see a slow return of the face-to-face. And I think the virtual will stay. And I think they'll be related, but different teams. I mean, we've talked about this, you and I. There's different skillsets for virtual. So I can see organizations, at least I think smart ones, will invest in both. And I think we're going to see a new era of events that are going to combine virtual and physical. >> Talking about theCUBE, you know. We talked about theCUBE being, you know, they're front and center at an event to offer those expert insights. Can you see in that, well, give us your crystal ball, where's theCUBE going to be in five years time? Do you hope? And do you, where do you think it's going to be strategically wise? >> You know, the awesome thing for theCUBE is that we started in virtual events and hybrid events back in 2015. And so, but it was interesting is we sort of try to push that on our clients, and nobody wanted it. It's like I was saying before, everybody wanted physical. So when COVID hit, we were in a really good position to extend our portfolio into virtual. And that's exactly what we did with our two studios and our software stack. What was a little tricky for us was we had to retrain people. And it was like training by fire. So that took some time. And so you start to see, okay, who's, who really enjoys the virtual, who enjoys the physical. So where I see theCUBE in five years time is that hybrid combination. Very clearly, people want theCUBE at their events, because it's light. It's lights, camera, action. You know, the sports-center-like vibe with the live production, you know. But at the same time, we've got this great capability and team that can reach a much, much wider audience. And then what we've learned, the big learning or one of the big learnings from COVID in virtual was the post-event consumption, that long tail is actually quite amazing, especially if you keep nurturing it. And by the way, a lot of our clients still miss this, a lot of brands move on to the next one, move on to the next one, whereas you can see the consumption continuing. And so I think people are going to continue to fine tune that and really take advantage. So I see theCUBE in both places. And it's just, we're really excited, because it's just a great expansion of our business. >> And I think that strategy, as you said, that, you know, building out a 365 strategy when it comes down to communications and bringing people on a journey with you, which is what you're doing at theCUBE, I think that's the future. And it's an exciting future. My last question for you. You've been locked down like we all have here in the UK, You're in the US. What are you most looking forward to now you've had your second shot, the world is opening up? What's the first thing that you're going to be doing sort of post-lockdown? >> You know, I'll say this. I, again, I don't miss flying every week and dragging my big, heavy backpack through airports. What I have missed is that interaction post-event. So theCUBE is intense. You go to an event. You're doing 10 to 12 interviews a day. Sometimes three or four days. You're exhausted at the end of the day. But then you get to sit back. And that's when you go to the evening events. And you see people, for instance, that were on theCUBE. And people were pointing to you, "hey, you're theCUBE guys." And you build a really intimate relationship with them that is long lasting. And I really do miss that. We, John Furrier, my business partner and co-CEO, we've made some great business friendships that will last a lifetime. And you only form those with these face-to-face interactions. You just, as you know, Samme, you can't do it. You can't get that level of intimacy in a video call. You just can't. So I'm really looking forward to that. And maybe a little better life balance. That's what I'm most looking forward to. >> I think that's a wonderful way to close this out. So I'm looking forward to also seeing you in person, raising that glass, building those relationships. Thank you, Dave, so much for being with us today. Thank you all for watching. Stay tuned to theCUBE for breaking insights, expert insights front and center when you need them. Keep safe. And see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to the cubes ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual cube, you know, the pandemic has caused us to really rethink this this whole concept of operational resilience and we're gonna dig into that and talk about the importance of constructing a holistic resilience plan and get the perspective of some really great domain experts. Alan Downs is the vice president, global Cloud security and resiliency services at IBM and he's joined by MS Michelle what? Weston who is the director of cloud security and resiliency offerings at IBM folks. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>Now before we get into it, I said IBM but I want to ask you, alan about an announcement you made last month about Kendrell new spin out from IBM. What can you tell us? >>Very excited about the name? I think there's a lot of meaning in the name centered around new growth and censored around partnership and relationship. So if you look at the name that was announced I think it really does typify what we set out to be as a trusted partner in the industry. All born around new growth centered around strong partnership and relationship. So very pleased and excited and look forward to the opportunity we have going forward. >>Yeah congratulations on that. Had some clarity martin schroder. New ceo Cubillan. Great executive love it. So good luck. Um Alan let me stay with you for a second. I mean operational resilience it means different things to different people and we know from speaking with C. IOS in our community during the pandemic. It doesn't just mean disaster recovery. In fact a lot of C. I. O. Said that their business continuing strategy were too focused on on D. R. Ellen. What does operational resilience mean from your perspective? >>So I'll answer it this way. Operational resiliency risk is defined as the quantifiable steps that any client needs to take in order to respond, recover from an unplanned outage. It sits squarely within operational risk. And if you think about it, operational risk is the kind of non financial element of risk. And defined within that category, operational resiliency risk is trying to identify those steps both pre active and reactive that a client needs to consider that they would have to take in the event of an unplanned disruption or an unplanned outage that would impact their ability to serve their clients or to serve their organization. That's how I define operational resiliency risk. >>Great and I wonder Michelle if you can add to that but I think you know I sometimes say that the pandemic was like a forced march to digital and part of that was business resilience. But You know, where do we go from here? You know, we had 14 months shoved into our face and now we have some time to think about. So how should clients think about evolving their strategies in this regard? >>Yeah, Well, certainly with respect to what was called Newco now, Kendrell, um our approach has been advisory led. Uh we will help clients along this journey. Uh, one thing that I'd like to point out in one of the journeys that we've been taking over the last couple of years is it really is about security and resiliency together. If you think of that planning and how to mitigate your operational risk, the security and resiliency go hand in hand through the same people within the organization that are planning for that and worried about it. And so we had already started about three years ago to pull the two together and to have a unified value proposition for clients around security and resiliency, both being advisory lead, doing everything for a client from project based to the digital consumption world which we know clients live in today to a fully managed service all around security and resiliency together. >>Yeah, so I mean it's really important topic. I mean you heard Chair Powell last month. He was he was on 60 minutes saying well yeah worried about inflation, were way more worried about security. So so alan you know, were let's say you're in the virtual, you know, conference room with the board of directors. What's that conversation like? Uh where does it start? >>I think there is a huge concern right now with regard to security and obviously resiliency as well. But if you just think about what we've all been through and what's transpired in the last 12 months, the what we call the threat landscape has broadened significantly and therefore clients have had to go through a rapid transformation not just by moving employees to home base, but also their clients having a much higher expectation in terms of access to systems, access to transactions which are all digital. So you referred to it earlier. But the transformation, our clients have had to go on driving a higher dependence on those systems that enable them to serve their clients digitally and enable them to allow the employees to work remotely in this period has increased the dependencies that they have across the environment that are running many of the critical business processes. So the discussion in the boardroom is very much are we secure? Are we safe? How do we know how safe and secure and resilient should we be? And based on that fact about how safe and secure should we be? Where are we today as an organization? And I think these are the questions that are at the boardroom is basically from a resiliency security perspective, where should we be that supports our strategy vision and our client expectation? And then the second question is very much where are we today? How do we know that we are secure? How do we know that we can recover from any unplanned or unforeseen disruption to our environments? >>So Michelle, I mean I just mentioned the threat surface is expanding and we're just getting started, everybody's like crazy about five G leaning in the edge Iot and that's just uh this could be orders of magnitude by the end of the decade compared to where it is today. So how do you think about the key steps that organizations should should take to ensure operational resilience, you know, not only today, but also putting in a road map. >>Yeah, yeah. And and one thing that we do know from our clients is those that have actually planned for resiliency and security at the forefront. They tend to do that more effectively and more efficiently. Um It's much better to do that than to try to do that after an outage. You certainly learn a lot. Um but that's not the experience that you want to go through. You want to have that planning and strategy in the forefront. As Alan said in terms of the threat vector, the pandemic brought that on as well. We saw surgeons Of cyberattacks, opportunistic attacks. Um you know, we saw the best of people in the pandemic as well as the worst in people. Some of those attacks were on agencies that we're trying to recover. We're trying to treat the public with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. So none of us can let our guard down here. I think we can anticipate that that's only going to increase. And with the emergence of these new technologies like cloud, we know that there's been such a massive benefit to clients. In fact those that were cloud enabled to sustain their businesses during the pandemic full stop. But with that comes a lot more complexity. Those threat vectors increase five G. I expect to be the same. So again, resilience and security have never been more relevant. More important, we see a lot of our clients putting budget there and those that plan for it with a strategic mindset and understand that whatever they have today may be good enough, but in the future they're going to have to invest and continue to evolve that strategy. Are those that have done the best. >>Yeah, the bolt on strategy doesn't doesn't really work that well, but and I wonder if you think about when we talk to CSOS for example, and you ask them what's your biggest challenge? They'll say things like lack of talent. We got too many tools. It's just as we're on the hamsters on wheels. So I would think that's, you know, unfortunately for some, but it's good for your, your business. That's that's a dynamic that you can help with. I mean you're a services organization, you got deep expertise in this. So I wonder if you could, could talk a little bit about that, that lack of talent, that skills gap and how you guys address that. >>I think this is really the fit for managed services providers like Kendrell, um, certainly with some of our largest clients, if we look at Peta as an example, that notion of phone a friend is really important when it starts to go down and you're not sure what you're gonna do next. You want the expertise, you want to be able to phone someone and you want to be able to rely on them to help you recover your most critical data. One of the things clients have also been asking us for is a vaulted capability, almost like the safe deposit box for your data and your critical applications. Being able to put them somewhere and then in the event of needing to recover, um, you certainly could call someone to help you do exactly that >>Ellen. I wonder if you can address this. I mean, I like IBM I was I'm a customer. I trust IBM. What's your relationship? Are you still gonna, you know, be able to allow me to tap the pieces that that I like and maybe you guys can be more agile in some respects, maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>She has Sure, Dave and many of our clients, we have a long history with a very positive experience of delivering, you know, market leading and high high quality of services and product the relationship continue. So we will remain very close to IBM and we will continue to work with many of IBM's customers as will IBM work with our customers going forward. So the relationship, I believe whilst a different dynamic will continue and I believe engenders an opportunity for growth and you know, we mentioned earlier the very name signifies the fact that it's new growth and I do think that that partnership will continue and we'll continue together to deliver the type of service, the quality of products and services that our clients have, you know, enjoyed from IBM over the last number of years, >>Michelle my, one of my takeaway from your earlier comments as you guys are hands on consultative in nature. Um, and I think about the comment I made about a lot of Ceo said we were way too d our focus. But when I think about d are a lot of times it was a checkbox to the board. Hey, we got it. But it was last time you tested it. Well, we don't test it because it's too risky to test. You know, we, we do fail over, but we don't fail back because it's just too risky. Can I stress test, you know, my environment, we, at the point now where technology and expertise will allow us to do that is that part of what you bring to the table? >>It is exactly exactly what we bring to the table. So from a first of all, from a compliance and regulatory perspective, you no longer have that option. A lot of the auditors are asking you to demonstrate your d our plan. We have technology and I think we've talked about this before about the automation that we have in our portfolio with resiliency orchestration that allows you to see the risk in your environment on a day to day basis. Proactively manage it. I tried to recover this, there's a there's a failure and then you're able to proactively address it. I also give the example from a resiliency orchestration perspective in this very powerful software automation that we have for D. R. We've had clients that have come in scheduled A. D. R. Test, it was to be all day they've ordered in lunch And the D. R. test fail over failed back took 22 minutes and lunch was canceled. >>I love >>it. Very powerful and very powerful with an auditor. >>That's awesome. Okay guys, we've got to leave it there. Really great to get the update. Best of luck to you and congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much >>and thank you for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the cubes continuous coverage of IBM think 2021 right back. >>Mhm.

>>okay. Getting data right is one of the top priorities for organizations to affect digital strategy. So right now we're going to dig into the challenges customers face when trying to deploy enterprise wide data strategies. And with me to unpack this topic is Kirk born principal data Scientists and executive advisor Booz Allen Hamilton. Kirk, great to see you. Thank you, sir, for coming on the program. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>So hey, enterprise scale data science and engineering initiatives there. Nontrivial. What do you see? Some of the challenges and scaling data science and data engineering ops. >>Well, one of the first challenge is just getting it out of the sandbox because so many organizations, they say, let's do cool things with data. But how do you take it out of that sort of play phase into an operational phase? And so being able to do that is one of the biggest challenges. And then being able to enable that for many different use cases then creates an enormous challenge. Because do you replicate the technology and the team for each individual use case, or can you unify teams and technologies to satisfy all possible use cases? And so those are really big challenges for companies, organizations everywhere to think about >>what about the idea of industrializing those those data operations? I mean, what does that? What does that mean to you? Is that a security connotation? A compliance? How do you think about it? >>It's actually all of those industrialized to me is sort of like How do you not make it a one off? But you make it sort of a reproducible, solid, risk compliant and so forth system that can be reproduced many different times and again using the same infrastructure and the same analytic tools and techniques, but for many different use cases, so we don't have to rebuild the will reinvent the wheel, reinvent the car, so to speak. Every time you need a different type of vehicle, you build a car or a truck or a race car. There's some fundamental principles that are common to all of those, and that's where that industrialization is, and it includes security, compliance with regulations and all those things. But it also means just being able to scale it out to to new opportunities beyond the ones that you dreamed of when you first invented the thing >>you know, data by its very nature. As you well know, it's distributed, but for you've been at this a while. For years, we've been trying to sort of shove everything into a monolithic architecture and and in hardening infrastructures around that and many organizations, it's It's become a block to actually getting stuff done. But so how? How are you seeing things like the edge emerged? How do you How do you think about the edge? How do you see that evolving? And how do you think customers should be dealing with with edge and edge data? >>Well, it's really kind of interesting. I had many years at NASA working on data systems, and back in those days, the the idea was you would just put all the data in a big data center, and then individual scientists would retrieve that data and do analytics on it, do their analysis on their local computer. And you might say that sort of like edge analytics, so to speak, because they're doing analytics at at their home computer. But that's not what edge means. It means actually doing the analytics, the insights, discovery at the point of data collection, and so that's that's really real time Business decision making. You don't bring the data back and then try to figure out sometime in the future what to do. And I think an autonomous vehicle is a good example of why you don't want to do that. Because if you collect data from all the cameras and radars and light ours that are on a self driving car and you move that data back to a data cloud while the car is driving down the street and let's say a child walks in front of the car, you send all the data back. It computes and does some object recognition and pattern detection, and 10 minutes later sent a message to the car. Hey, you need to put your brakes on. Well, it's a little kind of late at that point, and so you need to make those discoveries, insight, discoveries, those pattern discoveries and hence the proper decisions from the patterns in the data at the point of data collection. And so that's Data Analytics at the edge. And so, yes, you can bring the data back to a central cloud or distributed cloud. It almost doesn't even matter if if your data is distributed, so any use case in any data, scientists or any analytic team in the business can access it. Then what you really have is a data mesh or a data fabric that makes it accessible at the point that you need it, whether it's at the edge or in some static post, uh, event processing. For example, typical business quarter reporting takes a long look at your last three months of business. Well, that's fine in that use case, but you can't do that for a lot of other real time analytic decision making. Well, >>that's interesting. I mean, it sounds like you think the the edge not as a place, but as you know, where it makes sense to actually, you know, the first opportunity, if you will, to process the data at low latency, where it needs to be low latency. Is that a good way to think about it? >>Absolutely. It's a little late and see that really matters. Uh, sometimes we think we're gonna solve that with things like five G networks. We're gonna be able to send data really fast across the wire. But again, that self driving cars yet another example because what if you all of a sudden the network drops out, you still need to make the right decision with the network not even being there, >>that darn speed of light problem. Um, and so you use this term data mash or or data fabric? Double click on that. What do you mean by that? >>Well, for me, it's it's, uh, it's a sort of a unified way of thinking about all your data. And when I think of mesh, I think of like weaving on a loom, or you're you're creating a blanket or a cloth and you do weaving, and you do that. All that cross layering of the different threads and so different use cases in different applications and different techniques can make use of this one fabric, no matter where it is in the in the business. Or again if it's at the edge or or back at the office. One unified fabric, which has a global name space so anyone can access the data they need, sort of uniformly, no matter where they're using it. And so it's a way of this unifying all the data and use cases and sort of a virtual environment that that no longer you need to worry about. So what's what's the actual file name or what's the actual server of this thing is on? Uh, you can just do that for whatever use case you have. But I think it helps Enterprises now to reach a stage which I like to call the self driving enterprise. Okay, so it's modeled after the self driving car. So the self driving enterprise needs the business leaders in the business itself. You would say it needs to make decisions oftentimes in real time, all right. And so you need to do sort of predictive modeling and cognitive awareness of the context of what's going on. So all these different data sources enable you to do all those things with data. And so, for example, any kind of a decision in a business, any kind of decision in life, I would say, is a prediction, right? You say to yourself, If I do this such and such will happen If I do that, this other thing will happen. So a decision is always based upon a prediction about outcomes, and you want to optimize that outcome so both predictive and prescriptive analytics need to happen in this in this same stream of data and not statically afterwards, so that self driving enterprises enabled by having access to data wherever and whenever you need it. And that's what that fabric that data fabric and data mesh provides for you, at least in my opinion. >>Well, so like carrying that analogy like the self driving vehicle, your abstracting, that complexity away in this metadata layer that understands whether it's on prem or in the public cloud or across clouds or at the edge where the best places to process that data, what makes sense? Does it make sense to move it or not? Ideally, I don't have to. Is that how you're thinking about it? Is that why we need this notion of a data fabric >>right? It really abstracts away all the sort of complexity that the I T aspects of the job would require. But not every person in the business is going to have that familiarity with the servers and the access protocols and all kinds of it related things, and so abstracting that away. And that's in some sense what containers do. Basically, the containers abstract away that all the information about servers and connectivity protocols and all this kind of thing You just want to deliver some data to an analytic module that delivers me. And inside our prediction, I don't need to think about all those other things so that abstraction really makes it empowering for the entire organization. You like to talk a lot about data, democratization and analytics democratization. This really gives power to every person in the organization to do things without becoming an I t. Expert. >>So the last last question, we have time for years. So it sounds like Kirk the next 10 years of data not going to be like the last 10 years will be quite different. >>I think so. I think we're moving to this. Well, first of all, we're going to be focused way more on the why question. Why are we doing this stuff? The more data we collect, we need to know why we're doing it. And one of the phrases I've seen a lot in the past year, which I think is going to grow in importance in the next 10 years, is observe ability, so observe ability to me is not the same as monitoring. Some people say monitoring is what we do. But what I like to say is, yeah, that's what you do. But why you do it is observe ability. You have to have a strategy. Why what? Why am I collecting this data? Why am I collecting it here? Why am I collecting it at this time? Resolution? And so getting focused on those why questions create be able to create targeted analytic solutions for all kinds of different different business problems. And so it really focuses it on small data. So I think the latest Gartner data and Analytics trending reports said we're gonna see a lot more focused on small data in the near future. >>Kirk born your dot connector. Thanks so much >>for coming on. The Cuban >>being part of the program. >>My pleasure. Mm mm.

(soft music) >> Getting data right, is one of the top priorities for organizations to affect digital strategy. So, right now we're going to dig into the challenges customers face when trying to deploy enterprise wide data strategies and with me to unpack this topic is Kirk Borne, Principal-Data Scientist, and Executive Advisor Booz Allen Hamilton. Kirk, great to see you, thank you sir for coming on the program. >> Great to be here, Dave. >> So hey, enterprise scale, data science and engineering initiatives, they're non-trivial. What do you see as some of the challenges in scaling data science and data engineering ops? >> First challenge is just getting it out of the sandbox, because so many organizations, they say let's do cool things with data but how do you take it out of that sort of play phase into an operational phase? And so being able to do that is one of the biggest challenges and then being able to enable that for many different use cases then creates an enormous challenge, because do you replicate the technology and the team for each individual use case or can you unify teams and technologies to satisfy all possible use cases? And so those are really big challenges for companies, organizations everywhere to think about. >> Well, what about the idea of you know, industrializing those data operations? I mean, what does that mean to you, is that a security connotation, a compliance? How do you think about it? >> It's actually all of those. And industrialized to me is sort of like, how do you not make it a one-off but you make it a sort of a reproducible, solid risk compliant and so forth system that can be reproduced many different times. And again, using the same infrastructure and the same analytic tools and techniques but for many different use cases. So we don't have to rebuild the wheel, reinvent the wheel, reinvent the car so to speak every time you need a different type of vehicle. You can either build a car, or a truck, or a race car there's some fundamental principles that are common to all of those. And that's where that industrialization is. And it includes security, compliance with regulations and all those things but it also means just being able to scale it out to to new opportunities beyond the ones that you dreamed of when you first invented the thing. >> Yeah, data by its very nature as you well know, is it's distributive but for you you've been at this awhile, for years we've been trying to sort of shove everything into a monolithic architecture, and in hardening infrastructures around that. And in many organizations it's become, you know, a block to actually getting stuff done. But, so how are you seeing things like the Edge emerge you know, how do you think about the edge, how do you see that evolving and how do you think customers should be dealing with edge and edge data? >> Well, that's really kind of interesting. I had many years at NASA working on data systems, and back in those days the idea was you would just put all the data in a big data center and then individual scientists would retrieve that data and do analytics on it, do their analysis on their local computer. And you might say that's sort of like edge analytics so to speak because they're doing analytics at their home computer, but that's not what edge means. It means actually doing the analytics, the insights discovery at the point of data collection. And so that's really real time business decision-making. You don't bring the data back and then try to figure out sometime in the future what to do. And I think autonomous vehicles is a good example of why you don't want to do that because if you collect data from all the cameras and radars and lidars that are on a self-driving car, and you move that data back to a data cloud while the car is driving down the street and let's say a child walks in front of the car, you send all the data back it computes and does some object recognition and pattern detection. And 10 minutes later, it sends a message to the car, "Hey, you need to put your brakes on." Well, it's a little kind of late at that point (laughs) and so you need to make those discoveries those insight discoveries, those pattern discoveries and hence the proper decisions from the patterns in the data at the point of data collection. And so that's data analytics at the edge. And so yes, you can bring the data back to a central cloud or distributed cloud. It almost doesn't even matter. If your data is distributed at sort of any use case in any data scientist or any analytic team and the business can access it then what you really have is a data mesh or a data fabric that makes it accessible at the point that you need it, whether it's at the edge or in some static post event processing, for example, typical business quarter reporting takes a long look at your last three months of business. Well, that's fine in that use case, but you can't do that for a lot of other real time analytic decision-making >> Well that's interesting. I mean, it sounds like you think of the edge not as a place, but as you know where it makes sense to actually, you know the first opportunity, if you will, to process the data at low latency where it needs to be low latency, is that a good way to think about it? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's the low latency that really matters. Sometimes we think we're going to solve that with things like 5G networks. We're going to be able to send data really fast across the wire, but again, that self-driving car is yet another example because what if all of a sudden the network drops out you still need to make the right decision with the network not even being there. >> Yeah that darn speed of light problem. And so you use this term data mesh or data fabric, double click on that, what do you mean by that? >> Well, for me, it's sort of a unified way of thinking about all your data. And when I think of mesh, I think of like weaving on a loom, you're creating a a blanket or a cloth and you do weaving and you do that all that cross layering of the different threads. And so different use cases in different applications in different techniques can make use of this one fabric no matter where it is in the business or again, if it's at the edge or back at the office. One unified fabric, which has a global namespace so anyone can access the data they need, sort of uniformly no matter where they're using it. And so it's a way of unifying all of the data and use cases and sort of a virtual environment that you no longer need to worry about. So what's the actual file name or what's the actual server this thing is on, you can just do that for whatever use case you have. I think it helps the enterprises now to reach a stage which I like to call the self-driving enterprise, okay? So it's modeled after the self-driving car. So the self-driving enterprise, the business leaders and the business itself you would say needs to make decisions, oftentimes in real time, All right? And so you need to do sort of predictive modeling and cognitive awareness of the context of what's going on. So all of these different data sources enable you to do all those things with data. And so, for example, any kind of a decision in a business, any kind of decision in life, I would say is a prediction, right? You say to yourself, if I do this such and such will happen. If I do that, this other thing will happen. So a decision is always based upon a prediction about outcomes and you want to optimize that outcome. So both predictive and prescriptive analytics need to happen in this same stream of data and not statically afterwards. And so that self-driving enterprise is enabled by having access to data wherever and whenever you need it and that's what that fabric, that data fabric and data mesh provides for you, at least in my opinion. >> Also like carrying that analogy like the self-driving vehicle, you're abstracting that complexity away and there's a metadata layer that understands whether it's on prem or in the public cloud or across clouds, or at the edge, where are the best places to process that data, what makes sense, does it make sense to move it or not, ideally, I don't have to, Is that how you're thinking about it? Is that why we need this notion of a data fabric? >> Right, it really abstracts away all the, sort of the complexity that the IT aspects of the job would require, but not every person in the business is going to have that familiarity with the servers and the access protocols and all kinds of IT related things. And so abstracting that away, and that's in some sense what containers do. Basically the containers abstract away all the information about servers and connectivity, you know, and protocols and all this kind of thing. You just want to deliver some data to an analytic module that delivers me an insight or a prediction, I don't need to think about all those other things. And so that abstraction really makes it empowering for the entire organization. We like to talk a lot about data democratization and analytics democratization. This really gives power to every person in the organization to do things without becoming an IT expert. >> So the last question we have time for here is, so it sounds like Kirk, the next 10 years of data are not going to be like the last 10 years, it will be quite different. >> I think so. I think we're moving to this, well, first of all, we're going to be focused way more on the why question, like, why are we doing this stuff? The more data we collect we need to know why we're doing it. And what are the phrases I've seen a lot in the past year which I think is going to grow in importance in next 10 years is observability. So observability to me is not the same as monitoring. Some people say monitoring is what we do but what I like to say is, "Yeah, that's what you do, but why you do it is observability." You have to have a strategy. Why am I collecting this data? Why am I collecting it here? Why am I collecting it at this time resolution? And so getting focused on those why questions, be able to create targeted analytics solutions for all kinds of different business problems. And so it really focuses it on small data. So, I think the latest Gartner data and analytics trending report, so we're going to see a lot more focus on small data in the near future. >> Kirk Borne, you're a dot connector. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube and being of the part of the program. >> My pleasure. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. I'm really excited to have our next guest on. You see them all over on social, a very active community member. And we have not heard from him for a little while, so I'm psyched to have him on. He's Bobby Allen. He is a tech and Cloud evangelist. Bobby, how you doing? >> I'm good, Jeff, how are you? >> Good, so, I'm just to have the obligatory check-in. So, you're getting through this madness of COVID, and family's good, everything's good? >> Yeah, everybody's good. I've got a teen and a twin. They haven't driven us crazy yet. So, so far, everybody's healthy and everybody's good. >> Good, good. So, let's jump into it, Bobby. You know, people talk about Cloud as being, there's a lot of great benefits to Cloud, you know, kind of, cost savings, and agility, and more importantly, really as a driver of innovation which I think most people are kind of late to the party there, they think really more on cost savings versus innovation, but now, it's been around, you know, AWS has been around kind of, broke open the door in terms of public Cloud, and then everything was a public Cloud and not because of public Cloud, and then we have hybrid Cloud and we have multicloud. And now, things are kind of, settling down. So, when you talk to people about Cloud, how should they think about the reality of it once they kind of, leave the trade show and they're getting back to their desk, and they actually have to start implementing some things? >> So, great question, Jeff, First of all, thank you for giving me that opportunity to answer that. This is how I think about Cloud. So, we often talk about Cloud in terms of gym memberships, right? Like going to the Cloud is like buying a gym membership. I actually argue that the Cloud is actually more like weights. If you apply weights to a good form you're going to get stronger, if you apply weights to a bad form you're going to hurt yourself. And what we found is that a lot of these companies, Jeff, are applying Cloud and automation to things that really didn't make a lot of sense. And so, they're wasting more money, they're getting more frustrated, and they're wondering why Cloud was not this magic bullet that just solved everything. It didn't fix world peace and global hunger, and now, they're worse off than they were before. There are a couple of reasons I can go into about that but hopefully, that answers the question at first. We're training the wrong way, Jeff. We're adding weight to things that don't make sense and we're hurting ourselves. >> So, it it just I picked the wrong application or are they operating it in a way as they operated it when it was on-prem? 'Cause the thing I always think of, which is interesting, right? Is everybody always talks about spinning up capacity, right? Spin up capacity. You're running a promotion on the Superbowl, and you're going to have a bunch of people hitting your coupon but they'd never talk about spinning it down. And I went to a really interesting presentation one time where a guy talked about their application. He's like, we like when you turn it off, when you turn off our application, we're not making any money, but it tells that you know, kind of how to operate this thing, which is turn it on, but don't forget to turn it off. And I think, you know, we had a situation on one of our little applications that we left open and let something run and ended up with a bill that we weren't necessarily anticipating, not because we did anything wrong, but we just didn't do the right thing, which was to turn off that particular service when we didn't need it. So, what's the wrong way, what's the wrong exercise? Why are people screwing this up? >> So, I think the problem, Jeff, is actually more upstream. So, my personal mantra for 2020 has been, tech is the easy part, data and behavior are the hard parts. And I think you nailed it, right? That Cloud is only about what you need to buy, not what you need to change, then you're going to be woefully disappointed with the results. And so, when I'm saying go upstream, what I'm finding is, missed expectations, Jeff, sink more projects than bad code broken APIs or large bills? The thing that we're missing is, we're thinking that technology replaces the need to have a conversation. So, for example, when we say we want to do something better in the Cloud, what does better actually mean? So, let's talk about food for a second. Hopefully, I don't make your people hungry 'cause it's around lunchtime. But if we think about Cloud application like a recipe, are we tryna make a mediocre recipe better or make a good recipe at scale, right? 'Cause if you take a nasty recipe and scale it out, you're just going to go broke faster. So, really the question is, which problem are we trying to solve? What is the issue that we're really wrestling with? And so, we need to have a better vocabulary, more descriptive conversations. And so, let me give you one that I often talk to customers about, right? We talk about technical debt a lot of times. And technical debt, Jeff, in my opinion, is being used as a misnomer. So, they're kind of, different sorts of debt that I see often in the C-suite. So, there's technical debt where I don't like what we're running, there's data debt where I don't know what we're running, and there's brain debt where I don't know what we want. And Jeff, I would argue that a lot of things that are masquerading as technical debt in the C-suite are really brain debt. I haven't figured out what we want to do, I haven't thought about what we're willing and able to change. And so, that's why the Cloud is a disappointment because we haven't figured out what we want for lunch. (laughs) >> So, it's a classic like people process technology program, you know, problem. And we hear about it all the time, right? And everyone loves to focus on the technology. I haven't heard it really explained that well, but that's what you're saying. It's like, we'll just jump to that part so we don't have to actually ask the hard questions, right? And the thing that makes me think of it when you talked about that is it's kind of like the whole data aggregation problem and all the big data adventures when half the time people don't know what data is where, so, even just going through the exercise of cataloging, finding, organizing, cleansing, all that kind of stuff before you really start to think about what can you do with the big data project? You got to get the baseline down before you can get into the fancy stuff. Sounds kind of like, what you're talking about. >> You nailed it, Jeff. And I'm actually going to piggyback on something you said. This is actually the problem that I think we're wrestling with in Cloud and in life. There it is, right? And we're got to put a fine point in it for the listeners. We are struggling, Jeff, with how to evaluate better versus different. And so, what Cloud has done more importantly, Cloud has shortened the amount of time that we're willing to spend on something before we just start over again. And so, the question that we wrestle with is, do I need to do the same thing a little bit differently? Do I need to tweak it or is there something better that's come along where I need to throw everything away, start all over again, and wipe the slate clean. And so, here's what ends up happening, right? The challenge that we have building on that is how we choose, Jeff, is more important than what we choose because a lot of us are making choices but we're not developing a framework to choose in a world where different things are pushed at us really every day and every night, right? Amazon and Azure are changing literally thousands of things every night. And if I feel like there's something new out there, I have to understand, is this noise, or is this something I pay attention to? Is this a size for a project or is this something that helps my value? If you don't have a way to choose, Jeff, every new option is going to just lead to more confusion and more decommitment. >> Right, well, I mean, you raised a really interesting point which is how do CIOs keep up with all this stuff? I mean, how do they possibly keep the lights on, you know, run digital transformation, kind of, keep up with the, Lord knows, how many changes like you said, get made at Amazon every single day I mean, the feature set when Andy stands on stage at re-invent and lists all the services. I think he's using like a two-and-a-half point font on a 200 foot video screen. I mean, there's so much there. So, how do you help people take a step back from, it's like driving, you know, a car with headlights through snow at night. You know, it's just like kuchu chu chu. How do you help people take a step back and be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more intentional, a little bit more circumspect to lay a good foundation which is going to be what the rest of the house is built on. If you don't have it, it's just going to crumble, if you have it, then at least you have a chance of success. How do you help guide them and get out of that snow storm? >> So, I'm going to give you a new acronym, Jeff, but I think it starts with humility. It starts with us admitting that we don't have this all figured out yet. I often tell a lot of customers, Cloud is that best a teenager that just learned how to drive. And Cloud similar to teenagers, the ability of what it can do is, kind of, in conflict with what it can comprehend in terms of unintended consequences. And so, if Cloud is changing all the time, let's not talk about, we crushed it, we nailed it, we knocked it out of the park. Let's raise our hand and say, you know what? I humbly need some help, because here's what we do, Jeff. In this industry, we throw around acronyms and terms all the time. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BDaaS, DBaaS, whatever. I'm going to introduce the term CaaS, but that's not containers as a service job. I think what we're getting is confusion as a service. (laughs) There's so many things that are changing that people are overwhelmed but because we want to act so much like we're crushing it on social media, we really need to say, I need help, I can't do this in a spreadsheet anymore. Please are there solutions out there that can help me automate some of this stuff so that I'm not a victim of my own ignorance. So, humility, right? Embrace other people that have solved some of this problem before, somebody has solved this problem. There are companies out there that are taking in the data, that are automating the decision-making, and that can help you, right? Bring people in, bringing outside help. >> Right, well, the other piece you just talked on is automation, and it goes back to your earlier comment about, you know, scale, bad things at scale are not good. So, if you don't get things dialed in now, and you start applying automation, and you start applying machine speed, you know, then things can get really squirrely really quick. So, that's even another kind of, you know, danger zone coming ahead, start to plan and make sure you've got your stuff organized or now you're going to automate it at machine speed, IOT, 5G, and really run things ragged super quickly. >> Jeff, I agree a hundred percent with that. I want to go back to something you talked about before. People process technology. I want to tweak that. I think we really need to evolve into people, process, product, or people, process, problem. It's got to go back to what am I creating or what am I solving this helping someone? And the technology is something that I will use or not if that helps me meet that outcome. But as technologists, Jeff, a lot of us are getting lazy. I want to play with Kubernetes. I want to play with containers. I want to play with serverless. I want to play with IOT. Who is that actually solving a problem for? Is what we've got to come back to because if I'm not doing that, the less you submit that I'm playing with this, but I'm not really making something better for a customer or adding more value to the business. >> So, again, what are your tips and tricks? 'Cause things are not going to get less complicated, right? As we've talked about Amazon's rolling out new services all the time. Google is really starting, you know, Google Cloud is really starting to rage. Obviously, Satya has done an amazing job with Microsoft, and then there's Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, and all these secondary Clouds, Equinix, and that acceleration is only going up. So, how do you, you know encourage people, coach people, tell people to make sure that they're taking a step back and being organized and thoughtful, and not just racing ahead at the next bright shiny object? >> So, great question again, Jeff. I think people have to have to be careful that just because you hear about something a lot doesn't mean it's proven to scale. Social media is dangerous in the sense that we think that we hear something a hundred times then a means that is polished. And I think that as enterprises and as businesses, you know, go with something that's proven, but dip a toe in the water, if you're not sure about it. So, maybe you are experimenting with some things in DevTests, but here's some practical tips that I'll give. Three things, right? I recommend that people typically start here with Cloud strategy, the three D's of data are what I recommend people begin with. Don't begin with the widgets, the shiny objects, begin with data storage, begin with data transport and begin with data organization. We know that data is the lifeblood of the enterprise, right? That's what all of us are focused on right now, right? Data is collected from watches, from websites, from things like self-driving cars, eventually. So, how is my data going to be stored? 'Cause that's the most important part of likely what we're doing as a corporation. How is it going to be transported? Am I okay with spending X amount of dollars on Egress? Do I have latency issues? And then when it comes to data organization, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, I would start with my philosophy, Jeff, on how I plan to leverage that information across any of the multi or hybrid providers that I plan to spin up, because if I start with the data that connects me better to the customer, how am I going to leverage this data then make something better for them? And then any venue honestly, Jeff, that I choose to execute in we'll have tools and utilities and packages that I can leverage to make something better for someone. >> The piece you didn't mention though, was the application. So, where's the application? Say you still start with the data foundationally, and then go to the application or? >> Yes. >> But most of the initiatives driven kind of, at the application level layer? >> They are, and I'm glad you mentioned that. So, practically speaking, let me go down a level to double-click on stuff. Well, people want to be Cloud native, right? 'Cause we don't want to run servers. We don't want to run boxes, we don't even really want to do VMS anymore. One thing that I recommend, that I believe is high reward and low risk is that people strongly consider adopting database as a service, and this is the reason why. It gives us a format to go to something that's Cloud native that doesn't have to be totally rewritten. So, the juice is worth the squeeze there because I'm reducing labor, I'm reducing maintenance, I'm reducing cycles, the DBaaS that people like that have to do, but I'm not paying to refactor an application. Where we struggle, Jeff, and maybe this is another topic, we really struggle with the value of applications, and because we don't know the value of an app, we're using the cost of an app as a proxy. And so, if you don't know the value of something, you're always going to be at risk of over or under improving it. This is why I like database as a service. I can be more nimble, I can reduce labor, and I'm not rewriting an application and spending more to rewrite it than the app is worth. If I totally refactor, or if I totally replatform, the cost may outstrip the value. DBaaS is almost always a slam dunk, 'cause I'm going to reduce manual things that my people are doing that freeze them up, to focus more on customers and evolve in the end. That's what I see pretty consistently in the enterprise. >> That is really scary. That statement that you said that people don't necessarily know the value of the app and using cost as a proxy is not good. You know, I had Butch Rizzo on recently, and he did a study on, you know, trying to figure out the value of data, versus the the value of an app. And he did some research of that UCSF, and what they did is they basically said the value of the data is dependent on the business process that you can improve, or the business project that you want to do. You make an estimate as to what the ROI in that process is, and then you basically see if it's worthwhile to do. And that case and point was, you know, running a promotion at Chipola 'cause bill loves Chipola, but he had a real concrete way that, you know, if we can increase sales at the target stores by, you know, 10%, or we can increase the average ticket by 20 cents or we can increase the average number of items ordered by 0.5 or whatever. So, you know, real far metrics that tie back to real numbers, that tie back to value that you can make an assessment of that project, and that project is enabled by data. So, I hope people are doing that far applications 'cause cost is not the way to figure out value >> The challenge that we have, Jeff, when we look at a lot of the things in the Cloud, there's a big difference between if I have "big C" customers, someone who's literally pulling out a wallet or a credit card to pay for my service or product versus "little C" customers like internally. If I'm paying for a streaming service, and the cost of the streaming service goes up the value of that's likely also going up because I'm serving more big C customers. If the cost of a password reset manager goes up and internal application that nobody was likely paying for, and that's really the dilemma that a lot of folks have in the enterprise, Jeff. Am I going to take something that has limited value like a password application, and put it in a place that can have unlimited spend. Now, if I'm a Netflix or Disney plus, if my spend is going up, my value is going up because I'm serving more big C people that are going to pull out their credit card and give me money. So, a lot of the struggle is when we drill down into this in the enterprise is the people that have the little C customers that don't have anybody paying them 'cause they're tryna understand this is like funny money in our houses job. My kids are teenagers. If I was to charge them, right? For room and board or for dinner, they don't have any money. So, the value of what they think about my cooking on the weekend, right? It's hard to put a value on that because they're not paying me, but if I had a food truck, it's easy to put a value on that, are people buying it or not? So, again, the challenges between internal or external customers and asked me to get any things I charged back and show back, we need a model to understand, is this something that you're tolerating or something that you're actually choosing and are you willing to spend money on it? >> Yeah, and it's a complicated issue, right? Because the other thing is you'd say, you take this conversation over to the security space, which I always find fascinating 'cause investigating security is kind of like investing in insurance and you can't use all your money to insure everything a hundred percent or else you just, why would you even do it? But you have to have some, and it's not a real clear ROI, but the potential downside is pretty huge. So, it's this kind of, balancing act, as you said, it's not really clean as to what the true value of that is unless you tie it back to some specific event, a breach, you know, some type of pins getting stolen, et cetera. So, these are not hard questions, but it's funny 'cause they're not technology questions, right? They're business value questions, and they're priority questions, and they're trade off questions. That's the other thing, right? You don't have infinite resources. So, even if you solve the model here you need to solve it within a portfolio of challenges, opportunities to then, as you said, you know, kind of rank order, where do you spend that next version of dollar? 'Cause it really can have a very a huge difference on the return. >> Okay, I think if I was going to give a, maybe a final piece of advice to the audience, Jeff, it would be to not confuse planning and analysis. That's something that I've talked about before. There's a big difference between those two things, and I often use the analogy of tax planning versus tax preparation. Jeff, when we collect our receipts, and our W-2s and 1099s, and go to our CPA at the beginning of the next year, we can't call that tax planning. That's tax preparation. It's already kind of done and dusted as long as you don't mess it up, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. And the enterprise is doing a lot of analysis and a lot of preparation, but really we need to do more planning. We need to look at the tools and the companies that are helping us simulate and plan for the future that's coming because then when we're talking about it, right? When you're sitting with your CPA and you're saying, what if I do this with my retirement or 401k, or real estate assets, when they can talk to you about what might happen, right? You're not in crisis, it's not a fire drill, it's not a dumpster fire, you can have a very easy conversation around the pros and cons of that. So, I think that's one thing we really have to embrace is press ahead, talk to those consultants and those solution providers, is this really planning or is this just analysis? Is this looking backwards or is it really looking forward and giving me some insight into the things that are coming so that I feel smarter going into the next season? >> And the opportunity to make a change before you hit December 31st. I mean, I think that's a really great analogy. Well, Bobby, a lot of great stuff squeezed in in a few short minutes, it's super fun to catch up, and I just love all your analogies and your stories because at the end of the day, it is about people, and it's about priorities, and it's about business, it's not about the technology. So, thank you so much for sharing your insight. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, absolutely, all right. He's Bobby Allen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, we are wrapping up two days of wall to wall coverage at the Accenture Executive Summit. You are watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment, we have Zafar Razzacki, he is the managing director Digital Industry X at AWS, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebecca: And Jon Allen, global automotive professional services leader at AWS, thank you both for coming on the show! >> Thank you so much, thanks for having us. >> So, first, I'm going to start with you, Zafar, I want to hear both, what you do, what is Digital Industry X? It's so mysterious! (laughter) >> So, Industry X.0 is a fairly new practice inside of Accenture, we focus on all things smart and connected. There's a product segment that focuses on smart and connected products specifically, and then certainly we have to think about engineering, so how do you build those products and how do you automate and make the processes for developing those products smarter, and then processes and operations, how do you actually run those types of businesses? So, I'm new to the practice, I actually joined from a number of years at General Motors, where I worked on mobility and innovation there, and prior to that, spent a number of years at Google, working on innovation and new products there, so happy to be at the firm and excited to think about how we bring these types of skills to the mobility industry and change automotive. >> So, Jon, paint a picture for our viewers. The entire industry is being disrupted, we're changing the way we move around from city to city, we have Uber and Lyft, electric scooters, connected cars, just paint the picture for our viewers about the disruption taking place. >> Sure, I mean, I'll use a line from one of our CEOs in the auto industry, Mara Barra, said we'll see more disruption in the next five years than we've seen in the last twenty-five years, in the automotive industry, and it's really fascinating, seeing what's happening. I think the big disruption is that, automotive industry and automotive makers are no longer traditional metal benders. They see themselves as mobility companies. And they see that they need to integrate with this ecosystem, it's just not about driving your car to one spot to another, but it's a full customer experience, from the moment you get into your car, you get to your location, and then how do you actually get further, maybe, take a Lyft, a scooter, maybe you're not using your car, you're using Uber, so it's fascinating to see how the ecosystem is all integrated in. The auto industry also has shifted that, no longer do they think they should just do it alone. I think we're seeing a lot of partnerships, and they're bringing a lot of small businesses and they're bringing in more innovation, they realize that innovation isn't just happening within their four walls, but they're using a much larger ecosystem to really change and transform mobility across the world. >> So, maybe talk a little bit about how broad this ecosystem is, right, 'cause maybe, you know, in the old time, we had maybe sort of car manufacturers, right, and we had cities. You know, cities made the roads, car manufacturers built the vehicles, right? But now we've got a complicated ecosystem, right? We've got data companies that are playing a role in this, that are driving sort of ride hailing, et cetera, we've also got cities thinking about how they offer traffic services differently. Maybe just talk about some of the things you're seeing around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, certainly, OEMs are re-imagining their role in the ecosystem, suppliers are also thinking about how they can start to add new value and leverage the data off of their systems. We have to talk about startups in this space as well, I mean, the ecosystem with startups is just growing rapidly, we've talked about Uber and Lyft, they've been a great model for the way a startup can come in and disrupt and grow, but across all aspects, from supply chain, to retail, to in-vehicle technologies, you know, there are so many new entrants, and it's exciting. And it's leading to these types of partnerships where, traditionally, an OEM might have said, I'm going to do it all, now there's this comfort with, I'm going to partner with a startup, I might invest in them, I might put some project dollars into that relationship, and work on co-developing a solution together. >> Yeah, what's amazing, I think, is the customer has a lot more power, maybe than in the past, and so, automotive makers, this unique partnership that's happening, is they're really putting the customer in the center. Customers want a seamless experience, they want to be jumping between different apps or different capabilities, that's what's beautiful about what we're doing in AWS, is we're trying to help these OEMs take that full experience end-to-end. Think of your car as a personal assistant. Think of it as, it can help you get to your job, but it can also help with your personal life as well, and so I think it's fascinating that they're really starting to put the customer at the center to have a better customer experience, and it's no longer just horsepower, and how your car works, but it's really the connected ecosystem that extends, theoretically, beyond your car. So you can connect to your home, you can connect with the rest of your life through your vehicle these days, and I think that's the change. >> So, how will that work? Describe the connected car, what are we really talking about here? >> Wow, you want to take that one first? >> Sure, well, let's contrast it to the non-connected car. >> All right, fair enough! >> I mean, you know, literally, getting in, turning the engine on, and the car was a standalone part of your daily life. But to Jon's point, now, with it being really software-driven and having data able to flow from your vehicle to your home, and be able to automate, you know, turning on your thermostat as you're approaching the home, automatically opening the garage just based on proximity, those types of things. Being able to have the convenience of your favorite playlists and your phone book, bringing that digital life into the car, those weren't possible before the connected car and that technology architecture that we see now. But now, you know, that experience becomes much richer and much more personalized. >> Yeah, and I think, look at it latency, look at an IoT, looking at Edge, fascinating, especially with the introduction of 5G coming out, it's going to completely be a game changer for the rest of this. >> So let's build on that. So the roles of the players in the ecosystem are changing, right, so the role of the car manufacturer's changing, the role of the city is changing, the role of the startup's changing, but it seems like the kind of common theme among all of these is that they're leveraging data in different kinds of ways, I was just wondering, how does AWS help these stakeholders be able to leverage that kind of data? >> That's great. So, my role on professional services for AWS is we help our customers use the AWS services to make it real, whether it's from a proof of concepts all the way to operations. So we use our wonderful partner community like Accenture, and we come in together, and so, for example, say a customer wants to create a personal assistant through the vehicle, using Alexa, using other services, we would go in, maybe with a partner, and a lot of times we love to do it with the customer, with the auto maker, and together build. And again, it might be a concept. There is still a long lead time to create devices to be included in the vehicle, but the great thing about now, Cloud, and some other technologies, seven years was generally the design cycle for a vehicle, you can't do that anymore with new technologies. So we as AWS come in and really help, A, let's envision, let's work backwards from the customer, let's think about what we need to have, help them build, and then later on, actually implement and make it operational. >> Maybe I could just add to that real quick. One of the beauties of this partnership is that we see some of the new technologies that AWS is developing and what's in the pipeline, and our teams are actually working on building demos on top of this, so you know, one example of that is a trip planner that we actually have on display here at the show floor, where we can help a family plan a trip, what are all the things they need to take on that trip, because Alexa knows your shopping preferences, you know, we can recommend the snacks and things that you want to take, we can recommend stops along the way. In the future, when we're all driving electric vehicles, you know, how do you plan out your charging, and take the family to a restaurant while you're waiting thirty minutes for the vehicle to charge, so a lot of those things are realities that we can actually build today based on the technologies that AWS has to offer. >> What are some of the best in class auto makers in the sense of who are really at the cutting edge in terms of working with you both Accenture and AWS in terms of really thinking innovatively and creatively? >> Sure, well, I think everyone across the ecosystem is at that point in time where they recognize, it's time for that transformation to happen. So, you can pick any one of the major brands, and look at great examples of the way they're changing the experience inside of the vehicle. From the integration of different types of personalization offerings, to even, you know, some of the newer entrants, like at Tesla, that's really building vehicles from the ground up focused on software and that customer experience. So I think it's an exciting time across the industry, everyone's really making those changes and you guys are probably a seat at the table in all of those conversations. >> Yeah, I hate to point out one specific, but what I think I've seen a theme is that they recognize to draw talent, they can't do the old way of doing business, right, so they're creating these joint innovation centers with AWS, they have innovation centers kind of off campus of the main campus, they kind of have that Silicon feel, because it's a draw of talent, and they got to make it as exciting to get these new coders and developers in to want to join an automaker. They weren't really necessarily seen as that, the joint automaker, and that's completely transforming especially the rise of the digital, the CTO and the CDO, the chief digital officer, we're seeing that completely change and data science, these are themes maybe ten years ago that really weren't talked about in OEMs, and now they have a seat not only at the table, but they're at the board level. These are conversations at the board level now. >> Absolutely. >> So, one of the things we've all experienced, we all spend a lot of time sitting in traffic, right? Maybe talk a little bit about how are cities getting smarter about kind of using mobility in order to move people across cities and avoid traffic, some of the other problems we all experience. >> Well, I think there's cities as consumers of data, so cities are now having conversations with many of the automakers about leveraging vehicle data to make better decisions about the use of their roadways or how they manage traffic light phasing, so there's a lot of interesting things happening there, where manufacturers are able to share their data to cities, and you know, their city planner teams, the way they're building new roadways, are including a lot of that infrastructure now, where you see technologies like DSRC, that's able to talk to vehicles and help those traffic lights phase accordingly. I think cities are playing a really important role in making those new technologies come to bear. >> And I think it's amazing to see some of the investments in some of the smaller cities. So a few years ago, the Department of Transportation put out a challenge, a smart city challenge, and selected a city to actually be the incubator. But that created all these other cities, from Austin to Columbus to Ohio to you name it, to almost have these PMOs or these centers of excellence to create smart cities, and we talked about the ecosystem at the beginning of the conversation, and it's really enabling these cities to bring in maybe big ideas that weren't able to be brought in before. You know, the Cloud and the technologies we have are really leveling the playing field and giving access to maybe companies that didn't have that kind of compute power before, and that's what we're seeing with the smart cities initiatives, is it's not so expensive anymore, and you can bring in some really brilliant ideas of a small business that is maybe a three person shop that could actually transform. But I think we do need to fix the infrastructure, and we've talked about this as a nation for a while, and we continue to invest in our infrastructure to really enable smart cities. >> We've been talking about these smart cars and how they are going to serve as our personal assistants of the future, but what about safety, too? As an innovative USP? In the sense of, here we are using data to make these cars smarter, more connected, and also safer. >> Right, yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of debates right now on safe the autonomous vehicle and we're learning more as we go along that, I think as a couple use cases that I've seen is, you can sign up for apps to become a smarter driver, right? You see, you get your score, right, with my vehicle I get a report card every month to say how I've actually been doing, and as a parent, I can see how my kids are driving and all that, but I think at the end of the year, and it's kind of, I'll be bold here a little bit, we really don't remember the last time there was a major commercial airline crash in the United States. It makes the six o'clock news. By the time I retire, I make a bold prediction, I can be bold here, that a major car accident in the country, now I might be in a nursing home, could make the evening news. 'Cause we could get to that level of safety in the future, okay? >> Meaning, car accidents are so infrequent-- >> So rare. >> Could be so infrequent, rare, right. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen near turn, I do have a prediction that if, what we're trying to design today, enables that for the future, I think it's pretty proud to be a part of that, right? Again, I think it's, years down the road, I might be at Shady Pines retirement community at that point, but I really, I mean, you think about how we've been able to do the aviation industry and make it safer, even with the challenges around that, I think in the future we could have that for safety in vehicles in my lifetime. >> I totally agree, and I think that's a big promise of autonomous vehicles, that's what so many people are excited about, you know, traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our country, so to be able to address that through technology, I think, is an exciting promise. We see some of that even today, with all the technology that's being built into the vehicle, there are high standards for minimizing driver distraction, and just imagine that future where, you no longer have to worry about driver distraction. And now our relationship with the vehicle is one where we sit back, we live our lives, you know, there's a statistic that we estimate people will get back 4.5 years of their life that they're not spending behind the wheel locked on the road. You know, those types of things are really exciting to think about. >> Somebody out there will probably correct me on the numbers, but I think 39,000 fatality deaths in the United States was reported by Nets, I think that's the number, but I know that the number of distracted driving is going up, and that's a problem. I mean, people are using their phone, and it's not only phone, it's drinking, it's distracted driving, so anyway-- >> And distracted pedestrians, that's the thing, walking around Boston, everyone's just-- >> That's right, walking around here, you see people on their phone, absolutely. And I think that we are on a, it's amazing to see the changes that have happened around this the last couple years, and I think it's just opened new opportunities for companies that could never have really played in this space, are making a change for us. >> So one of the stories I love to hear about is how these kind of connected car and data capabilities are enabling us to use the infrastructure we've got today better. I mean, we'd all love to jump in a flying taxi and zoom over traffic, et cetera, but there's some concepts like smart carpool lanes, things like that, maybe you can talk a little bit about those and kind of how new business models are being allowed by that. >> Sure, yeah. So metering is one way, where it becomes a smart infrastructure, where you understand the traffic patterns, and it'd be HOV or you pay for it, so you can make the decision if you want to spend $30 to try to get into the city, or be stuck in traffic and take you an hour. And so it's interesting, with the smart infrastructure that's actually occurring, within cities right now that changes on how people will use metered lanes, and that's one thing we're seeing today. But there's also integrations with apps that we use every day to help us give us better insights, obviously, that we all use, to be able to have traffic, but it's the integration with that, imagine being able to have an application integrated with emergency management. So, you know, today people are hitting an app cause waves as a cop on the side of the road, well, we have customers, one customer particular, that wants to make sure that's integrated in a smart way, you know, that if a police car is on the side of the road, how is that really feeding the larger infrastructure? So, yes, there's a whole piece on metering and smart infrastructure, but I think that some of these other businesses are finding ways to integrate things like emergency management and some other pieces to really help reduce traffic flow and make it easier. >> Parking is another great example. >> Parking. >> There are a number of startups out there that have created technologies to help map open parking spaces, so how do you feed that data to the end user to help them make smarter decisions. I think there's another data point, we spend about 30% of our time in our vehicle, is spent just looking for parking. Right, so, how can we help to drive those things down, how can we help make it more efficient to find a parking spot, to even transact for that parking spot, and you might come to a situation where, again, when there's peak traffic, are we bidding for a parking spot? And will a parking spot go to the highest bidder? So these are all opportunities that technology really enables, when we connect the vehicle and are able to feed in that type of data around parking, infrastructure, roadway usage, et cetera. >> Well, Zafar and Jon, this has been a really cool conversation, you have great jobs. It's really neat, re-imagining mobility, yes. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein, that wraps up our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit for theCUBE, thank you so much, and we'll catch you next time.

>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cube. We are in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with John Wall's. I'm very excited that we're kind of color coordinated >>way. Didn't compare notes to begin with, but certainly the pink thing. It's worth it if >>you like. You complete me. >>Oh, thank you. Really, Joe, I don't hear that very often. My wife says that >>you tell that we're at the end of day one of the coverage of A W s three in bed. Good day, though. Yes, it has been very excited. We have a couple of guests joining us for our final segment on this. Please welcome. We have Bill Gerard CTO of Digital Transformation and Scale solutions at Intel Bill, welcome to our show. >>Thank you very much. Happy to be here >>And one of our friends. That's no stranger to the Cube. One of our former host, Bobby Allyn, the CEO of Cloud Generate. Bobby. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>Guys, here we are. This there has not been a lull in the background noise all day. Not reinvent day one. But Bobby want to start with you. Talk to her audience about cloud genera. Who are you guys? What do you do? And what's different about what you're delivering? >>One of the first things is different about Claude Generous where we're located. So we're in Charlotte, which I call Silicon South. So we're kind of representing the East Coast, and we're a company that focuses, focuses on helping with workload, placement and transformation. So where you don't know whether something should go on from off grim. If you put it in Amazon, which service's should have consumed licensing models? Pricing models way help you make data driven decisions, right? So you're not just going based on opinion, you're going based on fact. >>And that's challenging because, you know, in the as, as John Ferrier would say, No Cloud Wanda Otto, which was compute network storage, it was the easy I shouldn't say easy, but the lift and shit applications that enterprises do are these workloads should go to the cloud. Now we have you know what's left over, and that's challenging for organization. Some of the legacy once can't move. How do you help from a Consul Tatum's down point that customers evaluate workloads? What data are they running? What the value that data has and if they are able to move some of those more challenging applications. >>So part of the framework for us, Lisa, is we want to make sure we understand what people are willing and able to change right, because sometimes it's not just about lower costs. Sometimes it's about agility, flexibility, deploying a different region. So what we often start with his wit is better look like you would assist us with life for your organization. And so then, based on that, we analyze the applications with an objective, data driven framework and then make sure the apse land where they're supposed to go. We're not selling any skewer product. We're selling advice to give you inside about what you should do, >>Bobby, I think. And maybe Bill to you could chime in here on this. If you give people a choice, What does this look like? What you know, What do you want? I don't want to do anything right. I want to stay put, right? But that obviously that's not an option, But you I'm sure you do get pushed back quite a bit from these almost the legacy mindset. And we've talked a lot about this whole transformation versus transition. Some people don't want to go, period. So how do you cajole them? Persuade them bring them along on this journey? Because it's gonna be a long trip. Yeah, I think you gotta pack a lunch. >>It's a good point. I think what we've seen, most of them have data experience that this is a tried and elements didn't get the results that they expected. This is where you know, the partnership that we have with call General. Really? You know that data driven, intelligent, based planning is super important, right? We want to really fundamentally health organizations move the right workloads, make sure they get the right results and not have to redo it. Right? And so part of that, you know, move when you're either past scars or not used to what you're doing. Give him the data and the information to be able to do that intelligently and make that as fast as they can. And you know, at the right, you know, experience in performance from a capability perspective. >>So so many businesses these days, if they're not legacy if they're not looking in the rear view mirror, what is the side mirror site? Objects are closer than they appear, even for Amazon. Right? For all of these companies, there are smaller organizations that might be born in a cloud compared to the legacy two words. And if they're not looking at, we have to transform from the top down digitally, truly transform. Their business may not be here in a year or two, so the choice and I think they need to pack a lunch and a hip flask for this because it's quite the journey. But I'm curious with the opportunity that cloud provides. When you have these consultation conversations, what are This? Could be so transformative not just to a business, but to a do an entire industry. Bill talked to us from your perspective about some of the things that you've seen and how this next generation of cloud with a I machine learning, for example, can can really transfer like what's the next industry that you think is prime to be really flipped upside down? >>Well, the good news is I think most of the industries in the segment that we talked to have realized they need to some level of transformation. So doing the business as usual really isn't an option to really grow and drive in the future. But I do think the next evolution really does center on what's happening in a I and analytics. Whether it's, you know, moving manufacturing from video based defect detection, supply chain integrity. You know what's happening from a retail was really the first in that evolution, but we see it in health care in Federal Data Center modernization, and it's really moving at a faster pace and adopting those cloud technologies wherever they needed, both in their data center in the public, cloud out of the edge. And we'll start to see a real shift from really consolidation in tow. Large hyper converts, data centers to distributed computing where everything again. And that's where we're excited about the work we're doing with the Amazon, the work we're doing with Eyes V partners to be at the capability where they need it, but I think it will be really the next. Evolution of service is everywhere. >>Never talk us through an example or use case of a customer that you're working with, a cloud genera with intel and and a W S. What does that trifecta look like for, say, a retailer or financial service is organization >>so that that looks like this? ELISA. When we when we talk about workload placement, we think that most companies look at that as a single question. It's at least a five fold question. Right there is the venue. There's the service. There's the configuration, the licensing model and the pricing model. You need to look at all five of those things. So even if you decided on a DBS is your strategic partner, we're not done yet. So we have a very large financialservices customer that I can't name publicly. But we've collaborated with them to analyze tens of thousands of workloads, some that go best off from some that go best on for him. And they need guidance and coaching on things like, Are you paying for redhead twice your pay for licensing on him? Are you also paying for that in the cloud? There are things that maybe should be running an RT s database as a service. Here's your opportunity to cut down on labor and shift some of the relationships tohave, toe re index and databases is not glamorous or differential to value for your business. Let's take advantage of what a TBS does well and make this better for your company. One of the things that I want to kind of introduce to piggyback on your question. We lean on people process technology as kind of the three, the three legged horse in the Enterprise. I want to change that people process product or people process problem. We're falling in love with the tech and getting lazy. Technology should be almost ubiquitous or under the covers to make a product better or to solve a problem for the customer. >>Well, maybe on that, I mean automation concern to come in and make a big play here because we're taking all these new tasks if you could automate them that you free your people, your developers to do their thing right. So you raise an interesting point on that about being lazy and relying on things. But yet you do want off put our offload some of these nasty not to free up that creativity and free up the people to do what they're supposed to be doing. It's a delicate balance, though, isn't it? It is. It is. This >>is where I think the data driven, you know, informed decisions important. We did a lot of research with Cloud Jenner and our customers, and there's really four key technical characteristics when evaluating workload. The 1st 1 of course, is the size of the data. Where is the created words They use Words that consumed the 2nd 1? Is the performance right? Either performance not only to other systems around it or the end user, but the performance of the infrastructure. What do you need out of the capability? The level of integration with other systems? And then, of course, security. We hear that time and again, right? Regulatory needs. What are we having from top secret data to company sensitive data? Really Getting that type of information to drive those workload placement decision becomes at the forefront of that on getting, you know, using cloud gender to help understand the number of interfaces in and out the sides of the data. The performance utilization of the system's really helps customers understand how to move the right workload. What's involved and then how to put that in the right eight of us instance, and use the right ideas capabilities, >>and you and you both have hit on something here because the complexity of this decision, because it's multi dimensional, you talked about the five points a little bit ago. Now you talked about four other factors. Sue, this is not a static environment, No, and to me that as you're making a decision, that point is what's very difficult for, I would assume for the people that you're interfacing with on the company level. Yes, because it's a moving target for them, right? They just it's it's dynamic and changing your data flows exponentially. Increasing capabilities are changing. How do you keep them from just breaking down? >>I don't want to jump in on that, because again, I'm going to repeat this again. That my thesis is often technology is the easy part. We need to have conversations about what we want to do. And so I had a conversation earlier today. Think of Amazon like a chef. They could make anything I want, but I need to decide what I want to eat. If I'm a vegan and he wants steak. That's not Amazons fault. If they can't cook something, that's a mismatch of a bad conversation. We need to communicate. So what I'm finding is a lot of executives are worried about this. There were Then you're going to give me the right the wrong answer to the right question. The reality is you may have the wrong question. First of all right, the question is usually further upstream, so the worry that you're gonna give me the wrong answer to the right question. But often you need to worry that you're getting your starting with the wrong question. You're gonna get the right answer asked the right question first. And then you got a chance to get to the final destination. But >>and then he in this multi cloud world that many organizations live in, mostly not My strategy could be by Emma A could be bi developer preference for different solutions. A lot of Serios air telling us we've inherited a lot of this multi cloud and technical debt. Exactly. So does not just compound the problem because to your point, I mean you think of one way we hear so many different stats about the number of clouds that on average enterprises using is like 5 to 9. That whole world. That's a reality for organizations. So in terms of how the business can be transformed by what you guys are doing together, it seems like there's a tremendous opportunity there. But to your point, Bobby, where do you start? How do you help them understand what? That right first question is at the executive level so that those four technical points that Bill talked about Tek thee you know, the executive staff is all on board with Yes, this is the question we're asking then will understand it. The technology is right. Sold >>it. It's got to start with, Really? What? The company's business imperatives, right? It can't start with an I t objective. It's it's Are we moving into new markets? Do we need thio deploy capabilities faster? Are we doing a digital customer experience? Transformation? Are we deploying new factories, new products into new regions, and so really the first areas? What's the core company strategy, imperatives of the business objectives? And >>then how >>does I t really help them achieve that? In some cases, it may be we have to shift and reduce our data center footprints way have to move capabilities to where we have a new region. Deployments, right? We've got to get him over to Europe. We don't have capabilities in Europe. We're going to Asia. I've got a mobile sales force now where I need to get that customer, meet the customer where they're doing, you know, in the retail store, and >>that >>really then leads quite simply, too. What are the capabilities that we have in house that we're using? >>How are >>they being utilized? And he's using them, and then how do we get them to where they need to be? Some cases accost, imperative. Some cases and agility, Time to market and another's and we're seeing this more often is really what are the new sets of technologies? A. I service is training in forgetting that we're not experience to do and set up, and we don't want to spend the time to go train our infrastructure teams on the technology. So we'll put our data scientists in there figuring out the right set of workloads, the right set of technology, that we can then transform and move our applications to utilize it really starts, I think with the business conversation, or what's the key inflection point that they're experiencing? >>And have you seen that change in the last few years that now it's where you know, cloud not cloud. What goes on Cloud was an I t conversation to your point, Bill. And then the CEO got involved in a little bit later. But now we're we're seeing and hearing the CEO has got to be involved from a business imperative perspective. >>Share some data, right? Uh, so, you know, a couple of years ago, everybody was pursuing cloud largely for cost. Agility started to become primary, and that's still very important. A lot of the internal enterprise data modernizations were essentially stalled a bit because they were trying to figure how much do we move to the the public cloud, right. We want to take advantage of those modern service is at that time, we did a lot of research with our partners. He was roughly 56% of enterprise workload for in their own data center. You know, the rest of them Republic Cloud. And then we saw really the work, the intelligent workload discussion that says we've had some false starts. Organizations now really consistently realize they need both, you know, their own infrastructure and public cloud, and we've actually seen on increase of infrastructure modernization. While they're moving more and more stuff to the cloud, they're actually growing there on centre. It's now roughly 59% on Prem today for that same business, and that's largely because they're using more. Cloud service is that they're also even using Maur on premise, and they're realizing it's a balance and not stalling one or starving one and then committing to the other the committing to both and really just growing the business where it needs to go. >>Strategic reasons. All right? >>Yes, well, there should be four strategic reasons. There aren't always back to your question about which question asked. One of the questions I often ask is, What do you think the benefits will be if you go to cloud? And part of what happens is is not a cloud capability? Problem is an expectation problem. You're not gonna put your GOP system in the cloud and dropped 30% costs in a month, and so that's where we need to have a conversation on, You know, let's iterating on what this is actually gonna look like. Let's evolve the organization. Let's change our thinking. And then the other part of this and this were clouded or an intel come in. Let's model with simulation looks like. So we're gonna take those legacy work clothes unless model containers. Let's model Micro Service is so before you have to invest in transformation to may not make sense. Let's see what the outcome's look like through simulation through a through M l and understand. Where does it make sense to apply? The resource is, you know, to double click on that solution that will help the business. >>I was gonna finish my last question, Bobby, with you saying, Why, Cloud General? But I think you just answered that. So last question for you, though, from from an expectation perspective, give me one of your favorite examples of customer whatever kind of industry there and that you've come in and helped them really level, set their expectations and kick that door wide open. >>That's tough, many >>to choose from. >>Yeah, let me let me try to tackle that one quickly. Store's computer databases. Those are all things that people look at I think what people are struggling with the most in terms of kind of expectations is what they're willing and able to change. So this is kind of what I leave on. Bill and I talked about this earlier today. A product is good, a plan is better. A partnership is best. Because with the enterprises of saying is, we're overwhelmed. Either fix it for me or get in there with me and do it right. Be in this together. So what we've learned is it's not about were close applications. It's all kind of the same. We need help. We're overwhelmed. I want a partner in telling Claude Juncker the get in this thing with me. Help me figure this out because I told you this cloud is at best a teenager. They just learned how to drive is very capable, but it needs some guard rails. >>I love that. Thanks you guys So much for explaining with Johnny what you guys are doing together and how you're really flipping the model for what customers need to be evaluated and what they need to be asking. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you for having us >>our pleasure. Thank you. for John Wall's I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the Cube at Reinvent 19 from Vegas. Wants to go tomorrow.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. We're here live at the the Sands Convention Center. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is re:Invent 2019, the seventh year theCUBE has been here. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Justin Warren. Sesh Iyer is here, he's the Managing Director and Senior Partner at DCG and is joined by Allen Chen who's the Associate Director of Software Engineering at BCG. Gents, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you >> Thank you for having us >> So we're going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about machine intelligence, digital transformation, but I want to start with this concept that you guys have put forth and you're putting it to action with some of your clients I'm sure, of this bionic organization. You know it's a catchy term, but what's behind it? What's a bionic company? >> So if you think about the next 10 years we believe that it's going to be the era of the bionic organization. Where the bionic organization is essentially humans and machines coming together. The bio and the nic, right. We believe that we are at a point now where the power from AI, the power from machines combined with the intrinsic human potential coming together delivers a very, very different set of outcomes. We get to outcomes largely on three fronts. The first is around customer experiences and relationships, you take that to a really new level. The second thing is in operations, you drive to a lot more productive set of operations through automation, and the third thing is innovation. The rate of innovation is just going to increase significantly, and we are seeing a lot of that today at re:Invent here. >> So you're optimists for the future, right? You don't want to pave the cow path, you don't want to protect the past from the future, but at the same time people are concerned, right. Machines are replacing humans, and they always have but for the first time in history it's with cognitive functions. So I'm sure you guys are having these conversations with your clients, maybe that's one of the blockers is that sort of perceptions that it's going to cause too much disruption. But maybe you could talk about that. How do I get to become a bionic organization? What are some of the barriers that I have to go through? >> I think the biggest thing is we are actually getting to an organization where technology continues to augment the human. So it's not substituting or replacing the human it's really augmenting the human. So how do we take human performance and organizational performance to a next level by bringing them together? So it's always about them coming together. When we think about barriers the real barriers actually are organizational models and old ways of working. They are legacy technologies. It's the lack of access to data that we can leverage to actually convert that into insightful outcomes using AI. And the lack of talent, so we really are at a point where we don't have enough digital and AI talent out there . Andy today talked about training as one of the core tenants of what you do to take an organization to leverage technologies that we have today, so those are the things that are barriers today that we're working with our clients on to overcome, to be able to extract the full potential of what we can do. >> Allen maybe you could talk a little bit about BCG's AI business, how do you guys look at it? Maybe share that with our audience. >> I mean as Sesh mentioned, the bionic organization really has two parts, right. It has the human element and it has the machine element and AI is really the thing that underpins the backbone for the machine element, but you can't really disconnect it from the human, because you know as we see with our clients if you just do the algorithms themselves the algorithms can't change the business, right. You can't remove the algorithms from the context of the business. The people who need to make the cultural changes, the organizational changes, the priority changes to actually put those algorithms into action. So we of course, as a company that helps clients go through this transformation, we have to usher along the human change but for the AI and machine learning change, we bring a lot of the best talent that we have. We've got 850 data scientists and engineers around the world helping our clients go through this transformation and you know we build lots of really, really interesting technology. For example, we've got a platform called SOURCE AI that we use to facilitate the building of these AI models and these advanced analytics use cases to accelerate at least the machine portion of that journey. >> Do you have a discrete AI business, a practice, or is it part of sort of a client's digital transformation where you bring in that expertise? >> Yeah, so within BCG we have a group called BCG GAMMA which is the arm of the company that focuses solely on AI and machine learning use cases. But the thing is, our model isn't just to kind of embed ourselves into your company and try to like take root and be there forever. We want to empower these companies to kind of kickstart their journey so we can go in, we help them get started, prove out a few use cases and then we actually train and transfer them so that they can make sure that the programs that we helped plant the seeds for end up being long term, sustainable programs for them. >> Dave: Teaching 'em to fish? >> Exactly >> When we think about what really drives impact and outcome and clients, it's all about bringing together the different capabilities that we have. So we have our heritage strategy consulting business. We have GAMMA, which is our AI at-scale, data analytics business. We have BCG Digital Ventures which is all about incubating new companies and taking them out of market. And then we have our Platinion team which is all about driving new architectures, new technologies, in terms of driving adoption at client. So all these capabilities typically come together at a client for us to deliver impact at the end of the day. >> Examples of sort of where you've implemented? Some successes? >> So I think, I think one great example that we have is around when you think about customer experiences and customer engagement, we have recently done a piece of work with United Airlines that's actually getting showcased here at AWS re:Invent where we really used personalization technology that we have with our partner Formation.Ai to really deliver a new level of customer experience and engagement for United customers, right. So we call it Miles Play and you can actually, I don't know if you guys are United customers, I know you guys travel a lot, >> Dave: Of course, everybody we also, so Miles Play is a way in which we have actually really leveraged AI and gamification inside of the United app to really drive a different level of experience for customers. So that's one example, there are many, many others. >> Yeah, we are here at AWS re:Invent as you point out, and the talk of transformation was part of the keynote this morning with Andy Jassy. A lot of that is around organizational change, but this is also a cloud show, so how does this work that BCG's doing with AI, how does that interact with the cloud and how does that link into that idea of organizational transformation? >> So when we think about, again I'll go back to that bionic organization, we see as we move towards this new organization that's bringing together bringing together data, technology as well as organization constructs, there are four things that we think of. We think about purpose at the core. So what is the reason that an organization exists, and how to we make that alive, and bring it alive? I think there's a second around data and technologies. So what can you do with AI, what can you do with data, how do you really drive modular technologies to adopt them to drive change? And then there's a third around people and organization. So how do you drive new organizational models to get an organization to deliver to the potential? And how do you bring new talent? And you know Andy talked about re-skilling today or training people, and then lastly leadership. How do you bring in a different style of leadership, we call it jazz leadership, where you really have to bring different parts of your organization to, and help them orchestrate to get to an outcome, rather than a more command and control style approach. So all of these are the pieces that we see coming together and that's what we work with our clients on to move them from where they are today to where they will be in the next 5 years. >> Allen you have software in your title, so I'm curious as to what kind of tooling that you guys have built, that you apply in your client situations? >> Yeah, so we work with a lot of different clients in a lot of different industries, and in a lot of different use cases and even though we treat every client as a unique situation there are patterns that begin to emerge and we want to make sure that, you know in order to provide the most value to our clients we want to be able to quickly prove out wins and use cases. And one of the ways that we're able to do that is building software products that facilitate those things. And so we've got data scientists that go through this whole machine learning pipeline even though the use cases are different, the challenges are kind of the same no matter what so you go through the process of how do you get access to data, right? Once you have access to data, how do you begin experimenting with models? Once you've experimented, how do you begin to consolidate the knowledge of the team to start evaluating models in a collaborative way? And once you have a model that you decide is good, how do you deploy that into a client environment? In many cases, it's going to be cloud because in order for these clients to really see the value of these AI programs, it's got to scale and so we work very closely with partners like AWS to ensure that we can bring the most scalable AI solutions to bear for our clients. And so we build platforms like SOURCE AI to facilitate that entire journey from data access all the way to deployment at scale. And then depending on the verticals, we also have other products that are most use case specific So we work with a lot of airlines to actually do airline scheduling for their airplanes, gate scheduling, routing bags. And so while we have SOURCE AI underpinning the platform, airlines have very, very unique problems of their own that are very, very interesting to solve and so we built products to cater to those industries specifically as well. >> One other piece that I would add is for the retail industry for example, markdowns is a big topic. So how do you get the best price for the given inventory that you have. We again have AI based solutions that drive markdowns and take the profitability of the revenue of a client to a better level than they're at. >> One of the things that we see is many of our clients want to get increasingly close to their customer to have that one-on-one relationship that traditional marketing can never afford you, right. So with things like markdown and personalization, we can gather all this data, use the latest AI techniques and begin to start giving offers and discounts and promotions and offers to people on a one-to-one basis, rather than marketing to a cohort of people. >> So a lot of these are functional areas, particular problem domains that have particular technological solutions, and then the pace of technology continues to change. We've seen that for decades. But it seems that this transformational agenda that we need to have, has a lot more to do with the humans and that problem doesn't really seem to have changed to me in the last several decades. BCG's been around for a very long time. Became famous back in the '80s for doing a lot of the same sort of transformational ideas how do you transform your organization? So what is it that is about, what is it about cloud and AI today that's changed the nature of organizational change? What the change in there? >> So my sense is My sense is, if you think about maybe there are two points to make here, and then Allen you should add on. I think one is, it's always easy to bring AI and data and do a proof of concept, right? And to show that something has potential. Taking that potential to impact and outcomes requires it to move to being at scale. So one of the big changes that we are seeing is we have to take these AI technologies and really deliver them at scale. So that's one piece of it. I think the other piece that really becomes important is leveraging AI for the right context in which you're applying the solve for. So you need to go into targeted spaces, as Allen said, certain use cases that have huge impact and go after it and deliver value there. As opposed to trying to do something a lot more expansively. So how do you now go into specific industries and identify unique areas that have a lot of promise and potential, and then put your energy against that to get to again impactful outcomes. Right, he had that example around markdowns. We've talked about airline optimization, we have talked about personalization. All of these are good examples of very targeted areas that have a lot of potential to really drive value. >> Yeah, like one of the things that I see that cloud has changed the transformation process is just the ability for us to very quickly experiment with new use cases, right. In terms of the types of tools and building blocks that cloud vendors like AWS provide us, you know we could think of an idea, an AI powered use case one day, and we could start cranking the gears on it the next day and if it works, we could just start scaling it up. And if it doesn't, we turn it off and it's a very, very kind of low regret, low risk kind of thing. Whereas back in the day where everybody is building data centers, in order to try something new you have to capitalize the cost of actually buying all this hardware, filling up your data center, staffing it, and then if it turns out that that use case didn't pan out, well now you've got loads of hardware that's just kind of costing you tons of money every day. With the cloud, we can just move so much more quickly and take a lot more bold risks. >> It's the cost of, I think it's the cost of experiments and the speed with which you can bring teams to get to outcomes. Right, so Andy again talked today about an integrated development environment for data scientists. How do you really bring data scientists, get them to start working on something, experiment with it, start to show some potential and then really scale it? Those are things that we believe, you know cloud has really immensely changed. The other thing is access to massive, massive data sets. Again Andy today talked about how different data sets can be brought into Amazon and the ability to do that easily today. So how can you really create value from these billions, and billions of rows of data that are sitting out there in your enterprise and converting that into something meaningful. >> So that approach and that philosophy of sort of low risk, pick a winner, scale it first of all, the CFO loves it, I think generally the organization is going to see value. They can, it's tangible. However, I think about digital disruption and if you think about the successful digital companies they've got data at their core. So my question to you is, are you helping these sort of incumbents? You mentioned United, I'm sure there are many others you work with. Are they able to sort of transform and put data at the core, become a digitally transformed organization before somebody disrupts them? You know will those, maybe not quick hits, but those focused projects, will they ultimately lead to an outcome that transforms them in a way that Jassy was sort of putting forth today? >> I would, I think so. I think that's the promise of the next five years. So if I think about, when we talk about a bionic organization, we talk about 30 to 50 processes that that organization will have. I mean my sense is those processes will have 50 to 60% of the components that are driven by AI or data. So if you think about an incumbent today working in manual processes, legacy systems, they are going to actually move to leveraging AI and data and new ways of working to transform that legacy environment into a next gen technological environment but also ways of working, and then bringing all of that together to drive a very different level of engagement with the customer, experiences with the customer, how they actually run their operations, do it much faster, reduce cycle time, and then also the rate and pace of innovation, right. You can see today the number of new features that got released on AWS and it's all been in a year and there are like 30 of them. So how do you really drive to that level of rate and pace of innovation. You'll see all of those happening in all of these traditional industries over the next five years. >> And if they don't move, they're going to probably be in big trouble. >> Sesh: They are going to be in big trouble, they're going to die >> All right, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great conversation, great to have you. >> Our pleasure, thank you >> Yeah, thank you so much for the time. >> All right, keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Dave Vellante for Justin Warren from AWS re:Invent 2019. Right back (electronic music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering AWS Reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. Welcome >> back, everyone. Day two of live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS Amazon Web services. Inaugural conference called Reinforce. This is a Cloud security conference, the first of its kind. It's the beginning of what we see as a new generation of shift in now new category called Cloud Security. Obviously, Cloud has been growing. Security equation is changing and evolving. I got a great guest here. Colby Alan, who's a platform architect at ZIP with based in Seattle. Great for joining us. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So we're chatting before we came on about your journey and your Dev ops chops you guys have built over there that I want to get into that just quickly explain what you guys do real quick. Set the context. >> Yes, it is on SMS text messaging provider way Specialize in toll free messaging. We also texting able landline phone numbers. Our business is kind of really split into two parts way. Have you know your traditional Sadd's application that ran runs like a sad That's where you can, you know, have the you I thio interface your landline phone number eight under number With that messaging, no, top that We run a carrier grade network. So we have direct binds into all the major carriers in the U. S. Bringing online some Canadian carriers. That's really where the power of our platform and we own the network on DSO way started Nicolo and over the last last year, which has spent nine months moving all that into Amazon and >> forget about that. So explain the architecture. You guys move yet polos with network you moved to Amazon with three people. Just classic devils. A lot of hard work, I'm sure take us through what happened. What was the old environment? And now what does it look like now? >> Yeah, so, you know, when I just started with, you know, they were interesting place. They were just starting a huge growth. And so at that point, they existed in a few data centers in the U. S. And running the empire workloads on or bare metal databases on. The problem was, there was just a scaling problem, right? I mean, we couldn't way We're looking at the type of scale we needed and trying to procure hardware. And we just couldn't physically get it fast enough with the right amount of budget. So I come from a previous place doing a job? Yes. I mean, that's kind of what I've done for a lot of years. So, you know, I convinced my boss stay here. Let's let's run the stats happen. Eight of us. So we built that ran it, launched our new version of arse as application in Amazon. And at that point, you know, our traffic skyrocketed. You know, I think last year we had somewhere to 180% growth, right? And, you know, our core infrastructure just wasn't surviving. Right is outages and problems. And so, you know, we took it and we we went to Amazon with it. And, you know, we rebuilt it all. And it was a really interesting thing, because Amazon was Luther releasing features and we were consuming them, right? Five. Siri's and Nitro came out, and we're like finally waken get performance of the networking interfaces. Then they released the D instances within ve Emmys, or like finally, our databases will survive and they can go fast enough, you know? And then we leveraging huge Aurore instances, real impact power, the back end of this thing. So you >> guys really tapped really? At the right time? You guys were growing. You saw the, you know, that scale potentially bursting. You saw the scale coming in growth coming in the company you could almost see. Okay, look, we got a plan. So you go to Amazon News Service is what's the impact on the staff has been any more people. What's been the impact on? >> Yeah, I think the big thing is the initial move. We did it for three of us. I mean, it was a lot of work. We spent a lot of time doing it. A lot of people, sleepless nights, a lot of long weekends. But now you know, we've got a really stable platform, and, you know, we were able to really continue processing our message. Growth is increased, and we know we haven't, you know, had to totally re architect things again, right? The architecture's work has grown and expanded. Stale ability has been fantastic for us. The performance, of course, is you know, some of >> the best walking commercial for eight of us, a question paper. But if you'll have that same experience, but what's interesting is you guys essentially are, in my opinion, representative of the trend that we're seeing, which is certainly in security as they catch up the devil. That's a big story here. Security now can level up with speed of the Dev ops kind of engineering philosophy and pointing, but it's it's the trend of building your own and a lot of companies. They're reinvesting in teams of people because they're close to the action and they can actually code if I quickly use cases that they know are bona fide, whether it's a low level platform service, primitive or right up into the app, using machine learning and data. So you know you have now that now you had security in there. This is where the action is and so cos I mean, I see the successful ones like you guys coming in saying You know what? Let's not boil the ocean over. Let's just solve one problem scale and then let's look at the service is that we can leverage to doom or take us through that philosophies. I think you guys were great example of that. >> So, I mean, if we touch on the security aspect, I think that that was a big thing is way. Don't run a dedicate security team. My team is the security team, right? And that was a big thing that both me and my director is. You know, we wanted the people building it to be doing the security. And, you know, the that was what was really, you know, easy with eight of us is, you know, we could turn on all these fancy features. It was just, you know, a flag and Terra formed all of a sudden way. Have encryption arrest. It's something we've never had before. So there's that. And then, you know, to the builder methodology be because we came from such a scrappy like way. Got to go fast, like we didn't have time to evaluate software bringing consultants, you know, it's so, you know, we kind of just kind of adopted that, you know, it's better for us a lot of times to kind of roll our own thing. Andan there, times where there's software that's a good fit for it. I mean, we do use some external vendors on things, and >> that's really more of a decision on the platform. But as you look at the platform engineer, you go. Okay, we gotta build here. Let's weigh No, he don't really is not me that be a core competency. Let's go look at some vendors for this, this and that. But ultimately, if you look at something that's really core, you can dig into it. And certainly with Kubernetes and with a lot of the service is coming out sas after taking eventually Cloud Native. >> Yeah, yeah, through you're you're so we're huge Criminality is 100% kubernetes everywhere, and I think that that's really been another big thing for us is you know, it's it's brought our application up a level to be able to integrate, be more reliable. I mean, you know where you used to have this external service discovery piece, and then you have your security peace. You know where kubernetes I can go deploy a container application. Describe it all at once, right? It's all in my coat config so I can audit it for our compliance sees. You know we can co to review for our compliance, sees but the same time I deploy the whole thing. I'm not. Here's this team to point the There's this other team then coming by trying to secure the app. It it's all together. >> The old way would have been kind of build it out, maybe use some software. Have all these silo teams. Yes, and that's kind of all kind of built in. >> Yeah, we kinda just opened it out, right? I mean, you know, from from arse, as teams leveraging a lot of, you know, the security features that are available to us to our core piece, which is a very different type of software, you know, is leveraging the same pieces and same type of monitoring principle. >> It's interesting, You know, the Kino. There's something people hemming and hard around, like the word Dev sec ops. I mean, I love Devon. We've been we've been part of that since day one. It's been fun to be part of it, but we saw the benefits of it. Clearly. You see, no doubt there's no debate. But when you start getting into some of the semantic definitions, go to security known feel that, by the way, is fragmented like crazy and now you get the growth of the cloud is starting to see cloud security become its own thing That's different than the on premises side. So what's your take on that? Because a lot of people are wanting their going to cloud anyway. So what's that they're saying on premise, security posturing and cloud security? In your opinion? >> Yeah, so I mean, it is drastically different. I think part of it's the tool set that's available, right? I mean, we ran data centers. I've automated data centers, but, you know, they're just not at the level of which I could do the automation in the auditing in the cloud. So I feel like I found actually, some respects makes it easier for me to do security on run security and audit security numbers. The data center. You know, I don't run a lot of tooling and a lot of things to get all the views. I need it, But there's a lot of really separate systems, you know, in the cloud you have, like this one. Nice, fundamental, a p I. That hi is a person who has to build the infrastructure can use, but it's the same a p I that I put my security had on that. Like I used to make security, right, security groups, things of that sort. It's all the same, right? I'm not having to learn five different applications has been really important for our team because, you know, my team comes from the vast majority of no true Dev ops Thio. You know, we've been upgraded from people in our knock, you know, and have them really just learned the one ecosystem >> is you don't want to fragment the team. Yeah, I don't wanna have five different skill sets, kind of >> their victims. We just We don't wanna have tools that only one person knew how to do right. We wanted people to take vacations right? And like, we don't want to have a tool that's like only only that person knows how to run it, nobody else does. And so >> that was the big thing for us. What you think about the show here, reinforce all say it's not an Amazon Webster's summit. They do the summits which assistance see a commercial version of reinventing regions. This is a branded show is obviously their cloud security going hard at it. What's your take. So far, >> I've really enjoyed it. I mean, so I've gone to some. It's I've been to reinvent for a few years spoken to reinvent once, you know? But, you know, those things were fun, but they're so big and there's so much going on, you know, it's it's refreshing to be in this reinforced conference and focus on the security side. Sitting talks were like, You have people getting into kms and like some of these really pivotal tools. Yeah, it's been really, really >> get down and dirty here. Yeah, And people talk to, you know, approachable >> without, like, having to deal with all of Amazon, right? I can focus on, like, this one little >> portion reinvent you kidding? Walked through the hallways just like >> yeah, I mean, Well, where one hotel Are you gonna >> be at that point now, right? Yeah. >> Okay. So I gotta ask you about the dev ops question. We've been commenting yesterday day Volonte, who is on his way in. He and I were talking with a lot of si sos and a lot of practitioners. And the conversation generally was security needs to catch up to Dev ops and to pay who you talk to. They may or may not believe that way. Think that to be true. We think security now has the level up with the speed of Dev ops from his agility things that are highlights. For example, you guys have What's your take on that when someone says, Hey, security's got to catch up the devil Is it really catching a prism or transformation? What's your view on this >> will be like when you say catching up like it takes a negative. You know, I don't want to be negative there on DSO. I feel like it's a transformation. That means the same thing of going from the data center as as just as an operational engineer to Amazon is, there wasn't catching up. It was you just changing everything you do and how you think. And I think you know that's That's the same thing that a lot of security people I've seen struggle with was their success. Life are the ones that have gone, and I understand that, like, >> what do you think is the most important story happening in this world security cloud security screen general that should be covered by media that should be covered by the industry that is covered him should be amplified Maur or isn't covered and should be talking about what's the what is the most important stories that should be told. >> Well, so again, you know, I'm a fundamental layer, so things to me that I are always over shouted or like, you know, just encryption, right? I mean, everybody's like train encryption on. But, you know, I feel that talks I've gone to today or deeper dives into that. I feel like, you know, the kms product of Amazon. I feel like is a very powerful product that isn't super talked about. It's been nice here because they talked about 100 like you go to reinvent you don't really see a lot of kms type things are crowded, just them. And, you know, I think it makes some of those very difficult products to run in a data center very easy. You know what you hear on the security side is unsecured, as three buckets are like. Security groups are in conflict. Configure it incorrectly. And you know, no one knows that commercial. Everyone knows that. You know Elasticsearch not turned into a new s three right compromises You choose your database of choice of public. But for me, I think it's like a part that I feel is missing with Amazon is the ease of use of like, clicking a button. And >> now I have >> full Aurora encryption by default >> and the service you can just turn on what's next for you guys. Give us a peek into some of the things they're working on. What excited about? >> So I mean, we're making Ah, big thing is, you know, so we spend a lot of building now we're kind of going back and really kind of wrapping are a lot of our compliance is so zip it is a hole has been working towards a lot of stock to type compliance, seize on things like that. So, you know, we've been working through governance and no deploying. You know, software that kind of is more actively watching our environment and alerting us or helping us make sure we're staying at C. I s type benchmark so that you know, when my boss comes to me and says, Show me that we're doing this, I can just say, Oh, here's dashboard. So we were really not like via more secure State is a big, big product that we're working with right now. We leverage cloud health and those kind of the two external vendors that we've really partnered with. And so, you know, this year's been adopting those into the system. That's when the eight of us side, you know, we still just run Cooper Nettie. So there's a lot going on in the Cuban aunties ecosystem that we're also working on. So, like, service, mash and things of that sort like, How can I take this idea of security groups in this least trust model infrastructural e up to kubernetes, which by default this kind of flattened open. And so, you know, we've been exploring envoy and sdo linker D or write our own, you know, you know, and looking through those things and and then again wrote, making more robust CCD pipeline. So container scanning vulnerability, protecting our edge way running cloudfront wife for a while. But, you know, a lot of this year's gonna be spent, you know, Evaluate Now you know, we deployed a lost about 10 and got it turned on right because it works. But diving more deeply into like some of the autumn mediations >> have a fun environment right now, is it? You can knock down some core business processes, scale them up, and then you got the toys to play with the open source front. You got kubernetes really a robust ecosystem. They're just It's a lot of fun. >> Yeah, Criminal has definitely been exciting to play with >> advice to fellow practitioners and platform engineers because, you know, you guys been successful with transmission A the best. You got your hands on a lot of cool things. You got a good view, the landscape on security side of the deaf, upside for the people out there who were like they want to jump in with a parachute open. Whatever makes you that nervous, Some people are aggressively going at it hard core. Some have cultural change issues. What's your invite? General advice to your >> fellow appears My advice is just jump in and do it right. I mean, you know, don't be afraid. I mean, we had a really fast transformation, and we failed a lot very fast, and we weren't afraid of it. I mean, you know, if we weren't failing, we weren't doing it right. You know, in my opinion, right. We had to fail a few times a year. I was gonna work. And so I think, you know, don't be scared to jump in and just build, you know, right the automation. See what it does. Run some tests against it. >> You know, it's almost like knowing what not to do is the answer. Get some testing out there, get his hands dirty. >> What's gonna work for you? What's gonna work for your business? And the only way you're going to do that is to actually do it. >> Showed up in specialized Colby. Thanks for coming and sharing the great insight. Kobe Alan, platform engineer for Zip Whip Great company here. The Cube. Bring all the action. Extracting the signal from the noise. Great insights. And here, coming from reinforced here in Boston, eight dresses. First conference around. Cloud security will be right back after this short break

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. You're watching The Cube, and we have a special coverage here of the pre-day at AWS headquarters in London. I'm Dave Vellante and The Cube, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Alastair Allen is here, the chief technical officer of Healthcare Kainos Software. It's a Belfast based company, publicly traded company. Alastair, welcome to The Cube. Great to see you, thanks for coming out. You were downstairs earlier addressing the audience, we're gonna talk about that. But first of all, tell us about Kainos. >> So Kainos, Belfast based company, formed in the late '80's a spin out of Queens University in Belfast. We've grown to now over 1300 people and we build digital technology to help people work faster, smarter and better. There's two things we do. We provide digital services, bespoke services for public and private sector organizations across the world, and we provide digital platforms for work day customers and also for healthcare organizations. >> So, when you say digital platforms. What exactly do you mean by that? Tell our audience. >> So, our digital platforms in healthcare is something that we can talk about. So platforms to enable both hospitals to digitize their workflow and also regions, so CCG's , STP's within the NHS. To bring information together using a platform and normalizing that data and making it available to clinicians and patients. >> And this is, your flagship product is called Evolve. Correct? >> Correct. >> And you're one of the sort of founders or inventors of Evolve. Tell us more about Evolve. >> So Evolve, originated just over ten years ago, our first customer was Ipswich Hospital and Ipswich had a big problem with paper, with a large medical records library and they asked us to come in and help them digitize that and make it available in an easy to view, accessible format for their clinicians. >> So tell me more about that. So you digitize it, you take all this mounds of paper and what does that do? Other than reduce the amounts of paper. Does it make it searchable? >> Yeah, we index the content, we apply metadata whenever we capture it, trying to make it accessible for clinicians. I think when you digitize paper , the one good thing paper had going for it was you could pick it up and it was tactile. So we've done a lot of work to try and make it mobile, make it accessible, make it searchable and increasingly now with some of the services that AWS provide, we're able to look at taking that even further and getting more information out of that content. >> Add some color to that. So how has the AWS cloud affected your ability to deliver these capabilities to your customers? >> Well I think, the breathe and depth of services that AWS provide, enables us to be able to innovate quickly, to use services like I've mentioned like comprehend medical. That take the heavy lifting, away from us and helps us focus on delivering better applications for our customers. >> So part of what you do, is you architected the software that's running on the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about the architecture? What you guys have built. Presumably the cloud allows you to scale. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> And take advantage of more innovations. But discuss the architecture if you would. >> So, the product that I originally talked about in 2009 and about four years ago in 2015, we decided to re-platform for the cloud. And that was in response to a number of problems that we were seeing in the market. And moved to patient centered care, a drive to try and standardize care away from the variable nature that was there and also to get away from closed silos of information. And we decided at that point to create our platform natively in the cloud and using the services of Amazon web services. So we created a microservices based architecture that runs in multi-candidate cloud native way. With a AWS. That allows us to adopt disciplines like continuous delivery and cultures like DeVops. We've been able to release value quickly and often to our customers. >> So it was a total rewrite of the platform? >> Yes. So we started again from scratch and we developed that using the modern cloud services. And we've used that then for all use cases as well so we've moved beyond just settings within a hospital. And been able to take that beyond the walls of a hospital, out into the community, into primary care, mental health. And delivering solutions like that, across regions within the NHS, to join up information. Where before clinicians would simply not have had access to those. >> In a sense you're migrating your existing install base to the cloud based platform, as I presume it's a SAS based platform. Is that right? >> So, Evolve Integrated Care is a platform it's a SAS based platform. So we run it, we monitor it, we maintain it and we deliver that as a service to our customers. >> And so your existing customers now have an opportunity to migrate and how does that all work? >> Yeah, so we're talking to our existing customers, how they can leverage the cloud based platform and the breathe of different services that it provides. We very much see an opportunity for helping to digitize a hospital. So how do you optimize the flow of patients through a hospital and making sure that clinicians have access to the information. Many of customers have hundreds of applications, information spread across their estate, bringing that together and orchestrating the workflow for particular pathways or particular conditions. >> Plus they have to manage their own infrastructure, I presume. >> Absolutely, and we want to build applications quickly, they want to focus on delivering healthcare. They don't want to focus on managing ten and server rooms within their hospitals. So, our move to the cloud really came about because of our customers telling us that they're struggling to manage this infrastructure. They wanted us to take some of that burden away from them and to help them with some of their security challenges, availability challenges. Quite often their local infrastructure was not very resilient. And by moving to AWS, we were able to use native cloud services to address many of those challenges. >> So you're taking away that heavy lifting for them. AWS takes it away for you. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> In a large regard as well. While your engineers can obviously program the infrastructure. But how have you seen the customers that have moved and taken advantage of this. What has it done for their business specifically? What's the impact? >> So, what I think, it frees up people within their organization to scale up in other areas to do other things. It frees up physical space as well in many cases. It takes away risks and we've all heard of some of the recent security incidents. Wanna Cry was a huge thing in the NHS not so long ago. Coming around from just simple things like not patching servers and work stations. So, by taking on that responsibility we're freeing up those hospital systems to focus on what they do best. >> How do they do that? Do they kind of retrain folks? What's that been like? I presume it wasn't frictionless but it's an opportunity for people to advance their careers. Do you have any visibility on how your customers have handled that? >> To be honest, not a huge amount. It has, I agree, there has been some friction there. It's not always an easy journey, there's a whole mindset change of what people used to do before and the types of activity that they'll do tomorrow. And it's something that our customers are still on a journey on. And so we're quite early on in that process. >> But I would say to folks in the IT community of your expertise's of managing storage arase, there's probably a better future for you if you can move up the stack and learn more about applications , data, machine intelligence. >> Absolutely, higher up the value chain and getting closer to the user, closer to the customer. >> I mean, that's where the difference is. And it's particularly in healthcare right? You try to balance the cost of healthcare, everybody's aware of the rising cost of healthcare with the patient outcomes. And technology is a way to address that problem. Isn't it? >> Absolutely, and I think never before. I think it's just a great time to work in health IT. We've now got access to some fantastic services the rise of artificial intelligence, the machine learning has never before been so available. And really having organizations such as ourselves to really solve those problems that our customers have and introduce those efficiencies and ultimately better patient outcomes. >> So how are you using the data that lives in Evolve, I presume you're looking at applying artificial intelligence and the like, talk about that. But also, how do you ensure security, privacy, etcetera? >> So, a couple things on data, I think one of the things we've done recently is the adoption of the FHIR standard within healthcare and all the data that we aggregate from the various clinical systems, we normalize that down into a single FHIR data profile and that really helps us then have a common data model that our application can use. But that's only the start, that creates the potential then to use that for secondary usage, such as publishing health data analytics and ultimately machine learning. And we're looking at a number of errors in machine learning, I think there are some ethical challenges there to be aware of and we've started with a recent examples of understanding how we can use machine learning to try and get that structured data out of the documents, that's something that we're working on with data with the AWS team at the minute, to leverage a lot of that scanned content that we have and evolve and be able to create the structured outcome. Really to make it easier for clinicians to find information within the medical record. >> So the AWS reinvent last fall, you know Sage Maker was of course buzzing. Is that something that you're looking at? >> It's something, so we haven't used it in Evolve so far but within Kainos we have an AI practice and we have a group of guys that are focused on the AI capability. Evaluating those tools, working with AWS and helping us understand how we can use that technology to solve the problems of our customers. >> Yeah, it's early days. So you talk about helping solve the problems of the customers. Summarize for us the key problems that you see machine intelligence, AI solving. >> I think there's probably different categories of how you could use it. There's the diagnostic sort of use case where you could use AI to help process imagery, to help with the diagnostic process. There's being able to add personalization to whether that be to patients or to clinicians, helping to provide insight into whatever the use case may be and all the use cases similar to that. >> Last words, so you're addressing the pre-day healthcare reform that's going on here at AWS. What's that like, what's going on downstairs, what did you tell the audience? >> Yeah, great day. So we had a group of healthcare professionals across the NHS in Ireland, very interesting group. We spoke this morning, I spoke with our customer Gloucester CC chief and we talked about the shared care record solution that we've delivered into Gloucester. So that's bringing information together for over 600,000 patients across the region and providing information in a single joined up view that was not available before. So great feedback, great interaction, lots of questions afterwards so looking forward to going back down and chatting some more to the group. >> Excellent. Hard to do that without the cloud I would imagine , accommodating all of the 600,000 customers right. >> Not possible. >> Alastair thanks so much for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Appreciate having you. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching The Cube from AWS headquarter in London. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019 I'm John Furrier. With Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Jeff Allen, Senior Director Product Marketing, Adobe. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> So day one is kind of winding down, big, great keynote, laid out the platform product's working together, lot of data, lots of data conversations. >> Yeah, exciting day. Excited to have Adobe Analytics in the mix with that, you saw the four clouds we talked about, Analytics Cloud is one of them and really kind of core to everything we do at Adobe, right? In fact, even in the Creative Cloud side, Document Cloud side, our customers have to be able to measure what they're doing and so, data is obviously key to that. >> Tapping the data across the different applications and now clouds - It's interesting - it's a whole new grail, people have been trying to do for how many years? >> Forever, from the beginning. >> And it's always been that holy grail, where is it? Now some visibility is starting to get to see into the benefits of horizontal scale, diverse data, contextual workloads, >> Absolutely, yeah. >> This is a big deal. >> It is a big deal. >> Explain why it's impacting. >> It's funny. Our culture now expects data right? We measure everything. Our kids are taught to measure things, even something as simple as likes on, my kids, they argue about whether the picture mom posted of them or the other one got more likes, right? So we kind of have hardwired our society around measurement, and now of course, marketing has always been a measurement-heavy discipline, and so, it's just absolutely core to what we're doing. >> And we had a historic moment, we've been doing theCUBE, it's our 10th season, a lot of events. >> Congratulations. >> And we had a guest come on here, that we've never had before, the title was Marketing CIO, it was one of your customers at MetLife >> Interesting, yeah. >> But this brings the question of, of the confluence of you know, the factions coming together. IT, creative, marketing, where the tech, measurement, data. >> Yeah, totally. >> Data processing, information systems, kind of an IT concept now being driven and married in with the business side. >> Absolutely. >> This is really the fundamental thing. >> I started my career marketing to CIOs, in fact, I've spent most of my career marketing to the CIO organization, right, and about 7 years ago, I came over to Adobe to market to marketing, right? And I used to say, "You know I kind of like marketing to this guy, I understand him better," right? Because I know how marketers think a lot better than CIOs, I had to go learn how they thought. But it's amazing how the tech explosion has happened in MarTech and AdTech, all of these vendors here at this event, this is just a piece of our industry, right? There's thousands of companies serving marketing organizations, and so, all of a sudden, the tech stack looks more crazy than even what many CIOs manage, and so it doesn't surprise me at all that organizations, you're talking to organizations that have a CIO/CMO hybrid role. >> Jeff, I'm curious how the landscape is changing, because all the talk here is about experiences, right? And the transaction is part of the experience, but it's not the end game, in fact, it's just a marker on a journey that hopefully lasts a long time. How does that change kind of the way that you look at data, the way customers are looking at data, you know, how the KPIs are changing, and what they're measuring, and the value of the different buckets of data as it's no longer about getting to that transaction, boom, ship the product, and we're done. >> Yeah, so I look after Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Analytics was the first component we acquired in this business, right? Experience Cloud, started with the acquisition of a company called Omniture back in 2009, was an analytics company, primarily web and mobile app analytics, and it has grown since then, to measure many more things. And we've seen our category with analytics that we've addressed move from web analytics to a broader view of digital analytics, right? The digital parts of marketing to all of marketing, the rest of marketing said, "Hey, we need measurements too. We need tools." And then it clicked out another broader click to this idea of experience, right? Because everybody has a stake in experience, and experience is all wrapped around people and how people move through experiences with your brand, so that's where we sit today, is really helping organizations measure experiences, and that spans every person in the organization. >> Talk about the dynamic between how the old way of thinking was shifting to this new way, and specifically, the old way was "I'm a database guy. I've got operational databases and analytical databases," you know, and that was it. You know, relational, unstructured, you know, kind of quadrants. Now, it's kind of, you have (laughs) it's not about databases, it's about data. So you have operational data, which is the analytical data now >> Yeah. >> So you have now, this new dynamic, it's not about the databases anymore >> Absolutely. >> It's about the data itself. >> It's not about, I would say, it's not about the stores of data, right? It's about really getting the insights out of the data, and you know, for the longest time, in my career, uh, you went to CIO, the CIO organization and there was a BI team there, and you would ask them for data, and they could go to the main frame, they could go to these big IT systems, and you know, in 30 days, they could email you back a .csv file, or even before that meeting, give you a .zip file or something with the .csv file on it. And then you got to go see if you could even get it to open on your laptop and get it into Excel and start to manipulate it. And those days don't work. >> And then you go get your root canal right after. It's a painful process. >> What if the data - today that data is trying to understand, "Hey I got a guy that just checked into the hotel. He's standing in front of me, I need to know if he had a bad experience the last time he checked in with us, so I know if I need to give him an upgrade. And you can't go down to I.T. real quick and ask them to take 30 days to get that data and then crunch the data all to find out. Customers need to know, and in the experience business, immediately this person just walked into the hotel and we need to give them a good experience, we blew it last time for them. That's what the experience business wants out of data. >> One of the questions we had with Anjul, who runs engineering on the platform side, was around the rise of prominence of streaming data, how is that impacting the analytics piece, because, you know, if you want the flow, this is a key part of probably your side of the business. Can you comment, what's your reaction to that - streaming trend? >> We've been talking about streaming for a while. CIO, this isn't a new thing, we were streaming applications, right, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but really in the story I just shared, right? The idea of going down and waiting in this asynchronous process with data, the experience business can't handle that, so streaming data is really implying that, as it's coming in, we're processing it, and learning from it, and getting that out into the systems and the people that can take action, instantaneously. >> Talk about the dynamic that customers have around, traditional silos within their organization, you know, that guy runs the database and data for that department, that person runs the data over there, and if this vision is to be, is to be, is to come true, you have to address all the data, you got to know what's out there you got to have data about the data, you got to know in real time, and these are important concepts. How does a company get through that struggle, to break down those kind of existing organizational structures? >> It's a cultural shift, I mean, who has a desktop publishing team anymore in their organization, right? Everyone does desktop publishing, that is how data is too. Everyone's got to be comfortable with data, they have to be conversing around data, and everyone needs access to data. So, that's, you know, that's what is happening in our industry, the analytics industry, is that we're democratizing that data, and getting it everybody's hands, but it's not enough to give them charts and graphs, they have to be able to manipulate that and make it apply to their part of the business, so they can make a decision, and go, and so, that shift in how people think about data, as it's not part of your - it's part of everyone's job, as opposed to being a specialized, siloed job. >> I'm just curious to get your take, a lot of conversations here about you know, Adobe, using their own products, eating your own dog food, drinking your own champagne, whatever analogy (laughs) you like to use. And when you see the DDOM, right, the Data-Driven Operating Model, on the screen, in the keynote, with the CEO, and he says, "Basically everyone at this company is running their business off of these dashboards, that's got to be pretty, pretty, uh, profound for a guy like you who is helping feed those things. >> It's cool. I like to talk about what I call the modern measurement team. The modern measurement team is no longer that centralized data team, right, or that centralized BI team, but every single function, right, under CIO. Every one of the CEO's directs, has their own data team. You go look around and you see that in every single function, there is a sophisticated data team. They have the best tools in the industry, they have the smartest people they can find, they have PhDs on staff, and that's not enough. So, these teams now have to get that out to every constituent in their organization. And that's what we're trying to do at Adobe, that's what we're seeing our best customers do as well, is trying to inform every decision anybody makes. >> And that's where machine learning really shines. You get high quality data on the front end, with the semantic data pipeline capability, get that into the machine learning, help advance, automate, that seems to be the trend. >> Yeah. Yeah, look the insights that you can get from the data, the ability to predict with rich data, it sounds - prediction sounds like - invention used to sound like this novel thing, right, and then you realize, we're inventing things all the time, that's not so - that's just creativity. Well, the same thing is happening with AI and ML, is we're able to predict things with good statistical modeling, with pretty strong, uh, reliability around those models. >> The keynote had great content, I liked how you guys did a lot things really well, you had the architectural slides, platform was a home run, how you guys evolved as a business, see you laid that out nicely, but one of the things I liked, not that obvious, unless you go to a lot of events like we do, everyone says "The journey of the customer", I mean, it's a, it's become a cliche, you guys actually mapped specific things to the journey piece that fit directly into the Adobe set of products and technologies, and the platform. It's interesting, so the word journey has become, actually something you can look at, see some product, see some - a pathway to get some value. >> There's definitely a risk if the word journey, becomes like "Big Data" and all these cliche terms, you know, that means everything, so it comes to mean nothing. But for us, journey, and as marketers especially, journey is just naturally understanding where did I interact with this person, and what did that lead to along the way, right? And so, customer journey, is absolutely core to data analytics. >> All the hype markets, cloud washing, until Amazon shows them how it's done, everyone else kind of follows, you guys are doing it here with journey, one of the things that came out was a journey IQ. I didn't really catch that. Can you take a minute to explain? >> So we have a couple of things. We have something called Segment IQ, Attribution IQ, and now we have even introduced Journey IQ. And when you see that IQ moniker on one of our, kind of our super umbrella features - that means that we're applying AI and ML, right, and Sensei is involved. So we're using powerful data techniques, and we're also wrapping it with a really simple user experience. So Journey IQ starts to break down the customer journey in terms that a normal person, without a PhD, without knowing statistical methods, or advanced mathematics, can leverage those techniques to get really powerful insights. And that's specifically around the customer journey. >> So the IQ is a marker that you guys use to indicate some extra intelligence coming out of the Adobe, from the platform. >> Yeah, yeah, if we're going to democratize data, right, we have to democratize data science as well, right? And so, a big part of what we're doing at Adobe Analytics is really simplifying the user experience, right? So I don't say, Do you want to run a regression model against this to answer your question? We just say Click this button to analyze. Right? So it's a simple user experience, behind the scenes, we can run these powerful models for the customer, and give them back valuable insights. So, Journey IQ is specifically taking things like cohorts, and introducing cohort analysis into the experience, making it simple to do powerful things with cohorts. >> What's the pitch to a customer when you go to one and talk about all this complicated tech and kind of new, operationalized business models around the way you guys are rolling it out, when they just want to ask you, "Hey Jeff, I care about customer experiences." So, bottom line me. What's the pitch? >> How can you possibly address your customer's needs if you don't know what they think. Right? What they need? So, at the end of the day, the great thing about working with customers, like most businesses do, is customers are happy to tell you where you're getting it right, and where you're getting it wrong, right? And that's all over the data. So all you have to do is develop a culture of using data to make decisions, and 9 times out of 10, if you have the right data, and people are using the data to make decisions, they are going to make the right calls and get it right for your customer. And when they don't, they're using opinions and they're going to get it wrong all the time. >> Or, bad data, could be hearsay. >> Or you course correct, or that wasn't - you know, make an adjustment. Right? Again, based on the data. >> Exactly, yeah. >> You're in product marketing, which is a unique position, because you have to look back into the engineering organization, and look out to the customers, so you're, you're in a unique position. What's the customer trend look like right now? What are some of the things you're hearing from the market basket of customers that you talk to? Generally, their orientation towards data? Where are they on the progress bar? What is the state of the market on the landscape of the customer, what patterns are you seeing? >> Good question. So there's a lot of - there's a lot of, um, anxiety around where do I have pockets of data that I'm not able to leverage, and how do I bring that together, so when we tell a platform story, like you heard us tell today, customers are really excited about that, because they know, they've known forever. I mean, this isn't a new problem, like, data silos have been around as long as data has. So, the idea of being able to bring this data into a central place, and do powerful things with it, that's a big point of stress for our customers. And they know, like, "Hey, I have dark spots in my customer experience, that I lose the customer." For example, if I'm heavily oriented around digital, let's say, um, I'm a retailer, and I see a customer, I acquire them through advertising channels, they come through an experience on my website, and they buy the product. Success. I ship the product to them, and then they return it in the retail store. The digital team might not see that return. >> So they might think it was successful. >> They think it was successful. So what do they do? They go take more money and spend it in the ad channel, where that person originated. When in reality, if they could look at the data over time, and incorporate this other channel data, of in-store returns, the picture might look very different. >> So basically, basically. >> It's those dark spots that customers are really needing. >> So getting access to more diverse data, gives you better visibility into what's happening contextually, to open up those blind spots. >> Exactly. Yup. It's just that, adding resolution to a photo. >> Love this conversation, obviously we're data-driven as well on theCUBE, we're sharing the data out there. This interview is data as well. >> Fantastic. >> Jeff, final question for you - for the folks that couldn't make it here, what's the - how would you summarize the show this year, what's the vibe, what's the top story here, what's the big story that needs to be told from Adobe Summit? >> We're just a day in, there a lot, there's a lot to do still, right? We still have two more solid days of this show. But you know, the big themes are going to be around data, they are going to be optimizing the experience for your customers, and what's really amazing is how many customers are here, telling their stories. That's the thing, I wish everybody in your audience could experience by coming here, because there is 300 breakout sessions that feature our customers talking. All of our sessions on main stage, we bring customers out, and we learn from them. That's the best part of my job, is seeing how customers do that. >> Some of the best marketing, you let the customers do the talking, and they're doing innovative things. They're not just your standard, typical, testimonials, they're actually doing - I mean, Best Buy, what a great example that was. >> Cool brand - we work with some of the coolest brands in the world, so, fascinating, brilliant people. >> Marketing, at scale, with data. Good job, Jeff, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Jeff Allen, here inside theCUBE with Adobe. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Stay with us for more Day 1 coverage after this short break. Stay with us.