>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Miami. Lisa Martin here live with the Cube at IFS Unleashed 2022. We're so excited to be here. We just had a great conversation with Ifss, CEO of Darren Rouse. Now we've got another exciting conversation. F1 is here. You know how much I love f1. Christian Peterson joins us as well, the Chief Product Officer at ifs, and Sean Edwards IT business partner at Aston Martin. F1. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having >>Us. Thank you >>Very much. We were talking about F one. We probably could have an entire conversation just on that, but Christian, I wanna talk with you. It's been three years since the Cube has covered ifs obviously for obvious reasons during that time. So much momentum has happened. IFS cloud was launched about 18 months ago. Give our audience an o, a flavor of IFS, cloud and some of the milestones that you've hit in such a short time period. >>Yeah, I mean IFS cloud is really transformational in many ways. It's transformational for first and foremost for our customers in what enables them to do, but also transformational for us from a technology perspective, how we work and how we do everything. And at the end of the day, it has really surfaced, served around the the, the fact of what we need to do for our customers. And what we saw our customers often do back then, or any company, was they were out looking for EAP solutions or FSM Solutions or EAM Solutions or what have you. And then they were trying to stitch it all together and we, we said like, Hang on a second, these these traditional software s, those are some that I'm guilty. You know, there's some that we actually invented over the years together with analysts. So we invented EER P and we invented CRM and EAM and all these different things. >>But at the end of the day, customers really want a solution to what they are, they are what they're dealing with. And so in these conversations it became very clear that and very repeated conclusions from the conversations that customers wanted something that could manage and help them optimize the use of their assets. Regardless of what industry you're in, assets is such a key component. Either you are using your assets or you're producing assets. Second thing is really get the best use of of your people, your teams and your crew. How do you get the right people on the right job at the same time? How do you assemble the right crew with the right set of skills in the crew? Get them to the right people at the same time. So, and then the final thing is of course customers, you know all the things that you need to do to get customers to answer these ultimate questions, Will you buy from this company again? And they should say yes. That's the ultimate results of moments of service. So that's how we bring it all together and that's what we have been fast at work at. That's what IFS cloud is all about. >>And you, you talked about IFS cloud, being able to to help customers, orchestrate assets, people, customers, Aston Martin being one of those customers. Shawn, you came from ifs so you have kind of the backstory but just give the audience a little bit of, of flavor of your role at Aston Martin and then let's dig into the smart factory. >>Sure. So I previously worked at IFS as a manufacturing consultant. So my bread and butter is production planning in the ERP sector. So we, I Aston Martin didn't have an ERP system pre IFS or a legacy system that wasn't working for them and the team couldn't rely upon it. So what we did was bring IFS in. I was the consultant there and as IFS always preached customer first, well customer first did come and I jumped to support the team. So we've implemented a fully RP solution to manage the production control and the material traceability all the way through from design until delivery to track. And we've mo most recently implemented a warehouse solution at Trackside as well. So we are now tracking our parts going out with the garage. So that's a really exciting time for RFS. In terms of the smart factory, it's not built yet. >>We're we're supposed to move next year. So that's really exciting cause we're quadrupling our footprint. So going from quite a small factory spread out across the North Hampton Share countryside, we're going into one place quadruple in our footprint. And what we're gonna start looking at is using the technology we're implementing there. So enabling 5G to springboard our IFFs implementations going forward with the likes of Internet of things to connect our 15 brand new CMC machines, but also things like R F I D. So that comes with its own challenges on a Formula One car, but it's all about speed of data capture, single point of truth. And IFFs provides that >>And well, Formula One, the first word that comes to mind is speed. >>Absolutely. Second >>Word is crazy. >>We, we are very unique in terms of most customers Christian deals with, they're about speed but also about profit and efficiency. That doesn't matter to us. It is all about time. Time is our currency and if we go quicker in designing and manufacturing, which ifs supports ultimately the cargo quicker. So speed is everything. >>And and if we, if we think of of people, customers and assets at Asset Martin F one, I can't, I can't imagine the quantity of assets that you're building every race weekend and refactoring. >>Absolutely. So a Formula one car that drives out of the garage is made up of 13,000 car parts, most of which, 50% of which we've made in house. So we have to track that all the way through from the smallest metallic component all the way up to the most complex assembly. So orchestrating that and having a single point of truth for people to look at and track is what IFFs has provided us. >>Christian, elaborate on that a little bit in terms of, I mean, what you're facilitating, F1 is such a great example of of speed we talked about, but the fact that you're setting up the car every, every other weekend maybe sometimes back to back weeks, so many massive changes going on. You mentioned 50% of those 13,000 parts you manufacture. Absolutely. Talk about IFS as being a catalyst for that. >>I mean the, it's, it's fascinating with Formula One, but because as a technology geek like me, it's really just any other business on steroids. I mean we talk, we talk about this absolutely high tech, super high tech manufacturing, but even, even before that, the design that goes in with CFDs and how you optimize for different things and loose simulation software for these things goes into manufacturing, goes into wind tunnels and then goes on track. But guess what, when it's on track, it's an asset. It's an asset that streams from how many sensors are on the car, >>I think it's over 10,000 >>Sensors, over 10,000 sensors that streams maybe at 50 hertz or 50 readings. So every lap you just get this mountain of data, which is really iot. So I always say like F one if one did IOT before anybody invented the term. >>Absolutely. >>Yep. You know, F1 did machine learning and AI before anybody thought about it in terms of pattern recognition and things like that with the data. So that's why it's fascinating to work with an organization like that. It's the, it's the sophistication around the technologies and then the pace what they do. It's not that what they do is actually so different. >>It is, it absolutely isn't. We just have to do it really quickly. Really >>Quickly. Right. And the same thing when you talk about parts. I mean I was fascinated of a conversation with, with one of your designers that says that, you know, sometimes we are, we are designing a part and this, the car is now ready for production but the previous version of that part has not even been deployed on the car yet. So that's how quick the innovation comes through and it's, it's, it's fascinating and that's why we like the challenge that Esther Martin gives us because if we can, if we can address that, there's a lot of businesses we can make happy with that as far, >>So Sha I talk a little bit about this is, so we're coming up, there's what four races left in the 2022 season, but this is your busy time because that new car, the 23 car needs to be debuted in what February? So just a few months time? >>Absolutely. So it's a bit cancer intuitive. So our busiest time is now we're ramping up into it. So we co, we go into something called car build which is from December to December to February, which is our end point and there's no move in that point. The car has gotta go around that track in February. So we have got to make those 13,000 components. We've gotta design 'em, we've gotta make 'em and then we've gotta get 'em to the car in February for our moment of service. They said it on stage. Our moment of service as a manufacturing company is that car going around the track and we have to do it 24 times next year and we've gotta start. Well otherwise we're not gonna keep up. >>I'm just gonna ask you what a, what a moment, what's a moment of service in f1 and you're saying basically getting that >>Functional car >>On the track quickly, as quickly as possible and being able to have the technology underpinning that's really abstracting the complexity. >>Absolutely. So I would say our customer ultimately is the driver and the fans they, they need to have a fast car so they can sport it and they ultimately drive it around the track and go get first place and be competitive. So that is our moment of service to our drivers is to deliver that car 24 times next year. >>I imagine they might be a little demanding >>They are and I think it's gonna be exciting with Alonzo coming in, could the driver if we've gotta manage that change and he'll have new things that he wants to try out on a car. So adds another level of complexity to that. >>Well how influential are the drivers in terms some of the, the manufacturing? Like did they, are they give me kind of a a sense of how Alon Fernando Alanzo your team and ifs maybe collaborate, maybe not directly but >>So Alonzo will come in and suggest that he wants cars to work a certain way so he will feed back to the team in terms of we need this car, we need this car part to do this and this car part to do that. So then we're in a cycle when he first gets into the car in that February, we've then gotta turnaround car parts based off his suggestions. So we need to do that again really quickly and that's where IFS feeds in. So we have to have the release and then the manufacturer of the component completely integrated and that's what we achieve with IFFs and >>It needs to be really seamless. >>Absolutely. If, if we don't get it right, that car doesn't go out track so there's no moving deadline. >>Right. That's the probably one of the industries where deadlines do not move. Absolutely. We're so used to things happening in tech where things shift and change and reorgs, but this is one where the dates are set in their firm. >>Absolutely. And we have to do anything we can do to get that car on the track. So yeah, it's just a move. >>Christian, talk about the partnership a little bit from your standpoint in terms of how influential has Aston Martin F1 been in IFS cloud and its first 18 months. I was looking at some stats that you've already gotten 400,000 plus users in just a short time period. How influential are your customers in the direction and even the the next launch 22 R too? >>I mean our customers do everything plain and simple. That's that's what it is. And we have, we have a partnership, I think about every single customer as a partner of ours and we are partnering in taking technology to the next level in terms of, of the outputs and the benefits it can create for our customers. That's what it's all, all about. And I, I always think about these, these three elements I think I mentioned in our state as well. I think the partnership we have is a partnership around innovation. Innovation doesn't not only come from IFS or the technology partner, it comes from discussions, requirements, opportunities, what if like all these things. So innovation comes from everywhere. There's technology driven innovation, there's customer driven innovation, but that's part of the partnership. The second part of the partnership is inspiration. So with innovation you inspire. So when you innovate on something new that inspires new innovation and new thinking and that's again the second part of the partnership. And then the third part is really iterate and execute, right? Because it's great that we can now innovate and we can agree on what we need to do, but now we need to put it into products, put it in technology and put it into actual use. That's when the benefits comes and that's when we can start bringing the bell. >>And I think it's really intrinsically linked. I mean if you look at progress with Formula One teams and their innovation, it's all underpinned by our technology partners and that's why it's so important. The likes of Christian pushes the product and improves it and innovates it because then we can realize the benefits and ultimately save time and go faster. So it's really important that our, our partners and certainly inform one, push the boundaries and find that technology. >>And I think one of the things that we also find very, very important is that we actually understand our customers and can talk the language. So I think that was one of the key things in our engagement, Martin from the beginning is that we had a set of people that really understand Formula One felt it on their bodies and can have the conversation. So when the Formula One teams they say something, then we actually understand what we're talking about. So for instance, when we talk about, you know, track side inventory, well it's not that different from what a field service technician have in his van when he goes service. The only difference is when you see something happening on track, you'll see the parts manager go out to the pit lane with a tablet and say like, oh we need this, we need that, we need this and we need that. And then we'll go back and pick it and put it on the car and the car is service and maintain and off go. Absolutely. >>Yeah that speed always impresses me. >>It's unbelievable. >>Shannon, last question for you. From a smart factory perspective, you said you're moving in next year. What are some of the things that you are excited about that you think are really gonna be transformative but IFS is doing? >>So I think what I'm really excited about once we get in is using the technology they've already put in terms of 5G networks to sort of springboard that into a further IFS implementation. Maybe IFFs cloud in terms of we always struggle to keep the system up to date with, with what's physically happening so that the less data entry and the more automatic sort of data capture, the better it is for the formula on team cuz we improve our our single point of truth. So I'm really excited to look at the internet of things and sort of integrate our CNC machines to sort of feed that information back into ifs. But also the RFID technology I think is gonna be a game changer when we go into the new factory. So really >>Excited. Excellent. Well well done this year. We look forward to seeing Alonso join the team in 23. Fingers >>Crossed. >>Okay. Fingers crossed. Christian, Jeanette, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and how ifs asked Martin are working together, how you really synergistically working together. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much for having us. Our >>Thanks for having us. And go Aston >>Woo go Aston, you already here first Lisa Martin, no relation to Aston Martin, but well, I wanna thank Christian Peterson and Shannon Edwards for joining me, talking about IFS and Aston Martin team and what they're doing at Speed and Scale. Stick around my next guest joins me in a minute. >>Thank you.

>>Hey, welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of eaters reinvent 2021. So our third day wall-to-wall coverage. I'm my coach, Dave Alonzo. He we're getting all the action two sets in person. It's also a virtual hybrid events with a lot of great content online, bringing you all the fresh voices, all the knowledge, all the news and all the action and got great guests here today. As your renderer, managing director of AWS is Europe, middle east, and Africa also known as EMIA. Welcome to the cube. Welcome, >>Welcome. Thanks for coming on. Lovely to be here. >>So Europe is really hot. Middle east Africa. Great growth. The VC culture in Europe specifically has been booming this year. A lot of great action. We've done many cube gigs out there talking to folks, uh, entrepreneurship, cloud, native growth, and then for us it's global. It's awesome. So first question got to ask you is, is you're new to AWS? What brought you here? >>Yeah, no, John, thank you so much. I've been here about three and a half months now, actually. Um, so what brought me here? Um, I have been in and around the tech world since I was a baby. Um, my father was an entrepreneur. I sold fax machines and microfilm equipment in my early days. And then my career has spanned technology in some form or the other. I was at EMC when we bought VMware. Uh, I was a Colt when we did a FinTech startup joined Schneider in my background, which is industrial tech. So I guess I'm a bit of a tech nerd, although I'm not an engineer, that's for sure. The other thing is I've spent a huge part of my career advising clients. And so while I was at McKinsey on business transformation and cloud keeps coming up, especially post pandemic, huge, huge, huge enabler, right of transformation. So when I got the call from AWS, I thought here's my opportunity to finally take what companies are wrestling with, bring together a pioneer in cloud with our enterprise and start-up and SMB clients connect those dots between business and technology and make things happen. So it real magic. So that's what brought me here. And I guess the only other thing to say is I'd heard a lot of other culture, customer mash, obsession, and leadership principles. >>That's why I'm here. It's been a great success. I got to ask you too, now that your new ostium McKinsey, even seeing the front lines, all the transformation, the pandemic has really forced everybody globally to move faster. Uh, things like connect were popular in EMEA. How, how is that going out? There's at the same kind of global pressure on the digital transformation with cloud? What are you seeing out there? >>I've been traveling since I joined, uh, around 10 of the countries already. So Ben planes, trains, automobiles, and what you definitely see is massive acceleration. And I think it's around reinvention of the business. So people are adopting cloud because it's obviously there's cost reasons. There's MNA reasons. There's really increasingly more about innovating. How do I innovate my business? How do I reinvent my business? So you see that constantly. Um, and whether you're a enterprise company or you're a startup, they're all adopting cloud in different, different ways. Um, I mean, I want to tell a core to stack because it's really interesting. And Adam mentioned this in his keynote five to 15% only of workloads have moved to the cloud. So there's a tremendous runway ahead of us. Um, and the three big things on people's minds helped me become a tech company. So it doesn't matter who you are, you're retail, whether you're life sciences or healthcare. You've probably heard about the Roche, uh, work that we're doing with Roche around accelerating R and D with data, or if you're a shoes Addie desk, how do you accelerate again, your personalized experiences? So it doesn't matter who you have helped me become a tech company, give me skills, digital skills, and then help me become a more sustainable company. Those are the three big things I'm thinking of. >>So a couple of things to unpack there. So think about it. Transformation. We still have a long way to go to your point, whatever 10, 15%, depending on which numbers you look at. We've been talking a lot in the cube about the next decade around business transformation, deeper business integration, and the four smarts to digital. And the woke us up to that, accelerated that as you say, so as you travel around to customers in AMEA, what are you hearing with regard to that? I mean, many customers maybe didn't have time to plan. Now they can sit back and take what they've learned. What are you hearing? >>Yeah. And it's, it's a little bit different in different places, right? So, I mean, if you start, if you look at, uh, you know, our businesses, for example, in France, if you look at our businesses in Iberia or Italy, a lot of them are now starting they're on the, at least on the enterprise front, they are now starting to adopt cloud. So they stepping back and thinking about their overall strategy, right? And then the way that they're doing it is actually they're using data as the first trigger point. And I think that makes it easier to migrate because if you, if you look at large enterprises and if you think of the big processes that they've got and all the mainframes and everything that they need to do, if you S if you look at it as one big block, it's too difficult. But when you think about data, you can actually start to aggregate all of your data into one area and then start to analyze and unpack that. >>So I think what I'm seeing for sure is in those countries, data is the first trigger. If you go out to Israel, well that you've got all, it's really start up nation as you know, right. And then we've got more of the digital natives and they want to, you know, absorb all of the innovation that we're throwing at them. And you've heard a lot here at reinvent on some of the things, whether it's digital twins or robotics, or frankly, even using 5g private network, we've just announcement. They are adopting innovation and really taking that in. So it really does differ, but I think the one big message I would leave you with is bringing industry solutions to business is critical. So rather than just talking it and technology, we've got to be able to bring some of what we've done. So for example, the Goldman Sachs financial cloud, bring that to the rest of financial services companies and the media, or if you take the work we're doing on industrials and IOT. So it's really about connecting what industry use cases with. >>What's interesting about the Goldman Dave and I were commenting. I think we coined the term, the story we wrote on Thursday last week, and then PIP was Sunday superclouds because you look at the rise of snowflake and Databricks and Goldman Sachs. You're going to start to see people building on AWS and building these super clouds because they are taking unique platform features of AWS and then sacrificing it for their needs, and then offering that as a service. So there's kind of a whole nother tier developing in the natural evolution of clouds. So the partners are on fire right now because the creativity, the market opportunities are there to be captured. So you're seeing this opportunity recognition, opportunity, capture vibe going on. And it's interesting. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that, because certainly the VCs are here in force. I did when I saw all the top Silicon valley VCs here, um, and some European VCs are all here. They're all seeing this. >>So pick up on two things you mentioned that I think absolutely spot on. We're absolutely seeing with our partners, this integration on our platform is so important. So we talk about the power of three, which is you bring a JSI partner, you bring an ISV partner, you bring AWS, you create that power of three and you take it to our customers. And it doesn't matter which industry we are. Our partner ecosystem is so rich. The Adam mentioned, we have a hundred thousand partners around the world, and then you integrate that with marketplace. Um, and the AWS marketplace just opens the world. We have about 325,000 active customers on marketplace. So sassiphy cation integration with our platform, bringing in the GSI and the NSIs. I think that's the real power to, to, to coming back to your point on transformation on the second one, the unicorns, you know, it's interesting. >>So UK France, um, Israel, Mia, I spent a lot of time, uh, recently in Dubai and you can see it happening there. Uh, Africa, Nigeria, South Africa, I mean all across those countries, you're saying huge amount of VC funding going in towards developers, towards startups to at scale-ups more and more of a, um, our startup clients, by the way, uh, are actually going IPO. You know, initially it used to be a lot of M and a and strategic acquisitions, but they have actually bigger aspirations and they're going IPO and we've seen them through from when they were seed or pre-seed all the way to now that they are unicorns. Right? So that there's just a tremendous amount happening in EMEA. Um, and we're fueling that, you know, you know, I mean, born in the cloud is easy, right? In terms of what AWS brings to the table. >>Well, I've been sacred for years. I always talked to Andy Jassy about this. Cause he's a big sports nut. When you bring like these stadiums to certain cities that rejuvenates and Amazon regions are bringing local rejuvenation around the digital economies. And what you see with the startup culture is the ecosystems around it. And Silicon valley thrives because you have all the service providers, you have all the fear of failure goes away. There's support systems. You start to see now with AWS as ecosystem, that same ecosystem support the robustness of it. So, you know, it's classic, rising tide floats all boats kind of vibe. So, I mean, we don't really have our narrative get down on this, but we're seeing this ecosystem kind of play going on. Yeah. >>And actually it's a real virtuous circle, or we call flywheel right within AWS because a startup wants to connect to an enterprise. An enterprise wants to connect to a startup, right? A lot of our ISV partners, by the way, were startups. Now they've graduated and they're like very large. So what we are, I see our role. And by the way, this is one of the other reasons I came here is I see our role to be able to be real facilitators of these ecosystems. Right. And, you know, we've got something that we kicked off in EMEA, which I'm really proud of called our EMEA startup loft accelerator. And we launched that a web summit. And the idea is to bring startups into our space virtually and physically and help them build and help them make those connections. So I think really, I really do think, and I enterprise clients are asking us all the time, right? Who do I need to involve if I'm thinking IOT, who do I need to involve if I want to do something with data. And that's what we do. Super connectors, >>John, you mentioned the, the Goldman deal. And I think it was Adam in his keynote was talking about our customers are asking us to teach them how to essentially build a Supercloud. I mean, our words. But so with your McKinsey background, I would imagine there's real opportunities there, especially as you, I hear you talk about IMIA going around to see customers. There must be a lot of, sort of non-digital businesses that are now transforming to digital. A lot of capital needs there, but maybe you could talk about sort of how you see that playing out over the next several years in your role and AWS's role in affecting that transfer. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you're right actually. And I, you know, maybe I will, from my past experience pick up on something, you know, I was in the world of industry, uh, with Schneider as an example. And, you know, we did business through the channel. Um, and a lot of our channel was not digitized. You know, you had point of sale, electrical distributors, wholesalers, et cetera. I think all of those businesses during the pandemic realized that they had to go digital and online. Right. And so they started from having one fax machine in a store. Real literally I'm not kidding nothing else to actually having to go online and be able to do click and collect and various other things. And we were able with AWS, you can spin up in minutes, right. That sort of service, right. I love the fact that you have a credit card you can get onto our cloud. >>Right. That's the whole thing. And it's about instances. John Adam talked about instances, which I think is great. How do businesses transform? And again, I think it's about unpacking the problem, right? So what we do a lot is we sit down with our customers and we actually map a migration journey with them, right? We look across their core infrastructure. We look at their SAP systems. For example, we look at what's happening in the various businesses, their e-commerce systems, that customer life cycle value management systems. I think you've got to go business by business by business use case by use case, by use case, and then help our technology enable that use case to actually digitize. And whether it's front office or back office. I think the advantages are pretty clear. It's more, I think the difficulty is not technology anymore. The difficulty is mindset, leadership, commitment, the operating model, the organizational model and skills. And so what we have to do is AWS is bringing not only our technology, but our culture of innovation and our digital innovation teams to help our clients on that journey >>Technology. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time coming on the cube. We have a couple more minutes. I do want to get into what's your agenda. Now that you're got you're in charge, got the landscape and the 20 mile stare in front of you. Cloud's booming. You got some personal passion projects. Tell us what your plans are. >>So, um, three or four things, right? Three or four, really big takeaways for me is one. I, I came here to help make sure our customers could leverage the power of the cloud. So I will not feel like my job's been done if I haven't been able to do that. So, you know, that five to 15% we talked about, we've got to go 50, 60, 70%. That that's, that's the goal, right? And why not a hundred percent at some point, right? So I think over the next few years, that's the acceleration we need to help bring in AMEA Americas already started to get there as you know, much more, and we need to drive that into me. And then eventually our APJ colleagues are going to do the same. So that's one thing. The other is we talked about partners. I really want to accelerate and expand our partner ecosystem. >>Um, we have actually a huge growth by the way, in the number of partners signing up the number of certifications they're taking, I really, really want to double down on our partners and actually do what they ask us for, which is join. Co-sell joined marketing globalization. So that's two, I think the third big thing is when you mentioned industry industry industry, we've got to bring real use cases and solutions to our customers and not only talk technology got to connect those two dots. And we have lots of examples to bring by the way. Um, and then for hire and develop the best, you know, we've got a new LP as you know, to strive to be at its best employer. I want to do that in a Mia. I want to make sure we can actually do that. We attract, we retain and we grow and we develop that. >>And the diversity has been a huge theme of this event. It's front and center in virtually every company. >>I am. I'm usually passionate about diversity. I'm proud actually that when I was back at Schneider, I launched something called the power women network. We're a network of a hundred senior women and we meet every month. I've also got a podcast out there. So if anyone's listening, it's called power. Women's speak. It is, I've done 16 over the pandemic with CEOs of women podcast, our women speak >>Or women speak oh, >>And Spotify and >>Everything else. >>And, um, you know, what I love about what we're doing is AWS on diversity and you heard Adam onstage, uh, talk to this. We've got our restock program where we really help under employed and unemployed to get a 12 week intensive course and get trained up on thought skills. And the other thing is, get it helping young girls, 12 to 15, get into stem. So lots of different things on the whole, but we need to do a lot more of course, on diversity. And I look forward to helping our clients through that as well. >>Well, we had, we had the training VP on yesterday. It's all free trainings free. >>We've got such a digital skills issue that I love that we've said 29 million people around the world, free cloud training. >>Literally the th the, the gap there between earnings with cloud certification, you can be making six figures like with cloud training. So, I mean, it's really easy. It's free. It's like, it's such a great thing. >>Have you seen the YouTube video on Charlotte Wilkins? Donald's fast food. She changed her mind. She wanted to take Korea. She now has a tech career as a result of being part of restock. Awesome. >>Oh, really appreciate. You got a lot of energy and love, love the podcast. I'm subscribing. I'm going to listen. We love doing the podcast as well. So thanks for coming on the >>Queue. Thank you so much for having me >>Good luck on anemia and your plans. Thank you. Okay. Cube. You're watching the cube, the leader in global tech coverage. We go to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier with Dave, a lot to here at re-invent physical event in person hybrid event as well. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to eigth automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Damum meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God mighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Domuo meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God almighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to this special Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier in the Cube's Palo Alto Studios. My next guest is Dr. Tom Bradicich, he's a friend of the Cube, works at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, heads up the IOT. He's general manager and vice president of servers, converged edge, IOT systems. But we're here to talk about, not so much HPE but really that work that Tom's done in a topic called First Mover, a book that he's writing. It hasn't come out yet, so we'll get an early preview of what it's like to create a category innovation and how to use process to your advantage, not make it your enemy. (chuckles) How to use creativity and how to motivate people and how to sell it through organizations, whether it's venture capitalists or managers. Tom, you've got great experience, thanks for spending time to come into the studio. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me and I'm happy to have this discussion. >> If you go back to the Cube videos, folks watching that know you, seen all the videos at HPE Discover or HP Discover, back in the day, you had a great career. You were an engineer, built the first notebook computer with IBM, you've done a lot of groundbreaking things and I like the topic of your book, First Mover, 'cause it speaks to your mindset. Entrepreneurial, innovative, breaking through walls, you probably got a lot of scar tissue. So, I want to talk about that. Because this is what the opportunity many entrepreneurs have as you know, in the Cube, we really believe that a renaissance in software development is coming. It's so obvious, open source is growing at a extraordinary pace, reuse of code. >> Right. >> You got IOT. >> You're involved in, you got crypto currency, block chain, all these new waves are coming all at once. >> Yes. >> I wish I was 22 again. >> Because this is a great opportunity to innovate. But this improving things, what are some of those things? Let's jump in, what do you see as the playbook? What have you learned and what can you share? >> Well, sure, I've been blessed, I've had a career where I've been able to do a lot of innovation but also, I like to separate the notion of innovation from differentiation. Now see, it's possible to be innovated and not different. Like it's possible for you and I to have the same new suit. It's new, it's innovative, but it's not different. And differentiation is really where one can have a first mover advantage because differentiation by definition is new, is innovation. But it's not always the other way around. So, I always tell my teams and I always focus on, how can we be two things, both different and better. It's possible also to be different and not as good. You can have the highest failure rate in the industry, you're different but that's not good. >> Right? >> Yeah. >> So, the concept here is how do you be different, not just new and innovative but how to be different and how do you be good. And I've actually faced three risks in mostly the big corporate culture that we've had to innovation. And the first risk is, of course, the obvious one, will customers buy it, that's called market risk. Is it something that's good enough to be purchased at a profit? The second risk is, can it be manufactured at quality and at a rate of consumption. The third risk is your own company, does the company have what it takes, actually, to take on the risk of a brand new product category, not just a new product. But a new category of products that, by definition, have never been done before. And when one can do that, when one can figure that out, and I've had some significant experience with this, you can catapult your careers, you can catapult your company and your customers to new levels because you enjoy the benefits of the first mover. That's the name of the book, The First Mover. >> Well, I'm looking forward to seeing it. But I want to ask, this is super important because a lot of people are really good at something and they run hard, they break through a wall but might have missed something. So, you kind of bring up this holistic picture. What are some of the things that folks should focus in on? Say I have a breakthrough idea, I have a prototype I've been running, it's in market, I think it's the best thing since sliced bread, I'm pushing it hard, people are just going to lap this up, this is going to be great, I know it's innovative but no one else knows it. >> Right, right, yeah. >> What do I do? >> What's the process, what do you recommend? >> Well, what I like to do is portion the benefits into two categories. There's supply side benefits that's to your company. Why is this good for your company to do this? And then there are demand side benefits. Meaning, why is it good for the customer? Most people tend to focus mostly on the demand side. Oh, it's solves this problem and the customers will love it and that's important and I would call that a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The other condition is why is this good for your company? And many times, when it's a brand new product category, those inside a company aren't quite in tune with why it's good for the customer. Because, again, it's a new thing, it's a new product category. Why is an automobile better than a horse and buggy, right? Why is a laptop computer better than a desktop computer? These are the ideas where it may be intuitive, it may be instructive to talk about that but when you can get a business model first and start with that, well, the reason is, we can enjoy this margin. The reason is, we can enjoy this particular first mover advantage, the halo effect, the reputation of being the leader. The reason is because we can penetrate a new market. The reason is we can now overcome a falling revenue in a shrinking tam. Now we can accelerate in another tam, perhaps, as well. So, by coming up with both the demand side and the supply side, you have a better case to go forward for support and funding inside a big corporation. >> There's always product market fit, I hear the buzzwords, I got to get the cashflow positive, break even. There's always a motivating force to get something done. How should someone organize the order of their operations to get something done, to the market, if it's an innovative, groundbreaking, differentiating? Because a lot of the big challenge is, some people call it landing span, I heard that buzzword too but you get a champion inside a company and that champion embraces it and most people think, oh man, I got a customer. But then that person has to sell it through and then it has to be operationalized, meaning, people got to get used to it. These are really challenges. >> They are, yes. >> What is your view of how an entrepreneur or a business executive or practitioner to get through that? >> Well, you have to get people on your side and it's really important. Somebody's got to believe in, either, you not even understanding what you're proposing but they'd say, well, you have a track record. For some reason, I believe what you're saying. And then, secondly, getting customers. So, I have personally never done anything major without a customer that I call an inspiration customer. That's a name I just made up. So, a customer, by definition, is an end user that will buy something from you, that's the definition of a customer. And an inspiration customer is one that will help you that is okay with seeing your dirty laundry, okay with mistakes you might make because they see the value in it and they also see the value in them being a first mover. And I like to tell my team, we want to be a first mover and a trendsetter, so our customers can also be trendsetters in their business as well. So therefore, by getting that customer support, and that's in the form of POCs or in trials or in just customer testimony, combine that now with a second dimension called the analyst community, which you're team resides in as well, also saying well, I think this is good as well, brings a lot credibility because there's a saying, a verse in the bible that a prophet is not without honor except in his own home town. Now, if you think about that, a lot of times, you're own company that you reside in has a lower point of view because it's very consumed with, indeed, what is next and doing the right thing, by the way. I have to make this quarter, right. We have to protect the brand. We have to keep the cashflow coming in. These are all important things, so how do you get someone to focus on that? Many times, it's not you anymore, it's outside. And I call that the second C. The first C is internal, the company. The second C is your customers and the community. That also could include, by the way, analysts, the media, other experts, consultants, those type of Cs around there. Now the third C is the competition. This is a little bit controversial. What happens when the idea is now exploited by the competition first; sometimes that is a motivator for a company to jump on it as well and make the market. But, again, if you follow the competition, you're not the first mover, you don't enjoy the benefits of first mover advantage. Higher margin, the halo effect of being the innovators and also, learning, that's an important one. When you're a first mover, you're out there learning so that you can respond to the second generation in a better way. >> I like the notion of differentiation and innovation as two different variables. >> Yes. >> Because it's super important. You can be different and not innovative. You can be innovative and not different. Again, it's all contextual but I want to get back to the pioneering of the first movers. So, statistically speaking, a lot of the best entrepreneurs are first movers and they're often "misunderstood", you hear that all the time. >> Yes. >> Or being a visionary is the difference being 10 years in the future versus an hour, can make the difference between success. (chuckles) We are crazy on one end and you're brilliant on the other because the time to value catches up with that profit, if you will. So the question is that, how does first movers continue to win 'cause I've seen situations where first movers come in, get a position and win and stay, keep the lead. Other times, first movers come in, set the market up, create all the attention and then have arrows on their back. >> And a second mover enjoys the benefit. >> Yeah, so the second mover comes in, bigger scale, so this competition, competitive strategy overlaid on this. Which even complicates it even further. >> Indeed, yes. >> So, your thoughts on that. >> Yes, indeed. Well, one way to look at this is the way to move forward is again, when you can get some momentum that's not you. That's the number one as a... >> John: Market growth, number of subscribers, doing the internet as a trend. >> Yes. >> Mobile users. >> Yes. >> And a third party consultant who's highly respected, a greaser, an analyst. I ran into an analyst recently in a coffee shop who agreed with some of this first mover work we're doing and converged edge systems, which is a new class of products as well. But it's really important that you can't be discouraged, let me point this out. What I tell my team, and I tell students, I lecture at universities and I've been edge professor, those younger in their career, is if you cast and vision and you have an idea and nobody gets it, don't be discouraged, that's a good sign. That's sounds a little funny. Why is it a good sign? Because if everybody gets it right away, it's likely not that novel, it's likely rather ordinary, it's likely been thought of before as well. So, by the very nature and definition that the average person might think it's discouraging. Oh, nobody understands me, nobody gets this idea, should be an encouragement, and a motivation. Now the risk here, is people not getting it is also a sign of a stupid idea. So, usually, when people don't get it, it's either, really not good. >> Or really good. >> Or really amazing that, eventually, they'll come around to it. I had a boss in one of my career opportunities told me to stop working on a product. I don't want to give too much detail, but he literally told me that. And I said, I didn't want to be insubordinate to a boss, we have them and I said, can I please just keep working on it, okay, don't let it interfere with the other stuff. Dah, dah, dah. Today that market is a nine billion dollar market as well. >> Of that product that you-- >> Of that very product that I was told by a very astute person, one of my colleagues, my bosses, that I don't see the future in this, let's not do this, you know, as well. But, being able to have a second thing. So, number one is don't be discouraged by people not getting it. By definition, that's supposed to happen. >> Yeah. >> When you have new-- >> Good point, you want to finish that? >> I just want to get-- >> Get one more thing. >> If I may add a second one. And as you're moving forward with this as well is seek out and find those who do agree with you and stick with them very, very closely. And I have, I can say a couple of names. There's one, we've created this new product class called Converge Edge Systems. Alan Andriole is senior vice president at HP. >> Cube alumni. >> And he's a Cube alumni. >> Super smart. And I'm pointing him out because he has publicly taken on this idea that this product category can really, really work and he's worked-- >> John: Cloud Nine? >> Oh, the converge edge system called Edgeline. >> Okay, got it. >> The Edgeline product brand. >> You know it as well. So therefore, when you find someone who had authority-- >> Eagles fly together, you want to get a good peer group. >> Absolutely. >> Here's a question for you. >> One of my experiences, and I want to just get your reaction and add on to it, your thoughts is, most entrepreneurs or pioneers are misunderstood, so I agree, don't be discouraged, but also, keep validating and be a data seeker, get the data. But a lot of the times, just getting something in the market or getting it going creates movement and inertia to get rolling and sometimes the original idea is actually the big idea turns into it as you get more data. An example is like Air B&B wasn't... What it is, it was basically air mattresses and selling cereal. >> Yes, yes. >> That was the original story, right. And then it turned into, but conceptually, it was the same thing, so you don't have to be 100% right on the semantics. >> It's well known that most startups don't end up being successful with the product they start with. That's well known fact but that's true also in large companies with a product idea as well. So, you have to have this interesting balance. It's very interesting as I've thought about this in study. You have to have deep philosophical and conviction of principles. And here's why: If you don't, you will be swayed by everybody's opinion and you'll never get anything done because oh, well, that's a good idea, maybe I should do this well, that's a good idea, maybe I should do this. Now, I'm not saying that's bad to listen to others but if you don't have a grounding of principles. Example, we established the seven principles of the IOT over two years ago, and we've held on to them and created the success we have based on those principles. Now that's not to say we didn't modify them a little bit but the point is, we were convicted with something and when somebody would come up with a counter to it, we had a way to defend our convictions, if you will, in internal debates and external debates as well. And then, secondly, you got to be also okay with being the sole inhabitant of that field of discourse. Being a visionary can be a very lonely job because of that, right. And, again, it's because you are and your team is, it's not always a lone person right, the team is actually creating something that literally nobody's ever seen before. Nobody understand before. >> What process do you wrap around this? Because Dave Alonzo and I always talk about this on the Cube and after the Cube is that the process has to be your friend, not your enemy. It has to work for you. >> I always say that, yeah. >> Also says that as well on Amazon. But also Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's partner always says I'm not a big fan of master plans, meaning, because become a slave to the plan rather than the opportunity. >> Yep, yep. >> So these are process kind of things, right. So how does an innovator that's a first mover that wants to create a category, 'cause categories killers or category creators are huge opportunities financially. So they create a lot of value wealth and opportunity. What process is best? Is there a view, is it conditional on certain things? What's your thoughts on... >> Well, let me say, I'm going to give you a big company or a medium size company context, not a startup, I think they're distinctly different. I have limited experience with a startup but I've had significant experience with bigger, medium and large, now, companies as well. You can't try to change the system because now you have two variables. You got this new product that nobody's ever heard of and now you're trying to change the whole system. Now, again, this is just advice for bigger companies. So be careful how many things you want to change, how many things you want to stop. So you want to take this new thing and align it with existing processes and existing core competencies as much as you can, even though it's new, it has to have some alignment; I'll give you an example. When we built the converged edge systems, the Edgeline brand, we aligned it with compute. It's not only compute, but we aligned it with compute, why? Because HPE or HP, at the time, was and is and now, number one in compute when it comes to data center. Compute systems when it comes to high performance computing and mission critical, right. So therefore, that was easy to understand so you're okay, you're familiar with this, but now, let me tell you this new twist on it. And I would assume, and I don't know this for sure, but I would assume Steve Jobs and the Apple team that was thinking of this smartphone concept, the iPhone as well, they had to align it with some level of compute capabilities, right. And if you notice, as it emerged, it also included something that already exists called the iPod which was already aligned with their laptop computers and their desktops, right. Your music would be downloaded as an app to connectivity, but now you can take it with you and by the way, now I'll add a phone to it and so this incrementally built and by the way, you ain't seen nothing yet, I'm going to add a GPS system, I'm going to add a camera, your flashlight, your wallet, I'm going to add all that in. So, I think, by incrementally moving but not upsetting the system, like you said, in a large company really, really helps because you can't change everything too quickly. You got to be okay being alone-- >> Well, I want to interrupt you there for a second. Peter Buress and I talk all the time; I love his quote, Peter Buress, head Cube on research says, the iPhone was a computer that happened to make phone calls. Okay, and that's the smartphone, it's category creator and we know what happened, the rest is history. However, you mentioned talking to customers, having an inspiration customer, I love that concept. Because you need a muse as an innovator. You got to have someone you can trust that knows what you're trying to do that understands the mission. If Steve Jobs went into the marketplace and did market research, he would have probably had the customer feedback to build the best Blackberry. A better Blackberry or another device. Instead, he used is gut, was on his mission and then he understood the inspirational customer, whether it was real or not, he was going down a different road. It takes guts but also some discipline. >> I hear you and I agree with this 100%. When I had the great fortune of leading a team that created the first enterprise blade server or converge system, and today that is pushing about a 10 billion dollar market opportunity, and not one customer asked me for it. Now, that doesn't mean I didn't listen, okay. But I had to bring it to them. So here's the difference, we're not responding to trends, this is a key point, we're creating a trend. And what I tell my team is, you must create trends, not follow them. Many of competitors, are by the way making good money and doing good business, I'm not knocking that, but I'm saying they're not creating a trend, they're actually following one. They're in an exploding tam. >> Pretty lucrative trend. >> It can be. >> Very mature, big market. >> Dave Thomas with Wendy's followed a trend called hamburgers and he did pretty well. He didn't create the hamburger market but he followed one. Now, this is really rather interesting. So when you come in, and then you're saying I want to actually set a trend and create one, it really gives you this opportunity to redefine what is happening. So now, quick story, you may have heard this, maybe your viewers have heard this. A manager of a shoe company sends two guys to an island. He says, I want you to sell shoes on this island. They get to the island, the first guy calls back and says, boss, this is terrible, everybody is barefoot. There's no opportunity to sell shoes. This is terrible, I'm coming home. The second guy calls and says, boss, you're not going to believe this, there's not a shoe on this island and I have a tam that's 100% of the market to sell shoes. I believe, as you pointed out, Steve Jobs didn't go and say well, what apps do you own on your Blackberry. What he did is reversed it and this is what we're doing, we're reversing, we're saying, if you could watch a full length high definition movie in your hand, would you? Well, I can but I can't do it on this device. But if you could, right. So now, in the IOT, I hear this all the time from my competitors and even some colleagues out in the industry, well, we ask them what apps they run at the Edge. We ask them what they do at the Edge. That's good, that's necessary but not sufficient. You have to say, but if you had this product, wouldn't you, for example, run an entire database? Would you compile your machine learning models at the Edge, do it in the cloud now, wouldn't you do that, if you had it? Well, I never thought of that because I don't have that capability, just like, well, I never thought of being able to take pictures and watch full length high definition movies 'cause I never had it. But what if you did, would you do it? So you always got to be setting that trend, not responding to it only. >> That's awesome. >> Dr. Tom Bradicich, writing a book called First Mover really about being innovative. Give you the final word, thanks for coming in, appreciate you sharing the advice. What's going on with HPE and your IOT work? Take a minute to talk about what's happening at HPE. >> Well, thanks, pretty exciting, we've been able to move forward with some really great customer wins. I'm hoping to go public with them. We're in many ways, I know this is an abused term, but we're revolutionizing the industrial IOT in particular and manufacturing floors. We have the large auto-manufacturer that has chosen Edgeline as the standard to produce more and more vehicles per day. That's their goal, how many more vehicles can I get into my customer's hands per day. We have snack company making potato chips. Looking at what we're doing with sulfur, defining operations. We have even, we've talked about this before, space travel, engage with what the space edge is all about. In many ways, we're potato chips to space ships. >> Data centers on Mars. >> Data centers everywhere. >> And then, also, converging OT, just like the smartphone converged the camera and the GPS system, we're converging control systems, data acquisition systems. It's pretty exciting, I've been fortunate to have a company and our new CEO, Antonia Neery, has been very supportive, I was with him this morning and we talked about that new, first-of-a-kind product that we have at this auto-- >> So, is Antonio going to let us come in and do an exclusive interview since he's been a Cube alumni multiple times? >> Yes, I think he should. >> Tell him we said hello. >> I will, I will. >> Tom, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Tom Bradicich, great thought leader, really around category killers, category creators, being innovative and different, that's the key to success. Thanks for sharing. This is the Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS reInvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube here, live in Las Vegas for Amazon web services, AWS annual conference reInvent 2017 and I'm John Furrier here, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of the Cube. We are here for our fifth year in a row as Amazon Web Services continues to go on a thundering pace of product announcements and massive growth and we're here with two live sets, we're growing so much, there's so much action, there's two cubes, double barrel shotgun of innovation and data we're sharing with you, go to SiliconAngle.com, check out all the stories, all the news and we're hear kicking it of with an analysis, getting ready for tomorrow, the big day, today's officially the partner day, Sunday night they had Midnight Madness, the first ever event for Amazon, where they used the March Madness, kind of copied Cube Madness if you follow the Cube and they do a little preview, I'm here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend, two great analysts in the community, guys and co-host this week at the cube. First of all thanks for co-hosting the Cube this week and thanks for coming by >> It's a pleasure >> Nice being here with my 50,000 closest friends (laughs) >> It's so good to have you guys here, one, the hosting but more importantly more Cloud thinking men but we've been watching this evolution, both when the Amazon start, I know you both have been involved in the game, in the Cloud watching it and participating but watching just like the tipping point, you're starting to see that moment where, people are calling this the Vmware 2008 moment, Where it's like oh my God its kind of gone mainstream but its still got a community, can they keep that alive? Meanwhile everybody is just getting blown away by Amazon, no matter what is being said, they're clearly the leader in Cloud, Microsoft pedaling as fast as they can, cobbling together their legacy Cloud, to try to keep up. Google, a new guard company looking really good with developers but not international, not a lot of things there yet but certainly looking great and then you got everybody else. >> Keith: Is there anybody else, really? >> As Dave Alonzo would say, what horses are on the track? >> Yeah there's lots of smaller players who are calling themselves Cloud, they're much more like, manage service providers and collocation kind of things, its not really Cloud they way you would think of it from the AWS kind of perspective. >> I've been talking to a lot of Fortune 500's lately and all of their internal customers, when they describe what they want, they're describing AWS, Azure and Google compute and everything else is just not even part of the discussion >> Yeah it needs to look like AWS, that's like the bench mark so this is what it is >> Total gold standard, the bell weather, let's talk about Amazon because I was writing a post on Forbes, I posted about kind of, trying to tell the story in a way that was kind of understood by the mainstream, still not really truly understood but they're changing the game, they're just kind of minding their knitting, they're just all steam ahead, you know, why look in the rear view mirror when your top dog? Why do that but the game is changing, they're constantly introducing new stuff, serverless is the hot trend that we've been tracking, you're seeing it here, you're seeing real developer centric, customer centric announcements. Even during the analysts meeting I heard rumblings, we can't even keep up with all the news, it's so massive so just thundering pace of announcements. Where's the innovation? What's Amazon doing now? What do they gotta do to distance themselves from the field? >> It's interesting, I reckon the competitors to Amazon are actually distancing themselves from AWS, they're trying to find their own way of doing things because you cannot AWS AWS >> Keith: Rackspace learned that a couple years ago right? >> Yeah, trying to compete head on, you're gonna lose so then we see Google is pushing really really hard, machine oiling and they are in top systems, a lot of people are using them for that big data and genomics research, Microsoft is all about office 365 and their traditional enterprise applications that all of their customers today, they know and love >> Yeah so Microsoft is doing what Microsoft does, which is taking care of their enterprise customers and I think this is where AWS needs to innovate in and its not maybe a technical innovation more than a operating and sales approach to how they treat enterprise customers. Enterprise customers still I think, are struggling to this date on how to interact with AWS and AWS is still trying to figure out how do they sale and help manage enterprise accounts. >> So let's separate IT because obviously two factors are merging, the CXO which is traditional IT, which we're all familiar with and a new kind of developer model is emerging and I won't say it's developer speeds and fees, developer programs, where developers are shaping the agenda. It used to be CXO's have the cash, they drive everything. Now you got this developer mojo and I can see early signs of a cult here, where all the innovation that's come in the field, is from customers saying screw it, I don't need the big dog telling me, the old guard, the old CIO up there, I'm just gonna go do it, get out of my way, three feet in the Cloud dust, get a prototype up and running. So you guys see that dynamic, with this cultural shift, what's your thoughts? >> Cloud is a state of mind... (laughs) It's a way of operating the business, its not so much about the infrastructure, its not so much about the services that live on top of it, it's how you use them and that way of doing things that the developers like, is that they get to pick and choose their favorite tools from what they think is the best solution and a lot of the time that's been AWS and then they blend them together and they just stitch this system together based on the favorite tools that they have and that just lives in a completely different level of abstraction than what we've seen before. >> And the speed too, I mean that's just changing the game too, right? >> Well you can do that a lot faster than waiting, raise a PO, wait for three months for someone to rack ans stack a whole bunch of gear, wait for everything to clear through purchasing and then you get access to the enterprise, anointed correct thing, so we saw it the same with sales floors, where people would... sales guys would just go with a credit card and just say, yes I'll have some of that, thanks >> It's much more than a credit card, VMware worked their re-Cloud air service a couple years, said, I can take your credit card, build a data center, my son a developer, in college, I gave him that solution, he looked at it, he was like what's a load balancer, why do I need to configure a firewall, I just want to build a application man, I just want to build, I just want to code, and AWS has figured that out, how to get developers back to what they love to do, which is solving problems via code and you see it, even before the start of this show, there's a lot of hoodies and shorts at this conference, compared to the culture that we see at a lot of other and past shows. >> I find it inspirational, so couple key points, so I asked Andy Jassy, an exclusive one on one with him last Monday and I asked him, you know, he was talking and he made a comment to me and I'll tell you the story here, he says, you know, we have a conversation inside Amazon, this is Andy talking about if we were gonna start Amazon all over again, cause he tells the story about the scar tissue and all the pain they went through with S3. He says if we're going to do it all over again, we would use Lambda, and the serverless trend is interesting because now that speaks to your son's objective, I don't need routers, I don't need load balances, I don't need gear... >> What do you mean how many CPUs I need? I don't know >> What's a patch? >> You tell me, alright, yeah >> Load Linux? What's Linux? So, okay if that's the norm, the driver has to be a new programming methodology, not agile, we're talking about compose ability and a level where no one says, oh I need Oracle for that or I need Mongodb for that, there's just data bases. So a whole new things happening where this choice that used to be the religious war between vendor A or B... serverless could change the game on this >> We're just gonna end up with a new religious war I think, it's gonna be, instead of Vim versus Emacs, it's gonna be should I use Amazon Lambda or should I use Google Cloud functions, it's gonna be one of those, which programming language is the best. >> Okay old guard, new guard, it's a term that Jassy uses, I like it because I'm old, so maybe I'm old guard trying to be new guard, old guard means legacy, he's really talking about Oracle, IBM, probably say Microsoft, so move over and put them in that bucket, so new guard players, clearly Amazon, saying they're new guard, but Google's new guard in Cloud, they're not really trying to do anything legacy, they have legacy infrastructure but they're approaching a... a market from a new guard perspective. What's you guys take on old guard, new guard and do you agree with that statement and what do the old guards have to do to be cool with the new school? >> So the Cube has been at almost every major conference, this year, take an example, what some of the old guard is trying to do, NetApp is trying to get into the Cloud conversation. Google has none of that legacy concern of needing to sell boxes, you look at a solution like Kubernetes, Kubernetes has come on and taken over the container orchestration conversation because Google doesn't need to make money off of Kubernetes, they don't need it to sell more boxes, there's a bit of freedom... >> They may have moved some work loads off Amazon, don't you think? >> It's a great way to move work loads out of Amazon, AWS has joined the CNCF because they no longer have a choice in the matter, Kubernetes has won the containers war so because of that, these new school competitors can compete in ways that a HPE, Dell EMC, etc., simply can't. >> Josh I gotta ask you this, I agree with what he's saying, I'll take it one step further, the old guards trying to slow the game down, move the goal post as an expression, they gotta try to slow this freight train down because otherwise it could be less than it does and they have leverage, they've got customers, they have market power, even Oracle I would say is in that category so they gotta kind of slow the game down but is the scale and the unprecedented amount of announcements, the differentiator as more services come on, their thesis here at Amazon, as I release more services faster, more available capability thus more, total address full markets available. Do you buy those two things, slowing down and services being the advantage? >> That's interesting I think it's more of a scatter gun approach in a way, it's like you know, fail fast. So if we throw enough services out there, throw enough stuff at the wall, we'll just find the ones that work and concentrate on those, as someone who tries to keep up with what Amazon is doing and this happens with developers as well. When you release 800 new services in a year, name them all, as a human that's really really difficult to manage. So I think in some ways it's a little bit... >> I've got four kids I can't even name, I get them all confused >> It's a little bit like Microsoft Word, it's got 800 billion different features but for any given customer they're gonna use maybe 10% of them and yet all of them are there because different customers use a different 10%. I think that's a little bit what Amazon is going for, kind of ubiquitous market coverage, as much market as it can possibly get, it's a lot like it's retail strategy, we want to be in everything, where some of the competitors are being a little bit more focused about saying well rather than just being a generic service that covers everything, we're gonna focus on particular areas that we think have enough value in that for it to be worth that time. >> Okay I wanna ask you guys a question about value creation, entrepreneurial, the startups, companies that are trying to go, you kind of see, certainly in Silicon Valley, where I live, startups are getting pummeled, if they were born before 2012, they're really going.6.. they try to go big but they're mostly going home. Barracuda Networks just announced this week that they're gonna go private, private equity's squabbling up all these companies that have pretty good sizeable funding, 100 million dollar invests from Andressen Horowitz, Graylog, Sequoia, big names, folding tent and being acquired which is code words for we can't got public and even big public companies that don't have a Cloud player, kind of retooling. So the question is, are we at a point now where scale and speed of the game is causing some havoc in the market place. >> Well look no further than what's going on in Europe now, the Cube is at HPE reInvent. HPE's discover in Europe and HPE is a completely different company than it was three years ago as a direct result of what Amazon has done in the Cloud space and gobbling up all of these smaller accounts and new opportunity. You mentioned it earlier, HPE is still HPE, HPE is gonna get that interview or session with the CIO, Meg makes the call, someones going to pick up the line. >> Now Antonio >> Yeah, now Antonio But AWS has been changing that story, impacting and taking the air out. HPE chose a interesting approach, get smaller, become more agile, Dell chose the opposite route of getting bigger to compete, we'll see which one plays out, in the meantime 18 billion dollar run rate and no sign of slowing down. >> 18 billion dollar run rate with 40% growth on that bassline is pretty significant, I think they might even be doing better than that next quarter but that speaks to the traction, it's not just startups, those numbers aren't just startups. Airbnb is a big company now but they started out small. We use Amazon, a lot of people use Amazon, they're winning big enterprise deals, why? What do you guys think, what's the reason why? >> You know what... Go a little bit intuitive here, look at VMware on AWS, I've been kind of critical of that solution but it is a easy win, if VMware made the exact same announcement on IBM, the year before at VM world... the Fortune 500's I talk to don't consider that Cloud, the exact same solution and AWS is Cloud, that's the Cloud check box. AWS, they do a much better job at controlling their brand Kleenex but they are the Kleenex, they are the Xerox of Cloud, you don't have Cloud unless you have AWS from a enterprise perspective, that's what Azure, Google Compute, and all the other Cloud providers have to compete against >> First of all those guys are incomplete in their Cloud and that's just on a feature by feature basis, I do agree it's kind of like Outlook or Word, I like Outlook because it's more bloated than Word and less useful but my point is, that's the name of the game, getting functional value creation. So final question for you guys is, as we look at reInvent this week obviously I looked at the industry day yesterday and the board, a lot of Alexa repeats. So you can see what sessions are repeating so that's a indicator of popularity so Alexa's got traction, serverless with Lambda. What do you guys see as the big, so far, early show buzz? >> I'm hearing a lot about containers, containers and like you say, things like Lambda and Alexa, anything that has AI machine learning in it, that's very hot at the moment whether or not it's just hype and the bubble on that will pop in a few years, I personally think that that is mostly hype and hot air but it'll settle down and there'll be some real value in there. That's where I'm seeing the noise. >> So over at the RA, they have the container kind of show, it's a show within a show and I'm hearing similarities with containers but not just containers, to your point, serverless, it was a term that we struggled with a couple years ago, now it's generally accepted, you know what, I can just write code and that code can be executed without regard to infrastructure operations. That has proved to be insanely popular right now. >> Okay final question, I'll start it, we're gonna end this on this last segment, I know I wanna get one more in, that's the buzz. I wanna ask you guys, what tea leaves are you reading, what signals are you looking for? Because remember Amazon is very scripted up right now, you can see them on message, I'm trying to poke holes, and which tea leaves, smelling it, putting my ear, ear to the ground, think about that question, my view is, I'm looking at, is this developer trend a cultural shift and to what extent is that developer traction in terms of mind share and love of the brand, Kleenex, the Cloud, the real Cloud, and how much will that tip the CXO conversation. Where's that power shift? So me, I'm trying to read what the tea leaves are saying, if this developer tipping point happens at this scale, developers could really be in the drivers seat. Not just oh developers are in charge, I'm talking about really making the decisions on all big deployments, that's my tea leaf read. What are you looking at? >> So I'm talking to a lot of vendors, their number one reason for being at AWS, when I say vendors, vendors that we see at traditional infrastructure shows, they're here to talk to new audiences, to that developer audience that you mentioned and what I want to know from them, more than just interest, do these developers have money? One of those challenges that all of these Cloudy type companies have faced is that the developers fall in love with them, Docker is a great example, developers fell in love with Docker, millions of downloads. However that doesn't translate to POs and purchases, do these guys actually have the buying power to see through that initial contact all the way to the sale of the solution. >> Influence the buying decisions and IT, thoughts? >> You made the same comment I think earlier about 2008 VM world, it has a very similar vibe to me here, I'm seeing that this is now the crossover between where it was developers, where it was all hoodies and tracksuits and pink hair, I'm seeing a lot of suits, seeing a lot of money floating around this conference, so I'm starting to think that this is the point where AWS is starting its transition from being the new guard to the old guard, they would love to be IBM, IBM made a lot of money. >> Turning into an old guard is very good financially >> It makes you a lot of money. So I'm looking to see where on that transition are we and how long can AWS maintain that momentum of being a new guard company. >> If they can hold the line on new guard they win everything as long as they could in my opinion. Alright, I'm John Furrier here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend kicking off the first day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at AWS reInvent, stay tuned for more analysis opinion, commentary, of course go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the exclusive interviews with Andy Jassy and all the top executives of Amazon. We'll be back with more after this short break. (slow futuristic music)

>>The cube at big data SV 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsors. When disco we make Hadoop invincible and Aptean accelerating big data, 2.0, >>Okay. We're back here, live in Silicon valley. This is big data. It has to be, this is Silicon England, Wiki bonds, the cube coverage of big data in Silicon valley and all around the world covering the strata conference. All the latest news analysis here in Silicon valley, the cube was our flagship program about the events extract the signal from noise. I'm John furrier, the founders of looking angle. So my co-host and co-founder of Wiki bond.org, Dave Volante, uh, George Matthew CEO, altruist on the cube again, back from big data NYC just a few months ago. Um, our two events, um, welcome back. Great to be here. So, um, what fruit is dropped into the blend or the change, the colors of the big data space this this time. So we were in new Yorkers. We saw what happened there. A lot of talk about financial services, you know, big business, Silicon valley Kool-Aid is more about innovation. Partnerships are being formed, channel expansion. Obviously the market's hot growth is still basing. Valuations are high. What's your take on the current state of the market? >>Yeah. Great question. So John, when we see this market today, I remember even a few years ago when I first visited the cave, particularly when it came to a deep world and strata a few years back, it was amazing that we talked about this early innings of a ballgame, right? We said it was like, man, we're probably in the second or third inning of this ball game. And what has progressed particularly this last few years has been how much the actual productionization, the actual industrialization of this activity, particularly from a big data analytics standpoint has merged. And that's amazing, right? And in a short span, two, three years, we're talking about technologies and capabilities that were kind of considered things that you play with. And now these are things that are keeping the lights on and running, you know, major portions of how better decision-making and analytics are done inside of organizations. So I think that industrialization is a big shift forward. In fact, if you've listened to guys like Narendra Mulani who runs most of analytics at Accenture, he'll actually highlight that as one of the key elements of how not only the transformation is occurring among organizations, but even the people that are servicing a large companies today are going through this big shift. And we're right in the middle of it. >>We saw, you mentioned a censure. We look at CSC, but service mesh and the cloud side, you seeing the consulting firms really seeing build-out mandates, not just POC, like let's go and lock down now for the vendors. That means is people looking for reference accounts right now? So to me, I'm kind of seeing the tea leaves say, okay, who's going to knock down the reference accounts and what is that going to look like? You know, how do you go in and say, I'm going to tune up this database against SAP or this against that incumbent legacy vendor with this new scale-out, all these things are on in play. So we're seeing that, that focus of okay, tire kicking is over real growth, real, real referenceable deployments, not, not like a, you know, POC on steroids, like full on game-changing deployments. Do you see that? And, and if you do, what versions of that do you seeing happening and what ending of that is that like the first pitch of the sixth inning? Uh, w what do you, how would you benchmark that? >>Yeah, so I, I would say we're, we're definitely in the fourth or fifth inning of a non ballgame now. And, and there's innings. What we're seeing is I describe this as a new analytic stack that's emerged, right? And that started years ago when particularly the major Hadoop distro vendors started to rethink how data management was effectively being delivered. And once that data management layer started to be re thought, particularly in terms of, you know, what the schema was on read what the ability to do MPP and scale-out was in terms of how much cheaper it is to bring storage and compute closer to data. What's now coming above that stack is, you know, how do I blend data? How do I be able to give solutions to data analysts who can make better decisions off of what's being stored inside of that petabyte scale infrastructure? So we're seeing this new stack emerge where, you know, Cloudera Hortonworks map are kind of that underpinning underlying infrastructure where now our based analytics that revolution provides Altrix for data blending for analytic work, that's in the hands of data analysts, Tableau for visual analysis and dashboarding. Those are basically the solutions that are moving forward as a capability that are package and product. >>Is that the game-changing feature right now, do you think that integration of the stack, or is that the big, game-changer this sheet, >>That's the hardening that's happening as we speak right now, if you think about the industrialization of big data analytics that, you know, as I think of it as the fourth or fifth inning of the ballgame, that hardening that ability to take solutions that either, you know, the Accentures, the KPMGs, the Deloitte of the world deliver to their clients, but also how people build stuff internally, right? They have much better solutions that work out of the box, as opposed to fumbling with, you know, things that aren't, you know, stitched as well together because of the bailing wire and bubblegum that was involved for the last few years. >>I got it. I got to ask you, uh, one of the big trends you saw in certainly in the tech world, you mentioned stacks, and that's the success of Amazon, the cloud. You're seeing integrated stacks being a key part of the, kind of the, kind of the formation of you said hardening of the stack, but the word horizontally scalable is a term that's used in a lot of these open source environments, where you have commodity hardware, you have open source software. So, you know, everything it's horizontally scalable. Now, that's, that's very easy to envision, but thinking about the implementation in an enterprise or a large organization, horizontally scalable is not a no brainer. What's your take on that. And how does that hyperscale infrastructure mindset of scale-out scalable, which is a big benefit of the current infrastructure? How does that fit into, into the big day? >>Well, I think it fits extremely well, right? Because when you look at the capabilities of the last, as we describe it stack, we almost think of it as vertical hardware and software that's factually built up, but right now, for anyone who's building scale in this world, it's all about scale-out and really being able to build that stack on a horizontal basis. So if you look at examples of this, right, say for instance, what a cloud era recently announced with their enterprise hub. And so when you look at that capability of the enterprise data hub, a lot of it is about taking what yarn has become as a resource manager. What HDFS has been ACOM as a scale-out storage infrastructure, what the new plugin engines have merged beyond MapReduce as a capability for engines to come into a deep. And that is a very horizontal description of how you can do scale out, particularly for data management. >>When we built a lot of the work that was announced at strata a few years ago, particularly around how the analytics architecture for Galerie, uh, emerged at Altryx. Now we have hundreds of, of apps, thousands of users in that infrastructure. And when we built that out was actually scaling out on Amazon where the worker nodes and the capability for us to manage workload was very horizontal built out. If you look at servers today of any layer of that stack, it is really about that horizontal. Scale-out less so about throwing more hardware, more, uh, you know, high-end infrastructure at it, but more about how commodity hardware can be leveraged and use up and down that stack very easily. So Georgia, >>I asked you a question, so why is analytics so hard for so many companies? Um, and you've been in this big data, we've been talking to you since the beginning, um, and when's it going to get easier? And what are you guys specifically doing? You know, >>So facilitate that. Sure. So a few things that we've seen to date is that a lot of the analytics work that many people do internal and external to organizations is very rote, hand driven coding, right? And I think that's been one of the biggest challenges because the two end points in analytics have been either you hard code stuff that you push into a, you know, a C plus plus or a Java function, and you push it into database, or you're doing lightweight analytics in Excel. And really there needs to be a middle ground where someone can do effective scale-out and have repeatability in what's been done and ease of use. And what's been done that you don't have to necessarily be a programmer and Java programmer in C plus plus to push an analytic function and database. And you certainly don't have to deal with the limitations of Excel today. >>And really that middle ground is what Altryx serves. We look at it as an opportunity for analysts to start work with a very repeatable re reasonable workflow of how they would build their initial constructs around an analytic function that they would want to deploy. And then the scale-out happens because all of the infrastructure works on that analyst behalf, whether that be the infrastructure on Hadoop, would that be the infrastructure of the scale out of how we would publish an analytic function? Would that be how the visualizations would occur inside of a product like Tableau? And so that, I think Dave is one of the biggest things that needs to shift over where you don't have the only options in front of you for analytics is either Excel or hard coding, a bunch of code in C plus plus, or Java and pushing it in database. Yeah. >>And you correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be building your partnerships and your ecosystem really around driving that solution and, and, and really driving a revolution in the way in which people think about analytics, >>Ease of use. The idea is that ultimately if you can't get data analysts to be able to not only create work, that they can actually self-describe deploy and deliver and deliver success inside of an organization. And scale that out at the petabyte scale information that exists inside of most organizations you fail. And that's the job of folks like ourselves to provide great software. >>Well, you mentioned Tableau, you guys have a strong partnership there, and Christian Chabot, I think has a good vision. And you talked about sort of, you know, the, the, the choices of the spectrum and neither are good. Can you talk a little bit more about that, that, that partnership and the relationship and what you guys are doing together? Yeah. >>Uh, I would say Tableau's our strongest and most strategic partner today. I mean, we were diamond sponsors of their conference. I think I was there at their conference when I was on the cube the time before, and they are diamond sponsors of our conference. So our customers and particular users are one in the same for Tablo. It really becomes a, an experience around how visual analysis and dashboard, and can be very easily delivered by data analysts. And we think of those same users, the same exact people that Tablo works with to be able to do data blending and advanced analytics. And so that's why the two software products, that's why the two companies, that's where our two customer bases are one in the same because of that integrated experience. So, you know, Tableau is basically replacing XL and that's the mission that thereafter. And we feel that anyone who wants to be able to do the first form of data blending, which I would think of as a V lookup in Excel, should look at Altryx as a solution for that one. >>So you mentioned your conference it's inspire, right? It >>Is inspiring was coming up in June, >>June. Yeah. Uh, how many years have you done inspire? >>Inspire is now in its fifth year. And you're gonna bring the >>Cube this year. Yeah. >>That would be great. You guys, yeah, that would be fun. >>You should do it. So talk about the conference a little bit. I don't know much about it, but I mean, I know of it. >>Yeah. It's very centered around business users, particularly data analysts and many organizations that cut across retail, financial services, communications, where companies like Walmart at and T sprint Verizon bring a lot of their underlying data problems, underlying analytic opportunities that they've wrestled with and bring a community together this year. We're expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 600 folks attending. So largely to, uh, figure out how to bring this, this, uh, you know, game forward, really to build out this next rate analytic capability that's emerging for most organizations. And we think that that starts ultimately with data analysts. All right. We think that there are well over two and a half million data analysts that are underserved by the current big data tools that are in this space. And we've just been highly focused on targeting those users. And so far, it's been pretty good at us. >>It's moving, it's obviously moving to the casual user at some levels, but I ended up getting there not soon, but I want to, I want to ask you the role of the cloud and all this, because when you have underneath the hood is a lot of leverage. You mentioned integrates that's when to get your perspective on the data cloud, not data cloud is it's putting data in the cloud, but the role of cloud, the role of dev ops that intersection, but you're seeing dev ops, you know, fueling a lot of that growth, certainly under the hood. Now on the top of the stack, you have the, I guess, this middle layer for lack of a better description, I'm of use old, old metaphor developing. So that's the enablement piece. Ultimately the end game is fully turnkey, data science, personalization, all that's, that's the holy grail. We all know. So how do you see that collision with cloud and the big, the big data? >>Yeah. So cloud is basically become three things for a lot of folks in our space. One is what we talked about, which is scale up and scale out, uh, is something that is much more feasible when you can spin up and spin down infrastructure as needed, particularly on an elastic basis. And so many of us who built our solutions leverage Amazon being one of the most defacto solutions for cloud based deployment, that it just makes it easy to do the scale-out that's necessary. This is the second thing it actually enables us. Uh, and many of our friends and partners to do is to be able to bring a lower cost basis to how infrastructure stood up, right? Because at the end of the day, the challenge for the last generation of analytics and data warehousing that was in this space is your starting conversation is two to $3 million just in infrastructure alone before you even buy software and services. >>And so now if you can rent everything that's involved with the infrastructure and the software is actually working within days, hours of actually starting the effort, as opposed to a 14 month life cycle, it's really compressing the time to success and value that's involved. And so we see almost a similarity to how Salesforce really disrupted the market. 10 years ago, I happened to be at Salesforce when that disruption occurred and the analytics movement that is underway really impacted by cloud. And the ability to scale out in the cloud is really driving an economic basis. That's unheard of with that >>Developer market, that's robust, right? I mean, you have easy kind of turnkey development, right? Tapping >>It is right, because there's a robust, uh, economy that's surrounding the APIs that are now available for cloud services. So it's not even just at the starting point of infrastructure, but there's definite higher level services where all the way to software as industry, >>How much growth. And you'll see in those, in that, as that, that valley of wealth and opportunity that will be created from your costs, not only for the companies involved, but the company's customers, they have top line focus. And then the goal of the movement we've seen with analytics is you seeing the CIO kind of with less of a role, more of the CEO wants to the chief data officer wants most of the top line drivers to be app focused. So you seeing a big shift there. >>Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of the real proponents of the cloud is now the fact that there is an ability for a business analyst business users and the business line to make impacts on how decisions are done faster without the infrastructure underpinnings that were needed inside the four walls in our organization. So the decision maker and the buyer effectively has become to your point, the chief analytics officer, the chief marketing officer, right. Less so that the chief information officer of an organization. And so I think that that is accelerating in a tremendous, uh, pace, right? Because even if you look at the statistics that are out there today, the buying power of the CMO is now outstrip the buying power of the CIO, probably by 1.2 to 1.3 X. Right. And that used to be a whole different calculus that was in front of us before. So I would see that, uh, >>The faster, so yeah, so Natalie just kind of picked this out here real time. So you got it, which we all know, right. I went to the it world for a long time service, little catalog. Self-service, you know, Sarah's already architectures whatever you want to call it, evolve in modern era. That's good. But on the business side, there's still a need for this same kind of cataloguing of tooling platform analytics. So do you agree with that? I mean, do you see that kind of happening that way, where there's still some connection, but it's not a complete dependency. That's kind of what we're kind of rethinking real time you see that happen. >>Yeah. I think it's pretty spot on because when you look at what businesses are doing today, they're selecting software that enables them to be more self-reliant the reason why we have been growing as much among business analysts as we have is we deliver self-reliance software and in some way, uh, that's what tablet does. And so the, the winners in this space are going to be the ones that will really help users get to results faster for self-reliance. And that's, that's really what companies like Altrix Stanford today. >>So I want to ask you a follow up on that CMOs CIO discussion. Um, so given that, that, that CMOs are spending a lot more where's the, who owns the data, is that, is we, we talk, well, I don't know if I asked you this before, but do you see the role of a chief data officer emerging? And is that individual, is that individual part of the marketing organization? Is it part of it? Is it a separate parallel role? What are you, >>One of the things I will tell you is that as I've seen chief analytics and chief data officers emerge, and that is a real category entitled real deal of folks that have real responsibilities in the organization, the one place that's not is in it, which is interesting to see, right? Because oftentimes those individuals are reporting straight to the CEO, uh, or they have very close access to line of business owners, general managers, or the heads of marketing, the heads of sales. So I seeing that shift where wherever that chief data officer is, whether that's reporting to CEOs or line of business managers or general managers of, of, you know, large strategic business units, it's not in the information office, it's not in the CEO's, uh, purview anymore. And that, uh, is kind of telling for how people are thinking about their data, right? Data is becoming much more of an asset and a weapon for how companies grow and build their scale less. So about something that we just have to deal with. >>Yeah. And it's clearly emerging that role in certain industry sectors, you know, clearly financial services, government and healthcare, but slowly, but we have been saying that, >>Yeah, it's going to cross the board. Right. And one of the reasons why I wrote the article at the end of last year, I literally titled it. Uh, analytics is eating the world, is this exact idea, right? Because, uh, you have this, this notion that you no longer are locked down with data and infrastructure kind of holding you back, right? This is now much more in the hands of people who are responsible for making better decisions inside their organizations, using data to drive those decisions. And it doesn't matter the size and shape of the data that it's coming in. >>Yeah. Data is like the F the food that just spilled all over it spilled out from the truck and analytics is on the Pac-Man eating out. Sorry. >>Okay. Final question in this segment is, um, summarize big data SV for us this year, from your perspective, knowing what's going on now, what's the big game changer. What should the folks know who are watching and should take note of which they pay attention to? What's the big story here at this moment. >>There's definite swim lanes that are being created as you can see. I mean, and, and now that the bigger distribution providers, particularly on the Hadoop side of the world have started to call out what they all stand for. Right. You can tell that map are, is definitely about creating a fast, slightly proprietary Hadoop distro for enterprise. You can tell that the folks at cloud era are focusing themselves on enterprise scale and really building out that hub for enterprise scale. And you can tell Horton works is basically embedding, enabling an open source for anyone to be able to take advantage of. And certainly, you know, the previous announcements and some of the recent ones give you an indicator of that. So I see the sense swimlanes forming in that layer. And now what is going to happen is that focus and attention is going to move away from how that layer has evolved into what I would think of as advanced analytics, being able to do the visual analysis and blending of information. That's where the next, uh, you know, battle war turf is going to be in particularly, uh, the strata space. So we're, we're really looking forward to that because it basically puts us in a great position as a company and a market leader in particularly advanced analytics to really serve customers in how this new battleground is emerging. >>Well, we really appreciate you taking the time. You're an awesome guest on the queue biopsy. You know, you have a company that you're running and a great team, and you come and share your great knowledge with our fans and an audience. Appreciate it. Uh, what's next for you this year in the company with some of your goals, let's just share that. >>Yeah. We have a few things that are, we mentioned a person inspired coming up in June. There's a big product release. Most of our product team is actually here and we have a release coming up at the beginning of Q2, which is Altryx nine oh. So that has quite a bit involved in it, including expansion of connectivity, uh, being able to go and introduce a fair degree of modeling capability so that the AR based modeling that we do scales out very well with revolution and Cloudera in mind, as well as being able to package into play analytic apps very quickly from those data analysts in mind. So it's, uh, it's a release. That's been almost a year in the works, and we're very much looking forward to a big launch at the beginning of Q2. >>George, thanks so much. You got inspire coming out. A lot of great success as a growing market, valuations are high, and the good news is this is just the beginning, call it mid innings in the industry, but in the customers, I call the top of the first lot of build-out real deployment, real budgets, real deal, big data. It's going to collide with cloud again, and I'm going to start a load, get a lot of innovation all happening right here. Big data SV all the big data Silicon valley coverage here at the cube. I'm Jennifer with Dave Alonzo. We'll be right back with our next guest. After the short break.